two fish

     Halfway squared equals twice back to zero. Primordial rhythms surge against the neonate. Blue hall, blue wall, blue crystal ball. I don’t know yet what I am. Always returning, resurging, resurgence. Gathering documents from an internal realm. Ali Akbar Khan showed his tabla player how to become more powerful, how to pulse with a new beat in the midst of metaphysical ecstacy. Damaged hands re-enact helplessness.

Past life):

     I sit there with my fallen self, heiroglyphic belt trapped outside. Dark tall cell, golden wall, window-slit of light above. The room is a three-dimensional trapezoid. A woman dances in red on a stone-covered courtyard. Children with golden halos, around their small heads. Was it a priest, lost them

         –  remainders .

Joseph Rowe writes
In all the excellent material that has been published and broadcast (notably by Bill Moyers) about stories and myths of the hero figure in Campbell, there seems to be little awareness of the fact that the hero archetype is really one pole of a dialectic, one which I also overlooked in my previous post. It cannot be complete without its Other, the Hero’s complement (and in a sense, his opposite) which I shall call the Sage, though there are other possible ways of describing it.

Campbell himself is keenly aware of this dialectic. He continually discusses and alludes to it in many ways in his writings. He associates the strong emphasis on Hero archetypes mostly with Western traditions, and with the masculine pole; and strong emphasis on the Sage archetype with the Eastern traditions, and the feminine pole. Of course this is a generality, with commonsense caveats against reductionism – after all, these poles exist within each of us, psychically. But the historical and cultural manifestations are fascinating, and can perhaps be helpful for dealing with them in our own lives.

In a nutshell, the Hero says : “I will.” The Sage says “I am.”

Action vs. Being.

There is an ineluctable tension, and sometimes even a conflict between these two. This tension will always return sooner or later, no matter how many times we think we’ve “solved” it with truisms such as “true action is non-action.” We can verify this in our own lives. Of course the two poles of the dialectic can (and must) be reconciled. Figures like Jesus and the Buddha are great inspirations. But it’s not as easy as we think! And it’s a process, not a static formula or solution.

It reminds me of something Ram Dass once said (quoting approximately):

“Our human predicament seems to be that we must live with two truths simultaneously: that all Being is One, absolutely and mind-bogglingly perfect, just as it is; and also that there is an experience of suffering, and of wrongness, and that compassion compels us to do something about it, to try to make things better.”

The poles of Hero and Sage have always existed, of course, but different cultures and different epochs of human evolution have placed very different emphases on one or the other. Historically, heroism comes into its fullest expression, according to Campbell, with the advent of warlike, patriarchal cultures, who give priority to masculine, sky-gods. These religions replaced the older Bronze-age, goddess-oriented religions, and their emphasis on wisdom, acceptance of impermanence, and the cyclic, cosmic order of time. Campbell is worth quoting at length here, from the chapter called “The Serpent’s Bride” in Occidental Mythology:

“For its is now perfectly clear that before the violent entry of the late Bronze and early Iron Age nomadic Aryan cattle-herders from the north and Semitic sheep-and-goat herders from the south into the old cult sites of the ancient world, there had prevailed in that world an essentially organic, vegetal, non-heroic view of the nature and necessities of life that was completely repugnant to those lion hearts for whom not the patient toil of earth, but the battle spear and its plunder were the source of both wealth and joy. In the older mother myths and rites the lighter and darker aspects of the mixed thing that is life had been honored equally and together, whereas in the later, male-oriented, patriarchal myths, all that is good and noble was attributed to the new heroic master gods, leaving to the native nature-powers the character mostly of darkness — to which, also, a negative moral judgment now was added. For, as a great body of evidence shows, the social as well as mythic order of the two contrasting ways of life were opposed. Where the goddess had been venerated as the giver and supporter of life as well as consumer of the dead, women as her representatives had been accorded a paramount position in society as well as in cult. Such an order of female-dominated social and cultic custom is termed, in a broad and general way, as the order of Mother Right. And opposed to such, without quarter, is the order of the Patriarchy, with a ardor of righteous eloquence and a fury of fire and sword.”

He then goes on to discuss the figure of the Serpent, which was associated universally and intimately with the goddess, and which also represented, in its coiling movement, and its shedding of skin, the ever-destroying, ever-renewing, cyclic nature of Time. It is very significant that a number of patriarchal god-heroes — the three best-known are Yahweh, Zeus, and Indra — do battle very early in their careers with a cosmic Serpent, vanquishing that figure (seen as a monster), and thereby instituting a new, heroic order of things. Not the least of this new order of things is a new concept of time. When Yahweh whipped old Leviathan’s ass, Zeus did likewise with Typhon, and Indra with Vritra, they were not just getting rid of monsters associated with the old Mother Right religious order, they were vanquishing, according to Campbell,

“daemons that formerly had symbolized the force of the cosmic order itself, the dark mystery of time, which licks up hero deeds like dust: the force of the never-dying serpent, sloughing lives like skins, which, pressing on, ever turning in its circle of eternal return, is to continue in this manner forever, as it has already cycled from all eternity, getting absolutely nowhere.”

To me, this brings us close to the heart of the tension between the Hero and the Sage, as well as the related tensions between West and East, and between the Masculine and the Feminine. For the Sage, time is characterized by eternal cosmic cycles and the implacable Law of Impermanence. For the Hero, on the contrary, time is actually GOING SOMEWHERE … there is a purpose, a goal, a meaning in its story, its evolution, and its outcome. It seems to be more linear than cyclical — it may contain cycles, but they are subservient to its over-arching, linear story.

How can these be reconciled? Apparently we are faced with a paradox which cannot be solved intellectually, for this dual aspect is inherent in the very nature of the way we think about time. Campbell’s great virtue is that (like Ram Dass, in his comment about our “predicament") he never really takes sides, though he is fearless in pointing out deluded cultural and religious exaggerations on either side (which has led to a number of misconceptions and fatuous charges against him by some critics). And for anyone who is tempted to take sides, and find easy solutions, he offers copious material for deeper reflection, bringing us always back to the paradox.

I am tempted to leave things here, because this paradox is something that each of us must work out in our own lives. But I can’t resist closing with another short quote (with a delicious allusion to Wm. Blake), one which sympathizes with the Sage and the goddess-oriented aspect. This may seem like taking sides — but after all, we live in an age of unprecedented planetary crisis, when the hyper-masculinization of culture, politics, and economics is so imbalanced in its worship of competition, elevating the market to the status of divinity, and those whom it favors to the status of heroes, that it has become pathological, threatening all life on Earth. In speaking of the exquisitely beautiful figures of Cretan and Mycenaen goddess-figures consorting with serpents in a Garden of Paradise, a Garden which appears in many Bronze-age cultures, and which is much older than the Garden of Genesis which was derived from it, he says:

“… [these figures still] stand as a shrine to this goddess of the early Garden of Innocence, before Nobodaddy made her serpent lover crawl, and locked the Tree of Life away for all time.”

Watching The Source, there’s a moment when Norman Mailer appears (in 1990s present), offers a short poem to Allen Ginsberg, and says

He may be the bravest man in America.

Jay Stevens

The hipster, Mailer wrote, was the man who understood the central role Death had come to play within life—in the Fifties death was personified by the concentration camp (cultural death) and the H‑Bomb (species death)—and as a result had decided “to divorce” himself from society, “to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self.” But for Mailer these rebellious imperatives did not include looking into the face of God, which was the whole point as far as Ginsberg and Kerouac were concerned.

In Storming Heaven, Stevens continues
It was ironic, but … at the height of their fame the Beats already were mutating toward what a later generation would call hippies. But a few heard a peculiar siren song amid all the bad poetry and smelly feet. Writing in Playboy, Herb Gold, who was considered an expert on the Beats largely because he lived in San Francisco, was reminded of some lines that William Yeats (another nineteenth‑century man who had thought Homo sapiens was in the process of climbing the evolutionary ladder) had written:

What rough beast, ifs hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.

Could the beatniks, Gold wondered, be Yeats’s proto‑gods? Naw. “When Yeats looked into the future to find a terrible savior, an evolution up from animality into something strange and wonderful—he did not mean James Dean. Perhaps, as they claim, the tunneling hipster’s avoidance of feeling can lead to a new honesty of emotion. Perhaps a ground hog might someday learn to fly, but man O man, that will be one strange bird.”

Precisely the point Yeats was making.

In The Dharma Bums, Kerouac’s second Beat novel, there is a moment when the Gary Snyder character experiences a vision of the future comparable to Yeats’s. What he sees is “a great rucksack revolution, thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh … wild gangs of pure holymen getting together to drink and talk and pray.”

That was the Beat fantasy, and it was one that Allen Ginsberg was using all of his market research skills to bring about. Ginsberg became the public relations director of the Beat movement, which irritated some of the more self‑reliant poets. He badgered the intellectual journals, particularly hostile ones like Partisan Review and Hudson Review, to publish the work of his friends; he contacted agents and editors and was rarely without a selection of manuscripts that he was trying to place. If the Beat movement was a modestly glowing goal, he was going to do everything within his power to make sure it burst into flame. Years later Ginsberg described the potential of this moment this way:

We’d already had, by ‘48, some sort of alteration of our own private consciousness; by ‘55 we made some kind of articulation of it; by ‘58 it had spread sufficiently so that the mass media were coming around for information, and by that time I realized that if our private fancies, our private poetries, were so serious that they absorbed the attention of the big, serious military generals who wrote for Time magazine, there must be something strange going on.”

What was happening, Ginsberg thought, was an alteration of consciousness that was filtering up through the young into all levels of society. It was as though the country was just catching up to where the New Visionaries had been back in 1944. “That year on the literary scene in New York it was all in fashion to go crazy,” remembers Barbara Probst Solomon. “It was the fashion to push things to their ultimate extreme—all kinds of sexual and drug experimentation. Once, at a party, someone put LSD in my drink, and I went home and woke up seeing things. I thought I was going crazy until someone phoned later in the afternoon and asked how I liked my acid trip …. It was the beginning of the Sixties, really, and I used to say to Larry Roose, a Freudian friend of mine, that it was all very violent, that I didn’t like being part of it.”

America, thought Ginsberg, was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

In these days of haste, you may not want to waste your time reading the merely superb; what you want is the superlative. You need it – ya gotta have it. Whaddaya do, comb through the LRB, the NYT, the ABR, the NYRB? Rely on bestseller lists? Admirable as Adam Ant, yet why not have a quick go at Harold Bloom’s contemporary writer short list: cut to the chase.

Compendia Courtesy of Wikipedia

Bloom’s association with the Western canon has provoked a substantial amount of interest in his opinion concerning the relative importance of contemporary writers.

In the late 1980s, Bloom told an interviewer: “Probably the most powerful living Western writer is Samuel Beckett. He’s certainly the most authentic.” Beckett died in 1989, and Bloom has not suggested who occupies that position now.

Concerning British writers: “Geoffrey Hill is the strongest British poet now active,” and “no other contemporary British novelist seems to me to be of Murdoch’s eminence.” Since Murdoch’s death, Bloom has expressed admiration for novelists such as John Banville, Peter Ackroyd, Will Self, and A. S. Byatt.

In his 2003 book, Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds, he named Portuguese writer Jose Saramago as “the most gifted novelist alive in the world today,” and “one of the last titans of an expiring literary genre.”

Of American novelists, he declared in 2003 “there are four living American novelists I know of who are still at work and who deserve our praise.” Claiming “they write the Style of our Age, each has composed canonical works,” he identified them as Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy and Don DeLillo. He named their strongest works as Gravity’s Rainbow and Mason & Dixon, American Pastoral and Sabbath’s Theater, Blood Meridian, and Underworld. He has also praised fantasy writer John Crowley as these writers’ equal – especially his novel Little, Big.

In Kabbalah and Criticism (1975) he identified Robert Penn Warren, James Merrill, John Ashbery and Elizabeth Bishop as the most important living American poets. By the 1990s he regularly named A.R. Ammons along with Ashbery and Merrill, and he has lately come to identify Henri Cole as the crucial American poet of the generation following those three. He has expressed great admiration for the Canadian poet Anne Carson, particularly her verse novel Autobiography of Red. Bloom also lists African American Jay Wright as one of only a handful of major living poets.

Bloom also has something to say about the superlatives in American art–that is, the sublime:

Bloom’s introduction to “Modern Critical Interpretations: Thomas Pynchon” (1987) features his canon of the “twentieth-century American Sublime,” the greatest works of American art produced in the 20th century. Bloom singles out the following works for distinction:

“Miss Lonelyhearts” by Nathanael West
William Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying“
The end of the Marx Brothers’ “Duck Soup“
Nearly all of Hart Crane
Wallace Stevens‘ “Auroras of Autumn“
Bud Powell’s performance of “Un Poco Loco“
“I Remember You” and “Parker’s Mood” as performed by Charlie Parker
“Byron the Light Bulb” from Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow”

Happy hunting, Earthers.

It’s a bit tragic that, if glimmers become dreams and dreams become social realities, if the realities are consuming enough, the manifestation appears as organic, simply part of the existing landscape, thus relatively unnoticed. The glimmer of a dream - instantly being able to freely access those most-condensed fonts of human wisdom: books, works of intense labors, devotion – just beyond reach. No more! A panoply of sacred texts translated, straight no chaser.

Just now the golden-sandled dawn has called.

(Sappho, Fragment 18)

Sacred Texts Online

Sacred Texts: Timeline

World Mysteries dot com

Bibliography of Sacreds Texts - with online links

Comparative Religion dot com

Some 2000 free eBooks - relating to Asian cultures and and cultural studies generally

here at the U Virginia eText Center

Beyond Reading: Papyrology Links

Sappho and

Other Women’s Voices: Translations of Writings Before 1700

What greater good can be done for the future without learning, growing into knowledge. Even without a friend, impoverished, with only food, an Internet Cafe and a few bucks – open your mind.

A napkin dripping.

(Sappho, Fragment 110)

Notations of the Wild: Ecology in the poetry of Wallace Stevens by Gyorgyi Voros is a wonderful book reframing Wallace Stevens as a poet of nature. This book seems to have met with but a peep from the literary community, though praised by John Ashbery, who wrote, “a dazzling, multi-tiered account of the poetry,” and Harvard Prof. Lawrence Buell (known for his works on 19th century literary transcendentalism), notes her work is “incisive, ambitious, original, timely.” If you’re into haiku and/or Stevens, or wish to contemplate a modern philosophy of nature, a sensible ecocritical adventure, you could do worse.

Gyorgyi

    Voros

First,

The Idea of Order at Key West
    (Stevens reads it here)
      Wallace Stevens (1935)
 
 

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard.
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.

For she was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.

If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone. But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.
It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

 
 

Below, an excerpt from Notations of the Wild: Ecology in the poetry of Wallace Stevens (University of Iowa Press, 1997), partly commenting on the poem:

Stevens’s sense of the American experience of the Nature / culture relation was that modern awareness of Nature – whether Nature be manifest as wilderness, as the human body, or as the human unconscious – had diminished dangerously. Stevens complained, “The material world, for all the assurances of the eye, has become immaterial. It has become an image in the mind.” Human preconception had so blunted the human experience of and relation to nonhuman Nature, upon which the human rested, that indeed nothing but empty anthropocentric image remained. Stevens knew that a cancerous humanism diminishes human experience. “The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real,” he asserted.

This interdependence of imagination and reality is, of course, the subject of “The Idea of Order at Key West.” The poem’s speaker, walking on the shore, listening to the singer, posing questions and propositions about the nature of art to his companion, posits a series of antinomies which can be reframed as usefully within the categories of Nature and culture and human and nonhuman as they can within reality and imagination. The speaker pits mind against Nature’s “body wholly body,” singer’s song against the “meaningless plungings of water and the wind,” the glassy lights of the town against the darkness of the sea, and language against the “words of the sea.” While he asserts the mutual influences between sea and song, he emphasizes an essential discontinuity between them and averts any suggestion of an easy synthesis: “The song and water were not medleyed sound / Even if what she sang was what she heard,” he cautions and stresses that “it was she and not the sea we heard.”

The poem’s central question asks, “Whose spirit is this?” That is, what interface exists between human and Nature in song, the poem’s metonym for art? The speaker has already shown that the singer’s song fails as direct translation of the sea’s “constant cry,” nor can song effect a seamless identification between singer and natural elements. Is it then a production of individual vision against the spectacular stage set of Nature? After all, “she was the maker of the song she sang. /… [the] sea / Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.”

The poem’s final third is customarily read as an avowal of the romantic doctrine of the mind’s ultimate superiority over Nature: after all, “It was her voice that made / The sky acutest at its vanishing” and the aftermath of her song that answers to the human “rage for order.” In the resounding silence that follows the song, the lights of the fishing boats

Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

Indeed, Helen Vendler’s reading of this poem places it within the Wordsworthian mind / Nature dichotomy and reads it as asserting the romantics’ sense of “the power of poetry over nature.” Similarly, Harold Bloom writes that the poem “remains equivocal and perhaps impossible to interpret” because it simultaneously “affirms a transcendental poetic spirit yet cannot locate it, and the poem also remains uneasily wary about the veritable ocean, which will rise up against Stevens yet again.”

Placing this poem too squarely within the romantic framework of mind over Nature, however, discounts the poem’s true dynamic, which does not rest solely on the dichotomy between singer and song. The two listeners themselves engage in creation (song making) by attending to sea and singer. The stimuli around the speaker – singer, song, companion, “bronze shadows heaped / On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres / Of sky and sea,” night descending, lights emerging – engender in him a flow of propositions, questions, and highly charged perceptual experiences. Rather than depicting the power of poetry over Nature, the poem depicts the power of the sum of perceptual experiences created by human and nonhuman components in the speaker, whose main role in the poem may be summarized as that of creative listener. . . .The night deepens after the song has ended; the resounding silence, as it were, heightens the effects of song and what might be regarded as the visual analogues to song, the lights, boats, town, and other human productions that order and “portion out” the natural scene. This difference – the juxtaposition and interface between before and after – is more significant than any element of the experience. It is finally the speaker, not the singer or the song, who effects the enchantment of the night . . .

Gyorgyi Voros

 
 

 

 

The Zen monk Ikkyu seldom painted landscapes, preferring instead such subjects as birds, orchids, prunes, and especially poems and Zen parables written in his powerful calligraphic brush manner. These bokuseki (ink traces) are revered in Japan because they reveal the spiritual character of this eccentric cleric’s life and thought (Cleveland Museum of Art).

It’s nice to read something beautiful from 15th century Japan:

Natural, reckless, correct skill;
Yesterday’s clarity is today’s stupidity
The universe has dark and light, entrust oneself to change
One time, shade the eyes and gaze afar at the road of heaven.

(Ikkyu Sojun, number 291 in Sonja Arntzen)

Ikkyu also ponders sexuality, passion, as Jusin Hall writes:

There’s something nicely saucy about sex poems that last five or six hundred years. Ikkyu wrote graphically, straightforwardly, about a woman’s vagina as a beautiful, alluring, important place, “the birthplace of all the ten thousand buddhas” and his own penis and the joys that could be found playing in his loincloth.

A Woman’s Sex:
It has the original mouth but remains wordless;
It is surrounded by a magnificent mound of hair.
Sentient beings can get completely lost in it
But it is also the birthplace of all the Buddhas of the ten thousand worlds.

A Man’s Root:
Eight inches strong, it is my favourite thing;
If I’m alone at night, I embrace it fully -
A beautiful woman hasn’t touched it for ages.
Within my fundoshi there is an entire universe!

(A fundoshi is a type of loose-fitting underwear once worn by Japanese men.)

Definitely a different take, for a Zen Buddhist Priest, on the age-old Buddhist precept, expressed in contemporary language in Thich Nhat Hanh’s 14th Precept: Three Sources of Energy

Do not mistreat your body. Learn to handle it with respect. Do not look on your body as only an instrument. Preserve vital energies (sexual, breath, spirit) for the realization of the Way. (For brothers and sisters who are not monks and nuns:) Sexual expression should not take place without love and a long-term commitment. In sexual relationships, be aware of future suffering that may be caused. To preserve the happiness of others, respect the rights and commitmennts of others. Be fully aware of the responsibility of bringing new lives into the world. Meditate on the world into which you are bringing new beings.

One zen priestess writes glowingly about Ikkyu:

One of the miscellaneous koans is, Why are perfectly enlightened bodhisattvas attached to the vermilion thread? The vermilion thread is the red thread, and the red thread is symbolic: I have recently learned that it is not the line of tears , as I used to think, but it comes from early China, where the geisha girls and courtesans would wear a red garter on their thigh, as the line of passions. So: Why are perfectly enlightened bodhisattvas attached to the vermilion thread? One of the characters I want to introduce you to is a wonderful character in the Zen tradition, called Ikkyu, who is one of my longstanding and favourite Zen masters and who appeals, I guess, to the wild woman in me. He was born in 1394 and was an illegitimate son of the emperor Go-komatsu. He was known by some as the emperor of renegades, a wild wandering monk and teacher, sometimes called Crazy Cloud. He was a lover, a poet, and he could write very tenderly about the beauty of women. He relentlessly attacked the hypocrisy of the then corrupt Zen establishment, and even had women as his students. I think he was one of the first Zen masters to have women as students; that was considered quite radical. It was in the brothels and geisha houses that he developed the Red Thread Zen, a notion he borrowed from the old Chinese master Kido and extended to deep and subtle levels of realisation.

This very body is the lotus of the true law. This very body is the lotus of the true law, linking human beings to birth and death by the red thread of passion. This approach was closely related to Tantric Buddhism, that used sexual union as a religious ritual. Ikkyus Red Thread form of Zen practice was a radical approach, a non-dualistic interpretation of the sexual act, realising this very body is the Buddha-dharma. Ikkyu wrote a poem after his first realisation experience:

From the world of passions returning to the world of passions:
There is a moments pause.
If it rains, let it rain; if the wind blows, let it blow.

Ikkyu’s Red Thread Zen and wild, poetic, passionate nature was also tempered, though, by his extensive training in the Rinzai school, very intense training. Rinzai was a very strict master, and Ikkyu was very strict and demanding with his own students.

At the age of 77, Ikkyu had a passionate relationship with a mistress named Lady Shin. She was a blind singer and composer and a very skilled musician, and she was in her late thirties. He wrote lots of beautiful graphic poetry celebrating their love, and it was in Lady Shin that Ikkyu finally located his own missing female self.

As Manfred Steger commented in his book Crazy Clouds [Crazy Clouds: Zen Rebels, Radicals, and Reformers (with Perle Besserman: A cross-cultural study in Zen Buddhism and Politics; Shambhala Press, 1991], Ikkyu incorporated bold elements of the physical relationship into his teaching of Zen, playing on koans in an erotic context, and bound the manifest and essential worlds in a love-knot. His radical methods and practices honoured women and the red thread that binds even the most enlightened Zen masters to passion, birth, and death.

Ikkyu celebrated the joy in human love, and within sexuality there lies a profound sacred practice, similar to Tantric Buddhism. He infused Zen for the first time with a feminine element that had long been missing. When Ikkyu was about 80 years old that he was asked to be the abbot of Daitokoji, which is one the great temples in Japan. At that time it was completely in ruin from a civil war, so it was an extraordinary thing to do at 80 years old, to rebuild Daitokoji: which he did. He had an extraordinary enlightened mind.

Ikkyu Sojun, Crazy Cloud, Zen priest and haiku master, (brief bio; 1394 - 1481), is one of the most eccentric figures in the history of Rinzai Zen. He has become quite a cult folk-hero in modern Japan. He once defended masturbation by quoting the Sixth Patriarch (who had written that “outside of licentiousness there is no true Buddha-nature").

Links to Zen poetry
Buddhism – free eBooks
Chan Buddhist texts – comments
online Zen Buddhist texts.

Shin-ju An Temple, dedicated to Ikkyu

Shichi Butsu Tsukaige

Ikkyu inadvertently
omitted the character
zen
and so wrote it in smaller
at the side. He later said
this accident gave
the calligraphy its
tasteful feeling.

I am reminded of Shelley [PBS], who in my view was a keen influence on the early
Stevens of Harmonium.

In his Prometheus, PBS puts into the mouth of Demogorgon (itself a . . . ‘mighty darkness . . . ungazed upon and shapeless’ (II.4., 2-5) the statement that ” . . . the deep truth is imageless.” (II.4., 19).

And Stevens himself famously observed that ‘ . . . the poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully.’

(reprinted from a Wed, 15 Dec 2004 wallace_stevens listserv post)

 

Demogorgon - Prince of Demons
From Monster Manual I, Gary Gygax:
“Demogorgon appears as an 18-foot tall reptilian-humanoid.
He has two heads that bear the visages of baboons.
His blue-green skin is plated with snake-like scales, his body
and legs are those of a giant lizard, his twin necks resemble snakes,
and his thick tail is forked.
In place of arms, he has two huge tentacles.”
While MMI indicates that this demon has baboon heads,
I decided to model them more after baboon skulls
to enhance the general evil look of the thing.
Keep in mind that a human to scale to this drawing
would only come roughly to the middle of its thighs.

I was asked, “How does this zeal for life shape your haiku and haiku spirit?” (what zeal you ask . . .) by Robert Wilson, co-founder of the new and exponentially growing site Simply Haiku. His question inspired the below speculations on haiku and sacred space.

What is poetry, why do we need it, what does poetry do—to us, for us? In The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, Lewis Hyde affirms a sense that the poem, indeed all art is created fundamentally as an offering. Our culture commodifies artworks, a rather aberrant activity, apparently. Hyde reminds the reader of a truth concerning artwork – the desire to offer a gift, not only to humanity but to the cosmos, the sky, sun, moon, animals, plants, universe, to the moment, to history, one’s ancestors, to the invisible. To offer in a sacred way. Mircea Eliade discusses another aspect of offering in The Myth of the Eternal Return, the means for constructing sacred space, and of enacting life within that space (and timeless time) of the sacred. Experientially investigating the absence and presence of the sacred has been a high value in my life, and also a “saunter: a sense of being sans terre, without Earth, has involved a meandering desire for holiness, a goal echoed in the last stanza of Goethe’s The Holy Longing:

And so long as you haven’t experienced
   This: to die and so to grow,
   You are only a troubled guest
   On the dark earth.

A portion of my research has been concerned with oblivion: the figure of Lethe, mother of the Graces. Why might Forgetting give rise to Splendor, Delight and Blossoming, the three Graces? Heidegger writes,

       The oldest of the old follows behind
   us in our thinking and yet it
   comes to meet us.

      That is why thinking holds to the
   coming of what has been, and
   is remembrance.

      ("The Thinker As Poet,” poetry, Language, Thought, Harper & Row, 1971, p. 10)

To remember that thinking is remembrance. . . It seems the sacred is easily forgotten, and entering again, in the encounter is a sense of remembrance, a return of “the oldest of the old. I’ve been interested in why not only the sense of poetry but the experience of poetic dwelling becomes lost. The danger inherent in a world, in any society, which loses poetic dimension and thereby becomes overtly literalistic, is a danger perhaps greater than that of terrorism. To know or feel the sense of poetry in life is to know “the coming of what has been, to desire remembrance: to re-member the world, cosmos, oneself, a leaf, a tree. It may be that a necessary means of entering the zone of the sacred is the experience of oblivion.

Haiku are not always instantly irruptive, do not always enact a sudden shift, yet they seem to draw us into a new resonance, creating a sense of the sacred, a context. Hoshinaga Fumio’s haiku,

nigemizu e sengo no chichi wo oitsumeru

      towards the mirage of water
the postwar fathers
            chasing after . . .

       (Kumaso-Ha, Honami Shoten, 2003)

is a haiku which seems to have layers (allusive adumbrations) of mirage: of image, time and space – heads curling Esherlike around tails. It’s a haiku I work into, never quite out of. There is an unfolding which I sense as lament, echoing back through millennia, through a myriad of cultures. I recall this haiku,

spring evening -
   the wheel of a troop carrier
   crushes a lizard

        (Knots: The Anthology of Southeastern European Haiku poetry, Red Moon Press, 1999)

by Dimitar Anakiev. Its main image is violent, shocking. But this haiku is not merely violent. There is also a sense of sacredness, the context or field of reality which is only partly given by the poem; the haiku also requires rapprochement on the reader’s part:

The genre itself indicates the boundary lines of the sacred, as context, and it is within the landscapes of the sacred, oriented by the genre as a whole, in which image and action occur.

Concision, disjunction and image elements largely contribute to a haiku’s effect, but these elements alone aren’t enough. If one reads the above poems without a pause, they quickly lose much of their drama and vividness. So, what happens when we slow down, allow this unique poetic form to come to life? I would argue that in some measure we experience oblivion(s), if for instants, and through such psychological moments, remembrance. Mnemosyne, anamnesis, Lethe’s sister, is mother to the Muses. Such may be said for any art one becomes absorbed in and passionate toward; nonetheless, haiku are quite uncompromising in the way they cut into reality. There is extreme and concise rupture. To my knowledge, the phenomenology of poetic process has not been explained by science. In fact, qualitative conscious experience itself has not yet been demonstrably elucidated—there is so much we experience and feel which is immeasurable. Without being able to precisely measure or define, it is nevertheless apparent that haiku becomes a genre due to demonstrably unique modes of poetic encounter and dwelling. I should say that what is truly unique isn’t the experience itself, but its prevalence and intensity, when compared with other poetic and artistic forms.

We may tend to devalue the significance and importance of poetic movements which open us to the sacred, to remembrance because of their immateriality, contrastive with the predominant materialist cultural ethos. I know I have, and it is one reason for my returning to the wellspring of haiku. The haiku genre (which includes a reader) constructs an environment within which its language (i.e. symbolic representation) uniquely occurs. It may be a zest for life that draws me to haiku, but likewise a zest for oblivion and erasure. Though not erasure in itself so much as what happens through it.

Some years ago, Barbara Dilley (a Merce Cunningham dancer, Naropa teacher and former Naropa President) introduced me to “square work, in which a length of bright red yarn is made into a large square on the dance floor, tacked down with a few bits of masking tape. What is within the square is defined as sacred space. Dancers (people) relate to the fact of the square, and to entering and exiting that space. It is quite difficult to remain conscious as one steps across the boundary, quite hard indeed. A gap in consciousness nearly always occurs right at the apotheosis of transition. This is one of the consciousness research-questions we explored in an embodied manner as dance. There’s nothing much to taking some twine and making a square on a patch of bare ground. The square has only as much meaning and significance as is intended by the participants; and, what grows from experiences of many crossings and movements (object and human arrangements) within and without. After the dancers have gone, seeing that red twine on a darkened stage, would an aura exist? Is there a magical quality to that bare ground, so carefully demarcated? I would say, yes, to a sensitive reader there is, because there is an intentional architecture, much like a temple or church, just much more minimalist. Haiku likewise possess an intentional architecture; hence, natively embody natural and nuministic aspects of being.

These days I watch Sumo on television; the dohyo, or fighting square, is a sacred space. Rikishi (wrestlers) climb the steps and enter throwing salt, an act of purification, as they step across the sacred rope boundary embedded within the clay ground, into the inner ring. Above, a temple roof hangs suspended, emblemizing the divine. Such an arrangement of objects in space is an example of an archetypal sacred architecture, explored in detail in Eliade’s works, among others. The sense of sacred space existing or inhabiting cultural constructions is no doubt a deeply archaic if not an intrinsic aspect of the human spirit. Haiku as poems are a bit like that length of red twine, though the boundaries and evidences of sacrality may appear more subtly. An objectively intentional aspect exists, not necessarily in the poem itself, but in the fact that sacred space inhabits the poem, out of which the poem presents new ideas of reality. Isn’t this what is implied by the term, “poetic tradition. The oldest of the old follows behind us in our thinking and yet it comes to meet us.

mirai yori taki o fukiwaru kaze kitaru

From the future
   a wind arrives
   that blows the waterfall apart

      (Ban’ya Natsuishi, A Future Waterfall, Red Moon Press, 2nd. ed. 2004)

In that art is an offering to the cosmos, the reader is returned by that offering to a cosmic sense or scene. Returned to the world purified and renewed by the “first moment, the moment before creation.

Rising out of the sea and shedding the tank it’s a bit surprising to not be with fish, feeling weightless in the strangeness of air. What was that dreamlike place, filled with unblinking creatures, turtles with flippers, sharks large enough to blot out the far-off sun? The twine, like sunlight is imaginal, extending along an invisible line between land and sea. Returning, instants of vivid memory quickly fade. But a drop of ocean coheres within, adamantine. It is for that one drop, so pure and crystalline, that haiku seem to speak.

Hoshinaga Fumio is an acclaimed Japanese gendai (modern, stylistically contemporary) haiku poet, whose career has spanned five decades. His sense of soul and brilliance extends far beyond the literary world of haiku style and composition. Th following articles appeared in the autumn issue of Modern Haiku, and are now posted on this haiku research page. I to invite you to read this interview, The Miraculous Power of Language: A Conversation with the Poet Hoshinaga Fumio [PDF], which took place in Kumamoto, Japan. Aa second article, Hoshinaga Fumio: Selected Haiku from Kumaso-Ha [PDF], contains 22 new poems with commentary. This is Hoshinaga’s first substantial appearance in English. A poetic sample from the second article:

The playfully dark, ironic metaphor of “becoming Hitler” is disjunctive, allowing a sense of depth to enter the haiku, a depth partly created through allusion. Due to itchy feet (a summer kigo; season word), the author cannot smartly click his heels or march in goose-step. The poem presents a disturbing psychosocial complex indicating the will to power or assumption of dictatorial authority which often remains hidden in persons or society.

A rhythmically outstanding haiku, which breaks up time into fragments of immanence. In reading this haiku aloud, it was suggested that the last ku, which is the verb, be preceded by a long pause; a dramatic semantic and rhythmic break. The final verb seems more a force of space than time, a wave of sorrow or grief in intimate quiet.

 
 

Reading Naomi Klein’s exposé of the attempted selling off of Iraq, wonder what Marx would make of it. That, and G W’s popularity.

Reading Marx, “Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people,” Marx’s statement seems overtly theatrical, and a form of ideological double-speak. Postmodern Marxist camps declaim, “they (we, Bush voters, everyone?) are oppressed (without knowing it).” That’s ideology for you. Hell, don’t you feel oppressed? I do. So, I’m oppressed and I know it. The economic game as it’s played is anti-human in some respects (never mind the environmental costs). Options? BBC panels of experts never seem to come up with a sensible alternative to Liberal Democracy, as we have it. Socialism is a dirty word on both sides of the pond. It seems professionals are afraid to rationally discuss more equitable economies between rich and poor, as a concept of sensible economic theory. In a recent debate, a presenter bemoaned “a failure of imagination” regarding alternative sustainable future economics. Maybe Brazil has a better idea, someone on the panel quipped.

I’m happy and lucky, to have a personal economy with which to live without daily economic anxiety. This pleasant experience began three years ago. It’s a pretty refreshing situation – though work is hard at times and I’m oppressed by it. I’d rather be by the beach, near a big research library, writing a book: Right now. Santa Monica would be okay, though I’d prefer Vancouver. Yeah, Vancouver would be great. Vancouver is my mantra. But I’m so oppressed I’ve had a sort of failure of inspiration or imagination. It’s just all I can do to keep this all up, keep it going. How could I possibly leave my work? And if I did, I certainly couldn’t afford to live in Vancouver for a year or two or three and write a book. Perhaps there are grants. My school doesn’t provide any. Well it’s always been hard to write a book, it’s not any easier now. Whether riding a liter bike via ferry to Amamioshima to snorkel and camp out and spend time alone with the elements eating raw fish will help heal the heat of oppression, I can’t say – it’s only a few hundred kilometers away and a few hundred bucks. But having the right bike seems important. A 1000cc twin. A sportbike, but “soft” enough for occasional light touring. Something used, not in demand, something that’s had its day. A bit of history, touch of gray, old man with a story, carburetion and poor mileage rather than fuel injection. Something lithe. Something you get into, not on top of. Something that reaches into your soul, kickstarts your heart, causes the world to disappear.

Everything depends on that new world and how you relate to it. Also, why you sought it in the first place. What is true citizenship, when your soul calls out for self-erasure, and the senses seek immolation in transformation in order to emerge connected again with unknowns.

In that religion comes from religio, meaning, a linking back to the origin, this defines a religious person, even one who denies God/Gods. In this sense Marx performed a manner of religio (Harry Watson and Joseph Schumpeter argued that Marxism is a religion).

Vehicles of transformation, transmutation. We are: for each other. Love is. Sickness is an initiatory requirement in many shamanic cultures. Violence, masochism and death play important roles in psychological transformation. “Like a sickness and its cure together . . . Like rain and sun, like cold and heat” (Shakespeare in Love ). Linking back. How can you renew the soul without death? Even in love, the height of love, the happiness of golden light, bliss of presence in which one becomes with another; unites without thought. What has died, was, might seem unimportant – and often is. It doesn’t hurt to let that old self go after you’ve crossed the threshold, it’s insignificant that old self. It was. Nevertheless, something has died. Death (psychologically) needn’t be composed merely of suffering and pain, that’s the point. But we do become conscious of what we lose when it’s painful to us, and when we desire what presently can’t be attained. As a result the concept that death, that absence, is essentially pain is easily acquired. Though pain may not always be painful – it may become something else; anger, drive, moods, art, an entryway into new worlds – “from pain to ecstasy, including the wounding in which one is ‘delivered’ from the flat ennui of numbing conformity to cultural expectations.” Pain isn’t singular; is mysterious.

Pain wounds, kills, yet also impells a journey through darker lands. Hades enriches with darkness, intoxication, waters of forgetting & remembrance, risk. Pain is no opium, that is, suffering is no opium. Unless the pain becomes subliminal, with the painful state presenting itself as reality, as the table of social interaction. Rules of propriety. Parochialism, codified parochiality. Virtue and pain may become as intimately related as lovers, unconscious Gods. Then, isn’t it a clue, to seek the erasure of all ideologies? In that ideology, in virtu, is a form of parochialism, and parochialism treats pain in a certain way, a limited and one-sided way. If the deepest nature of pain and pleasure both are sought, a sense of poetry arises: “Pleasure is the pleasure of the powers that create a truth that cannot be arrived at by reason alone, a truth that the poet recognizes by sensation. The morality of the poet’s radiant and productive atmosphere is the morality of the right sensation” (Wallace Stevens). Nature is profoundly paradoxical. This poetic sense alone, it seems to me, is capable of defeating parochialism, at its root. Nonetheless we live in serious times and have no truck with vapid imaginings. It is precisely for this reason I desire to become one with a particular machine and risk death.

Found the Allen Ginsberg Library today, online. It’s brilliant. Filled with audio, video, photos, ephemera, manuscripts, and more.

 

Jim Kacian is among a handful of truly excellent haiku poets in English. He is also the publisher/owner of Red Moon Press. Jim has kindly given me permission to reprint the introduction to his book, Presents of Mind: Haiku & Illustrations (Katsura Press, 1996). This is writing which I’ve wanted to share for some time.

 

 

 

Here is an impression made of fragments from Book One, the Mandelbaum Translation.

two fish

Nicholas Lezard, someone who knows something about Ovid, in a review of a new translation (by David Raeburn) writes in the Guardian (excerpts):

. . . while it seems as though the Metamorphoses has never really gone away – Ovid’s line at the end about his own poetic immortality is still borne out – people don’t necessarily feel any urgent need to read it.

This is not exactly the case around my neck of the sacred woods. I have been doing some work for the last few years that has involved steeping myself in, among other things, a good deal of Graeco-Roman mythology. One unforeseen side-effect of this is that I have come closer to accepting this mythic corpus as a convincing explanation of human motives than any other philosophical system. I may not have a shrine to Jupiter in the back garden, but it feels like it’s only a matter of time.

The now-redundant prose translation was perfectly serviceable but it was, after all, in prose. And ever since I read Allen Mandelbaum’s amazing translation of The Divine Comedy (published by Everyman), the game has changed: you can actually translate from an ancient tongue and retain not only fidelity but poetry.

As it happens, Mandelbaum has translated the Metamorphoses (and his prosody is so good it’s actually distracting) – but you won’t find it for sale here unless you’re very lucky.

It is easier to read this for pure pleasure than just about any other ancient text apart, perhaps, from the Odyssey (with Apuleius’s Golden Ass coming in a close third). It is also (and for some reason I’d forgotten this) even gorier than the Iliad.

Ovid is modern in other ways: you will recognise his attentiveness towards the very mechanics of metamorphosis. Here is Actaeon, punished by Diana for accidentally seeing her in the nude: “The head she had sprinkled sprouted the horns of a lusty stag; / the neck expanded, the ears were narrowed to pointed tips; / she changed his hands into hooves and his arms into long and slender / forelegs; she covered his frame in a pelt of dappled buckskin; / last, she injected panic …” What is that but, two millennia avant la lettre, a computer-generated animation in words?

Reading that, you may think the poetry of the translation isn’t that wonderful. This is what I thought at first, finding it hard to even recognise it as poetry rather than carefully sliced prose. Not really Raeburn’s fault: he isn’t a professional poet, and after all this is, as Dryden put it in his own translation of the work, a “vile degenerate age". But while Raeburn isn’t afraid of, shall we say, highly familiar imagery ("white as a sheet", and so on), the lines keep up a good six-stress pulse and sound much better if you imagine them being spoken aloud.

I’ve got this and another Metamorphoses post yet. There’s something seductive about the Golding translation, I’m posting the first 20 lines of the Epistle. They just don’t sign books like they used to:

The. xv. Bookes
of P. Ovidus Naso, entytuled
Metamorphosis, translated oute of
Latin into Englysh meeter, by Ar-
thur Golding Gentleman,
A worke very pleasaunt
and delectable.

With skill, heede, and judgement, this worke must be read,
For else to the Reader it standes in small stead.

from THE EPISTLE

At length my chariot wheele about the mark hath found the way,
And at their weery races end, my breathlesse horses stay.
The woork is brought to end by which the author did account
(And rightly) with externall fame above the starres to mount.
For whatsoever hath bene writ of auncient tyme in greeke
By sundry men dispersedly, and in the latin eeke,
Of this same dark Philosophie of turned shapes, the same
Hath Ovid into one whole masse in this booke brought in frame.
Fowre kynd of things in this his worke the Poet dooth conteyne.
That nothing under heaven dooth ay in stedfast state remayne. …
And next that nothing perisheth: but that eche substance takes
Another shape than that it had. Of theis twoo points he makes
The proof by shewing through his woorke the wonderfull exchaunge
Of Goddes, men, beasts, and elements, to sundry shapes right straunge,
Beginning with creation of the world, and man of slyme,
And so proceeding with the turnes that happened till his tyme.
Then sheweth he the soule of man from dying to be free,
By samples of the noblemen, who for their vertues bee
Accounted and canonized for Goddes by heathen men,
And by the peynes of Lymbo lake, and blysfull state agen…

 

Lately I’ve been reading versions of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. This is a book which Ezra Pound described as “the most beautiful book in the language (my opinion and I suspect it was Shakespeare’s).” He was referring to the Golding translation, 1567, the first in English; Shakespeare’s Ovid. Publius Ovidius Naso (43 BC-17 AD; bio, and links here) wrote Metamorphoses in exile, at the age of 52. Of the many translations available, the poet Ted Hughes, (whose free-verse translation, which won the 1997 Whitbread Award for a book of poetry), mentions: “However impossible these intensities might seem to be on one level, on another, apparently more significant level Ovid renders them with psychological truth and force. In his earlier books, preoccupied with erotic love, he had been a sophisticated entertainer. Perhaps here too in the Metamorphoses he set out simply to entertain. But something else joined in, something emerging from the very nature of his materials yet belonging to the unique moment in history – the moment of the birth of Christ within the Roman Empire” (Ted Hughes in The New York Review of Books, July 17, 1997).

It should be possible to gather quite a large number of translations for comparison. Below are six diverse versions of the Invocation, which appears at the beginning of The Metamorphoses:

MY SOUL WOULD SING of metamorphoses.
But since, o gods, you were the source of these
bodies becoming other bodies, breathe
your breath into my book of changes: may the
song I sing be seamless as its way
weaves from the world’s beginning to our day.
(Allen Mandelbaum, Trans. 1995)

Now I shall tell of things that change, new being
Out of old: since you, O Gods, created
Mutable arts and gifts, give me the voice
To tell the shifting story of the world
From its beginning to the present hour.
(Horace Gregory, trans., 1958)

OF bodies chang’d to various forms, I sing:
Ye Gods, from whom these miracles did spring,
Inspire my numbers with coelestial heat;
‘Till I my long laborious work compleat:
And add perpetual tenour to my rhimes,
Deduc’d from Nature’s birth, to Caesar’s times.
(translated into English verse under the direction of Sir Samuel Garth by John Dryden, Alexander Pope, etc., 1717)

I want to speak about bodies changed into new forms. You, gods, since you are the ones who alter these, and all other things, inspire my attempt, and spin out a continuous thread of words, from the world’s first origins to my own time.
(A. S. Kline, trans. 2000)

Of shapes transformde to bodies straunge, I purpose to entreate,
Ye gods vouchsafe (for you are they ywrought this wondrous feate)
To further this mine enterprise. And from the world begunne,
Graunt that my verse may to my time, his course directly runne.
(Arthur Golding, trans. 1567. Invocation here)

My soul is wrought to sing of forms transformed
to bodies new and strange! Immortal Gods
inspire my heart, for ye have changed yourselves
and all things you have changed! Oh lead my song
in smooth and measured strains, from olden days
when earth began to this completed time!
(based on Brookes Moore, 1922)

Here are a few more links. Quotes from Ovid’s works, primary sources: ancient texts, Illustrating Ovid (links to rare historical illustrations), additional art influenced by, U. Vermont Ovid Project, voluminous links.

Check out Simon Cozen’s page here, he’s translating Sei Shonagon’s 10th century Pillow Book (Makura no Sôshi – from this Japanese source text). A brief informative overview of Sei Shonagon can be found at Liza Dalby’s site (where the above image was found). Boing Boing reports:

It’s easy to forget the fact that these words were written in the tenth century, because the results in this format read – well, rather like a blog. Some dates are fictitous, and some liberties have been taken to produce a coherent narrative stream in blog format – but the content is purported to be a faithful translation of the original.

Here’s a teaser, a post dated November 12, 987, titled Huh, Men!, which begins:

Current music: Banshikicho Netori
   Current mood: Confused

I will never understand men. Their emotions are just really strange, and I just can’t work out why they behave the way they do.

I mean, you’ll hear about a man who leaves a really pretty woman, and . . .

I think one of the great potentialities of poetry is that, while it moves on the surface with image and color and motion and sense, it develops, not an exposition finally, but a disposition . . . what art does, and what explanation can’t do, is that it stops. The poem ends. And at that point, it becomes a construct, a disposition rather than an exposition, and it is silent . . . and indefinable. And this cures us of the fragmentation that words imposed on us from the beginning (A.R. Ammons).

A few words from A.R. Ammons. From An Improvisation for Angular Momentum:
 
 
Walking is like
imagination, a
single step
dissolves the circle
into motion; the eye here
and there rests
on a leaf,
gap, or ledge,
everything flowing
except where
sight touches seen:
stop, though, and
reality snaps back
in, locked hard,
forms sharply
themselves, bushbank,
dentree, phoneline,
definite, fixed,
the self, too, then
caught real, clouds
and wind melting
into their directions,
breaking around and
over, down and out . . .
 
 
from “An Interview with AR Ammons,”

It was when my little brother, who was two and
a half years younger than I, died at eighteen
months. My mother some days later found his
footprint in the yard and tried to build
something over it to keep the wind from
blowing it away. That’s the most powerful
image I’ve ever known.

(Michigan Quarterly Review. 28.1, 1989. William Walsh p. 117)

 
from another “An Interview with AR Ammons,”

I think one of the great potentialities of poetry is that, while it moves on the surface with image and color and motion and sense, it develops, not an exposition finally, but a disposition . . . what art does, and what explanation can’t do, is that it stops. The poem ends. And at that point, it becomes a construct, a disposition rather than an exposition, and it is silent . . . and indefinable. And this cures us of the fragmentation that words imposed on us from the beginning. You see, by the use of words and sentences and sense, we’re able to break down a silent world into certain clear things to say about it. But then we need to be rescued form the fragmentation we’ve made of the world. And we do that by art, by putting these motions back together and actually reaching the indefinable again. . . . it’s not a piece of knowledge that you put in books, but something you encounter, something you live with as if it were another person, as you come back again and again to a piece of sculpture and just stand and be with it. When we get to that point in a poem, where we be with it rather than ask what it means or explain how it got there, then we are back with the indefinable, we are restored to ourselves and feeling can move through us again.

(Poets in Person. Ed. Joseph Parisi. Chicago: Modern poetry Association, 1992. p. 58; also found here)

 
and another, from David Lehman:

Archie likes saying that his great motivation in poetry is anxiety, ferocious anxiety that “tries to get rid of everything thick and material – to arrive at a spiritual emptiness, the emptiness that is spiritual.”

But the final impression his lines have on the reader is of a sublime celebration of the way things are and a sublime indifference to all that would militate against poetry, “this way of writing” that is a “way of existing.” As he writes in Glare:

 
how wonderful to be able to write:
it’s something you can’t do, like

playing the piano, without thinking:
it’s not important thinking, but the

strip has to wind, the right keys
have to be hit, you have to look to

see if you’re spelling the words
right: maybe it’s not the thinking

but the concentration, which means
the attention is directed outside

and focused away from the self, away
from obsessive self-monitorings . . .
 
 

Impression, Rajiv Lather’s, horizon (Frogpond Journal 26:3, Fall 2003)

Impression, Ban’ya Natsuishi’s A Future Waterfall: 100 Haiku from the Japanese (Red Moon Press, 1999)

my son asks    casually       what a tree costs

 

John Stevenson Some of the Silence (Red Moon Press, 1999, p. 48)

 

“So, if any of my discoveries are important, the hole is. By hole I mean going outside the limitations of a picture frame and being free in one’s conception of art. . . . I did not make holes in order to wreck the picture. On the contrary, I made holes in order to find something else. They were never understood” (Lucio Fontana, 1968).
 
                              TV Time
 

flowers float above the moon blankets and tiger skin tawny orange her face moired in bla ck wildebeest herds edging a cross the plains before chang ing to channel 761 music and other available channels in 4″ rows
	bread bakes underwater the vi olent smell of bread is power li ttle money left now only paradi se or kerosene will end the col d season five yards away her hips south of the refrigerator d esperate for wheat I run down a dark wet street pulling out a gun past 3 sake shops red lant erns swaying in sleet falling fr esh from the bath
ten stories down laying on the floor our tired backs the night endless now that murder is co mmitted and the bakery theft i n the air surrounding her trea sure edging across the plains to flowers.

 
                             
 
twofish

Returning to the light topic of relationships between the Earth, poetry, psyche, and death (see this post) the following paragraphs are excerpted from the British critic Sir Frank Kermode, whose essay Dwelling Poetically in Connecticut appearing in the book Pieces of My Mind (pp. 153-57), is a gem. For the sake of space, you’ll have to put up with something of a jump start:

‘Poetically man dwells upon this earth’, said Holderlin. In the poverty of the Time Between, one establishes this dwelling by finding the poetry of the commonplace, in the joy of Danes in Denmark, the cackle of toucans in the place of toucans, in Elizabeth’s Park and Ryan’s Lunch. Stevens did it over and over again, observing the greater brilliancies of earth from his own doorstep. He dwelt in Connecticut as Santayana dwelt in the head of the world, as if it were origin as well as threshold. He wanted to establish Hőlderlin’s proposition, and every reader of Stevens will think of many more instances of his desire to do so. . . . The foyer, the dwelling place, might be Hartford or New Haven, Farmington or Haddam. The Captain and Bawda ‘married well because the marriage-place / Was what they loved. It was neither heaven nor hell’ (Collected Poems, p.401). It was earth, and the poetry of the earth was what Holderlin sought and Heidegger demanded. Stevens was always writing it and naming the spot to which it adhered. This is what poets are for in a time of need. They provide a cure of that ground; they give it health by disclosing it, in its true poverty, in the nothing that is. The hero of this world, redeemer of being, namer of the holy, is the poet. Stevens has many modest images of him, yet he is the centre. In that same central place Heidegger sets Hőlderlin and adorns him with words that have special senses: truth, angel, care, dwell.

Heidegger gave the word dwell a special charge of meaning. Drawing on an old sense of the German word, he can say that ‘Mortals dwell in that they can save the earth’, that is, ‘set it free in its own presencing’, free, as Stevens would say, of its man-locked set. There is much more to dwelling, but I will mention only that to dwell is to initiate one’s own nature, one’s being capable of death as death, ‘into the use and practice of this capacity, so that there may be a good death’. Furthermore, ‘as soon as man gives thought to his dwelling it is a misery no longer’; so out of its insecurity and poverty (‘man dwells in huts and wraps himself in the bashful garment,’ says Hőlderlin; ‘a single shawl / Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor. . .’, says Stevens [CP, p. 524]) he can build, can make poetry. For Heidegger is here meditating on Hőlderlin’s enigma, that we dwell poetically on this earth, even in a time of destitution, and that our doing so is somehow gratuitous, independent of our merits, a kind of grace.

But perhaps, after all, Stevens did know something about Being and Time. Perhaps it was knowing about it that sent him looking, in his seventies, for news of what that Swiss philosopher might have to say about his supreme poet. Heidegger wrestled with ideas we all wrestle with: the potentiality of no more being able to be there, he remarks, is the inmost, one might say the own-most, potentiality. We have many ways of estranging death; for example, we say, ‘Everybody dies’, or ‘one dies’. So we conceal our own ‘being-toward-death’; yet death is the ‘end’ of Being, of Dasein – and the means by which it becomes a whole. To estrange it, to make it a mere fact of experience, is to make it inauthentic. Being understands its own death authentically not by avoiding that dread out of which courage must come but by accepting it as essential to Being’s everydayness, which otherwise conceals the fact that the end is imminent at every moment. There must be a ‘running forward in thought’ to the potentiality of death.

Only where there is language is there world, says Heidegger; and only where there is language is there this running in thought, this authentication of death. It is the homecoming that calls for the great elegy; it is ‘learning at home to become at home’, as Heidegger says of the Hőlderlin elegy. ‘All full poets are poets of homecoming,’ he [Heidegger] says. And he insists that Hőlderlin’s elegy is not about homecoming; it is homecoming. Stevens knew this, whether he learned it from Heidegger or not. He knew the truth of many of Heidegger’s assertions, for example, about the nature of change in art. ‘The works are no longer the same as they once were. It is they themselves, to be sure, that we encounter . . . but they themselves are gone by.’ The work of art ‘opens up a world and at the same time sets his world back again on earth’. The perpetuation of such truth is the task of an impossible philosopher’s man or hero. Stevens’ poet works in the fading light; the ‘he’ of the late poems has to make his homecoming, has to depend on his interpreters to make it for themselves and understand that it is impermanent. The advent of the Supreme Poet, who would stop all this, is like the return of the god.

It should be added that the ‘he’, the poet, of some of the last [Stevens] poems, can be a ‘spirit without a foyer’ and search among the fortuities he perceives for ‘that serene he had always been approaching /As toward an absolute foyer . . .’ (Opus Posthumous, p.112). It is a different version of the running-toward-death, and Heidegger would have approved of that ’serene’, for Hőlderlin used the word and his glossator turned it over many times in his mind. Is this ordered serenity too easy? When we climb a mountain ‘Vermont throws itself together’ (OP, p. 115); Vermont does the work, provided, of course, that we climb the mountain. It is not quite easy, but it is of the essence that it is also not quite difficult. The greatest image of the being at the threshold of death is, I suppose, ‘Of Mere Being’, a poem that is also, one may be sure, very late. It contains a foreign song and a foreign bird. There is dread in it. Heidegger, I dare say, would have admired it . . .

To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. . . . But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and what he touches. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime (Emerson, Nature, Chap. 1).

The poet Stanley Plumley was interviewed last year in the Atlantic Monthly by Peter Davison, who writes in introduction, “For over thirty years Plumley, both as poet and as teacher, has explored the surfaces of nature and the darknesses of the human heart. A 2002 award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters recently ratified his poetic reputation, though he has long been recognized by alert readers as one of the assured masters of contemporary American poetry.” Here are some excerpts form the interview Language Makes the Senses One, and a poem, Promising the Air.

Language, at its best, is not easy, even though the task of the poem, in Yeats’s famous phrase, is to make it “seem a moment’s thought.” For me, language rests in a state of night gravity, and I must work very hard to bring it effectively to light. “Promising the Air” and “Pian