(three deleted posts restored)
[These three posts, deleted in the transition, are here presented with their original posting dates. The original post at this date has been moved to the next posting date, where it doubles with the edited version of that original post.]
self (posted 12/3/2006)
Unless one is amnesiac, autobiography always involves an excess of material. And one of my weaknesses is an elephant’s memory. I heard or read the statement somewhere recently: Even if the elephant sleeps, he always remembers. Perhaps it’s hyper-vigilance, but I commonly remember the things that made no sense to me at least as well as the most distinct or focused events. The peripheral is always tugging the eye.
But there has also always been the clear thread. Or perhaps not always. Probably when I was twelve or thirteen I began to recognize the light. It’s a dangerous thing. Walk into an open-stacks library with a million-and-a-half volumes. Learn enough of the Dewey and enough of the natural shelving order to know where your particular predilections lie. Then let the peculiar impetus guide you. Time and again it worked. My favorite example is the time I picked up a volume on inscriptions in North Africa. Somebody’s doctoral dissertation elevated to an Oxford text. Why did the first sentence or two draw me in? The thesis, finally, on an empirical basis, is that indigenous religions gradually replaced Christianity from the south northward. It showed that Christianity had been reduced to a handful of urban enclaves along the Mediterranean coast long before the Moslems swept across North Africa, contradicting the old legend of the Moslem destruction of Christianity. The indigenous culture predisposed the people to Islam.
But it also shows why Augustine refused to go into the countryside to combat the ‘Donatist schism’, which was actually not a schism. The name was Augustine’s polemical device for characterizing the gnostics as schismatic heretics rather than legitimate religionists. It also showed – which has become equally clear from the Nag Hammadi find – that original gnosticism was radically monotheistic and essentially anti-urban and individualist. When the Sufis say that Muhammad was the first Sufi, they are commonly pointing to the same source or understanding. Late gnosticism – what the church fathers used to combat gnosticism and which gives gnosticism its bizarre cachet in the contemporary world – is in fact relatively alien to its initial import.
Fast forward sixteen centuries. An adolescent in a room in the original structure on an old ‘Dutch’ farm in Pennsylvania – a stone house built over a spring – that our narrator has adopted as his private refuge. He is trying to break out of a depressive cycle induced by the residual Puritan quandary of fate and free will, as exemplified by science versus creativity. Determinism seems to have won. But our youth is studying Einstein’s simplified explanation of the Theory of Relativity. Suddenly, the fact that light, traveling at a finite speed, engenders the determinate conditions of an infinite speed, strikes through his awareness as the absolute solution. The simultaneity of finite and infinite defines the reality of the moment of experience, that is, the moment of observation, the moment of the observer. Sequence emerges from the wholeness which can only be established in terms of the simultaneity of finite and infinite in immediacy. Immediacy is the prior condition for history, and not the reverse. The wholeness of immediacy is the Cause of causality.
But this is only one statement, one possible axis of the experience out of an instant array of realization that has dawned upon our hero.
Fast forward another forty-five years and we gather our narrator back into the present voice, where we can say that the core experience could also be expressed in the crucial text of the Nag Hammadi find, the Gospel of Thomas: ‘If you will know yourselves, you will be known, and you will know that you are the children of the living father.’
But, in fact, the seminal question pivots on the actuality that we already know ourselves. How have we arrived at this self-witnessing which is the basis of our experience, which is actually the key by which 'experience' itself is ultimately defined? Therefore, what the text means is: if we can know how it is that we already know ourselves, we will not only penetrate the ulterior nature of 'experience' itself, we will also open the gates of the radical otherness at the core of our self-awareness. And in that process we will encounter both the mystery of Spirit – the mystery of creativity, the spontaneity which is both the source and the act of a truly new value in the universe – and that which stands beyond Spirit, whose corollary in ourselves is the vocational process.
In other words, as Henry Miller said, we start to recognize that all are on the path to ordination.
And so I’m on this multi-dimensional teeter-totter. Sometimes I’m over in abstraction, disporting myself with the goddesses of concept. But it’s a dangerous business. Other times, I’m falling through the small keyhole of pure creativity, catching glimpses of the mother, that naked Psyche. But all in all, it’s a very strange occupation. I’ve spent too much time with philosophy, history, the divagations of human conduct and aspirations. Time to get back to the poetry.
I’ve ended a petty argument with myself, and offer my own little piece of raw flesh:
now I –
who only asked
to be poet
have seen the
lost window
– like hegel –
the eye
of futurity:
all faults
potentially
proved true
[from 'Emily's Dawn', 1984]
Let it be (posted 12/9/2006) I hear the Beatles’ ‘Let it be’ on the car radio, and something about the song and the late but sudden cold weather, and I’m back in the attic room of a farmhouse in 1970, give or take a year, listening to the album on vinyl – (vinyl?!) – in the midst of all the lost early struggles. The attic room was also cold. And while Gene McCarthy and Watergate and all that is still in the future, it’s as if we’re already hearing the vatic reverberations of John’s ‘the dream is over’. ‘I was the walrus, but now I’m John.’ Because somehow nothing has panned out. All the glitter just fool’s gold. The street activism. The craziness of the East Village in ’67 – the summer, not really of love, but of smoke drift ending in meth biker madness up from Houston – the effetely beloved SoHo once the haven of the disenfranchised redneck thug. And the daytrippers from Short Hills undoubtedly an easy mark. My own world an island as well. Two or three years of vibrantly melodic but admittedly archaic poetry lost in the critical narrowness of the lit-crit mentality of a heavy undergraduate degree. My own attempts at involvement in this and that cracking up against the same immutable historical abutment. It takes another ten years for the 60s to die. But I didn’t really want to get into the death of the Sixties. Rather, the memory of the end brought back the feeling of the times, insofar as I can remember them between the smoke drift of spontaneous and induced outrageousness. Only those of us who were there can recall the sense of freedom that the passing of time has since proven is the only valid measure of human hope. But such freedom is so natural that we have no sense of it as we pass through it. We didn’t see the Sixties until they ended. Showing Colors (posted 12/13/2006) But if we recede from this artifice, this addiction to technique and concept, what we encounter at first appears as a hybrid. Because we have bred our minds to think in terms of a conceptualist shell game that allows us to be now a subtle or not so subtle materialist and now a nihilist, the ‘edge’ seems real to us, when in fact it’s an illusion.
In my meditation niche, I have a picture of my teacher while he was still vibrant, before the heart attacks crippled him and the strokes stole most of his extraordinary power of speech. He’s been dead more than a decade, but I look at the picture of him in his swami orange and the living dark brightness of his smile, and once again I hear him begin his meditation talk: ‘All friends. . . .’; and his living presence fills the room. Why wasn’t I able to focus on what I had? Everything was roiled up into the turbulence of questions and suffering. But here he is, as if nothing has changed.
I had a desire for poetry by the time I was 13. But, apart from the Beats, mostly I could only hear the latest generation of ‘accepted’ poets, Frost and Jeffers, some of the shorter lyrics by Sandburg. I was largely put off by Cummings. I had to hand the Modern British and Modern American Poets with Untermeyer and Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. I also had a three- or four-volume selected text on British poets from the beginning. When I was l5 or l6, however, I locked eyebrows with Keats. I can think of no better phrase than the borrowed Zen. Suddenly the mind of the poet became clear to me. Perhaps six months later I had the same experience with Macbeth. The assignment aspect disappeared. I reread the play three or four times in the next month.
In other words, I was essentially atavistic. The New Yorker lay on the coffee table and I consistently detested everything presented there as poetry. Perhaps I slandered Berryman, and possibly Lowell or Jarrell, as a result. But otherwise, I expect my opinions would still hold.
So the issue arose: ‘What is the modern?’
The question did not appear in isolation. Even before I turned to poetry I had had a desire to paint. By the time I was 12 or 13 I had prodded my parents to let me ‘study’ – God help me – at the local technical emporium.
In any case, my inclination was Impressionism and post-Impressionism and little beyond. I understood the quasi-realism of the Impressionists, because I could look out my window at the farm and see the colors they saw. It was a revelation. And I could follow the modern to some extent. But what I needed, in my peculiarly literal poet’s mind, was a principle. And the principle was not forthcoming.
Needless to say, the high school bohemians with similar pretensions became nine-to-fivers or married them. Their cheap buzz phrases for Existentialism, Relativity and Freudianism have largely become an embarrassment. And, as I’ve already indicated, taking a literature degree (because, again, I would not touch a ‘fine arts’ course with a long prod) succeeded in ending my independent reading for a year or two.
But by the early ’70’s, I’d found Lowell. And the combination of a fading old New England paternity and a quasi-contemporary Shakespearean prosody with a surrealist, perhaps semi-beatnik imagination – in sum, the pure, half-measured mania of the poetry – struck the necessary chord and opened the door. Pound, of course, followed through. Because, in that sequence, the regression leads directly to old Ez, the lyrical magician.
But all of this, to some extent, is beside the point, in the sense that it doesn’t necessarily indicate what the principle is. Decadent modernism holds that the basis of art itself has changed. It was this presumption that drove all the ‘experimentation’ in the arts. But a real change had taken place that was not an experiment but also not necessarily a change in the basic nature of art. The core of art, however, had become more accessible. It’s as much a psychological and historical change reflected in the art, as a change in art itself. The ‘I’ comes to the center of the creative process in a way it had not before. But to assume that the raw ‘I’ somehow now supersedes the motif is a flagrant, but pervasive cultural error. The motif is the I in terms of history and medium, but above all in terms of the nature of creativity itself. The beautiful duplicity of the self-transcendent nature of the I.
But as soon as we say that, the decadent eastern and domestic subjectivists pervert it into the culture of the concept, the culture of the conceptual technique, the new Salon. Because, the artifice of objectivity dictates the supremacy of the conceptual addiction, which is equally the technical addiction. The problem is, that objectivity itself is an experience and not a ‘state’ or ‘fact’. And this experience is essentially spiritual and religious. It is in fact that ultimate validation of the two selves and the possibility of the sameness of the two selves. Zen is the epitome of this understanding. Unfortunately, Zen itself has been perverted into this intellectual addiction. The new materialism and the new nihilism, based in this apparently ‘transcendent’ shell game of conceptualist abstraction, have debased a significant part of the contemporary Zen tradition as well. These are the same ‘heresies’ that infected Buddhism in the time of Buddha himself.
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