Reverie I.

Beneath the blossoms with a pot of wine,

No friends at hand, so I poured alone;

I raised my cup to invite the moon,

Turned to my shadow, and we became three.

Now the moon had never learned about drinking,

And my shadow had merely followed my form,

But I quickly made friends with the moon and my shadow;

To find pleasure in life, make the most of the spring.

Whenever I sang, the moon swayed with me;

Whenever I danced, my shadow went wild.

Drinking, we shared our enjoyment together;

Drunk, then each went off on his own.

But forever agreed on dispassionate revels,

We promised to meet in the far Milky Way.

~ Li Po (Li Bai)

Some time ago, another place and another mind, I found myself alone on a bench beneath a tree in what I thought (in my Mr. Flood-like state) to be a public park. It was late at night, and I was temporarily homeless; the “temporary distraction” (as I euphemistically called the harpy with whom I had been living) had kicked me out of her apartment. I was unconcerned, for I had a full bottle of gin and the night was warm and clear: stars wheeling overhead, the gently swaying branches of a stable, thick-limbed tree … oh, and the bench was partially rotten, sagging comfortably beneath my lax body. ‘Twas like unto a hammock.

For some reason, I was not willing to admit that I was in a crisis. Like Li Po I had three friends, only mine were the tree, the bench, and my own supine self. Thus integrated into that private ecosystem, I realized that certain moments are emblazoned forever on the mind, and are set to become monuments of or to the self, which is always in motion, even if its vehicle is temporarily disabled. It is part of the human quest for meaning to seek a reason for every situation, to follow some sort of tracery leading (supposedly) to a grand unified theory of personal existence. Well …

I refuse to follow Herrick and compose a farewell poem to my beloved booze, for we know that he ended up composing a poem celebrating his return to his favorite inebriant (called “sack” back then). Jinxes are psychological realities, alas. I am instead merely subsisting on tea, non-trigger music, and a rather forced zeal to write. This much is clear, and was clear to me beneath that tree on the bench: some events in life are morally and ethically neutral. They can serve as raw material for later use, perhaps, but neither good nor bad (indifferent, perhaps, as in the Stoic ADIAPHORA, but only for the moment in which they arise) – they are signposts leading toward a plot of ground on which the creative mind will erect a shrine to its own unicity.

Labor of this kind is invariably lonely. Eventually, as Li Po understood, each will go off on his or her own, with some outrageous promise to meet again in some impossible place or circumstance. The melancholy produced by this inescapable operation of inter-human existence can be as intoxicating as the contents of a bottle – and as addictive.

In the morning, when I awoke to the sound of crackling police radios, and opened my bleary eyes to see two amused officers looking down at me, the transformation had already taken place above and around my sleeping form. ‘Twas no park, but the ornate (if poorly manicured) lawn of a private residence. Bottle of gin at my side (empty) and rotten bench nearly touching the ground … I was kindly permitted to return to the cavern of Shelob whence I had come.

So now what? Li Po was wise enough to simply allow the language to take the shape of the event. Organic subjectivity. How’s that for a designation? Resisting the lure of analysis is hard for me. Re-presenting the immediacy of a moment through language? Well-nigh impossible.

Where have all the great poets gone?

Nevertheless …

Beneath a tree, bottle in hand

Breeze and my breath and a smack of the lips

As the fire infuses my form, I greet the tree

My friend the bench makes three

Da Vinci’s Ginevra understood the gin

And I daresay the night does too

A moment to myself in the inky night

A discovery: careless collapse and joy are kindred

I hum to myself as a gnat tickles my nose

I smile at the unexpected even as I shiver at some thought

She: a phone call away

I: a universe to my Self

Tangled like Neaera’s hair, we’re not through yet

Tomorrow a steep descent, or perhaps salvation for both

...

That sort of thing was acceptable in 8th century China. The United States in the early 21st century? That’s another matter. “A half savage country” indeed.

It's hard to explain the Rig Veda to an Existentialist

(or is it?)

"In the beginning this One evolved

Became desire, first seed of the mind.

Wise seers, searching within their hearts,

Found the bond of Being in Not-Being

~ Rig Veda (Nasadiya) 4

Reverse this poetic formula, and say that the desire for meaning begets Mind, and that Mind is the blank space into which our desires spill their seed, hoping to fertilize the oblivious Absurd -- then one has likely "existentialized" an ancient Hindu text.

When one is counseled to find a power greater than oneself, for the purpose of recovering from a certain disease of the mind and allergy of the body, one can go in circles and call this Higher Power the act of mind that seeks a Higher Power, and so on ... It won't end. Desire -- the well-spring of all that is good, bad, indifferent, or just pointless -- depends upon a willing agent. Even when the desire is for absorption into the cosmic organism, or just plain dissolution, there is no meaning when the agent is absent. "Time is no healer," as T. S. Eliot put it, for "the patient is no longer here" (Four Quartets, "The Dry Salvages" III.). Eternity is no healer either, for the patient is as if he'd never been.

I've no patience with any religion, philosophy, or "spiritual" system that belittles the existential center, the Ego (in the Classical Greek sense of the term, and in Ayn Rand's sense) and calls for a shedding of all the temporal encrustations that make the person the "unique, unrepeatable entity" that is the only ground for morals and ethics -- even in a post-modern environment where those terms are endlessly abused, ironically invoked, or transmuted into other signifiers by the great alchemy of differance ...

"Never have I not existed,

[says Krishna]

nor you, nor these kings;

and never in the future

shall we cease to exist."

~ Bhagavad-Gita, Second Teaching

From an Existentialist point of view, this statement renders the entire concept of personhood (and it is a Western concept, stated in Greek as hupostasis) meaningless; for the person comes to be in time, orients himself to the world as one who is in the process of becoming, and experiences continuity with the rest of the world (the community of others, if you will) only by way of existing as his own foundation (literally "standing under") -- which is precisely the meaning of the ancient Greek term, which we receive by way of Latin as "subject" (of, to, etc.)...

The great void out of which I emerged (and which I conceptualize only through a desire to know myself, which is a creative act) and into which I shall someday return is the sole reference-point for my personhood. Anaximander called it apeiron. An anonymous Anglo-Saxon poet described it analogically as the storm-wracked night out of which a bird flies, to enter the mead-hall for a brief spell of light and warmth, only to return again to that darkness.

Somewhere we have lost, as a culture, the love of the light of this day, the here-and-now, that makes creativity and personhood (the two are so inextricably bound as to be near synonyms) a necessity -- if we are to glorify this world for it's own sake, and not for some utilitarian end. For "Life piled on life / were all too little," as Tennyson so movingly put it ... "and of one to me / Little remains" ("Ulysses").

Being-toward-death or Being-toward-salvation: the great dilemma separating the atheist from the Christian Existentialists. Sartre versus Kierkegaard. Heidegger versus Bultmann. Moore versus AA. And so it goes.

"He who is in the sun, and in the fire and in the heart of man is One. He who knows this is one with the One"

~ Matri Upanishad

That is to say, no person, no subject, no desire ...

Petite Dinosaur

She Walks Like A Petite Dinosaur

Through the spit-stained and crack-riddled streets of darkened Philadelphia.

But she is my angel.

She rips and tears and renders me helpless …

But she is my beloved.

Her mind is fused with a body that demands stimulus: her body and mind are one and she is whole. But she falters at the very edge of pure human experience, and makes art of her variable self.

She is pure in mind, but gored in spirit.

Her face is a reflection of that aeonic image of eternal production that makes artists of us all.

She sings like an angel and scrapes like a beast:

Her hair is perfect.

I tasted her for a moment and entered a portal beyond which lies a darkness that I simply cannot enter.

No: will not enter. I’m not going to offer explanations to Dante and Virgil …

My explanation is to this white space upon which I type these words.

The love of a man for a woman is a mystery and a chalice, one from which all should drink, sacramentally, liturgically, whatever the fuck you want to say …

But the purpose here is to remind myself of the mellifluous little lady (short and cute) that I’ve lost.

Scum seeps into the streets of every life that draws sustenance from this earth that feeds us all …

Walk away or stick around and get infected by the common sweat and all of its bacteria – all that oozes from the graying skin of dying humanity.

The purity resides when a rather naïve and fetishistic man places his mouth on a worldly goddess …

The body … oh, the body!

Memory tries, but it never fails, no matter how severe the eruption of tainted dreams into the sleeping brain of a bereaved body.

It Festers ... and we calll it Philly

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To be bored with oneself

I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end,

But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.

There was never any more inception than there is now,

Nor any more youth or age than there is now,

And will never be any more perfection than there is now,

Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.

Urge and urge and urge,

Always the procreant urge of the world.

~ Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, III.

This only makes sense if one is in a co-breathing relation with the world (what the ancient Stoics called SUMPNOIA) … If I have this “spiritual” sense that the entire cosmos cares about my (well-)being, and that somehow I belong (metaphysically) in the exact space and time I inhabit, then Whitman’s gorgeous, exultant poetry moves me.

But I don’t believe it.

Walt wanted to make love to the earth itself, to fuck the ground he walked upon, and to somehow find communion with the iconic goddess “Nature” by masturbating himself into some sort of union with his supposed source of All.

The concepts by which we live are phantasms of the mind … that sounds like a quote, or perhaps it’s something I picked up from my life-sustaining reading over these past several years.

In any case, the urge to bring forth new selves into the world is universal. But the self, as a concept, is unique and unrepeatable, but gloriously malleable!

The Church Father were right to call it/us : HUPOSTASIS

.

Listen: as I sit in a café in Greenwich Village, martini in hand, smiling at the roving pseudo-angels that inhabit such joints, I am one self.

When I speak at a conference, where people engaged in actual research are taking the time to listen, I am an other – not a different (specious distinction!) self.

“The Same and the Other”? Horseshit!

Whatever swinging-dick motherfucker who came up with that distinction deserves to have his balls cut off!

There is only the self and the perceived world.

Period.

Get it?

Good.

No real matter. The HULE of our Being rots away at its own petty pace, from day to bleeding day … >We all fail and fall ... “Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.”

Day by day I’m drained of theTHUMOS that once made me a force to be reckoned with.

That’s fine.

Peace falls like a shroud upon us all, eventually.

If we are quiet in our hearts.

Someday I hope to walk, drunk (as usual) through a park or some suburban pathway and find a dying goddess.

Poe himself said that there is nothing more beautiful than a dying woman.

But it takes a dying man to appreciate her.

And the boredom of imminent death is enough to draw togetherPSUKHOIthat would otherwise remain Monads.

Gnostic-like.

In her is the end of breeding. Her boredom is exquisite and excessive.

~ Ezra Pound, The Gardenblockquote>

I wouldn’t dare – at this point – to declare anything about Pound. His nature was of another order.

Harold Bloom would be proud: I acknowledge the anxiety of influence.

There’s just one person that I refuse to acknowledge …

She lurks like a succubus in the dark Huysmanian night and she will be exorcised.

Peace, my friends.

To my enemies:

Asphyxia.

The contrast of blue and green is enough to make a darkened soul hate its ignominy. The Descent of Aeneas into Hell (French, circa 1530, painted enamel on silver copper)

Now let’s see: what has passed in the past 24 hours that requires a written message? Not much.

I drank, listened to Springsteen, slept, and drank some more … Oh, I took a 5-mile run around the local park. BFD

Perhaps Wordsworth can help us figure out, for this one moment in time, just why someone pretending to be a poet writes.

Taking up the subject, then, upon general grounds, I ask what is meant by the word Poet? What is a Poet? To whom does he address himself? And what language is to be expected from him? He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the Universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them. To these qualities he has added a disposition to be affected more than other men by absent things as if they were present; an ability of conjuring up in himself passions, which are indeed far from being the same as those produced by real events, yet (especially in those parts of the general sympathy which are pleasing and delightful) do more nearly resemble the passions produced by real events, than any thing which, from the motions of their own minds merely, other men are accustomed to feel in themselves; whence, and from practice, he has acquired a greater readiness and power in expressing what he thinks and feels, and especially those thoughts and feelings which, by his own choice, or from the structure of his own mind, arise in him without immediate external excitement.

(William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1802) – my emphasis

That is where I disagree with Bill. “Immediate external excitement” is the be all and end all of life. I cannot recollect anything of emotional force in tranquility. I can only recreate the scene and, perhaps (if I’m poetically lucky) the atmosphere.

How very few theorists have dwelt on atmosphere! I mean real atmosphere: the kind that causes a suburban lane to suddenly transform into a track behind a mediaeval English manor house, where the Gawain-poet likely wrote.

When I read poetical texts of any kind, I look less for content than for atmosphere. I don’t particularly care for Piers Plowman, but the opening lines:

In a somer seson, whan softe was the sonne,

I shoop me into shroudes as I a sheep were,

In habite as an heremite unholy of werkes,

Wente wide in this world wondres to here.

Ac on a May morwenynge on Malverne hilles

Me bifel a ferly, of Fairye me thoghte.

I was wery forwandred and wente me to reste

Under a brood bank by a bourne syde;

And as I lay and lenede and loked on the watres,

I slombred into a slepyng, it sweyed so murye.

(William Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman, prologue)

These lines invoke a childhood past that never quite existed, but came close enough to the tenor of those ancient lines to produce a marked affinity. And that, to me, is sufficient to make a poem worth reading. I am no fan of allegory, which is why I cannot quite make it through the rest of Piers (nor the Faery Queene for that matter!). But I think, somehow, we all make an allegory of our respective lives. My descent into alcoholism can be described thus:

Because this beast, at which thou criest out, Suffers not any one to pass her way, But so doth harass him, that she destroys him; And has a nature so malign and ruthless, That never doth she glut her greedy will, And after food is hungrier than before. Many the animals with whom she weds, And more they shall be still, until the Greyhound Comes, who shall make her perish in her pain.

(Dante, Inferno, Canto I. – Longfellow translation)

If I tried hard enough (actually, it would be pretty fucking easy) I could allegorize my life as a struggle against this insatiable monster (the bottle of vodka in front of me as I write this), one to which I am rapidly succumbing, but yet still only on one knee! It is too easy to allegorize, which is why so much of mediaeval poetry is bullshit to a post-modern atheist. Yet I still love it for its atmosphere!

So here is my anti-allegorical tale:

One early morning, when I was about 10 years-old, I rode my bike to the edge of a brook near our street, parked my bike, descended the bank, and watched the water flow against the emerald green of the bank. I fell asleep, and when I awoke, a garter snake was warming itself on a rock nearby. I watched him sleep, and was amazed at his primitive beauty. Like a typical young boy, I tried to catch him, but he quickly slithered into one of the many rocky outcroppings along the bank. Now I could easily turn that into an allegory, but it was just an experience, a point in my life when my childish innocence had yet to be sullied, and my connection to nature yet to be mediated by all-powerful science.

Yes, that old-fashioned manner of speaking still applies.

And when I returned home, the excitement of that day became a tapestry of that day’s denotive texture and tinctured it with a silent sort of significance. (I’m being consciously alliterative and silly now, but still whistling-in-the-dark serious) …

When I recall those days, the obvious reference is to Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode.

But yet I know, where’er I go,

That there hath pass’d away a glory from the earth.

(lines 17-18)

For something in me that day spoke of a point of no return. Carrying my household gods on my back, I returned to that brook later … only to find: The snake still there, the same emerald bank, the same gently bustling water. But my eyes had veils over them, metaphorically speaking. Only when I was in the moment did it matter. All now is a memory. And memories are like assholes.

I may not agree that we are capable of relinquishing the “immediate excitement” of a moment while still remaining poets, but I do agree that something of beauty has left this world … but only because our (meaning MY) drunken eyes can no longer see it. When I embrace a woman today, I only feel a potential corpse. The days of feeling a warm example of the life-principle are long over. (If any reader of mine has read Dragonlance and I refer to Raistlin, she or he will know exactly what I mean!)

The manifestations and perambulations (my own choice of words) of the universe: it still goes on. As do I.

For worse.

I am, like Wordsworth said, affected by absent things as though they were present. It is a disease of the mind. The greatest poet of the 20th century (in my none-too-humble opinion) Sylvia Plath, said:

If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.

Past and present, present and past, the point of immediacy which exists not. Too much fucking philosophy. Sylvia said it best. We don’t need Heraclitus or T.S. Eliot to tell us that the river flows and we are but tragic salmon. (Horrible analogy, but purposely so, like Lautréamont’s famous sewing machine). But I do need to make a point of this admittedly drunken ramble through a park filled with goose shit and crying brats, as I gulp from a bottle of Poland Spring water that is actually vodka. So here it is.

If ever I see the snake on the rock again, I shall recall my days of Gnosticism. If ever I meet a woman like Sylvia I won’t be a Ted Hughes but an Edward Moore.

And if ever I meet again the woman I truly (as if truth exists!) love, I shall tell her this (and so this day-long production ends):

Charon did not cry when the last soul reached the shore … He rejoiced, but with the melancholia of one who is alone, and has no purpose.

Sometimes it is good to have no purpose. At other times, despair becomes the wraith that smothers us in the night.

The poet creates a purpose, and it is his own.

That is why some of us continue to live.

All the learning in the world cannot compensate for the loss of the compassion that leads one to talk to a madman in Central Park at two o’clock in the morning. One may have to be drunk to do so … but by God (who doesn’t exist!) I’m better off for having been that person. Now that I recede into the dim caverns of my Avernian vodka, I hold on desperately, and as life recedes, my love for it increases.

Does that make me a poet?

Time is one No One’s Side

What might have been is an abstraction Remaining a perpetual possibility Only in a world of speculation.

~ T. S. Eliot, Burnt Norton

In an essay from 1919 Eliot said some shit about the personality being something that personality-strong persons should want (occasionally) to escape from … Load of shit (as far as I am concerned). He said:

“… of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.”

If I could escape, even through art, from my personality (hupostasis) I would cease to be Edward. Fuck that! I’d rather be the drunken, rambling pseudo-poet that I am, rather than some plastic “artist” living as an artifact of his “tradition.”

So much for Eliot.

But what about REAL poetic theory? Is there such a thing?

My answer is yes. And I shall use my beloved as an example:

Sylvia Plath strangled her own life for the sake of her art … She watched her children crawl about like slugs as she wrote the masterpiece known today as Ariel. She died for her art, and I am prepared to do the same. Here’s what SHE had to say:

“… everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

Eloquence (and proper grammar) might be absent from her statement, but the sentiment (all-embracing) is there!

Sylvia is telling us that the highest to the greatest is cause for poetry. A quick blowjob in a subway station, or a major fuck in a five-star hotel (you see where my mind is at!) … All are worthy of poetry.

She herself was worthy of poetry, and I’d like to write about her … I just don’t feel worthy. So here I am going to perform a shameless imitation of my beloved. Harold Bloom would likely approve (and for those who understand this reference, you get my silent applause). So here I

go: Listening to Van Morrison While Guzzling Vodka

A drink of water laced with vodka slows my soul But sets it moving Why does Born to Run suddenly seem like great poetry? Because I am drunk. Why do I think back to those golden days when I fed ducks in the parks and spoke cryptic words with my grandpop? Because I recall what it felt like to be HUMAN. Days take their toll, and love dies … What is a man to do? We … I … must remember that my soul resides only in this world: In the air, in the trees, the geese, the grass that tickles my feet … I must remember … I cannot. A veil has fallen. Something called …. Who fucking cares?!! A veil has fallen. My eyes are dim … not like Milton’s, but like a drunk who stares too long at Botticelli. So what, then? The world recedes and I call out to it with the only faculty I have left: my voice. No one answers. So I spit at the world and await a fight that I know will never come ….

And so my Sylvia awaits an academic reply. Sorry Sweetie, not yet … too much vodka in my system. Someday, my glorious angel, I shall do you justice in “academia” (whatever the fuck that means).

In the meantime, I shall lend you this:

“Curiosity killed the cat … Kerouac’s Dharma Bums and On the Road …”

OR BETTER YET: Sylvia’s Colossus and Ariel!

You surpassed all of them, my love … all of them.

I’ll see you when my love grows, Sylvia … It won’t be too long. We’ll soon embrace.

In the meantime, take my tribute as a poetic memorial (if such a thing exists – we’ll have to ask Shakespeare!) and remember:

A world of experience does not create a person. For no creator exists. Not even the world.

Let us love from beyond the grave, ghoulishly, if it must be …