Specter VI {A Farewell To Specters}

When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of space of which I am ignorant, and which knows me not, I am frightened, and am astonished at being here rather than there, why now rather than then.

~ Blaise Pascal

Sing we for love and idleness,

Naught else is worth the having.

Though I have been in many a land,

There is naught else in living.

And I would rather have my sweet,

Though rose-leaves die of grieving,

Than do high deeds in Hungary

To pass all men's believing.

~ Ezra Pound, An Immorality

I.

There is no salvation in hope; it is an empty style of living which renders the existent mere flesh on the bone, waiting on others, or on some event(s), to inject meaning into the meaningless.

Socrates said "the unexamined life is not worth living." I say, the solitary life is not worth reflecting upon ... Art does not come from a lonely individual in his private chamber, but rather from a walker, a thinker ... a lover.

To wonder why I am in the here-and-now, rather than elsewhere, is to avoid the challenge of forcing meaning out of the void of "thrown" existence, or what the German existentialists called Geworfenheit. I am here to create and to love: that is the only "truth."

The beauty of the beloved, and the clear spectacle of her presence -- no specter! -- is the reality ... the lips that the nihilist kisses and is forced to say, "I refute it thus!": the emptiness of absurd existence, now filled with the truth of Beauty, which is "all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know" (Keats).

The gnwsiV that rose up from the abyss, or descended like a coiling snake upon brute unfeeling matter ... The knowledge that returned from a long exile, to re-discover ousia the way the prince re-discovered himself in the Hymn of the Pearl, for example ... That knowledge born of exhaustion and longing, working together to lighten the far edges of an aborted universe, and renew the seemingly lost hupostasis ... Such was the love of Sophia for her accidental offspring, in Sethian Gnostic myth. And it is the love that causes specters to dissolve.

Sidney said that poets gild nature with gold. Lovers lighten the dark spaces, and reveal themselves to that which never sets, as sage Heraclitus once said ... Nature may die so long as the legacy remains ... the light, the gold, the monuments of our own magnificence.

II.

Warm pastoral! Idle contentment after demiuirgic endeavor -- such is the threshold of renewed existence!

When light falters at the end of day, shadows lengthen, bringing that oft-sung melancholy that is more than meaning: it is promise ... for to feel the feathery touch of this world, which we call emotion, is to find ourselves remaining, for a while, still -- and knowing that self is not all there is.

There will be time, there will be time, to embrace a future that is all hope ... It will not bring salvation but the knowledge that the here-and-now is the ground of our being, the 'upokeimenon that permits us to turn metaphysical when brute existence begins to frighten us ... or else to produce "Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears" (Wordsworth).

The fear of death, the crisis of the absurd, the angst that makes life seem like a pointless gesture ... or rather, the realization that life without love, creation, and infinite yearning -- a decision! -- is the cause of angst ... The recoiling from the other ... the retiring of self into private contemplative quarters where art languishes, and with it -- Life ... the motivation to rebel out of a frustrated sense of creative impotency ... the sabotaging of the Good, True, and Beautiful for the sake of a power that is not world-historical but pointless and draining ...

A future there will be, and to it we must answer. Indeed, it is our self that we will be answering to ...

Have you guess'd you yourself would not continue?

Have you dreaded these earth-beetles?

Have you fear'd the future would be nothing to you?

~ Walt Whitman, To Think of Time

Crippling fear of the future is the death of all art and love ... The ancient Stoics, for example, with their theory of eternal recurrence and terrifying ekpurosis, did their best to banish that fear, but it was at the expense of the moral development of the person. Ethics, meaning civic responsibility, may have flourished ... But how often did a Stoic man say to his beloved agape sou? I LOVE YOU.

III.

Hustle and bustle all around ... but two at table ... a pair of brown eyes by dark ringlets framed ... of the softest hair ... The world did not shake, my heart did not pound, but a peace settled upon me as our eyes met. 'Twas the peace of contentment ... No matter what was to come, the immortal gods smiled upon that moment, and it would have been ingratitude of the grossest kind to expect more ... yet more did come ... and shall -- I pray! -- continue ...

All measure, and all language, I should pass

Should I tell what a miracle she was.

~ John Donne, The Relic

Fine metaphysical Donne! Nothing is done ... I shall amend your lines by writing WHAT A MIRACLE SHE IS!

Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; thou hast doves' eyes.

~ Song of Solomon 1:15 (KJV)

Specter V

I am Defeated all the time; yet to Victory I am born

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson (Journal K, 1842, # 283)

There are many who labor under the delusion that life is simple, that all one must do is be honest, work hard, take care of family, and cause no harm to others. Yet life is more complex than we would wish. Regrets are buried, only to rise at the darkest hours of our life to overtake us ... Guilt for wrongs done to others (intentional or not) invade our psyches like potent vampires, reducing our well-filled intellect to a husk, a dessicated rind of nous left to rot unused and unremembered.

How can one forget one's mind? It happens all the time.

A man hardly knows how much he is a machine, until he begins to make telegraph, loom, press, and locomotive, in his own image. (Emerson, Conduct of Life, Part 2)

This act of making, which reduces the role of the human to a mere function, causes the mind to forget itself. How often have we heard someone say "I get lost in my work"? Rarely do we hear anyone say "I have discovered something new about myself!" This discovery of self (which IS possible!) is difficult; and there are those who seek shortcuts. I am such a one. My shortcut has been alcochol which, to quote Bob Dylan, "levels my head and eases my mind." Yet it nearly killed me. Defeat was closer than I ever thought possible. Victory is a promise -- but like all promises, there is always the possibility that it may prove empty.

Service to others is the popular mode of exorcising the demon; yet there are those who dwell alone in this world, for whom the other is, as Sartre put it, hell. Loneliness demands that the mind turn in on itself, in what sometimes amounts to a morbid preoccupation with one's own thoughts. Yet this preoccupation, or (as I prefer to put it) self-reflection or theoria ("contemplation"), is necessary if one wishes to preserve what is essentially human in us: the life of the mind, the creative impulse, the Byronesque self on the mountaintop, defying the world with one's own glorious defeat.

That being said, I disagree with Emerson that the Crucifixion was a defeat, however glorious. It was indeed a victory of the highest order. For this world is chaotic, purposeless and poisonous to the sensitive, self-reflective person. Christ with His defiant love is a model for those who know that defeat is inevitable, and that victory is nothing more than a noble defeat, a conquest of this world by a rejection of its mindless machinery.

Specter IV.

On Listening to Sibelius on a Wild and Windy Night

{Substitute for Spectre IV.}

I.

There I walked, and there I raged;

The spiritual savage caged

Within my skeleton, raged afresh

To feel, behind a carnal mesh,

The clean bones crying in the flesh.

~ Elinor Wylie, "Full Moon"

Power cannot produce purity, no more than artifice can craft Truth. Anyone who has listened to the violin concerto of Jean Sibelius -- and listened with attention -- will understand this statement. The gentle, lachryomose lines of the first movement quickly give way to a violent outburst of emotion, a calculated effort to draw the listener into a world of angst ... Calculation, yes ... But no deception. This piece is one of the most honest compositions I've ever encountered. I attempted to perform it as a youth. I stumbled on the platform, scraped and missed several arpeggios ... oh

well.

Time and again my feelings let me know ... there is a power raging inside of me ... a force destructive, personal, and constitutive of my life ... I prevail because I am pissed off. That concerto rages until the end, when the silence overtakes the exhausted violinist ... The silence not of the grave but of the burnt-out soul, which hastens to its end, but not with a whimper ... a BANG!!!

II.

... ill doing ... or loss or lack ... or depressions or exaltations,

They come to me days and nights and go from me again,

But they are not the Me myself.

~ Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself" (4).

Crackles of the heart, phone calls, explanations, seeking understanding, a rage of emotion, an analysis that breeds only scorn ...

She keeps herself at home, with a sweaty body in the bed that used to be mine: Whore of a Woman! Death be upon you!

No: Love keep thee,

and let me know it again.

You fucking slut.

III.

A terrible grazhny vonny world, really, O my brothers. And so farewell from your little droog. And to all others in this story profound shooms of lip-music, brrrrrr. And they can kiss my sharries. But you, O my brothers, remember sometimes thy little [Edward] that was. Amen. And all that cal. ~ Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (slightly modified to include MY name) She rots in my mind like a fester ... She sticks in my maw like a poppy seed that causes irritation ... She scrapes my shit along the toilet at 3:00 AM and expects me NOT to drink. Bolshy yarblockos to that witchy whore! At the mid-point of my life ... Dante-esque ... If I wanted Love I'd have it now. Are you out there, you cosmos-shattering disgrace to femininity? No. You have someone else's sweat in your bathrobe. April is indeed the cruelest month -- and to ME the cruelest Name. She knows her power and revels in it. I know my weakness ... And accept it. Shantih shantih shantih

Specter III. {Justification}

I.

She would like someone to speak to her,

And is almost afraid that I

will commit that indiscretion.

~ Ezra Pound, "The Garden"

Timid women excite me. The trembling smile and quivering lips ... the blush and the quick turn-away ... Such a compliment!

How can it be that I inspire such reaction? I with the the alcoholic face and the darkling eyes ... The sullen rapport of self with self ...

Yet it happens.

Time and again the season lets me know the extent of ability, the reason behind the rhyme, the law of nature exhibiting a portal of solace to an abandoned soul. If there were no more women in the world, I would curl up beneath a tree in the park, gin bottle in hand, and slowly die, a death of peace and quiet contemplation ... A peace unknown to man since this garden began.

Contemplation: in the ancient Greek, qewria, a term reminding us of God, qeoV, and indicating that the highest form of thought is the turning of the mind towards Divinity. But there is no divinity, just a crackling field of energy extending far beyond the parameters of human thought.

We drag this energy with us, into the most unlikely and inauspicious of territories. At least I do. A pretty intern smiling down at me as I am pumped full of vitamins. Good. Let me live, even though I agree with my darling Sylvia: "Suicidal, at one with the drive / Into the red" (Sylvia Plath, "Ariel" 29-30).

Tired, lonely, and bored: such is the life of the mind in the age of quickness and effects. Chausson speaks to me, in his lonely poem for violin ... The exhausted drift of the melody as it forces the violin almost to the dramatic intensity of the human voice ... He knew.

II.

I don't know what

Po' weary me can do.

Gypsy says I'd kill my self

If I was you.

~ Langston Hughes, "Bad Luck Card"

Poe said that the most moving and effective subject for poetry is the death of a beautiful woman. We wish death upon those we love because we do not want an other to possess them! It is that simple. But a more mature manner of living dictates something more honorable ... Exit. The last statement of a soul in torment. Fine. But what of the impression? If I make an exit in any way undignified ... If I step into the void with no love to guide me to the destination ... Then what?

Exhaustion causes all kinds of maladies of the mind ... Excess of vision, a torment bordering on a cry for salvation ... Never!

Missing the point is natural; gaining the prize is superhuman, and insupportable. Solon said that happiness can only be gauged at the end of life. So why strive for it in youth, or middle age? We are all, as Pascal said, chained in a dungeon awaitng death.

Easily it may come. III.

I dewyne fordolked of luf daungere

Of that pryuy perle wythouten spot.

~ The Gawain-Poet, Pearl I. 11-12.

Indeed. To languish alone is the fate of many ... However, it is worse for the intellectual, who knows the extent of his emotional power, and the manner in which it shaped the lives of others. It would be impossible for me to sit in my room and watch sports all day, drinking cheap beer and eating chips ... It works for some, but not for me! Someone told me recently that my reclusive nature is selfish, that I need to get out into the world and share myself again ...

But I miss my pretty pearl without a spot.

Another pseudo-Haiku

A bright painting on a wall

My mind forgets itself

But only for a moment

A pseudo-Haiku

The bright white bus goes by

Thoughts of a dull gray mountain

There shall I return

Specter II. {The Insomniac Types}

I.

I gazed awhile

On her cold smile,

Too cold -- too cold for me ...

~ Edgar Allan Poe, "Evening Star"

Divinity that comes to us only in dreams and shadows is worthless, as Wallace Stevens stated. Vision of a lost beloved -- a vision that wakes us from the deepest slumber, and causes the dark mirror of night to reflect, simultaneously, cold reality and warm eidetic idealizations -- that, however, is worth something ...

It is not the actions of a moment that lead to demise, but the long count of years and accumulated outbursts of pseudo-insanity that -- alas! -- pass for the real thing.

A bottle of gin at ten in the morning, strolling the grounds of Christ College, Oxford ... Speaking of Basilides to a packed room as the liquor courses through his veins ... Just one of many "perverse" actions (as Poe might put it); just one of many self-destructive attempts to inject some life into the cold monuments of intellect besmeared by sluttish time ...

Her smile faded as the lecture began, as he slurred through Irenaeus and Hippolytus, the two versions of Basilides' cosmology: aeon upon aeon, multitudes of powers separating the soul from its home on high ... If reincarnation or, to use the Greek term, metempsychosis, is a reality, then I shall return as a worm at the bottom of a bottle of tequila.

So! Reality takes on the cast of a dream, especially on nights such as this when sleep is banished by a gilded oneiric specter of one who became an Ideal.

In the dream we were driving through a New England town (let us say Providence) and desire began to overtake us both. We stopped at a motel and checked in. As I watched her hips sway invitingly as she entered the room, I felt another urge: to feel liquid heat in my veins. A neon sign across the street invited me, and I excused myself ... Upon my return -- and here is the Ideal -- she was ready and willing, no condemnation, a precious body on a cheap bed, and I, staggering, gazed in agony at the fading vision ...

Upon waking, the cold smile of reality prevailed, but on the dark wall of my room that ideal Form lingered, the warmth of exceptance, the embrace of the Perfect. I know not which is worse: the memory of the cold stare as he slurred through his Oxford lecture, or the constructed perfection that exists momentarily in dreams and nocturnal reveries. Either way, this typing is an exorcism.

II.

The historic atmosphere was there, certainly; but the historic atmosphere, scientifically considered, was no better then a villainous miasma.

~ Henry James, Daisy Miller

Only a fool returns to the scene of his crime; only a desperate lover returns to the site of his loss ... or worse, to the places where he and his beloved shared their inaugural moments of romance and devotion.

A little bookstore tucked behind the Philadelphia library ... John Stuart Mill in hand, discussing his grand concept of personal freedom and the self-enslavement of those who dare not to be different ... Her soft hand in mind, fantasies of what was to come overtaking the academic discourse ... And so it began: a union of free hearts and free foreheads ...

Time that devours all, and the distilled substance that rots all: in concert, they prevailed ...

Then there was another ... A substitute, sweet and free and full of the energy of youth ... Together we walked the old pathways, ate at the same restaurants, shopped at the same stores -- even the bookstore, where I bought her an anthology of Western philosophy.

No love, just fetishism: my lips on her feet, she rendered me helpless with silk scarves, caused excessive pleasure that disturbed the neighbors ... I would scream her name, over and over ... But then, one evening, in a moment of exquisite miasmic torment (she had been wearing shoes all day) I cried out to my lost beloved, her glorious name ... desire and inspiration from the depths of my soul -- and that caused it all to grind to a halt. Over.

Alone I walked the streets, went to the pier and just stared ...

It was deep night, and the lights of the city made the water black ... I smoked a cigar and allowed my mind to drift back to the effulgent past ...

Chester, England ... Roman ruins ... A cozy pub where we my beloved and I drank frothy pints of ale and I answered articulately her questions about the English past ... Charles I and his fate ... Glorious revolution, etc. ... And then it rained, and her hair was wet and I wanted to make love to her atop the wall surrounding that ancient town ...

Philadelphia, after the end ... To a hotel I went, to drink away the memories.

III.

Thus have you heard me severed from my bliss,

That by misfortunes was my life prolonged

To tell sad stories of my own mishaps.

~ Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors, I. I.

Life piled on life is all too much ... An excess of experience renders the present a place to be endured ... No fervor, just stoic endurance, the worst kind of existence.

Faulkner thought that our purpose on this earth is not to merely endure, but to prevail. Over what? My mishaps are indeed my own: I am cause and effect. It is impossible to hide from the light that never sets, as Heraclitus said. My personality is the shadow that walks before me ... To attempt to make art of one's misfortunes, of one's guilt, of one's irremediable losses ... Is that a desecration of an altar upon which one must sacrifice the self for salvation? Or is it a way of sanctifying impure elements?

In certain Gnostic myths the chaotic demiurge who created this idiotic cosmos will someday, we are told, be turned to the fullness of true divinity, and be given a place in the grand scheme of spiritual history. But that epistrofh will occur only after his illicit creation and its history is propelled to completion through its own internal, combustible force.

Listening to Van Cliburn play Prokofiev, I think how pleasant it must be to escape into someone else's art, to gain satisfaction from helping a great work to endure ... But to draw a great work from one's own personality: that is to prolong one's miseries and to dwell on past happiness ... It is, in short, to become neurotic.

Having no hope of heaven and no fear of hell, I have the space of the night in which to inscribe myself, to send out into the void some words that may resonate ...

The exorcism is not complete, will never be ... But the sun rises, and sleep overtakes me ...