Category: Poets and poetry

Writing about craft, poetry book reviews and appreciations, and anything else that isn’t an original poem.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Parenthesis and antithesis

The heat and humidity, which makes the birds so happy (and the dawn chorus so full) is bad for my brain. Bear with me here, folks! At this rate, I’ll have to slink through the summer in borrowed thoughts. (Barring inspiration, I could pay more attention to the look of the site, borrow codes from sites I admire. (You can see I already took the momentous step of introducing an Image yesterday, which necessitated learning to use a free image hosting site and the photo-touchup software that’s on my machine. (For anyone who’s wondering, it’s the Egyptian glyph KA, which refers to the undying part of the soul – the “spirit” or doppelganger – which in ancient times, according to Bika Reed, was understood by analogy with an egg in the womb of BA, the overall soul-complex.)))

If the oviducts of my imagination fail to produce any original thoughts soon, the stewpot will beckon. I could turn Via Negativa into a regular potpie of pithy quotes and striking images, maybe even build up a real readership! All sorts of folks who don’t have the time or patience to struggle through my usual fare would begin stopping by for Pearls of Wisdom – presuming I could keep my more swinish tendencies at bay. (Like insulting the present readership by implication – bad bad bad!)

Today, I’m off to town (first time in three weeks!), so I’ll cut the crap right here and retrieve a pearl of sorts that you won’t read anywhere else. You may remember me writing about my niece Eva, who is eight years old and a bit precocious in the spiritual sense. I reprinted her first-ever poem, which she wrote over a year ago. The beginner’s luck didn’t last, but she did send me a poem about a month ago that was impressive in its own way. I wrote back with praise and what I hope were encouraging remarks. Here’s the poem:

Why?

Why do people kill?
Why do we have wars?
Why do we cut trees for houses?
Why did we invent the nuclear bomb?

Why? Why? Why?

Everything is a question to me.
Why does the world have so much evil,
and sadness,
and kindness?

Why is the world like it is?

–Eva Bonta, April 6, 2004

Here’s how I responded. I don’t know how much of this she understood, but I’m a firm believer in not talking down to children.

Hi Eva,

Good work! What can I say? I still ask these questions, too. A lot of people would rather avoid wrestling with tough questions like these, and prefer to settle for easy answers. Why do they do that? That’s a question that’s not so hard to answer: because people want to feel safe and secure. Who can blame them? Very few people are brave enough to face up to the basic unfairness of existence.

I like the fact that you added “kindness” at the end. That’s a mystery too: why love when it’s easier to hate?

I don’t know whether a willingness to ask big questions will make you a happier person. But it will stretch your mind and make you wiser – and a better poet. You know what they say: the brain is a muscle, it needs to be exercised. I’m glad you’re giving yours such a workout!

Dave

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Remembering Jack

Up at dawn for some musical multi-tasking: listening to white-throated sparrows through the open window while playing a Leadbelly cassette and flipping through a sheaf of poems by Jack McManis.

Jack was my mentor in poetry, someone who taught largely through silence – he only ever commented on things he liked. He led writing workshops for 25 years at Penn State, but I never actually took a class from him. Instead, we met regularly in his office to exchange poems, starting with once-a-week visits in 1978 when I was in eighth grade, and continuing (with somewhat declining frequency) until Jack’s death in 1989.

Jack McManis was one of the first generation of post-war college poetry teachers. He placed poems often enough in magazines and anthologies, but – much to the distress of his numerous friends and supportive colleagues – never got around to finishing a book-length collection. This omission stemmed partly from the alcoholism that consumed the first half of his life and partly from the altruistic energy that consumed much of the second half. (I didn’t realize until well after his death just how active he had been in Alcoholics Anonymous, helping set up chapters all over the country.)

Jack grew up in southern California, fought in the Pacific in World War II, and was an excellent tennis player – at one time he was the tenth-ranked amateur player in the country. He helped found the poetry magazine Pivot, which still survives, though he was always content to remain Associate Editor. His former students include Diane Ackerman and the late Agha Shahid Ali.

Even after achieving sobriety and becoming a “born-again Anglican,” Jack was no saint in the conventional sense of the term. He office reeked of the snuff he dipped from a silver box, and he loved to try and get others hooked on the stuff. (I always refused it – I’ve never been big on the idea of nasal ingestion.) Although his satires and parodies grew a little less biting after his recovery, he never stopped writing them. Nor were bawdy subjects off-limits: a poem about his neighbor’s wife’s ass was one of his standards at poetry readings.

Jack’s favorite poet was Hart Crane; other favorites included William Carlos Williams, Melvin B. Tolson and Theodore Roethke (who also taught briefly at Penn State). He believed that a poet should be “drenched in words,” as he once wrote me, quoting Hart Crane. He was haunted by Crane’s death – he committed suicide in April 1932 by leaping off a boat in the Caribbean and feeding himself to the sharks. This more than anything seemed to symbolize the end of innocence for Jack, who grew up in the Roaring Twenties. In one satire, he imagined the Statue of Liberty being buried at sea: “slide her down / to the oil shark / republic.” Sharks seemed to possess a kind of limit-value for Jack, as in the following elegy.

MEMORIAL FIN

by the breakwater after the funeral,
Corona del Mar, California

My father, John, a gentle dusty man,
loved the country earth and what it grows.
He most loved lowly and neglected things
we glance at or gaze past but rarely see:
hawberries, snaky wildgrape, wormed crabapples,
swamp shade pools under willow oaks that home
nightsinging whippoorwills and clacking treetoads.
What reliquary for my father’s love
of earth? Wind-driven leaves and locust shells?
Earth crumbled over him, put out his stars
and hushed the cardinal’s clear water-fife
back in his boyhood Indiana woods
still whistling in the now, now lost to him.
My father’s Baptist testimony praised
all these as God’s. He praised the blind fin.

Love as your father loved, the preacher said.
I hear his hands wash now in slap and seethe
of wave on rock and wonder how to love
all this, my father, you its lover gone:
this sky of tearless blue, it’s dead-man’s-float
of the day moon and that lone firefly ghosting
hope, last night flown where in the too-bright noon?
O these feed the blind fin’s tidal appetite –
the sharkfin there by the quay carving its track
straight out, out into the afterbirth grey-green
Pacific and maybe on to infinity
shredding our mirages, love and time,
that fin’s synoptic arrow tugging sun
– to drown the sun? All worship the blind fin.

*
Like many of us, Jack hated to let a poem go. There are no definitive versions, just endless rewrites. The above poem seems to have been his last revision, although I admit I did substitute one line from an earlier version that I liked better – I don’t think Jack would have minded. Now, as I continue to leaf through my folders of his poems, I’m finding so much more that I can’t pass up! How about if I just put a few things down, assemble a brief, fairly random collection of McManis fragments, a la the Greek Anthology?

*
Tin can sacristan,
cling clang buoy!
. . .
I dream and look over
the rail at flaking
light churning,
pouring out
electric tears
as I lose self
in the jewelry
of water.

*
I was born
in a heat wave:
South Chicago.
Headfirst I popped out
crying for a drink . . .

*
And what about sweetsinging Bobby Jones gone paralytic,
Big Bill Tilden humbled in prison and Paavo Nurmi, Finn
ironman, loping off into Arctic twilight, last marathon
against a ghostly polar bear tireless as time?

(“Child of the Twenties in the Eighties”)

*
So the twenties, time of the great gestures! And whose
were greater than yours, St. Slapstick? You who spun truth
in crazy pantomime, though it’s half-past mayhem, time for me
to return to the missing persons bureau of the eighties, before
the onrushing manifest planet spill me in the whistlestop dark,
my keepsakes scattered in cinders, let me spin off the rods
not in mourning but laughing far down in my bones, tickled
by you, old holy pie thrower!

(Ibid.)

*
Let Satch blast out for you, Gabe,
that trumpet note
we’re just dying to hear.

(“Conceit for a Cloudy Halloween ’82”)

*
Finally
The Puerto Rican
counterman comes
and pries
the pair of clowns
out of that
glass coffin.

(“Daily Circus at the Automat / New York City”)

*
A long time ago
(but not so long)
when we pilgrimaged
down to Avenue C
in the cell-block
Lower East Side
to see Leadbelly,
America’s great folk
poet and musicman
(before the polio
things ate his spine),
sitting straight
in a chair in
his walk-up flat
he told us how when
he heard JS Bach
he couldn’t keep
still, but thumped
with his hands
and his feet and
from time to time
broke out into
half-chant and
half-recitativo.
“The beat and the
repeat and the
jubilee,” he said,
“shake the lyrics
out of me like
a hound dog
being gristed
and ground around
in a song mill!”

(“Kin: Remembering Leadbelly,” Prairie Schooner, Summer 1971)

*
I’ll prop the saint erect again come spring
but now his milky eyes feed on the grosbeaks.

(“Letter to a Friend Before the February Thaw”)

*
Inside the crinkled ghost-transparent tent
she’s stretched out gaunt, a green sarcophagus
suspended in seawater, head stuck out
of the bedsheet envelope and pillow-propped,
hawk nose thrust up a wedge to split the air,
to reach, to strain up to the source of it –
that dense life juice she mouths and gums and gulps.
Pinched nostrils labor hard ringed faint with blue-
fadeblue of robin eggshells on cement,
the cheeks caved in to make the forehead loom . . .
All birdmouth gaping she sucks air so hard
I listen for the wind-work hiss of lung,
but stillness hangs a curtain round her mouth
that quivers in and out and seems a stranger
to the frozen skull, the sheeted body mound –
the last sign visible of life the twist
of thin lips flexing their beseeching O.

If I woke where she is in a cloud of green,
what thoughts would consciousness, a broken wing,
flap fluttering against the swoongreen cage?
Or if eyes opened, tried to weave a way
through blear, what make of all the blurring ghosts
beyond the cave and gliding by like fish?
These the loved dead that slip my hands in dreams?

(“Life Mask”)

*
Finally, here’s a Jack McManis poem I couldn’t resist including in its entirety.

ART APPRECIATION CLASS

–Sir, some sacrilegious clown
has gone and dotted
that Tintoretto sunset
with tiny fly specks.
–Where?
–There, there, and there.
–Don’t touch the painting
you fool! Those
aren’t fly specks,
they’re birds.
Tempo giasco
with the Old Master.
The birds
on background of pink sky
are humorous.
–Yeah?
–Yes, the birds are fun.
–Fun?
–Yes, loads of fun.
–Oh, I see what you mean.
Just a minute, Sir.
Let me write that down.
The birds are fun.

***
Last fall my friend Jo, who is in the process of moving very gradually to Arizona, prevailed upon me to take what she calls the Jack McManis tree. This is a handsome, four-foot-tall Norfolk pine that used to belong to Jack. It doesn’t travel very well – the slight bruising and bending necessary to transport it home in the car caused extensive needle loss in the upper branches. But with plenty of light and water it’s growing vigorously now, and if anything has become more attractive as a result of this partial damage to its symmetry. Most of my house is too dark for plants; the only place I could put it was right at the opposite end of the table from where I write.

Thus it happens that when I look up from the screen I find myself staring absent-mindedly into the foliage of the Jack McManis tree. And sometimes then I am transported back to Jack’s “bartelby den of an office,” as he once described it, sitting companionably with sheaves of each other’s recent poems in our laps. I hear Old Main tolling the quarter hour. Then the rattle of a page, and an appreciative grunt gives way to a chuckle, the blowing of a nose. “What a great line,” he enthuses, and I crane my neck, staring with pretended comprehension at another pure accident, learning slowly and without realizing it how to value those moments when the words come mostly on their own.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Notes toward a beginner’s course in poetics

With the kind of naive self-assurance peculiar to the self-taught, I firmly believe I could do a better job leading would-be poets to discover something original about their craft than the majority of professional writing teachers out there today. So why don’t I? Largely because in order to do so I would need to be certified in precisely that form of schooling I reject, which understands the poem as an art object intended for elite consumption. Most academics seem convinced that poetry has (or ought to have) a mainly ornamental function, and that composing poetry involves “self-expression,” understood as the communication of private thoughts and feelings to a properly educated audience.

However, the growth of new, vital poetic traditions in the last few decades of the 20th century relates directly to the spread of liberation movements around the globe. “Free verse” gradually reached its potential to loose the tongues and unchain the spirits of many who had previously been silenced. Poetry had and continues to have the ability to revitalize and even recreate communities, as people imbibe its anti-hierarchical, make-up-your-own-rules message. Surveying ethnographic and literary texts, one finds few generalizations that apply to more than a sizable majority of all the many stylized forms of intensified language that humans have ever dreamed up. But one generalization that does seem almost universal is this: words have something to say. And this: words in the form of poetry or song lyrics can heal.

In my imaginary course for beginning poets, I would work with the students one-on-one to try and fit the teaching to whatever poetics seem most necessary for their own growth. For example, students who agonize about the loss of traditional values might be steered initially toward a neo-Confucian program, while students infected with the germ of psychologism might be exposed to shamanistic thinking. ROTC students could be encouraged to think of poems as a way of making peace, studying the song-duels of the Greenland Eskimos and the poetics of warrior societies like Yemen and Somalia. Excessively rationalistic or super-organized people might learn to let themselves go a bit by imitating certain Beat poets, while more laid-back people would probably profit from an intensive study of highly structured verse forms. Here are some excerpts from a few of the texts I would have on hand.

“A song ain’t just to play with. It’s for a reason. It comes out of the mind. If you got good thoughts that song comes out of your body clear and strong. It’s like praying . . . like the Cedar Smoke. The drum and the rattle carry the song out to everything. The song goes into things . . . into people . . . straightens them out.”

Anon. Washoe Indian, in Straight with the Medicine: Narratives of Washoe Followers of the Tipi Way, as told to Warren L. d’Azevedo, Heyday Books, 1985 (ellipses original)

“A man who desired a spell did not put his mind on word and tunes: he put it on pleasing the supernaturals. He must be a good hunter or a good warrior. Perhaps they would ‘like his ways’ and one day, in a natural sleep, he would hear singing. So does the Papago interpret the trancelike state of the artist who derives his material from the unconscious. ‘He hears a song and he knows it is the hawk singing to him or the great white birds that fly from the ocean.’ . . .

“A man who really longs for dreams does more than wait and be industrious. There are Indians who bid such a man to fast and pray, but not the practical Papago; he asks the would-be singer to perform an act of heroism . . .

“One who has performed an act of heroism has placed himself in contact with the supernatural. It is after this has been done, and not before, that he fasts and waits for the vision. The Papago sternly holds to the belief that visions do not come to the unworthy. But to the worthy man who shows himself humble there comes a dream. And a dream always contains a song.

“To us, with our scheme wherein the singer stands outside the practical scheme of life, and wherein he is thought of . . . as an idler, this philosophy is hardly comprehensible. Yet on it the Papago system of life has worked since time immemorial. The honored men are singers. The man who has fought for his people gets no honor from that fact, but only from the attendant fact that he was able to ‘receive’ – or compose, shall we say – a song. We who take the structure of our own society as a sample of ‘human nature’ might pause over this idea. What of a society which puts no premium whatever on aggressiveness and where the practical man is valued only if he is a poet? What of a society where the misfit, wandering hopelessly misunderstood on the outskirts of life, is not the artist, but the unimaginative young businessman? This society not only exists but has existed for hundreds of years.”

Ruth Murray Underhill, Singing for Power: the Song Magic of the Papago Indians of Southern Arizona, University of California Press, 1938

When you are content, you sing; when you are angry, you make noise.

When one shouts, he is not thinking; when he sings, he is thinking.

A song is tranquil; a noise is not.

When one shouts, his voice is forced; when he sings, it is not.

Basongye proverbs, quoted by Alan P. Merriam in The Anthropology of Music, Northwestern U.P., 1964

“When asked why he took up composing, [the Tiv singer Chen Ugye] gives two reasons: poverty and grief. He states simply, ‘Poverty [ican] made me become a composer.’ But it should be noted that ican has a more explicit range of meaning than our word ‘poverty,’ a range that encompasses ‘difficulties, suffering, physical weakness, a feeling of being disliked by others.’ Ican is often concretized in idiom and song as something that can be tied up, thrown down, defeated; a praise singer is forever noting that so-and-so has dealt with his ican in a dramatic and convincing way.”

Charles Keil, Tiv Song, University of Chicago Press, 1979

The first time I met the blues, mama, they came walking through the woods,
The first time I met the blues, mama, they came walking through the woods,
They stopped at my house first, mama, done me all the harm they could.

Little Brother Montgomery quoted by Houston A. Baker, Jr. in Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory, University of Chicago Press, 1984

Go to the pine if you want to learn about the pine. Go to the bamboo if you want to learn about the bamboo.

Matsuo Basho

“Only Dionysius, the god of possession and ‘otherness,’ is able to assure this play of deforming mirrors. In the remarks made earlier concerning the face of the Gorgon, we have seen that frontal representation in classical Greek iconography was reserved for those figures who go beyond the limits allowed for human action; Dionysius holds a privileged place at the center. The god of wine is thus the one who guarantees that the epic myth can be staged and presented face to face before the public; he guarantees that the mask, the enunciator (representing the Self, with his political identity) and the protagonist of the dramatic action (representing the Different, with his ‘mythological’ identity) coexist. Or, to put things somewhat differently, we could say that he assures the recovery of the Other in the Self. He also guarantees, through the process of imitative reversal, the normative, civic values of tragedy.”

Claude Calame, The Craft of Poetic Speech in Ancient Greece, trans. by Janice Orion, Cornell U.P., 1995

If you do not study [the Book of] Poetry, you will not be able to converse.

Confucius, Analects

Nothing approaches The Book of Poetry in setting up standards of right and wrong, in moving Heaven and Earth, and in appealing to spirits and gods. The ancient kings used it to make permanent the tie between husband and wife, to perfect filial reverence, to deepen human relationships, to beautify moral instruction, and to improve the customs of the people.

Poetry is where the heart’s wishes go. What lies in the heart is ‘wish,’ when expressed in words, it is ‘poetry.’ When an emotion stirs within one, one expresses it in words; finding this inadequate, one sighs over it; not content with this, one sings it in poetry; still not satisfied, one unconsciously dances with one’s hands and feet.

Preface/blurb to The Book of Poetry, attributed to Confucius’ disciple Pu Shang (507-400 B.C.E.).

Both of the preceding quotes are from James J. Y. Liu, The Art of Chinese Poetry, University of Chicago Press, 1962

“By far the most important social context in which zamil poetry is composed [by Yemenis] is in the dispute mediation. When a serious conflict breaks out between two or more villages or tribes or two different tribal sections – a conflict that might involve a dispute over land (private property or tribal boundaries), women (abductions, runaways, adulteries), or water rights – warfare among the contending parties often results. . . . The fighting at first is often a kind of symbolic violence in which the offended party tries to restore its honor by a show of force, and almost immediately after the first shots have rung out, intermediaries arrive to try and persuade the parties to agree to a truce . . .

“The intermediaries may arrive chanting a zamil poem . . . announcing their intention of mediating the dispute and offering up cows or sheep for sacrifice in token of their sincerity and good faith. If . . . the plaintiff . . . agrees to a truce, it sets the conditions in numbers of cows, sheep, guns, and, in the most serious conflicts, even hostages . . . These demands are put forward by the intermediaries in the form of zamil poetry. . . .

“It is practically impossible to delimit a class of occasions on which someone might use zamil poetry for his own personal ends. . . . Once I was riding a bus on which more boarding tickets had been sold than there were seats available for passengers, with the result that a luckless passenger who happened to be an old tribesman had to sit on the floor of the vehicle. Resenting the injustice of not having been given a seat like everyone else when he had paid for one, he composed a zamil on the spot voicing his complaint. It had its intended effect: everyone on the bus started to laugh when they heard the poem and taunted the ticket seller, who in turn relinquished his seat to the now greatly mollified old man.”

Stephen C. Caton, “Peaks of Yemen I Summon”: Poetry as Cultural Practice in a North Yemeni Tribe, University of Claifornia Press, 1990

“At the core of the women’s poetry movement is the quest for autonomous self-definition. Shaping that quest is a heritage, external and internal, which opposed female autonomy. ‘If we don’t name ourselves we are nothing,’ says Audre Lorde. . . [To] Adrienne Rich . . . a woman seeking her identity is like a woman trying to give birth to herself:
your mother dead and you unborn
your two hands grasping your head
drawing it down against the blade of life
your nerves the nerves of a midwife
learning her trade”

Alicia Suskin Ostriker, Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America, The Women’s Press, 1986

“Choosing words is a waste of time. Let the words choose you, let them choose their own place, time, identity, meaning. Writing is a waste of time in a sense because we try ‘to fit’ words into an order that makes sense to us and to other people. That’s arrogance, ego, artistic illusion. No matter what we do, what we think and feel, what we want words to do for us, we can’t fit them into an order that’s ours. They have their own power, their own magic, wonder, brilliance. Where and how they fit, that has nothing to do with us. The only thing we can do is recognize, admit, and accept that. Let words chose us. Let language empower us, give us beauty and awe. We cannot do anything about it. When we think we can, when we choose words, it is a waste of time.”

Simon J. Ortiz, After and Before the Lightning, University of Arizona Press, 1994
__________

Cross-references: Other quotes and essays on the anthropology of poetics include Poetry or vomit? (on Old Norse poetics); The world of the riddle (Anglo-Saxon); Portrait of a bard (Maninka); Holding forth (Judeo-Christian); Qarrtsiluni and Building Dwelling Eating (Inuit). For some more quotes on masks and the art of drama (including another quote from Underhill’s Singing for Power), see Mask and Pageant.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

A walk in the fog

What I love about language
is what I love about fog:
what comes between us and things
grants them their shine.

Mark Doty, “Fog Suite” (See V.N. Dec. 28, “Deeply Superficial”)

Too much happens to ever get it all down. The writer has a running bet with God that he can turn any base metals into gold. I will sacrifice my health and even my privacy; I will bare my soul to the world. Sometimes I even long for a device that would read my thoughts and automatically convert them into text. How many of us who blog wouldn’t jump at the chance to have a computer chip implanted in our brains? Something that would convert every verbalized thought into digital form for eventual download and editing.

Walking in the fog, I can’t help thinking about editing. As every Chinese landscape painter knows, there’s nothing like a little blank space in the middle of the canvas to make the romantic heart go pitter-pat. No wonder lovers feel as if they’re walking in a cloud. Without such selective vision, how could anyone fall in love?

The mountain sounds different in the fog. Nearby noises may be muffled or echo strangely; distant sounds may be amplified. Red-winged blackbirds fly over, invisible but for their calls. On the road to the Far Field, a pileated woodpecker lets me pass within a few feet of the snag where he beats out his baritone ostinato. I can hear two men talking in the valley, dogs and cars and quarry trucks, a ruffed grouse drumming off in the laurel. When I get back to the house the juvenile red-tailed hawk takes off from the vicinity of my front porch, setting off a chorus of alarm calls from all the gray squirrels in the vicinity. Although it’s 7:00 a.m., a screech owl is still trilling – an odd addition to the chorus of song sparrows, cardinals, bluebirds and juncos. A single blackbird seems to have alighted in a nearby treetop. The call of this most common of birds is unusual enough on a dry mountaintop to excite my admiration.

Things look different inside a cloud, too, and not just because of the loss of distance, the sudden drawing-near of the horizon. This morning, for example, I noticed that the distinction between vines and tree trunks had suddenly grown much more arbitrary. A tall skinny sapling can have as many crooks and bends as a wild grapevine. No longer even did they appear as different ways of reaching for the sky, since the sky was now here. My gaze was drawn to the pure form; the illusion of individual purpose had dissolved. It’s too early for spiders, but you know what fog can do to their webs, right? It felt like that: everything glistened. Touch one part and everything will vibrate.

In the dawn light, trees turned deep blue at a little distance. Up close, the trunks shone in a half-dozen shades of green and grayish blue, as lichens threw open all their doors and windows. The trail gleamed, a bright ribbon of yellow-green moss. I was reminded of descriptions of the jeweled buddhaverse of Amida, as in the Pure Land Sutra: “And on every side of these lotus ponds jeweled trees are growing, lovely and radiant with the seven precious gems: gold, silver, beryl, crystal, red pearl, diamond and coral. In the lotus ponds the lotuses grow: blue, bluish, with a blue radiance, blue to behold . . . “

This briefest of excerpts narrowly avoids the endless repetitions that make Buddhist scriptures so tedious to read. I remind myself that they were written for a largely illiterate audience, and were intended to be committed to memory. Absolute novelty is not as memorable as we may think. Indeed, the mind has difficulty even interpreting – let alone memorizing – things too far outside its experience. Thus for the supremely strange Pure Land, created to provide a short-cut to enlightenment for the non-intellectual and the illiterate, only a very repetitive description can permit its assimilation by the habit-bound imagination.

In Japanese, as in Chinese, the ancient Sanskrit invocation Namo Amitabha Buddha became an almost unintelligible spell, na-mu-a-mi-da-boots. Namu does sound like a Japanese verb, and is typically interpreted as such – “I invoke,” “I trust/depend upon,” or even “I become.” Given that verbs bring up the rear in ordinary Japanese sentences, however, the effect would be something like, “I become, Amida Buddha.” But at the same time, the whole phrase is thought of as Amida’s Name. Most Pure Land Buddhists repeat this mantra hundreds of thousands of times over the course of their lives. But theoretically, at least for members of the largest Japanese Pure Land sect, Jodoshinshu, it only takes one, completely heartfelt repetition of the spell to guarantee rebirth among the gem-trees and lotuses, where all ordinary impediments to enlightenment are removed.

*

I’m currently reading Walter J. Ong’s ground-breaking book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (Routledge, 1982), about which I’m sure I will have much more to say in the coming days and months. Ong summarizes a vast amount of material, much of which is new to me and almost all of which has bearing on the sorts of questions I’ve been concerned with here at Via Negativa. Today, I want to consider his analysis of how the world is understood by illiterate people and by people in mostly or entirely oral cultures.

“Without writing, words as such have no visual presence . . . They are sounds . . . To learn what a primary oral culture is and what the nature of our problem is regarding such a culture, it helps first to reflect on the nature of sound as sound. All sensation takes place in time, but sound has a special relationship to time unlike that of the other fields that register human sensation. Sound exists only when it is going out of existence. It is not simply perishable but essentially evanescent, and it is sensed as evanescent. When I pronounce the word ‘permanence’, by the time I get to the ‘-nence’, the ‘perma-‘ is gone, and has to be gone.

“There is no way to stop sound and have sound. I can stop a moving picture camera and hold one frame fixed on the screen. If I stop the movement of sound, I have nothing – only silence, no sound at all. All sensation takes place in time, but no other sensory field totally resists a holding action, stabilization, in quite this way. Vision can register motion, but it can also register immobility. Indeed, it favors immobility, for to examine something closely by vision, we prefer to have it quiet. . . .

“For anyone who has a sense of what sound means in a primary oral culture, or in a culture not far removed from primary orality, it is not surprising that the Hebrew term dabar means ‘word’ and ‘event’. Malinowski has made the point that among ‘primitive’ (oral) people generally language is a mode of action and not just a countersign of thought . . . Neither is it surprising that oral peoples commonly, and perhaps universally, consider words to have great power. A hunter can see a buffalo, smell, taste and touch a buffalo when the buffalo is completely inert, even dead, but if he hears a buffalo, he better watch out: something is going on. In this sense, all sound, and especially all oral utterance, which comes from inside living organisms, is ‘dynamic.’

“The fact that oral peoples commonly and in all likelihood universally consider words to have magical potency is clearly tied in, at least unconsciously, with the sense of the word as necessarily spoken, sounded, and hence power-driven. Deeply typographic folk forget to think of words as primarily oral, as events, and hence as necessarily powered: for them, words tend rather to be assimilated to things, ‘out there’ on a flat surface.”

Toward the end of the same chapter (“Some psychodynamics of orality”), Ong mentions that, in addition to its evanescence, “Other characteristics of sound also determine or influence oral psychodynamics. The principal one . . . is the unique relationship of sound to interiority when sound is compared to the rest of the senses. This relationship is important because of the interiority of human consciousness and of human communication itself.”

What might we make of using sound, in the form of charged words, to try and actualize a highly visual and essentially static buddhaverse – the inverse of our own “impure” world? Ong’s treatment seems to shed a little light, if you’ll pardon the expression. “To test the physical interior of an object as interior,” he continues, “no sense works so directly as sound. The human sense of sight is adapted best to light diffusely reflected from surfaces . . . A source of light, such as a fire, may be intriguing but it is optically baffling: the eye cannot get a ‘fix’ on anything within the fire. Similarly, a translucent object, such as alabaster, is intriguing because, although it is not a source of light, the eye cannot get a ‘fix’ on it either.”

Thus the radiant and gem-studded Pure Land is designed to baffle and intrigue, to lure and refuse hold. Without the sound of bells and the cries of birds of paradise, it might refuse all entrance to the mind. For our visual perception of depth, Ong says, is limited. “Depth can be perceived by the eye, but most satisfactorily as a series of surfaces: the trunks of trees in a grove, for example, or chairs in an auditorium. The eye does not perceive an interior strictly as an interior: inside a room, the walls it perceives are still surfaces, outsides.” Here I am reminded of Mark Doty’s eloquent defense of light-diffusing surfaces as containing a kind of depth of their own. (Has anyone ever thought to compare Doty’s notion of the salvific effects of shimmer, glitter and radiance with the visualization-based soteriology of Pure Land texts?)

“Taste and smell are not much help in registering interiority or exteriority. Touch is. But touch partly destroys interiority in the process of perceiving it. If I wish to discover by touch whether a box is empty or full, I have to make a hole in the box to insert a hand or finger: this means that the box is to that extent open, to that extent less an interior.

“Hearing can register interiority without violating it. I can rap a box to find out whether it is empty or full or a wall to find out whether it is hollow or solid inside. Or I can ring a coin to find out if it is silver or lead.

“Sounds all register the interior structure of whatever it is that produces them . . .

“Sight isolates, sound incorporates. Whereas sight situates the observer outside what he views, at a distance, sound pours into the hearer. Vision dissects, as Merleau-Ponty has observed. Vision comes to a human being from one direction at a time: to look at a room or at a landscape, I must move my eyes around from one part to another. When I hear, however, I gather sound from every direction at once: I am at the center of my auditory world, which envelops me, establishing me at a kind of core of sensation and existence . . .You can immerse yourself in hearing, in sound. There is no way to immerse yourself in vision.” Now, of course, I picture myself back among the trees, immersed in sound-filled cloud.

Whereas vision dissects, Ong maintains, “The auditory ideal . . . is harmony, a putting together.” To avoid undue Western bias, I would add here that “harmony” might be understood to include all forms of musical coherence. Phenomenologically speaking, syncopation may be more fundamental than harmony per se.

“Interiority and harmony are characteristics of human consciousness . . . What is ‘I’ to me is only ‘you’ to you. And this ‘I’ incorporates experience into itself by ‘getting it all together.’ Knowledge is ultimately not a fractioning but a unifying phenomenon, a striving for harmony. Without harmony, an interior condition, the psyche is in bad health.”

Now to return to the question of how pre-literate people may receive the religious or magical word – and what those of us who are immersed in the garden of the text might be missing. “In a primary oral culture, where the word has its existence only in sound . . . the phenomenology of sound enters deeply into human beings’ feel for existence, as possessed by the spoken word. For the way in which the word is experienced is always momentous in psychic life. The centering aspect of sound . . . affects man’s sense of the cosmos. For oral cultures, the cosmos is an ongoing event with man at its center. Man is the umbilicus mundi, the navel of the world.” Namo Amitabha Buddha!

*

There remains the matter of editing, of the Pure Land apart from this present, impure one. I have written elsewhere, from an environmental and aesthetic perspective, on the emptiness of the very idea of garbage. (See The Art of Living.) To produce garbage is to sin against the original wholeness and purity of mind. If words are, as Ong suggests, fundamentally evanescent, perhaps our Quixotic attempts to freeze and isolate them are precisely where waste is generated? Recall the possibility I threw out at the beginning of this post: a “bug” that could read and record our verbalized thoughts, the ones we speak silently with perhaps only the faintest motion of lips and tongue. Imagine how much would have to be discarded to make any of it cohere (or harmonize, as Mr. Ong would say)!

But imagine that I could do this editing as I walked, using a completely verbal computer language. This too – all the instructions to the computer – would be discarded or invisible in the eventual (or nearly simultaneous) text. Indeed, from the writer’s vantagepoint all hypertext (as in html) is waste material, is it not? Not for nothing did “garbage in, garbage out” become the mantra of the technorati.

To read to oneself is to become isolated – to edit out the world. “Because in its physical constitution as sound, the spoken word proceeds from the human interior and manifests human beings to one another as conscious interiors, as persons, the spoken word forms human beings into close-knit groups. When a speaker is addressing an audience, the members of the audience normally become a unity, with themselves and with the speaker . . .

“The interiorizing force of the oral word relates in a special way to the sacral, to the ultimate concerns of existence. In most religions the spoken [or sung, or chanted] word functions integrally in ceremonial and devotional life. Eventually in the larger world religions sacred texts develop too, in which the sense of the sacral is attached also to the written word. Still, a textually supported religious tradition can continue to authenticate the primacy of the oral in many ways. In Christianity, for example, the Bible is read aloud at liturgical services. For God is thought of always as ‘speaking’ to human beings, not as writing to them. The orality of the mindset in the Biblical text, even in the epistolary sections, is overwhelming . . . ‘Faith comes through hearing,’ we read in the Letter to the Romans (10:17). ‘The letter kills, the spirit [breath, on which rides the spoken word] gives life’ (2 Corinthians 3:6).” (The parenthetical interpretation is Ong’s.)

The letter kills, the spoken word revives. Hmmm, I don’t know. The fog is thickening . . .

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Ifa: telling the fortunes of animals and humans

Divination, or Ifa, occupies a central place in Yoruba religion. My understanding of the Ifa system is basic in the extreme; I lack the two essential English-language studies, both by Wande Abimbola: Ifa: An Exposition of Ifa Literary Corpus and Sixteen Great Poems of Ifa. As the titles of these works suggest, a large canon has grown up around the practice, which is all the more impressive for being entirely oral in its transmission until modern times.

There are several different methods of Ifa divination (casting of kola shells, casting of cowries, etc.) and as with any divinatory practice the interpretation and application of lessons arise from a kind of three-way negotiation between client, priest/therapist and divinities (orishas). (I would speculate in passing that the main difference between secular and religious forms of therapy is that the latter, by acknowledging the divine as a third party, may be more able to zero in on the problem through triangulation)

It’s during the interpretive stage that traditional Ifa poems may be recited if appropriate. English translations display much more affinity to the Hebrew Bible than to the I Qing; this should not surprise us, since many Hebrew religious concepts (including henotheism/monotheism) appear to be African in origin. Indeed, despite the passionate and eloquent arguments of the great A. J. Heschel (in The Prophets) I remain unpersuaded that the ancient Hebrew nebiim (prophets) were fundamentally different from West African diviners in their understanding of the relationship between revelation and response. In both cases, what matters is not predictive accuracy but moral transformation.
One might ask, Why not call the Ifa diviner a prophet rather than a priest? Yoruba priests and scholars like Abimbole prefer to reserve the term “prophet” to translate the role of the orisha Orunmila, who is second in the divine hierarchy after Oludumare, the High God who is not only beyond all supplication but can’t even be characterized in words or concepts. (It should not surprise us that Ifa recognizes the via negativa as explicitly as the other ‘world religions,’ for Yoruba religion too is a universalizing system, and thus needs to spell out speculative details that would be left largely unspoken in more particularistic or ‘tribal’ traditions.).

Ifa diviners are also called priests rather than prophets because they direct the sacrifice. In his essay in Evil and the Response of World Religion (W. Cenkner, ed., Paragon House, 1997) Abimbola translates what he says is a ‘very difficult verse’ explicating the power of sacrifice to maintain – or correct – the balance between benevolent and malevolent forces in the world. Like many Ifa psalms, it tells a story – here about the King of Epe (Elepe) who managed to appease death (Iku) for a little while. It begins in the praise-proverb mode familiar from West African poetry from almost all languages and genres. This mode typically uses metaphor and, especially, apparent non-sequitor to inject magic potency into the overall poem/utterance/act.

[from Osu Meji]

The old man who strolls gracefully like an elephant.
The old man who gallops like a buffalo.
When a wooden pestle falls on the ground, it makes the sound ogbonrangandan.
Help me catch my chicken with broken wings.
One room cannot adequately contain two sick people with different diseases.
Exchange-exchange, Ifa priest of the household of the king of Epe.
Ifa divination was performed for Elepe
When he was told to use an animal for sacrifice
As an exchange for his own life
Because of imminent death.
He listened to the prescription of sacrifice.
And he performed the sacrifice.
He was told to offer sacrifice to Eshu
And he complied.
He then heard the Ifa priests tell him that his sacrifice was accepted.
He praised his Ifa priests,
And his Ifa priests praised Ifa.
Death then left Elepe untouched
But took away the head of the animal.
Exchange-exchange, Ifa priest of the household of Elepe.
Loss left Elepe untouched,
But took away the head of the animal.
Exchange-exchange, Ifa priest of the household of Elepe.

*

Back near the beginning of this weblog I wrote a couple short pieces “for” and “against” sacrifice expressing my own ambivalence about this word, which still pervades discussions of ethical behavior – especially during wartime. In the essay about my television shrine I quoted Abimbola’s own thoughts on sacrifice; to recap, he says “sacrifice is an act of exchange. When one makes sacrifice, one exchanges something dear, or something purchased with one’s own money, in order to sustain personal happiness. Sacrifice involves human beings in a process of exchange or denial of oneself, or giving of one’s time, forsaking one’s pleasure, food, etc., in order to be at peace with both the benevolent and malevolent supernatural powers as well as to be at peace with one’s neighbors, family, the entire environment and ultimately to be at peace with oneself.”

It is Eshu who mediates between the 400 malevolent ajogan and the 401 benevolent orisha; thus it is to him that sacrifices are performed. As the straddler of worlds he is the master of paradox, which makes his praise-poems especially interesting in translation.

But – asks the sensitive postmodern reader, recoiling from the very notion of blood sacrifice – what about the animals? “Animal rights” propaganda to the contrary, traditional earth-based religions in which animal sacrifice is practiced (which could include all shamanistic systems, give a sufficiently broad definition of ‘sacrifice’) generally seem to inculcate more respect for the natural world in all its loving cruelty and complexity than many supposedly more advanced religious or philosophical systems. You can search the canons of European Romantic poetry in vain for a poem that deals as tenderly with a predator as the following excerpt from an Ifa psalm. (Though Blake’s “Tyger” comes close.) This was translated originally by B. King for Introduction to Nigerian Literature and is included in The Penguin Book of Oral Poetry, edited by Ruth Finnegan (whence also the remaining examples, except where noted). However, I have modified the translation of “tiger” to “leopard,” based on a strong resemblance to a briefer piece translated by Ulli Beier, not to mention the fact that tigers do not live in Africa! I am also not sure which orisha is meant by King’s “Oosa,” Orunmila or Oludumare.

[Leopard]

Ifa divination was performed for Leopard,
That one with lovely and shining skin.

Could he possibly have honour?
That was the reason Leopard performed Ifa divination.

He was told there was much prospect of honour for him,
but he should perform sacrifice.

And he performed it.
He performed sacrifice with ten knives
And one lovely and shining cloth.

The ten knives which he used for sacrifice
Were fixed to his fingers by his Ifa priests,
And with it he does havoc to all other animals.
That lovely and shining cloth which he also uses for sacrifice
Was used to cover his body
And it made him a beautiful animal.

He was dancing,
He was rejoicing;
He was praising his Ifa priests
And his Ifa priests praised Ifa.
He opened his mouth,
And the song of Ifa entered therein.
As he stretched his feet,
Dance caught them.

He said: O! Animal created to have honour.
Animal created to have honour.
It is Oosa who gave honour to Leopard,
Animal created to have honour.

*

For a fuller sense of traditional Yoruba attitudes toward animals, some translations of non-Ifa poems might help:

Python
(translated by Ulli Beier)

Swaggering prince
Giant among snakes.
They say python has no house.
I heard it a long time ago
and I laughed and laughed and laughed.
For who owns the ground under the lemon grass?
Who owns the ground under the elephant grass?
Who owns the swamp – father of rivers?
Who owns the stagnant pool – father of waters?

Because they never walk hand in hand
People say that snakes walk only singly.
But just imagine
Suppose the viper walks in front
The green mamba follows
And the python creeps rumbling behind –
Who will be brave enough to wait for them?

*

What’s remarkable about this poem from a Western perspective is not simply the reverential attitude toward snakes, but the recognition of swamps and stagnant pools as “fathers of rivers.” In this respect, traditional Yoruba knowledge is more advanced than was environmental science in the 1970s when the Clean Water Act was written: its supposition that such a thing as “isolated wetlands” can exist continues to bedevil conservation efforts in the U.S.

Beier also translates a praise poem for the viper. This comes from his African Poetry (Cambridge, 1966).

Viper

The viper lives in the forest.
Not even the Ogun worshipper can pick it up.
Viper’s child is beautiful in its nest.
But Nini is the most beautiful of snakes.
It is better for Nini to change its colour
and go home and bring some colour for Viper.
Viper owns all the rats in the forest.
Viper owns all the bush in the forest.
Viper owns all the snakes in the forest.
If there is no rat, what will snake eat?
If there is no rat, it will eat mouse;
if there is no mouse it will eat a shrew.
Poisonous death,
Poisonous viper,
Beautiful viper.

*

And here are two more from the same volume, which I use simply because I don’t have a copy of Beier’s Yoruba Poetry on hand. As with poems about people, in Ifa psalms or otherwise, the praise-proverb mode is above all designed to instruct and inspire.

Kob Antelope

A creature to pet and spoil
An animal with a smooth neck.
You live in the bush without getting lean.
You are plump like a newly wedded wife.
You have more brass rings about your neck
than any woman.
When you run you spread fine dust
like a butterfly shaking its wings.
You are beautiful like carved wood.
Your eyes are gentle like a dove’s.
Your neck seems long, long
to the covetous eyes of the hunter.

*

Colobus Monkey

We ask him to come and die – he sulks.
He dies at last – his cheeks are full of laughter.
Two rows of neat white teeth.
Death always follows war.
Those who wake early must sweep the ground.
Colobus says: the eagle sweeps the sky;
let me sweep the top of the tree.
Abuse me – and I will follow you home.
Praise me – and I will stay away from you.
Colobus is friend of the man in rags,
and a friend of the man in the embroidered gown.
He kills lice with black nails.
Deep-set eyes.
A mighty tail.
Don’t hold my tail,
don’t play with my face.
Death always follows war.

*

I don’t understand all the references in this last one, but the lines about praise and abuse could almost be my own motto! (A friend with whom I sometimes exchange poems, on the condition that we each be unsparing in our critique of the other, once accused me of not being able to take compliments.) Perhaps if Ifa divination were performed for me, some lines about the Colobus would crop up! For Ifa does possess a sense of humor, it seems:

Ifa
(translated by J. A. Adediji)

Ifa speaks in parables,
A wise man is he who understands it.
When we say understand it –
The wise man always understands it.
But when we do not understand it –
We say it is of no account.

*

Wisdom is the finest beauty of a person . . .
an Ifa oracle poem
(translated by Ulli Beier)

Wisdom is the finest beauty of a person.
Money does not prevent you from becoming blind.
Money does not prevent you from becoming mad,
Money does not prevent you from becoming lame.
You may be ill in any part of your body,
So it is better for you to go and think again
And to select wisdom.
Come and sacrifice, that you may have rest in your body,
Inside and outside.

*

As I conceive of it, the Ifa valuation of social and aesthetic balance bears a strong resemblance to that of the Diné (Navajo). The word usually translated “beauty” – as in the famous Nightway chant – for the Diné includes notions of harmony, symmetry, justice. A deep participation in this beauty promotes both wisdom and healing (“rest in your body, inside and outside.”) I’m also reminded a bit (again, perhaps erroneously) of the Japanese word kirei, commonly translated as “pretty” or “beautiful” but carrying also strong connotations of cleanliness, purity and order.

This ethos is on display in my final selection, one more translation of an Ifa psalm by Ulli Beier. It treats a theme that is truly pan-African in scope: the idea that, by sharing in the glory of others (through praise-singing or otherwise) our own selfhood is expanded: from the little bundle of urges and impulses familiar to us from western psychology, to the Self of Atman and Whitman’s Song of Myself. This psalm interprets the throw called Iwori wotura, which Beier uses for a title:

Oracle: Iwori Wotura

Iwori wotura.
Anybody who sees beauty and does not look at it
Will soon be poor.
Red feathers are the pride of the forest.
Young leaves are the pride of the palm tree.
Iwori wotura.
White flowers are the pride of the leaves.
A swept veranda is the pride of the landlord.
Iwori wotura.
A straight tree is the pride of the forest.
A fast deer is the pride of the bush.
Iwori wotura.
The rainbow is the pride of heaven.
A beautiful woman is the pride of her husband.
Iwori wotura.
Children are the pride of their mother.
Moon and stars are the pride of the sun.
Ifa says,
‘Beauty and all sorts of good fortunes arrive.’

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Gimme some sugar

From a culinary perspective, reducing means more than simply boiling down, removing liquid, thickening a sauce. Chemical changes happen as well. My most significant discovery in 20-some years of cooking concerns onions that have been fried at the lowest possible heat: rather than the sturdy, flexible, translucent bits or ribbons familiar to us from omelets and pizza toppings, slow-fried onions turn to yellow-orange sugar.

This is called caramelization. It represents but one way of making sugar through the reductive process. Homebrewers know two or more other ways of splitting long chains of starch into shorter sugar molecules; all involve the application of fairly precise temperatures for periods of 45 minutes or more. The essential art of brewing lies not in fermentation – even vintners can manage that – but in the various methods of extracting fermentable sugar from starchy grains and other plant parts.

I bring this up to remind myself that reductionism can be a wonderful thing. Usually I focus on its negative aspects, and not without reason – the results are all around us. I was struck yesterday afternoon by the absurdity of an AP story comparing The Passion of the Christ with a remake of Dawn of the Dead based on the wholly arbitrary measure of last weekend’s North American box office ticket sales. (I tried to turn this into a Diogenes post, which I subsequently removed for being out of character.) The humorous, Jesus-versus-flesh-eating-zombies story line irritated me more than it should’ve, setting off a chain of associations with bestseller lists and the hit system that has so distorted the evolution of so-called ‘popular’ music. Several things stick in my craw here: the reduction of value to sales or profit; the fake populism used to disguise elite control and manipulation of tastes and opinions; and most of all the very notion that different things can and should be ranked according to their positions on meaningless continua or axes of our own invention.

This last impulse is the most deeply rooted and difficult to challenge. We invent, for example, the category ‘poetry’ to encompass various distinct and unrelated forms of intensified linguistic expression – everything from light verse to song lyrics to elaborate puns, riddles, metaphysical mazes, transcriptions of dreams, rhythmic narrations, and so on. Having invented the category, the next impulse is to decide which among its various components is best, purest, most representative of the category. Then one must try and rank individual poems or poets according to some scale, be it economic, scholarly or purely personal. But what does it mean to have a favorite poet? Favorite for all seasons and moods, or simply evocative of one’s favorite season and mood? Top ten lists seem fairly harmless as long as they remain light-hearted, purely personal and subject to constant revision, but what makes us so fond of them in the first place?

What is genius? Does it cohere to a creator or to the creation? To say that a work is a thing of genius is to emphasize its uniqueness, its originality – its resistance to comparison with anything else. Originality: never to be confused with novelty (though the hit makers and bestseller listers have long since forgotten the distinction). A unique work, thing or being originates in unrepeatable circumstances. Such particularities of time and place are reflected in the etymology of the word genius, as I mentioned last week. The Latin word refers to the tutelary spirit of a place or person; according to my dictionary, it derives from the verb gignere, to beget.

It may be that an inclination toward hierarchical thinking is in some way innate for humans. No doubt our social structures closely resemble the strictly hierarchical societies of dogs and crows, though the overwhelming power of culture in determining the shape of human societies makes hash of such appeals to biological determinism without the addition of a great number of qualifiers and caveats.

In Nature herself there are no hierarchies. No component of a natural system is trivial; greatness is a trick of perspective, a matter of the eye only. Those of us involved in translating the language of ecology for professional conservationists must be careful to remember that notions of “top-down trophic regulation” must never be reified, however well they seem to capture realities of predation and the way in which the loss of one species can have rippling effects throughout an ecosystem. The top-down arrangement was designed by humans for the convenience of other humans. It is a cognitive crutch made necessary by the inadequacy of human imagination: because “Nature is not only more complex than we know, but more complex than we can know,” as the ecologist Frank Engler is reputed to have said.

Scientists themselves of course remain very aware that their maps and models are provisional and imaginary constructs, valued for their predictive power and their elegance. “Elegance,” to a scientist, seems to include notions of utility and efficiency: Ockham’s razor rules supreme. The great power of reductionism is nowhere more in evidence than in the discoveries of Western science – discoveries that rest upon inventions, but are no less real for that. To pick the most obvious and fundamental example: all of mathematics rests upon unprovable assumptions, such as the convention that dissimilar things have an essence that is in some way comparable, capable of reduction to a cipher. This apple and that apple and the other apple: any one of them is one, their numerical value is interchangeable. Together they are three. What a terrible and impious lie if we take it for the whole truth – but what a useful fiction it is, the sine qua non of all “higher” civilization.

Every abstraction is a reduction, a step away from original wholeness. But is the return necessarily better than the journey outward? The Daoist, dogmatic in his preference for the uncarved block, rejects all flavor – literally. From a diet of unflavored grains the Daoist aspires to subsistence on air alone.

I say, to hell with that! Whole grains aspire not to bread but to beer, just as the caterpillar’s cells say butterfly – regardless of how often its doom may be spelled by killer fungus or ichneumon. So gimme some sugar! And give me the dance from suchness to symbol, from mystery to imagination and back again. The genius is in the dance.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The calculus of luck

Ungrateful keyboard! I wake myself up two hours early to write and all you can do is sit there. Your so-called keys stay locked. My brain says write, my heart says hum to yourself.

The new snow stopped falling sometime in the night and a few stars were blinking in and out of the clouds by 5:00. Every snowfall has its own properties; this one brings the trains closer and drives the gurgle of the stream farther away. As I sat out on the porch with my coffee I was admiring as I do so often the unique pitch of each eastbound locomotive whistling the crossings: Bellwood, Tipton, Grazierville, Tyrone, Plummer’s Hollow, Birmingham. Now all I can do is sit here and hum, writing about writing about nothing. Because important things have been happening too fast for me to record, unless I were to turn myself into a writing machine with no time left over to experience anything except in retrospect. So I guess I’ll have to break an unwritten rule here and resort to bullet points, so as not to forgo all mention of:

~ The courtship flights of the woodcock at dusk almost every evening for the past week – the way it can slip in and out of sight against the almost-dark clouds, the sudden transition from strange nasal peent to the rapid piccolo it makes somehow with its wings, rushing across the sky in wide arcs like a released balloon

~ The week-long Visit of the Beloved Granddaughter (my niece Eva) from Mississippi, and her 8th birthday celebration yesterday in the snow she welcomed as “a present from God – I mean from Santa!”

~ The scavenger hunt for birthday presents, and the riddles my dad and I had dreamed up for clues leading from one present to the next all over the farm

~ Some of the things collected before the snow fell: ruffed grouse feathers; jawbones from winter-killed deer; bird’s nests; a large handful of wild grape tendrils, each one an eloquent restatement of the beauty in clinging, the unique possibilities of attachment

~ My mother saying yesterday morning as the birds mobbed the strewn seeds: “I wonder if a fox sparrow will show up today?” and a fox sparrow showing up two hours later, obligingly digging his trademark holes in the snow, the song sparrows and juncos giving him a wide wake

~ The very punctual return of the eastern phoebe in the middle of the snowstorm. I was attending to e-mail yesterday afternoon when he landed on a branch of the mulberry sapling right outside the window where I type and flicked his tail up and down three times.

It’s light now and I can see what the night brought: just the barest additional skim of snow on top of yesterday’s five inches. Today, we’re off to Penn State to visit museums – always a fun thing to do in the company of a bright and inquisitive 8-year-old.

I don’t get to enjoy the company of children very often – especially children who love nature, poetry and all the other things that exercise the imagination. So naturally I’ve been enjoying the excuse to relive my childhood for a few days (who knew that tinkertoys could still be so much fun?!). Fueling my enthusiasm, too, is the marvelous, multi-authored literary experiment unfolding over at Commonbeauty, “The Archaeology of Childhood.” The entries are in the form of personal letters between participants, describing an illness or an affliction suffered during the writer’s childhood and what it meant to him or her. The results have been very moving – not a dud yet. As Tom Montag observed a couple days ago, this is an experiment that takes advantage of the unique possibilities of the blogosphere for spontaneity and immediacy.

I believe today will see the seventh and final installment of this unique experiment, so if you have the time to stop over you can read the whole series from start to finish.

****

When I began thinking about luck yesterday it was with a specific destination in mind, but I ended up somewhere else instead. I’ll start again, with the “reprint” of an essay off my other website that’s also in the spirit of the archaeology of childhood. This was written in January of last year, as the chorus of harpies calling for “shock and awe” in Baghdad was rising to a crescendo.

****

RATS IN THE WOODPILE

There were always rats in the barn when I was a kid. We kept the chicken feed in wooden bins reinforced with sheet metal but they still managed to chew through. My father said that a Norway rat could chew a hole in a lead pipe in twelve hours, and I believed him. He put out d-con rat poison, but it never got them all. We tried not to think about how it worked: slow death by dehydration.

Then when we cleaned out the shed, we found dozens of mummified rats hidden in the scrapwood pile. My brothers and I kept the most gruesome examples for a long time, bringing them out to show visitors. The mummies were completely hairless, and their tough yellow-brown hides made them seem less animal than vegetable, dried seed husks or corn stalks in winter. Except, that is, for their heads, the place where their eyes had been. “Look at this one! It’s still got all its teeth!” “Why is it grinning like that?”

The rats had excavated an extensive subway system connecting barn, shed, and compost heap. The only way to catch more than a glimpse was to sit very still in the basement of the barn for a while, for instance with a loaded .22. They were part of the natural order of things, and it never occurred to me that they could die out. But one day a few years after we stopped keeping chickens and the raccoons killed the last of our Muscovy ducks, I realized there weren’t any more rats around. Their major tunnel entrances were all grown up with weeds.

My niece Eva comes to visit at least once a year, at Christmas. Two years ago, when she was four, she and her Uncle Steve discovered a mummified duck under the hay in the barn basement. Something had eaten half its face, but otherwise it was in pretty good shape. Eva was fascinated. Every day for the rest of her visit she would beg to be taken down to the barn to see the dead duck. Nor was it a passing fancy–a year later she was still visiting it faithfully at its resting-place on the hay of the next-to-last stall.

Had I been thinking, I probably could have predicted that Eva’s first poem would include a duck–very much alive, with ducklings in tow. In my family, we’re fond of attempting such auguries about people, about the weather, about world affairs, though we never bet any money on them. For major events, like elections or impending wars, everyone will predict a different outcome.

These days, there’s fierce competition for the worst-case scenario. No one actually wants it to come true, of course–in fact, some of us cling to the notion that a bad thing can’t happen if it has been fully exposed in advance. But even if it does come to pass, someone at least can enjoy the brief frisson of its discovery. “Why is it grinning like that?”

****

This brings me to what I wanted to mention in yesterday’s post: the role of luck/grace in the birthing of any truly original poem or work of art. I don’t mean to discount the importance of practice, practice, practice. In fact, I think that Pasteur’s dictum, “Chance favors the prepared mind,” perfectly captures the relationship of preparation to inspired discovery. All I’m saying is that such discovery is utterly chancey – as my experience this morning with the mute keyboard reconfirms. And that it comes from some specific place, some spot in the in-between of earth and sky: all genius was originally of place. The word applied to the production of an artist only by the once-conventional presumption that inspiration is (as its eymology still implies) a species of possession.

I had been invited to participate in a poetry reading for State College’s First Night celebration a year ago, and as usual I brought my audience with me in the form of the extended family. Eva was then six going on seven and wanted to know what kind of tree was this “poetry” I was going to read about. She sat with me in the front row throughout the entire two-hour reading – a fairly hyper, high-energy kid who is also blessed with the ability to concentrate. A month or two later, her daddy helped her type her very first poem and I proudly e-mailed it around to all my friends. She hasn’t written anything like it since, and I have no intention of pushing her.

[untitled]
by Eva Bonta (6 going on 7 years old)

How would it be to smell
like a flower and the petals
fall off from cold wet breeze
pink and silver yellow.

The birds fly up to
their nest as hot as the
sun with their hot smooth
egg. The frog at the
pond croaked once more
as the Duck with her
Duck-lings go silently to
bed when the moon is
yellow.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Laughing in church

“‘Consider, therefore, whether you won’t consult a fool.’ ‘Upon my soul,’ replied Panurge, ‘I will. I seem to feel my bowels loosening. A moment before they were all tight and constipated. But just as we have chosen the fine cream of wisdom to advise us, so I should like someone who is a fool of the first water to preside over our new deliberations.’ ‘Triboulet seems sufficient of a fool to me, said Pantagruel. ‘A proper and total fool,’ replied Panurge. ‘A fatal fool.’ ‘A high-toned fool.’ ‘A natural fool.’ ‘A B sharp and B flat fool.’ ‘A celestial fool.’ ‘A terrestrial fool.’ ‘A jovial fool.’ ‘A jolly, mocking fool.’ ‘A mercurial fool.’ ‘A merry, sportive fool.’ ‘A lunatical fool.'” (Etc., for three more pages.)
François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel 3:37-38 (trans. by J. M. Cohen, Penguin, 1963)

In the course of my usual coffee-fueled wool-gathering this morning I realized I have yet to write a single line about Rabelais, or about his foremost interpreter, the 20th-century Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin. Bakhtin – like his 16th-century mentor – was the rare example of a scholar who seemed to know a lot about everything, and to remember virtually everything he ever read. Most attempts to develop new theories fail because they attempt to synthesize too much about which the author knows too little. Bakhtin had the sense to restrict his scope to a single author (Rabelais in Rabelais and His World, elsewhere Dostoevsky) and let his discoveries and suggestions about their works ripple outward. Thus, instead of writing a comprehensive history or geography of laughter he situates himself at one pivotal point in human space-time – the Renaissance in Western Europe – and looks in all directions from there.

I was reminded of this while reading some Ashanti folktales about the trickster culture hero Anansi, the spider. It was no more than a tossed-off comment of Bakhtin’s about the original character of religion that first gave me, years ago, what I think is an essential interpretive insight into stories such as these. It’s not that Mircea Eliade’s hypothesis of a separate sacred time existing within but somehow completely apart from ordinary time – illo tempore, as he called it – isn’t useful and important in its own right. But Eliade neglected one key factor: the unique power of laughter to bridge the gap between sacred and secular, between the atemporal utopia and the here-and-now, between the spirit and the body. The king and the fool are born under the same horoscope, says Rabelais. Here is the self-important Anansi, perched ridiculously on a cashew shell “as if he were a chief sitting on a carved stool,” abandoning his role as arbiter among the other animals to claim the right of primogeniture for himself:

“‘If you had come to me first, I would have saved you this argument, for I am the oldest of all creatures. When I was born, the earth itself had not yet been made, and there was nothing to stand on. When my father died, there was no ground to bury him in. So I had to bury him in my head.'”
(Harold Courlander, The Hat-Shaking Dance and Other Ashanti Tales From Ghana, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1957)

Laughter pulls the ground out from under us, leaves us hanging, as it were, in mid-air. Ordinary laws are suspended (as in Eliade’s illo tempore) but so, too, is all fear and reverence, all sorrow and anger. In fact, if laughter has been generally outlawed by the so-called world religions, it is because it threatens their monopoly on the primal emotions. You can’t laugh in church. Bakhtin notes that “Early Christianity had already condemned laughter. Tertullian, Cyprian, and John Chrysostom preached against ancient spectacles, especially against the mime and the mime’s jests and laughter. John Chrysostum declared that jests and laughter are not from God but the devil. Only permanent seriousness, remorse, and sorrow for his sins befit the Christian.” (Rabelais and His World, trans. by Helene Iswolsky, Indiana U.P., 1984.)

Bakhtin shows, at least within the Western Christian milieu, the central importance of what he calls “the material bodily element” to the unofficial culture of festive laughter. It is, he writes, a “degrading and regenerating principle.” One has only to read accounts of the sacred clowns of the American Southwest and Mexico (see below) to realize the truth of this insight. If Aristotle was right about laughter being a unique and fundamental human trait, what from the perspective of Christian history appears to be a temporary lapse (in what were, after all, the “Middle Ages”) may instead represent a return to the origins of religious expression: “During the Easter season laughter and jokes were permitted even in church. The priest could tell amusing stories and jokes from the pulpit. Following the days of lenten sadness he could incite his congregation’s gay laughter as a joyous celebration . . . The jokes and stories concerned especially material bodily life, and were of a carnival type. Permission to laugh was granted simultaneously with the permission to eat meat and to resume sexual intercourse.”

Laughter and the grotesque were (are) opposed to death and the fear of death through their very celebration of change and renewal. Bakhtin stresses “the essential relation of festive laughter to time and to the change of season. . . . The gay aspect of the feast presented this happier future of a general material affluence, equality, and freedom, just as the Roman Saturnalia announced the return of the Golden Age. Thus, the medieval feast had, as it were, the face of Janus. Its official, ecclesiastical face was turned to the past and sanctioned the existing order, but the face of the people of the marketplace looked into the future and laughed, attending the funeral of the past and the present.” The comic inversions of the folk festivals included travesty/transvestitism; the reversal of hierarchical orders (jesters turned into kings and bishops); parodies of sacred rituals; and of course the celebration of all that was forbidden: drunkenness, gluttony, debauchery.

If I differ with Bakhtin at all it is only in my sense of the relative value of the spiritual/sacred versus the material/festive. My reading of ethnography over the past several years has convinced me that these two principles need not be ideologically opposed; we don’t need to choose between them. I do agree they we would be better to return to a more Rabelaisian, holistic appreciation of laughter. I think Bakhtin describes very well the diminished role of laughter in the post-16th century West, where “the essential truth about the world and about man cannot be told in laughter.”

Our conception of the body has narrowed as well. In contrast to the grotesque and universal body of the carnival, in the modern view bodies are smooth, closed off, private. Serious art and literature studiously ignores nose, mouth, belly and genitals, concentrating instead on eyes and hands. (Think of the language of love poetry, or the Victorian novel.) Whereas “the grotesque body . . is a body in the act of becoming,” the modern body is complete and strictly limited. I can’t help picturing the contrast between the bodies of local working-class people I know – and the kind of earthy humor they tend to indulge in – and the ideal bodily images of Hollywood and Madison Avenue: “That which protrudes, bulges, sprouts, or branches off (when a body transgresses its limits and a new one begins) is eliminated, hidden or moderated. All orifices of the body are closed. The basis of the image is the individual, strictly limited mass, the impenetrable facade. The opaque surface and the body’s ‘valleys’ acquire an essential meaning as the border of a closed individuality that does not merge with other bodies and with the world. All attributes of the unfinished world are carefully removed . . . The verbal norms of official and literary language . . . prohibit all that is linked with fecundation, pregnancy, childbirth. There is a sharp line of division between familiar speech and ‘correct’ language.” Well, fuck that!

Here’s anthropologist Barbara Tedlock (The Beautiful and the Dangerous, Penguin, 1992) describing one of the two main orders of Zuni clowns:

“I gazed at the ten silly-looking, but nonetheless sacred, serious, even dangerous, Mudhead clowns. Adobe-colored beings in tight-fitting cotton masks with inside-out eyes and doughnut-shaped mouths, simultaneously expressing eternal amazement and voracious hunger. Ears, antennae, and genitals (stuffed with hand-spun cotton, garden seeds, and the dust of human footprints) protruded knoblike from their heads. Without noses or hair, they were naked except for lumpy orange-brown body paint, feathered ear ornaments, black neck scarves, men’s woolen kilts, and women’s blanket dresses, concealing their tied-down penises.”

These ten Mudheads – or Dickheads, we should probably call them – were born through a primordial act of incest, and were the original inhabitants of the Zuni land of the dead, Kachina Village. As real beings who somehow inhabit the bodies of the men who play them every year, they represent more than archetypes: each possesses “a distinguishing personality trait and a sacred gift for humankind.

“Molanhakto, with a miniature rabbit snare dangling from his right earlobe, brought native squash. The Speaker, a daydreamer who rarely spoke, and then only irreverently, carried yellow corn. Great Warrior Priest, a coward, brought blue corn. Bat, in his blanket dress, who feared the dark but saw marvelously well in daylight, red corn. Small Horn, who thought he was invisible, white corn. Small Mouth the glum, gabbling and cackling constantly, offered sweet corn. Old Buck, frisky and giggly as a young girl, black corn. Gamekeeper, in his woman’s dress, speckled corn. Water Drinker, always thirsty, toted his water gourd. And Old Youth, the self-centered, thoughtless adviser of the team, brought the clairvoyance locked tightly within the tiny cracks in parched corn.”

In short, a pretty corny lot.

But what about us, us U.S.ians? By and large, for all the vaunted liberation of sexual mores, the tyranny of the official body remains nearly absolute. Freud, by reducing everything to sex, perhaps shares a great deal of the blame for our continuing discomfort in our own skins. Neurosis is endemic to the psychoanalyzed subject. Modern medicine has reinforced the wall between mind and body, which thus by definition can never truly be healed (made whole). This separation breeds many more. Even for those who abandon themselves to carnality, the body remains unreal: filth or idol, something to be whipped, something to be fetishized. Sex and laughter are still very far apart. Homosexuals no less than heterosexuals, religious and secular alike elevate the same, tortured body inhabited by the same lonely and alienated soul.

Whether we flagellate ourselves like the Shi’a commemorating the death of Hussein or ogle the flagellation of Jesus in The Passion of the Christ, our sense of what it means to be compassionate is limited, really, to a single emotion: sorrow. But is it not in shared laughter that people feel most akin? If the goal of religion is, as it proclaims, to promote peace and unite humankind, why is laughter still barred from the churches, temples and mosques? We alternate between the supposed poles of sacred solemnity and profane laughter without perceiving that they form a single axis – that axis on which this whole, vast, bulging, fecund and tragicomic world forever spins.

UPDATE: My sometime debating partner (and faithful reader) commonbeauty has written a highly compatible post, partly in response to this, on ‘vernacular bodies’ in the paintings of Bruegel. A brief and wonderful essay about a fascinating subject – check it out.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Learning language, learning poetry

Metaphor is defined [by Aristotle] in terms of movement.
Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language (Robert Czerny, trans., University of Toronto Press, 1984)

Yesterday’s fresh inch of snow and cold temperatures overnight gave everything a sparkle this morning as the sun rose into a cloudless sky. I remembered my niece Eva’s first use of metaphor at the age of 2 years, 9 months. She had just begun speaking semi-coherently the summer before, when she was in Honduras, and had a very limited vocabulary of mostly Spanish words. One night, during a prolonged Christmastime visit, her grandpa showed her the stars. She always accompanied him to the compost heap/wildlife feeding area after supper, taking out the scraps from the kitchen. It was an exceptionally clear night, and the stars were beautiful; Eva practiced saying “estrellas,” which tripped off her tongue with surprising fluency.

The next day dawned equally clear, and as Eva was riding on my shoulders up to her grandparents’ house for lunch, she surprised me by pointing at the ground and yelling, “Estrellas!” I looked. She was pointing, of course, at the sparkles in the snow.

I don’t suppose this sort of thing is too uncommon. It makes sense that facility with metaphors would be a normal part of language acquisition, since analogic or metaphorical definitions are common for many words (and are probably essential for abstract thinking; all of mathematics is based upon the ability to analogize, for example). Learning a new word involves figuring out the extent of its semantic coverage. In the case just described, was this really an example of the conscious use of metaphor? Perhaps, instead, it was simply an attempt to figure out whether “estrellas” meant solely “sparkly things in the sky,” or if it also included sparkly things elsewhere.

One way or the other, I would like to think that this kind of active, joyous measuring of the world through spoken language is fundamentally poetic. This is the argument Heidegger makes in his essay on a theme from Hölderlin, “‘…Poetically Man Dwells…'” To Heidegger, the comparison of sky with earth is an integral part of this measure-taking. “The upward glance spans the between of sky and earth.” It encompasses “everything that shimmers and blooms in the sky and thus under the sky and thus on earth, everything that sounds and is fragrant, rises and comes – but also everything that goes and stumbles, moans and falls silent, pales and darkens.” The poet does not merely describe such sights, but “calls … that which in its very self-disclosure causes the appearance of that which conceals itself, and indeed as that which conceals itself. In its familiar appearances, the poet calls the alien as that to which the invisible imparts itself in order to remain what it is – unknown.” (Albert Hofstadter, trans., Poetry, Language, Thought, Harper, 1971.) In other words, in her making-strange the poet merely testifies to the ultimate unknowability of everything language seeks to measure and describe.

I remember how fascinated Eva was with birds that year. It helped that her daddy was an ardent birdwatcher, I suppose. But more than that, I think birds appealed to her because they were small and quick, always in motion – just like she was. Her word for bird(s) was “Pio!” and she used it constantly – hardly a bird escaped her attention as we walked around the farm. One evening, we gave her a ballpoint pen and a pad of cheap paper and encouraged her to draw. She would put the pen on a blank page, move it rapidly in circling, sweeping strokes, turn the page and do it again. The pad quickly filled up with actionist creations that had little to do with representational sketching. After a while, one of us asked her what she was doing. “Pio!”

By sheer serendipity, one or two of them did end up looking like birds. I saved one that bore an uncanny resemblance to a resplendent quetzal. I wish I’d saved the whole pad.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Diagnostic test of certain hypotheses about the Old Norse worldview, with the able assistance of Dr. Williams

“Rigor of beauty is the quest. But how will you find beauty / when it is locked in the mind past all remonstrance?”

And so I’ve been tracing threads through books and on the web, through bad translations and worse. Weighing the scholar’s no-more-than against the modern enthusiast’s no-less-than. The Christian clerics who wrote down virtually everything we know about pagan thought were already unthinking it, whether they intended to or not. They wrote dom and thought legis – or apocalypse. They wrote Hel and thought of the rack for heretics, the fire for wizards and dissidents. But is it possible that the unwashed, drunken tribesmen of northern Europe, violent bastards as they were, knew a thing or two that we would do well to remember? Is it even possible to re-member it, or are we doomed to embroidery? Some say my ancestors believed something along these lines:

The descent beckons / as the ascent beckoned / Memory is a kind / of accomplishment / a sort of renewal / even / an initiation, since the spaces it opens are new places / inhabited by hordes / heretofore unrealized, / of new kinds – / since their movements / are towards new objectives / (even though formerly they were abandoned)

And yes, one could reach deep into the gone-before to learn about the apparent necessity of the just-now. But it isn’t gone, exactly – it is simply beyond alteration. And as such, it serves as a mirror for the could-be and the should-be.

My surface is myself. / Under which / to witness, youth is / buried. Roots? // Everybody has roots.

Mirror, mirror, I call you Weird. Urd. Wisest of the three sisters who guard the deepest of the three springs that water the roots of the ash tree Yggdrasil, sustainer of the worlds. Water still enough to reflect clearly but never stagnating, renewed continually from the ground and from the sky.

. . . grubbing the page / (the burning page) / like a worm – for enlightenment // Of which we drink and are drunk and in the end / are destroyed . . .

Old words from dead tongues: ORLAUG: “Personal destiny”? Not so immutable. “Well-being”? More portentious than that. NORN: “Goddesses of Fate”? Not goddesses. Not Fate. DISIR: “Guardian angels”? Not by a long shot. The word means women. And while they may be invisible, when they show themselves they are solid presences.

Who are these people (how complex / the mathematic) among whom I see myself / in the regularly ordered plateglass of / his thoughts, glimmering before shoes and bicycles? / They walk incommunicado, the / equation is beyond solution, yet / its sense is clear –

FYLGJA: “Fetch,” itself nearly an obsolete word. The one that follows. The double-which-may-be-animal-but-is-usually-woman. VALKYRJA, HAMINGJA: More supernatural women. Impossible now to sort out which were synonyms, which were regional variants, which were inherited from the ancestors (both male and female lines), which died with the death of their human charge, which accompanied it to which of multiple afterlife destinations. In the sagas, when a man meets a strange and beautiful woman who somehow reminds him of himself, that is the signal to turn fey (another nearly obsolete word). To go forward into death with eyes wide open.

Haunted by your beauty (I said), / exalted and not easily to be attained, the / whole scene is haunted: / Take off your clothes, / (I said) / Haunted, the quietness of your face / is a quietness, real . . .

But it is true, they fear / it more than death, beauty is feared / more than death, more than they fear death

The fetch is steadfast, but sometimes a bad man’s dis may work his doom. The disir are zealous for justice. According to one theory, they are Freya’s equivalent of the valkyries. But what about this doom? It seems it is not unalterable, it can be commuted in some circumstances. From the tapestry of Urd a seer or seeress can undo a few, critical threads.

Not prophesy! NOT prophesy! / but the thing itself!

Even Ragarnok, the doom of the Aesir, is a beginning as well as an ending. Fenrir is in some sense only

A tapestry hound / with his thread teeth drawing crimson from / the throat of the unicorn

What can we know? Snorri calls Odin the All-father, but he is flesh-and-blood, no Yahweh. He is a trickster, a shapeshifter, a supernatural being who is himself on a quest for wisdom. For poetry he turned into a serpent, slept with a giantess, risked his life. For the mead of poetry, which tells the truth through riddles and by rearranging the order of things.

. . . A poem is a complete little universe. It exists separately. Any poem that has worth expresses the life of the poet. It gives a view of what the poet is . . .

Q. Aren’t we supposed to understand it?

A. There is a difference of [sic] poetry and the sense . . .

Q. But shouldn’t a word mean something when you see it?

A. In prose, an English word means what it says. In poetry, you’re listening to two things . . . you’re listening to the sense, the common sense of what it says. But it says more. that is the difficulty.

For wisdom one time he plucked out one of his eyes, and another time he sacrificed his whole body, hung himself from one of the limbs of Yggdrasil and later returned to life, less like Jesus than a magician who, instead of a rabbit, pulls himself out of his hat.

The (self) direction has been changed / the serpent / its tail in its mouth / “the river has returned to its beginnings”/ . . . the all-wise serpent

Odin too has his fylgjur, the twin ravens named Thought and Memory. Every morning they fly all over the earth gathering news: like the raven of Moses, except that they return each evening to give a report, like the Biblical dove.

A voice calling in the hubbub (Why else / are there newspapers, by the cart-load?) blaring / the news no wit shall evade, no rhyme / cover. Necessity gripping the words . scouting / evasion, that love is begrimed, befouled . / . . . begrimed / yet lifts its head, having suffered a sea-change! / shorn of its eyes and its hair / its teeth kicked out . a bitter submersion / in darkness . a gelding not to be / listed . to be made ready! fit to/ serve . . .

Enlightenment is never final. Nothing is ever final, over, finished for good. Instead, renewal and a return to wholeness through a weird undoing:

The descent / made up of despairs / and without accomplishment / realizes a new awakening : / which is a reversal / of despair. // For what we cannot accomplish, what / is denied to love, / what we have lost in the anticipation – / a descent follows, endless and indestructible .
__________

All quotes are from William Carlos Williams, Paterson (New Directions, 1963), itself a montage of quotes, a tribute to the burning library of the mind as much as to the river and the falls and the many-voiced hypostasis called Paterson, NJ.