Ab initio: an epithalamium for Josias and Agnieszka

His view was of the free-and-easy and exceedingly
  gentle, mbira-like;

of the purple jacaranda, too, that fruits but can't blind

and of Shona elegance to ward off attacks at night
  for love of bride
 
From first to last all these were (to me) like clearing stars,
   his music and love            

December bird (written as I wait for return of vision)

I 'd love to sit with you, too, splayed
  into light, stringing along

and receive teaching (as I know you do)
  from the rugose tree

I'd throw out pleasures to the wind
  like a true inventor

or go rattling off from time to time--
  a perfect wan prophet

And I'd like, when it's time, to stop at a
   cute little extinction, too
 

Responsorial of mine

"Che sola a me par donna" (Petrarch)
_____________

    The little i do out of ardent love for
utterly little

         if i love! and see it

merge with whatnot, is still for you--

        the little i've got

   And the primacy of eye and joy over eye,
        amounting to the same old

        cold of rigid hearts,

    is still full value for Christ, is it not?


But what can my beloved of frilly anklet, eye
   hunched down by the well, do?

   Up or down, pure or not

it will still be just for me the utterly little
         i do love,

         if i do

George Grant



George Grant (1918-1988)

How delighted that I've discovered a blog dedicated to the writings and insights of the great George Grant, a person I had the privilege of meeting and reading some Plato with in the 70s. I'd like to thank Chris Faiers for posting at his Riffs and Ripples from ZenRiver Garden blog an article on Grant by Ron Dart that led me eventually to Ron's The Owl: George Grant Journal blog.

Now begins what (I guarantee) will be a very long discussion about the social, political and philosophical issues dear to the heart of one of Canada's greatest public intellectuals and scholars.

"Questionings of a daughter"

 (for Amy King)

I saw two girls holding hands,

  jasmine mit in mit,

balancing together 'gainst the

  icy walks, giggling,

heads bent low—

  & wouldn't have

thought much 'cept that at the

  light, when one

turned to kiss the other, on

  the mouth

( a pure Sapphic one )

  and leant softly

into her, both intertwining a

  moment, secure

against an icy fall--then I saw

   at last
  the world

could finally be safe from itself

Ternion: or thoughts on the usual male sorrow



Vultures always come in twos when a sky (under god!) perfumes
  the heart and mind, like both of us

and then breaks into a room where the stinking flabby-limbed
  always dart the heart (as I saw her do!)--

I mean, how can the rays and veiny leaves of my sunny day
 compare to uncomprehending legs and arms

  that won't completely entirely stop thrashing?

Why they kill gypsy moths

 "All visible things need a cross... All intelligible things need a tomb"
                                                                                       (Maximus Confessor)
______________________

  I got it from the rose & cicadas

(as also later from the fruit flies that watch for Ruth)

  & they said the gypsy, dying gypsy,   

who looks up at a thick rind sky as it lies eye-level over

  the sweet loofah & rye, —said it dies

& becomes dust that dries on the stalks, up to the top

  of both stalk and sky

And rising in this way, star-stitched the gypsy turns to dust

  But, again, just as they said

and I also sensed it from the fateful flutter & wings of dust,

  (wings praiseworthy for flight!)

a moth lifts & arcs, soul-bearing & frail & stalks past pig-weed

  & grasses with its cane,

knocking out bits of shale and algae to fight the slimy world

  Gypsy's silly cane! cloaked in dust,

against all that world's hard slimy shale as it tries to look deep

  (dusty moth!) into a pond's own hurt

or a lake's dark stony seed, and tame all that carnal hurt

  of rock, algae and dirt

Straining hard towards the world, when it flies , they say, it rises

  with a cane made of rye!

the gypsy moth that cruelly dies in dark serpentine woods

Bergsonian time and free will, and the poem that ensues

Henri Bergson

toward

the end --

just so

      (John Martone)

__________________________

I've recently revisited Henri Bergson's Time and Free Will, a work that though possessing remarkable insights into the nature of time and human perception, and the celebrated defense of free will, also makes (to my mind) the even more remarkable claim that the elements of artistic activity are almost always antithetical to language itself, leaving Bergson with the inescapable fact that "there is no common measure between mind and language." What type of poetry can come of this?

In his view (and mine) the data ("states of consciousness") from which the artist (the poet) draws reveal a source that's deeply temporal, deeply personal and whose greatest legacy to art will be its ability to disclose how the "fusion" and "interpenetration" of its objects--a sort of melting of qualities into each other so that objects can never be easily distinguishable from each other, leaving in their wake a spectral residue-- always give this hauntingly penumbral state for the poet who assimilates them to literary production. It's when the mind forms a "space" (as of the page or canvas) for these intuitive states and devises a decidedly more "impersonal" form by juxtaposing the primary data of artistic consciousness in linear fashion and employing the symbolism of language to represent the "feelings and ideas", or the true "living and original individuality", of artistic consciousness--it's when the poet, in short, looks for a more overarching medium of artistic "space" that "the thousand emotions that stir the soul" in "time" become the deadpan expression of mere language. The 'thing' appears always as a certain "shade" or "quality" of itself as it was once perceived: the poem that ensues is a veritable Eurydice who is tragically torn from our affections the moment she's glimpsed.

Bergson's example of the rose is illuminating:

I smell a rose and immediately confused recollections of childhood come back to my memory. In truth, these recollections have not been called up by the perfume of the rose: I breathe them in with the very scent; it means all that to me. To others it will smell differently.--It is always the same scent, you will say, but associated with different ideas.--I am quite willing that you should express yourself in this way; but do not forget that you have first removed the personal element from the different impressions which the rose makes on each one of us; you have retained only the objective aspect, that part of the scent of the rose which is public property and thereby belongs to space. Only thus was it possible to give a name to the rose and its perfume...And you now say that our different impressions, our personal impressions, result from the fact that we associate different recollections with rose-scent (162)

To give expression to the "inner" without resorting to the conventions of the "outer" conditions of artistic sensibility is the poet's fate. S/he faces the unenviable task of relating only the more hauntingly beautiful nuances of deeply interrelated human perceptions: the conventions and symbolism of language itself must, on the other hand, always militate against the ineffable and sublime qualities of a poetic mind. The world will reveal, and the poet is always fated to try to write, that which cannot be easily written, if at all. The 'maker' works with very recalcitrant materials that jealously hoard their interior riches.The "self", as Bergson says, "comes into contact with the external world at its surface." The poem's rose-scent and the feelings it elicits will be lost in the act of transmission. The chronicler of feelings can only provide a single one of what were successive states in the perception of the single object or event: the rose-scent in its final form as the poem. The only way a reader can intuit the poet's own inner experience is by impossibly recreating or reimagining, somehow, the exact "shading" or "colouring" or "intensity" of the experience that gave rise to the object that gave rise to the poem itself.

I've always believed this but not as some sort of conscious artistic manifesto of my own: it has always been intuitively obvious to me that the poet must look deep below the conventions of spatial configurations of reality (of which language and all conceptual thinking are primary exemplars) and record the exuberantly errant colourings of human perception at its most elemental. Bergson's true heir is Gilles Deleuze who I believe used precisely this Bergsonian sense of the "primary psychic phenomena" of human perception in his discussion of "the principle of the emission of singularities" to elucidate the source of every type of concrete expression (The Logic of Sense). To intuit the outlines of a mood or feeling or insight without the aid of the "word" is what I've always attempted to do, albeit at times clumsily and imprecisely. Language can do nothing (if it is to be poetic, above all) but try recording the essential evanescent and heterogeneous qualities of the world. It's a way of writing about things that by nature flee from where they've been necessarily accessed. And yet, at the same time, nothing has always appeared to me to be more liberatory.

I offer the following as another poem-offering to Bergonsian time and free will: a wildly exuberant way, that is, to voice a feeling and the only image of it available to me at that time. I can do no more without solidifying the form into a real prayer. Its aim is to show how agitated is the suppliant and how moody and changeable at the same time. That prayers go unanswered only attest to their living dynamism and liquidity. And since 'prayer' is at best a "symbolical representation" and a thing there's no way to predict a reader's response to it for, after all, one can really read the poem in its present state only. And the poem in that state will necessarily be imprecise and spontaneous like the perceptions that birthed it. There's no help for it.
_______________________

"Prayer"

You say, 'Blot out the leaves first, & pray', and so I do
creeping along as I have for some fifty odd years been
just this insanely cold, tired & rhapsodical
In the annals of heart, it was the eeriest light-greyish
                                                                            type by far

 

So by praying I can hope the ground to harden— but You,
up there with nowhere to go, star-fetish at best, a sky god
in the same wintery way a sparrow-bill can poke

into me anytime & tear like a bad tooth, wheresoever

And I hear myself say everyday, to you alone in my car
'With eyes like clouds, son-eager,& wise, see me through'.
The reply's the same, tho: all leaves turn each into a crow
and not just one but a whole tetchy gang of them, today

I'd even go for a more blanketing swarm to drop stone-fruit

down on me, and santana winds to turn or carry me like snow,
the road swept ahead like a lovely, pure sacrifice--ha!
even that'd be a little like prayer to a star-fetish, on the road

"Characteristically and for the most part..."

"In a chaotic scene inside the compound of the UN school, several bodies, among them children, were strewn across the ground in puddles of blood. Bloody footprints stained the ground where people had rushed the wounded into ambulances.

'Our trust and our fate is only in the hands of God!' one woman cried" (from recent online Associated Press article)
____________________

it's usually the child and illusory dun of desert sands that look the same,
   in substance and sands; i.e.,

the face in any year, and on any month of the year, on every day of any day,
                                                                  shrouded or bare
                                                            is how someone wants it,
  and wants it dead, usually...

See! chased in the prophet way, by design, fragmented, thrown into the Pit
                                                            as officials say it ought to be--
  the child or bloody print
                                                                                                                  Selah

Prior to deserts and cedars (recall!) was the god who used to pass for one,&
                                                            who used to be swollen with flies

  whenever a child lay swollen, too 

Childspeak

  

  

 But oh! sun's in the sky and high as a tree,

(says a child of this place!)
and that's too high to see. And so she eats-
and-goes & goes outside,

frantic with bread crumbs on her chin
 

& colours, some dozen, splashed

across the lawn that like being with her there

(like green on a bee on a leaf!)

and even drop from each eye as she's crying

And asked why she cries,

she puts a Sweet William to her ear, to hear

with its smooth-bladed ear,

and says the nest's stuffed up with fluff,

alone up there, & just fell

and 'honestly' made the fluffiest stuff that

                                          ever fell

 

Bob Dylan

Spiritual master

A Word Salad for America: post-July 4th

"It does not seem to me ignominious to be a poet, if nature has made one a poet unexpectedly" ( George Santayana)
______________________________

 

Shoulders back, with toes entrenched

  in tidal sands,

the One  rich in shoyu & desert trains--

  America , who is

ever two-lunged patriot and lovable

  oil-pot;

a lucid dead heat to Houston , after

  another storm,

or the grin of the irrepressible kid

  or

the hilarity, the gun or what they call

  the 'hereafter'—

 

 

America , anagram of all these, combined

  with a 'love of Thee'--

 to you, irrepressible One, that can't

  face absences alone,

 then, I give the palm and my dear

  dear heart:

and all at once because I've witched & read

  you to death, 

keeping only the best and then because

  you're number One;
 

or, again, because first in the process

  of cute fervid shucks

you've helped me to slice the choicest side

  and by helping

pulverized me in kindness, done almost

  to death,

and then left me to write alone, alone

  to write 

about storms, guns or whatever you

  call Angels & Saints
 

because after I stormed your poets I kept only

  the best

Thank you, Eugenie!

Eugenie Bouchard

Linda Evangelista

Bella Linda...for ever.

"Well, imagine that"

 

a lone fat snail, still in his grandad's boots, & with a twitch in both his horns
  had been going a mile a minute, pawing away
   at his neighbour's post,

 

greasing his ears with lies, two trusty ears that'd heard the lies before—    
  this snail who'd never leave without a trace,
   a sole proprietary trace

 

Ah! snail's life can be a bad one, at one moment flattening a verandah board,
  a shadow squeezed out from under his hot gut,
   & the next harassed

 

by the pernickety cat after all, after all whose shadow's greater than his gut
  But he thinks it would be great
    —the snail thinks!—

 

to lie flat on a cherry plank or slink along the grain towards a friendly ear of
  his mistress watering the azaleas
    & neighbour who digs alone

 

in his straw hat, behind the fence, content to hear more of his easy streets
  til the rooks, flustered and tail bristling,
    mistake him for a worm,

 

the hump-backed worm, and peck like mad at one then both of his silvery horns,
  snail rapt lifeless to the top of a tree,
   bitten in half

 

(a horn in one claw & another dripping from a beak,still twitching as he rose)
  hardly to be seen in a shadowless sky,
    greasy yelps unheard

 

 

A Face to a Name (5): "Alfred North Whitehead"

"Each creative act is the universe incarnating itself as one, and there is nothing above it by way of final condition." (Alfred North Whitehead)

Some reflections on Whitehead's remarkable insights into the nature of "creative advance", and its application to the poem.
_________________________________

See,

"each creative act" is  some--and let's say strictly unneutral-- matter of fact,
which is never in the same place twice,

god-oriented at its best (yes, of course) with enjoyment galore
  reserved for those with an eye for concrescent moons,
                                                                                                  
  whose function, at the base of their growing, is to feed on some matter of love,
    at least thrice-halved below,

   the urge towards fullness, i.e., moon's and ours, remaining the same, at the very least,
                   and amounting to love,
                                                                                                                              
     the poet then, i.e., taking hold and seizing it (but never in the same place twice),
         unbounded by the cradling thumbs,

     the poem more gladly appetitive than speculative, in any event
         (a nexus of ants and their endearing fora)

          a sanctity of self rather than dirty remarriage,
                 to be enjoyed more than done 

"Track and field" (or some minimalist surges)

As another Track & Field season ends I reflect back on things that always distract me from my officiating duties (like neighbouring forests, birds & escarpments)
_____________________________


In adjacent fields (to tantalize me!)  trails bronzing under an exposed breast of sky

A squalling light-tipped tree with chicks in its teeth--
                                                 no disc anywhere to match it for spin
                                             —
Mostly unseen in the forest, look, and lush still even when the winds pick up--
                                                 nests hanging like ribbons

At the fence, the bee's sadly unseeded who's both inside (here with me) and out there,
 ready to die sunless--
    the poor unobservable

For all it coveted was glory by the high jump bed, here with me--poor unobservable bee
  
My head up, reverentially, with both eyes hatched over in the insidious glare--
     at 50 meters geese bend like ripcord!

And just like light, wind & a leaf tossing over evenly (stem subject to resistance!)--
     dragonflies in the water pit

And down some escarpment (excluding the odd hatchling nosed out) is the mole's last jump,
    among millennia of gore

 

"Felicissima"

(for Mocha)

Always dear but curving close to the door,
  cats like this can peel the
    light off a star--

 

slip it slyly under an eye, & still sleep

  Calico cat dreams and moves
     outdoors, 

ears smartly smoothed flat to the head,
  mouth the usual moist pastiche
    of lips & razors

 

If she appears to be a bit too august now,
  after a splendid backyard shunt,
   and sits purring,

 

million to one she's got the dismembered
  jowls, tails to prove it,
    the grip relaxed--  

     

 freeing by degrees the bloody jay beneath
                                                  

  A sated cat's a very odd thing, indeed    

    & lies in odd places:

 on vents, in closets, over tawny pillows
  And even as she lifts herself up
     from my lap,

 

it's to peer stonily in direction of the door--
  sleepy, wild, free & every bit the

            equal of me

    who am just too big to eat

"A dream"

"The real conflict is not between Christianity and 'nature', but between Christian principles and other principles in the control of 'nature'." (C. S. Lewis)

Probably, and as night is night
  I was certain
to have dreamed (& torn out the
   antlers of)
a first view of its beastly grin—

  and crazy also
to have burst into a rage of cold embers
  with trying,
riled at first & then slowing to a trot:

 

  and crazier still
to have seen up close the dark sin
  such as it was
—for it moved from the very spot
  & spun like Naomi!—

Not the easiest thing I’d ever seen:

  stag without horns,
and tail coiled nicely down its throat--
   the sting!

 

And I followed like a coot, & ran
  down that maze,
racked with dark eyes & willow-lean—
  sin's dark lean

God percepta



"The concept of 'God' is the way in which we understand this incredible fact--that what cannot be, yet is" (Alfred North Whitehead)

__________________
     (For Father Loza)

 

In one way You feel like a tough goody (gopher-)wood
  of an Ark; the molluscs, of course
eerily jeered but the geese are the first to make shore,
  smacking the weeds.

 

Not any old receding lake will do nor a fawning mastless
  boat but geese who recoil

 from nothing and crack their jaws open—

 

                                        When You
  retreat catfish deaden dreams,certainly
or leave, belly up, drifting to shore, foam-churned,
  or long pike,
fins outstretching to You their warming source, who nose
  deep in the sensual mud
and grow old.

 

               A hardy rudder through sun-gleams You are,
  for skiffs fueling the tides
& mussels maddening a ship's tired sides will kick
  the lake bock green or grey,
and lay down shingles and timbers for another dirty
                                                                              day:
—   Maison sur la plage!

 

The rains and blossoms, too, that tenant You but dissolve
  hearts into a cruel mist; & shove
crabgrasses aside, mashing rhizomes into fine bee-glue.

  You dissolve in tears, too
as the groves loop in mire and loons turn silent as marshy
  inlets with thistly sides.

 In quite another way, You  still hang draping like Vimy moon,

  mother-weeping with obsidian
frown & star-dishevelled hair--
 

                                  You are, that is, a kind of
  drooping mother-eye
who peeps over teen sons:

 early scented, and carved in salt, You who march the clouds

  red with 'em  (don't You?)

sent always as a prowless Ark that runs aground even here,
  hulls stuffed with lads anemone-eyed,
feet to feet, scallop- brained & sadly disbudded as You who left
  & left the dead standing,

 

always cross-armed over the ones without boots, the dried, emptily
  drummed sons wallowing in salt.

Volta

 

Or even as (in another Eastertide), aeons from now, You'll
  hang in sculpted cathedrals,
canopy of crocuses and thuribles, of hosannahs slung
  craftily from leafy greens;

or sit like forsythia garlands on a sun's doddering brow

 

The sateen- or shagreen- folds of wrists & ankles,sides dripping
  red berry instead of court gold!

Herons jab at your sides-remarkable!-most likely and we'll all
  leave You behind,
and crane over the damnable world serving as gateway to hell:
  where You'll dare follow

 

discalced boys ferried in gopher boats to Iroquois ridges,
  and catfish dream the dead
and post-glacial hills will rise algae-like & flake and shelve off
  steeply into recoiling Times.