Prominent poet Robert White Creeley dead at 78
The Associated Press
Robert White Creeley, a longtime university professor in Buffalo regarded as one of the great American poets of the last half-century, died Wednesday. He was 78.
Creeley, who was associated with the Beat generation, died of pneumonia at a hospital in Odessa, Texas, where he was a writer-in-residence, a Buffalo newspaper reported Wednesday.
Creeley taught English at the State University of New York at Buffalo for 37 years before leaving in 2003 to take a post at Brown University in Rhode Island.
He wrote more than 60 books of poetry and earned many honors, including the Bollingen Prize, of which past winners include e.e. cummings and Robert Frost. Creeley was named New York state´s poet laureate in 1989.
A native of Arlington, Mass., Creeley lost his left eye in a childhood accident. He later attended Harvard University but struggled academically and dropped out. In 1955, he received his degree from Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where he was one of the founders of the Black Mountain school of poetry that promoted an anti-academic writing form.
He befriended several of the best-known Beat writers, including Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Creeley also became friends with painter Jackson Pollack but not until after the pair nearly came to blows in a New York City tavern.
"His place in American poetry is enormous," said Charles Bernstein, a poet and former University of Buffalo colleague now at the University of Pennsylvania.
He will be laid to rest in the Cambridge, Mass., cemetery where fellow poets Oliver Wendell Holmes and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow are buried.
Thursday, March 31, 2005
Hank Lazer Writes About His Friend, Robert Creeley
Robert Creeley (1926-2005)
Absolutely exemplary. Certainly these last ten years or so, a quality of sweetness, pleasure, and generosity. A life lived in and of words with absolute integrity. For me, personally, no more important poet, no one better able to show ways in words to make manifest the grace, pleasure, complexity, cadences, and play of mind at work.
I met Bob in the late 1970s, at a Black Mountain College celebration at Warren Wilson College. We spent a couple of days in conversation; I interviewed Bob; I listened to him read. Much of our time together I asked him for information on the three-line stanzas that he developed, and what relationship his writing had to similar modes in Williams. Great fun witnessing a packed auditorium at his reading, only to have Bob tell stories and follow out a range of thoughts for forty-five minutes to an hour before he read the first poem. Many left before he read. They missed a superb reading, one that was absolutely continuous with the talking that preceded it.
Yes, quite simply one of the greatest conversationalists of all time …
At the time of that Black Mountain event, I knew only parts of what Creeley had written – mainly Words and For Love. From then until now, I have grown more and more familiar with the range of his writing – the poetry, yes, but also the essays. In fact, when I got news of Bob’s declining health, I was reading a new essay of his on Whitman’s poetry of old age (in a special issue of Virginia Quarterly Review celebrating the 150th anniversary of the publication of the first Leaves of Grass).
In the mid-1990s, I gave a reading at Buffalo. Bob attended, and I had the pleasure of reading new poems (which became the book Days) which were very much based in what I had learned from his work. We spent the next morning, over pastry and coffee, sitting and talking, along with my good friend Yunte Huang. Bob’s generosity to Yunte is another story, but typical of Bob’s kindness to so many younger writers…
Here, at Alabama, I had the pleasure of hosting Bob for a reading a couple of years ago. Again, a packed house. A superb reading, though Bob had to sit for most of the reading, as he did for the conversation/discussion the following day. That particular visit enhanced by the presence of Donald Revell (in residence for the semester), another poet deeply steeped in Bob’s life and writing. And again, Bob made time for a morning of coffee, pastry, and conversation.
Last saw Bob at the Louis Zukofsky Centennial at Columbia this past fall. Some familiar anecdotes, and some unfamiliar.
I’ve been quite moved by the increasingly emotionally open work of Bob’s last couple of books – Life & Death and If I were writing this. He seemed able to circle back, to realize the importance and vitality of late 19th century verse – a family tradition of popular poetry – in his own practice. Or, to make of Keats’ work such a central thing.
We corresponded sporadically via e-mail. I would often send Bob a few poems, and his remarks were always appreciative. He blurbed a book of mine – an extended chapbook called As It Is (published by Mark Scroggins) – and was always supportive of my writing.
What Bob showed was the pleasure and work of making one’s way in a writing life. It is rather amazing to think of how many of us have learned from his example.
Yesterday, the day of Bob’s death, at the end of the day, I went with my son, Alan (16 years old), to Beulah Baptist Church – a black church on a hillside on the way home, a place that I’d often admired but where I’d never stopped. A modest graveyard with a cement angel of Memory leading the way up the dry, red clay hill. At the top of the hill, we walked around for a bit, sun streaming through the clouds. The wisteria now in bloom, we looked at the tombstones, stood beside one for “Pa Pa” Jones, and I read aloud several of Bob’s poems from Life & Death.
Earlier in the day I’d been in touch with several others to whom Bob had been so important – Charles Bernstein, Yunte Huang, Joel Kuszai, Don Revell, Claudia Keelan, Norman Fischer, Tyrone Williams. Even at the time of Bob’s death, it’s hard not to bear in mind his favorite closing in correspondence: “Onward.” Without Bob here to be the figure of Onward, we must take what we have learned from him and be, in our writing and friendship and conversation and correspondence, that no longer singular figure of Onward.
Hank Lazer
March 31, 2005
*
Here’s the e-mail I sent to Bob on Monday, March 28, 2005:
Dear Bob,A gray cold day of spring break, giving way to sunny windy afternoon. I spoke with Joel Kuszai mid-day, and learned some of your health difficulties. And then heard from Charles Bernstein, a more optimistic version. I'm simply writing to let you know I'm thinking of you. And thinking with you. Got in today's mail the latest issue of Virginia Quarterly Review -- on Whitman, and your superb piece on Whitman's poetry of old age. When I read at the Walt Whitman Center in Camden (several years ago, back when Alicia Askenase was in charge of the reading series), I visited Walt Whitman's house, and recognize it in the last photos. For me, the determining feature of my early years of writing poetry was to have an especially close relationship with my four grandparents -- all Russian Jews, all living close to us. In the way that drugs & zen of the 1960s allowed it, I spent time with them, in their decay mental & physical, with a mixture of love, curiosity, and observation (rather than the disabling frustrations that I saw in my parents' relationship to their aging parents). My poems began with telling their stories, my grandparents, and with learning (or trying to learn) something of the phenomenology of aging. And thus, yes, a reading of Williams' later work and others, including, eventually Oppen.A rambling way, Bob, to say that you are on my mind these days, as your poetry and your essays and correspondence will always be.With much love,Hank
*
And a poem, from several years ago, very much with Creeley in mind, from an ongoing work, Portions.
YOU
so the old
cabin leans “sit
up” i said
as if to
someone i said
it to you
i always do
if there were
no one else
if there were
only you i
would say “sit
up” & think
someone heard such
is my sense
the old cabin
leans what is
never passes away
- Hank Lazer
Absolutely exemplary. Certainly these last ten years or so, a quality of sweetness, pleasure, and generosity. A life lived in and of words with absolute integrity. For me, personally, no more important poet, no one better able to show ways in words to make manifest the grace, pleasure, complexity, cadences, and play of mind at work.
I met Bob in the late 1970s, at a Black Mountain College celebration at Warren Wilson College. We spent a couple of days in conversation; I interviewed Bob; I listened to him read. Much of our time together I asked him for information on the three-line stanzas that he developed, and what relationship his writing had to similar modes in Williams. Great fun witnessing a packed auditorium at his reading, only to have Bob tell stories and follow out a range of thoughts for forty-five minutes to an hour before he read the first poem. Many left before he read. They missed a superb reading, one that was absolutely continuous with the talking that preceded it.
Yes, quite simply one of the greatest conversationalists of all time …
At the time of that Black Mountain event, I knew only parts of what Creeley had written – mainly Words and For Love. From then until now, I have grown more and more familiar with the range of his writing – the poetry, yes, but also the essays. In fact, when I got news of Bob’s declining health, I was reading a new essay of his on Whitman’s poetry of old age (in a special issue of Virginia Quarterly Review celebrating the 150th anniversary of the publication of the first Leaves of Grass).
In the mid-1990s, I gave a reading at Buffalo. Bob attended, and I had the pleasure of reading new poems (which became the book Days) which were very much based in what I had learned from his work. We spent the next morning, over pastry and coffee, sitting and talking, along with my good friend Yunte Huang. Bob’s generosity to Yunte is another story, but typical of Bob’s kindness to so many younger writers…
Here, at Alabama, I had the pleasure of hosting Bob for a reading a couple of years ago. Again, a packed house. A superb reading, though Bob had to sit for most of the reading, as he did for the conversation/discussion the following day. That particular visit enhanced by the presence of Donald Revell (in residence for the semester), another poet deeply steeped in Bob’s life and writing. And again, Bob made time for a morning of coffee, pastry, and conversation.
Last saw Bob at the Louis Zukofsky Centennial at Columbia this past fall. Some familiar anecdotes, and some unfamiliar.
I’ve been quite moved by the increasingly emotionally open work of Bob’s last couple of books – Life & Death and If I were writing this. He seemed able to circle back, to realize the importance and vitality of late 19th century verse – a family tradition of popular poetry – in his own practice. Or, to make of Keats’ work such a central thing.
We corresponded sporadically via e-mail. I would often send Bob a few poems, and his remarks were always appreciative. He blurbed a book of mine – an extended chapbook called As It Is (published by Mark Scroggins) – and was always supportive of my writing.
What Bob showed was the pleasure and work of making one’s way in a writing life. It is rather amazing to think of how many of us have learned from his example.
Yesterday, the day of Bob’s death, at the end of the day, I went with my son, Alan (16 years old), to Beulah Baptist Church – a black church on a hillside on the way home, a place that I’d often admired but where I’d never stopped. A modest graveyard with a cement angel of Memory leading the way up the dry, red clay hill. At the top of the hill, we walked around for a bit, sun streaming through the clouds. The wisteria now in bloom, we looked at the tombstones, stood beside one for “Pa Pa” Jones, and I read aloud several of Bob’s poems from Life & Death.
Earlier in the day I’d been in touch with several others to whom Bob had been so important – Charles Bernstein, Yunte Huang, Joel Kuszai, Don Revell, Claudia Keelan, Norman Fischer, Tyrone Williams. Even at the time of Bob’s death, it’s hard not to bear in mind his favorite closing in correspondence: “Onward.” Without Bob here to be the figure of Onward, we must take what we have learned from him and be, in our writing and friendship and conversation and correspondence, that no longer singular figure of Onward.
Hank Lazer
March 31, 2005
*
Here’s the e-mail I sent to Bob on Monday, March 28, 2005:
Dear Bob,A gray cold day of spring break, giving way to sunny windy afternoon. I spoke with Joel Kuszai mid-day, and learned some of your health difficulties. And then heard from Charles Bernstein, a more optimistic version. I'm simply writing to let you know I'm thinking of you. And thinking with you. Got in today's mail the latest issue of Virginia Quarterly Review -- on Whitman, and your superb piece on Whitman's poetry of old age. When I read at the Walt Whitman Center in Camden (several years ago, back when Alicia Askenase was in charge of the reading series), I visited Walt Whitman's house, and recognize it in the last photos. For me, the determining feature of my early years of writing poetry was to have an especially close relationship with my four grandparents -- all Russian Jews, all living close to us. In the way that drugs & zen of the 1960s allowed it, I spent time with them, in their decay mental & physical, with a mixture of love, curiosity, and observation (rather than the disabling frustrations that I saw in my parents' relationship to their aging parents). My poems began with telling their stories, my grandparents, and with learning (or trying to learn) something of the phenomenology of aging. And thus, yes, a reading of Williams' later work and others, including, eventually Oppen.A rambling way, Bob, to say that you are on my mind these days, as your poetry and your essays and correspondence will always be.With much love,Hank
*
And a poem, from several years ago, very much with Creeley in mind, from an ongoing work, Portions.
YOU
so the old
cabin leans “sit
up” i said
as if to
someone i said
it to you
i always do
if there were
no one else
if there were
only you i
would say “sit
up” & think
someone heard such
is my sense
the old cabin
leans what is
never passes away
- Hank Lazer
Wednesday, March 30, 2005
2 poems
The Prophetic
How often does scared and sacred touch? When the rays of the sun reach the earth in the form of lightning? Concealed and mythic are the relations between scared and sacred that belief stumbles into the room unaware of its reason for being there. Faith is scared for lack of a better term and finds its way by fear. Trust is never sacred and therefore unrelenting in its frightening role as faiths widow. Perception is the first body to decompose in a mass grave of indignities. A mass grave where the onlookers are to scared to be sacred.
Mirrors in a Drop Of Alcohol
A rare form of slavery is the act of denial and love. Mixed together they can form a bond, a foundation that will crumble under its own weight as worry and lust overcome the more subtle acts of depravity and death. Locust will decimate everything it flies by, rape will scar the victim long after the victim seeks revenge and truth will be denied by every honest man in his dreams. Angels will get caught in the machinery of life here on earth and be swallowed up by the rationing of fear that operates the will of man. Love is an exodus of snakes abandoning their skin by traveling through rough terrain.
How often does scared and sacred touch? When the rays of the sun reach the earth in the form of lightning? Concealed and mythic are the relations between scared and sacred that belief stumbles into the room unaware of its reason for being there. Faith is scared for lack of a better term and finds its way by fear. Trust is never sacred and therefore unrelenting in its frightening role as faiths widow. Perception is the first body to decompose in a mass grave of indignities. A mass grave where the onlookers are to scared to be sacred.
Mirrors in a Drop Of Alcohol
A rare form of slavery is the act of denial and love. Mixed together they can form a bond, a foundation that will crumble under its own weight as worry and lust overcome the more subtle acts of depravity and death. Locust will decimate everything it flies by, rape will scar the victim long after the victim seeks revenge and truth will be denied by every honest man in his dreams. Angels will get caught in the machinery of life here on earth and be swallowed up by the rationing of fear that operates the will of man. Love is an exodus of snakes abandoning their skin by traveling through rough terrain.
Tuesday, March 22, 2005
Interview with Hank Lazer
What is the earliest tender moment you experienced, and how did it change you?
The problem, of course, is with what we remember, or, what, to serve present purposes, we claim to remember. I can’t say that I have some particular intense first memory of tenderness. No doubt, like other infants, I must have early moments of tenderness – eating, caressing, fondling, eliminating, sucking, making eye contact, etc. The earliest kinds of tenderness that I experienced that in some way might have been idiosyncratic or somehow personally defining would be associated with my grandparents. I grew up living close – often on the same block, sometimes within a few blocks – to all four of my grandparents. They were not quintessentially “sweet” grandparents – particularly my mother’s parents, who were rather depressed, critical, and moderately paranoid. But they did spend a good bit of time with me; they indulged me; and, most importantly, since English was not their first language, I acquired some of their fascination with language. I learned, somewhat, to see and hear English through them. I remember them telling jokes – often turning on a simple pun. I remember their accents – their first languages were Russian and Yiddish. I remember their delight in humor – a complex quality of language acquisition. Especially from both sides of the family, I felt a deep respect of learning, of thinking, even a love of seemingly esoteric learning (for its own sake). I remember their pride in reading. Eventually, they became the first important subject for my poetry – rather conventional brief or extended narratives telling elements of their history. These early poems can be found in the first half, Book One: Facts and Figures of Doublespace: Poems 1971-1989 (New York: Segue, 1992). Having this desire to tell their stories proved to be very important, since from the outset my poetry was not particularly located in self-expression.
Chogyam Trungpa said, “Buddhism will come to the West as a psychology.” Do you think this is the case or has the true feeling of selflessness actually occurred in our culture?
Perhaps Buddhism will come – or has come – to the West as a psychology, or as a philosophy, or as poetry, or as a meditation discipline, or as a new hybrid sort of religion (as it has entered and met with our cultural conditions). The categories themselves blur. The particularities, the singularities of experience, come and go. That true feeling of selflessness itself comes and goes. As for the feeling of selflessness becoming a key value and revered accomplishment in our culture? Obviously not. The current war (in Iraq) shows how far away we are as a culture from anything like selflessness. It is a war based on arrogance – based on a narrow sense of “our” righteousness. Think how far the war expenditures could have gone toward ameliorating hunger, or poverty, or lousy education – here, in the US, or throughout the world. We have not – as a culture – learned how to give freely. Clearly, though, Buddhism has arrived in the US – particularly in the western US (including Hawaii). Purists may debate whether or not it is a “true” or “rigorous” Buddhism. So, again, the labels may be part of the problem. Something has arrived and developed – some collision and collusion, some generative interaction of Buddhism and elements of western culture. In the area of poetry, of course, there are many examples of the importance of Buddhist thinking in our writing – Gary Snyder, Norman Fischer, Jake Berry, Armand Schwerner, and many others. The writing of poetry itself can become a means – a site, a portal – for accessing and dwelling in (temporarily) that locale of selflessness. Certainly the language and its pre-existing specificities as well as the many traditions of writing are well beyond the doings of an individual “self.” Consider too the wonderful (and at times frustrating) way that the best writing often is not a matter of will but of receptivity, of knowing when and what to listen to, of learning when and how to follow the suggestions of a few words that are given to one…
What do you feel is the anatomy of a poet? What makes some write, and others not?
I don’t think there really is such a thing as “the anatomy of a poet” other than the fairly obvious notion that a poet is someone with a particular fascination with words, someone who has experienced the peculiar depth and mystery of language (and its intimate relationship to human consciousness). As for what makes some write and others not – I think that it must remain a mystery. I tell myself – I try to learn it – that from appearances – say, looking at a line of people in a restaurant or at a sporting event – I know nothing about them. Poets may tend toward a certain seeming casualness (or understated melancholy) of dress, but then there might be a Wallace Stevens, or an Emily Dickinson, or there goes Dr. Williams. Or, there goes John Coltrane, playing amazing sax in his coat and tie. Plenty of people do dabble in poetry – and I think that’s a good thing. Why shouldn’t art-making be an accessible activity? But the more perplexing mystery is trying to determine who might persist at the activity (and why). I remember from the first poetry writing course I took in graduate school (at University of Virginia, taught by a Robert Lowell disciple), we were nearly all students in our early to mid-twenties. One student had, at age 21, published poems in Poetry magazine, and the teacher seemed to worship this student. A few years later, this person was no longer writing poetry. I think back to that class of fifteen students. Who writes today has nothing to do with the quality of writing done then (thirty some years ago). I’m not even sure that the cliché is true: if you enjoy it, you’ll continue. Or that the severe version of the cliché is true: when asked by a young poet, “should I continue to write poetry?” Auden supposedly replied, “if you can quit, do. ”It’s not as simple or clear-cut as either of these extremes suggest. Personally, I am enamored of poets who have some stubborn, self-taught, non-institutional streak. But persistence – especially for those who receive little or no recognition for many years – is a tricky thing. An enemy of persistence: self-pity, a quality that often seizes the poet (as a kind of prolonged adolescent agony for recognition or approval). For me – and I did not publish a first book of poetry until I was 42 years old– the persistence comes from the fact that when I write certain poems, I am able to enter a space (like Robert Duncan’s “Often I am permitted to return to a meadow”) that has a palpable intensification to it, an emotional and intellectual power (simultaneously) that is addictive, that is a supreme pleasure, that feels like a temporary participation in something quite splendid (even if painful). I feel it as a full and best use of my being, so I continue to seek out that place, as a writer, but also most definitely as a reader too.
Could grace ever be achieved through a sudden impulse as opposed to re-writes and revision?
I think that grace can only be achieved through a sudden impulse – being and living within the intensified present of the moment of composition. Yes, a great deal of practice – writing, revising, reading, studying, thinking – may go into the developing of the skills and resources and concentration that maybe of use in that moment of composition, but the achievement (or, perhaps more accurately, the experience) of grace will inevitably occur suddenly. Such a conclusion, though, does not mean that all of our efforts in writing are wonderful. There is, of course, an absolute mode of revision – “yes” or “no” – that allows us to throw out poems that are not especially good. And I have had plenty of experience re-writing and revising poems, sometimes with beneficial results. But for the most part, I find it very difficult to re-enter the space or field of the poem after much time has elapsed. Eventually, the highly specific integrity of that moment – including the peculiar rhythms and sounds that one heard at that moment – gets lost. Perhaps over the span of several days, I am able to tinker with some individual word choices, make some deletions, and occasionally make some substantial changes. But for the most part, the poem itself is an embodiment of a highly specific (usually brief) duration of consciousness – its concentration, its intensification, its specific music (i.e., the music of that specific thinking).I was relieved a couple of months ago to hear Robert Creeley, in an informal discussion, articulating a remarkably similar view. Such a viewpoint aligns poetic composition with jazz improvisation – an informed composition in the present. It does not necessarily mean that “first thought best thought” always turns out to be the case, but it does mean that the present – the specific duration of composition – will be honored to the utmost, the poem, among other things, being a record of attentive dwelling in that specific duration of time.
Should there be a specific role that spirituality should play in art?
Not really. I’d hate to be prescriptive – in regard to spirituality, or in regard to any important element in the making of poetry or art. I suppose that what I have tried to do with my own exploration of poetry (and spirituality) is to be phenomenal. That is, to be truthful to the inconstant, shifting experience of spirituality – as a kind of force, or vector, or pressure, or presence (and disappearance), or immanence, or contiguous relationship. To be truthful to the phenomena of that relationship. It seems to me that if one works at an adequately profound level of awareness of what’s at stake in art-making, spirituality will already be adequately woven into the fabric of the making. Over time, over many years of engaging in a mode of art-making, I think it’s important to embody or represent the elusive and inconstant nature of the spiritual. As I’ve experienced it, it simply isn’t something that’s available on demand. That’s part of why I’m suspicious of any kind of formulaic or axiomatic pronouncement about how spirituality “should” be present in art. Also, the nature and intensity of its location will be ever-changing. And like any other important or intense experience, the rhetoric or vocabulary of the spiritual may harden and become a merely repeated or second-hand, tired, received set of markers (that may actually stand in the way of a renewing experience).
Where do you suppose the self-destructiveness trait comes from that occurs in so many writers?
From frustration, as a consequence of marginalization, and from succumbing toa dangerous set of culturally romanticized stereotypes. First, the frustration and maginalization routes. A writer, particularly a poet, places himself in an odd position in relation to dominant cultural value. A poet decides to value certain kinds of somewhat aimless, impractical, non-money-making activities, and he decides to make room and time in his life for these activities. Furthermore, he’s apt to be pursuing a rather elusive mode of language – not necessarily the direct, communicative, “useful,” commercially manipulative kind of language skill that society readily appreciates and rewards (in advertising, in journalism, and in other modes of persuasive and/or manipulative writing). So, what he’s doing with his time is aberrant – hard to explain. And yet, if he is really engaged in a serious and profound relationship to poetry, he does have certain sporadic validating experiences – a sense of connection to a longstanding human enterprise of considerable wisdom, joy, and pleasure. The self-destructiveness may arise as a gesture of anger and frustration, arising from a sense that one’s primary life activity is not appreciated or understood or respected. The self-destructiveness becomes an act oddly complicit with that ignoring and marginalizing by the society at large, while it is also a somewhat desperate call for attention and significance. Society at large – at least here in the US – establishes an interestingly ambivalent role toward the poet/artist. Most of the time, it’s business as usual: scorn, neglect, derision, lack of value. But then there is the flip-side: a compensatory romantic larger-than-life version (preferably made for the movies) of The Artist. This Artist is one who is – big surprise – too sensitive and volatile for this world. It is, in my opinion, a very dangerous and seductive model, particularly dangerous for the artist/poet who buys into it. This intuitive, somewhat childish artist figure – who can’t help himself, who has to pursue the truth of his art at all costs (including family, personal health, etc.) – is exactly what the society at large needs to comfort itself. That is, some reassurance that being an artist is a big mistake, though a grand enough mistake – entertaining enough – that we can witness the story every couple of years in a big Hollywood production. And then we can return the rest of our days to ignoring such individuals in our midst. For the artist/poet, the self-destructiveness can be conformation to this cultural stereotype of the “crazy” artist. Since it’s already a bit crazy (in practical, capitalist America) to use your intelligence to pursue something like poetry, why not go all the way and become that “odd” figure as in the cinematic cliché? The result is an infantilizing identity: the artist/poet as intuitive creature severed from a penetrating cultural and practical intelligence. Personally, I find it hard enough to work with the nature and complexity of making poetry. No need to pursue additional clichéd personal drama (and self-destructiveness) just to make the story conform to a movie script. The real drama is one that can barely be seen: an internal drama, a drama of consciousness, the drama of wrestling with the issues, questions, and realizations of making the poem. You don’t see those moments dramatized in the movies. You see the scenes of drunken abuse; you don’t see the scenes of someone sitting in a chair, staring out the window, writing down three words.
If it is true that human beings are the only beings that can hate, then why are we the only species that feels a need for spirituality?
Perhaps to atone for our experience of hate? Perhaps, though, spirituality can be thought of as something intrinsic to us – not something “added” that we must seek. In the sense that Hebrew has no word for “religion” – since the experience of “religion” or of being “religious” is so integral to the (Biblical / Jewish) experience of being alive, that a separate word or concept does not occur. We begin by having some sort of consciousness. That consciousness is already a powerful, palpable, but utterly invisible element of our existence. Why wouldn’t we want to extend the realm of the invisible into something called “spirituality”? Why not develop concepts and modes of interaction with the spiritual?
What to you is required reading?
Increasingly, I find myself thinking about this – i.e., what is essential or crucial reading – in a couple of ways: when you go on a trip, and you can only take a few books with you, which ones do you pack? Or, honestly, which books/authors do you really return to again and again over the years? For me, the list includes: George Oppen, Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan. I also think of listening to music as a kind of reading. Hence: John Coltrane, and Thelonious Monk. Of course, there are many others – as the need and as circumstances dictate. And over the years, there have been many other writers I’ve learned from and who have been of great value to me. And I would give a different list if I were asked to recommend a basic reading list for someone else – and the list would depend on the person’s needs and circumstances. But for the time I have, and for my current needs, the list above is fine.
The problem, of course, is with what we remember, or, what, to serve present purposes, we claim to remember. I can’t say that I have some particular intense first memory of tenderness. No doubt, like other infants, I must have early moments of tenderness – eating, caressing, fondling, eliminating, sucking, making eye contact, etc. The earliest kinds of tenderness that I experienced that in some way might have been idiosyncratic or somehow personally defining would be associated with my grandparents. I grew up living close – often on the same block, sometimes within a few blocks – to all four of my grandparents. They were not quintessentially “sweet” grandparents – particularly my mother’s parents, who were rather depressed, critical, and moderately paranoid. But they did spend a good bit of time with me; they indulged me; and, most importantly, since English was not their first language, I acquired some of their fascination with language. I learned, somewhat, to see and hear English through them. I remember them telling jokes – often turning on a simple pun. I remember their accents – their first languages were Russian and Yiddish. I remember their delight in humor – a complex quality of language acquisition. Especially from both sides of the family, I felt a deep respect of learning, of thinking, even a love of seemingly esoteric learning (for its own sake). I remember their pride in reading. Eventually, they became the first important subject for my poetry – rather conventional brief or extended narratives telling elements of their history. These early poems can be found in the first half, Book One: Facts and Figures of Doublespace: Poems 1971-1989 (New York: Segue, 1992). Having this desire to tell their stories proved to be very important, since from the outset my poetry was not particularly located in self-expression.
Chogyam Trungpa said, “Buddhism will come to the West as a psychology.” Do you think this is the case or has the true feeling of selflessness actually occurred in our culture?
Perhaps Buddhism will come – or has come – to the West as a psychology, or as a philosophy, or as poetry, or as a meditation discipline, or as a new hybrid sort of religion (as it has entered and met with our cultural conditions). The categories themselves blur. The particularities, the singularities of experience, come and go. That true feeling of selflessness itself comes and goes. As for the feeling of selflessness becoming a key value and revered accomplishment in our culture? Obviously not. The current war (in Iraq) shows how far away we are as a culture from anything like selflessness. It is a war based on arrogance – based on a narrow sense of “our” righteousness. Think how far the war expenditures could have gone toward ameliorating hunger, or poverty, or lousy education – here, in the US, or throughout the world. We have not – as a culture – learned how to give freely. Clearly, though, Buddhism has arrived in the US – particularly in the western US (including Hawaii). Purists may debate whether or not it is a “true” or “rigorous” Buddhism. So, again, the labels may be part of the problem. Something has arrived and developed – some collision and collusion, some generative interaction of Buddhism and elements of western culture. In the area of poetry, of course, there are many examples of the importance of Buddhist thinking in our writing – Gary Snyder, Norman Fischer, Jake Berry, Armand Schwerner, and many others. The writing of poetry itself can become a means – a site, a portal – for accessing and dwelling in (temporarily) that locale of selflessness. Certainly the language and its pre-existing specificities as well as the many traditions of writing are well beyond the doings of an individual “self.” Consider too the wonderful (and at times frustrating) way that the best writing often is not a matter of will but of receptivity, of knowing when and what to listen to, of learning when and how to follow the suggestions of a few words that are given to one…
What do you feel is the anatomy of a poet? What makes some write, and others not?
I don’t think there really is such a thing as “the anatomy of a poet” other than the fairly obvious notion that a poet is someone with a particular fascination with words, someone who has experienced the peculiar depth and mystery of language (and its intimate relationship to human consciousness). As for what makes some write and others not – I think that it must remain a mystery. I tell myself – I try to learn it – that from appearances – say, looking at a line of people in a restaurant or at a sporting event – I know nothing about them. Poets may tend toward a certain seeming casualness (or understated melancholy) of dress, but then there might be a Wallace Stevens, or an Emily Dickinson, or there goes Dr. Williams. Or, there goes John Coltrane, playing amazing sax in his coat and tie. Plenty of people do dabble in poetry – and I think that’s a good thing. Why shouldn’t art-making be an accessible activity? But the more perplexing mystery is trying to determine who might persist at the activity (and why). I remember from the first poetry writing course I took in graduate school (at University of Virginia, taught by a Robert Lowell disciple), we were nearly all students in our early to mid-twenties. One student had, at age 21, published poems in Poetry magazine, and the teacher seemed to worship this student. A few years later, this person was no longer writing poetry. I think back to that class of fifteen students. Who writes today has nothing to do with the quality of writing done then (thirty some years ago). I’m not even sure that the cliché is true: if you enjoy it, you’ll continue. Or that the severe version of the cliché is true: when asked by a young poet, “should I continue to write poetry?” Auden supposedly replied, “if you can quit, do. ”It’s not as simple or clear-cut as either of these extremes suggest. Personally, I am enamored of poets who have some stubborn, self-taught, non-institutional streak. But persistence – especially for those who receive little or no recognition for many years – is a tricky thing. An enemy of persistence: self-pity, a quality that often seizes the poet (as a kind of prolonged adolescent agony for recognition or approval). For me – and I did not publish a first book of poetry until I was 42 years old– the persistence comes from the fact that when I write certain poems, I am able to enter a space (like Robert Duncan’s “Often I am permitted to return to a meadow”) that has a palpable intensification to it, an emotional and intellectual power (simultaneously) that is addictive, that is a supreme pleasure, that feels like a temporary participation in something quite splendid (even if painful). I feel it as a full and best use of my being, so I continue to seek out that place, as a writer, but also most definitely as a reader too.
Could grace ever be achieved through a sudden impulse as opposed to re-writes and revision?
I think that grace can only be achieved through a sudden impulse – being and living within the intensified present of the moment of composition. Yes, a great deal of practice – writing, revising, reading, studying, thinking – may go into the developing of the skills and resources and concentration that maybe of use in that moment of composition, but the achievement (or, perhaps more accurately, the experience) of grace will inevitably occur suddenly. Such a conclusion, though, does not mean that all of our efforts in writing are wonderful. There is, of course, an absolute mode of revision – “yes” or “no” – that allows us to throw out poems that are not especially good. And I have had plenty of experience re-writing and revising poems, sometimes with beneficial results. But for the most part, I find it very difficult to re-enter the space or field of the poem after much time has elapsed. Eventually, the highly specific integrity of that moment – including the peculiar rhythms and sounds that one heard at that moment – gets lost. Perhaps over the span of several days, I am able to tinker with some individual word choices, make some deletions, and occasionally make some substantial changes. But for the most part, the poem itself is an embodiment of a highly specific (usually brief) duration of consciousness – its concentration, its intensification, its specific music (i.e., the music of that specific thinking).I was relieved a couple of months ago to hear Robert Creeley, in an informal discussion, articulating a remarkably similar view. Such a viewpoint aligns poetic composition with jazz improvisation – an informed composition in the present. It does not necessarily mean that “first thought best thought” always turns out to be the case, but it does mean that the present – the specific duration of composition – will be honored to the utmost, the poem, among other things, being a record of attentive dwelling in that specific duration of time.
Should there be a specific role that spirituality should play in art?
Not really. I’d hate to be prescriptive – in regard to spirituality, or in regard to any important element in the making of poetry or art. I suppose that what I have tried to do with my own exploration of poetry (and spirituality) is to be phenomenal. That is, to be truthful to the inconstant, shifting experience of spirituality – as a kind of force, or vector, or pressure, or presence (and disappearance), or immanence, or contiguous relationship. To be truthful to the phenomena of that relationship. It seems to me that if one works at an adequately profound level of awareness of what’s at stake in art-making, spirituality will already be adequately woven into the fabric of the making. Over time, over many years of engaging in a mode of art-making, I think it’s important to embody or represent the elusive and inconstant nature of the spiritual. As I’ve experienced it, it simply isn’t something that’s available on demand. That’s part of why I’m suspicious of any kind of formulaic or axiomatic pronouncement about how spirituality “should” be present in art. Also, the nature and intensity of its location will be ever-changing. And like any other important or intense experience, the rhetoric or vocabulary of the spiritual may harden and become a merely repeated or second-hand, tired, received set of markers (that may actually stand in the way of a renewing experience).
Where do you suppose the self-destructiveness trait comes from that occurs in so many writers?
From frustration, as a consequence of marginalization, and from succumbing toa dangerous set of culturally romanticized stereotypes. First, the frustration and maginalization routes. A writer, particularly a poet, places himself in an odd position in relation to dominant cultural value. A poet decides to value certain kinds of somewhat aimless, impractical, non-money-making activities, and he decides to make room and time in his life for these activities. Furthermore, he’s apt to be pursuing a rather elusive mode of language – not necessarily the direct, communicative, “useful,” commercially manipulative kind of language skill that society readily appreciates and rewards (in advertising, in journalism, and in other modes of persuasive and/or manipulative writing). So, what he’s doing with his time is aberrant – hard to explain. And yet, if he is really engaged in a serious and profound relationship to poetry, he does have certain sporadic validating experiences – a sense of connection to a longstanding human enterprise of considerable wisdom, joy, and pleasure. The self-destructiveness may arise as a gesture of anger and frustration, arising from a sense that one’s primary life activity is not appreciated or understood or respected. The self-destructiveness becomes an act oddly complicit with that ignoring and marginalizing by the society at large, while it is also a somewhat desperate call for attention and significance. Society at large – at least here in the US – establishes an interestingly ambivalent role toward the poet/artist. Most of the time, it’s business as usual: scorn, neglect, derision, lack of value. But then there is the flip-side: a compensatory romantic larger-than-life version (preferably made for the movies) of The Artist. This Artist is one who is – big surprise – too sensitive and volatile for this world. It is, in my opinion, a very dangerous and seductive model, particularly dangerous for the artist/poet who buys into it. This intuitive, somewhat childish artist figure – who can’t help himself, who has to pursue the truth of his art at all costs (including family, personal health, etc.) – is exactly what the society at large needs to comfort itself. That is, some reassurance that being an artist is a big mistake, though a grand enough mistake – entertaining enough – that we can witness the story every couple of years in a big Hollywood production. And then we can return the rest of our days to ignoring such individuals in our midst. For the artist/poet, the self-destructiveness can be conformation to this cultural stereotype of the “crazy” artist. Since it’s already a bit crazy (in practical, capitalist America) to use your intelligence to pursue something like poetry, why not go all the way and become that “odd” figure as in the cinematic cliché? The result is an infantilizing identity: the artist/poet as intuitive creature severed from a penetrating cultural and practical intelligence. Personally, I find it hard enough to work with the nature and complexity of making poetry. No need to pursue additional clichéd personal drama (and self-destructiveness) just to make the story conform to a movie script. The real drama is one that can barely be seen: an internal drama, a drama of consciousness, the drama of wrestling with the issues, questions, and realizations of making the poem. You don’t see those moments dramatized in the movies. You see the scenes of drunken abuse; you don’t see the scenes of someone sitting in a chair, staring out the window, writing down three words.
If it is true that human beings are the only beings that can hate, then why are we the only species that feels a need for spirituality?
Perhaps to atone for our experience of hate? Perhaps, though, spirituality can be thought of as something intrinsic to us – not something “added” that we must seek. In the sense that Hebrew has no word for “religion” – since the experience of “religion” or of being “religious” is so integral to the (Biblical / Jewish) experience of being alive, that a separate word or concept does not occur. We begin by having some sort of consciousness. That consciousness is already a powerful, palpable, but utterly invisible element of our existence. Why wouldn’t we want to extend the realm of the invisible into something called “spirituality”? Why not develop concepts and modes of interaction with the spiritual?
What to you is required reading?
Increasingly, I find myself thinking about this – i.e., what is essential or crucial reading – in a couple of ways: when you go on a trip, and you can only take a few books with you, which ones do you pack? Or, honestly, which books/authors do you really return to again and again over the years? For me, the list includes: George Oppen, Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan. I also think of listening to music as a kind of reading. Hence: John Coltrane, and Thelonious Monk. Of course, there are many others – as the need and as circumstances dictate. And over the years, there have been many other writers I’ve learned from and who have been of great value to me. And I would give a different list if I were asked to recommend a basic reading list for someone else – and the list would depend on the person’s needs and circumstances. But for the time I have, and for my current needs, the list above is fine.
Sunday, March 20, 2005
Interview With Jake Berry
How is your health?
Physically, quite good, thank you. I’ve become a believer in exercise. Mentally, it varies; depression is a misnomer for a disease that seems to run in various kinds of cycles. But exercise is helpful there as well.
You told me once that if you thought someone would stage it you would write a play? If this could come about what would your play be about?
Recently Wayne Sides, hearing I was interested in writing a play, said if I’d write it he’d make sure it was performed. So I’ll begin work on that in earnest soon. I think the play will begin as an adaptation of scenes and characters from a piece Jon, my brother, has been writing. I’d like to do something character and dialog driven.
You are a self-proclaimed hermit, how has his affected your creativity?
For some reason unknown to me I have always been inclined toward a solitary existence. I regret this occasionally because it frustrates my friends. Still, one has to do what works best. Of course this means that I don’t do that much collaborating. I’d never make it as a film maker, I have, however, written collaborative poems through the main and e-mail and the Bare Knuckles recordings were very much a collaboration once we got into the studio, but this was in terms of production, the songs were already written. I also think that working alone might make one more inclined to go inward, and in my case the work became more visionary than it otherwise might have been.
At the Charles Olson festival in 1995 Vincent Ferrini stated that Olson lived his body as a poem. Do you think you have done this?
Well, one would like to reach a point where there is no longer any distinction between the poem and the poet. That would be the ultimate state of grace regardless of the emotional and mental complications. I’m not sure if I would say I live my body, perhaps my body lives me or that I am my body in this worlds, or that the word body could be a word that could be used to describe one’s traceable existence in whatever world and whatever form. I’m not surprised that Vincent would say that about Olson, it makes sense given the Olson wrote. It takes many years to get to the point where one vanishes into the work. I seem to be getting closer as I get older.
Speaking of Olson he has played quite a role in your writing, he appeared to you in a dream once. How have your dreams been lately?
Actually it wasn’t a dream. I was not asleep. If you’d been in the room I could have heard anything you’d said though I might not have been able to respond. It’s more one of those hypnogogic states. So Olson was actually there, that is to say, it was not an interior experience. Lately my dreams have been quite vivid and not always very pleasant. Nothing as profound as the Olson vision has happened recently, but poetry, at least in my case, so often proceeds from a condition that can not be said to be normal consciousness, whatever that might be.
When speaking of projective verse Charles Olson said, “ One perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception”, do you think this can be said for any type of poetry?
Probably not, but that is the ideal condition. One room opens into another and so on. Poetry is so many things to so many different kinds of poets that it would be impossible to make any kind of blanket statement. I think it is definitely true of projective verse. That one essay covers so much ground it’s staggering. The first time I read it I was astonished that Olson had mapped it so well. I rarely mark in a book. I tend to copy quotes into a notebook, but I’ve got about half that essay highlighted.
Since we’re talking about him, Olson’s essay on Projective Verse, his Maximus and several of his shorter poems. “In Cold Hell, In Thicket” is a tremendous poem. One needs to go as far back as possible. I’ve read several translations of Gilgamesh, that’s a vital work, Homer is fundamental. Also the bible, especially the Old Testament. Of the Roman period Ovid is best, at least I enjoy him more than Virgil. For shorter poems Sappho is always great, and I like Catallus. The great spiritual books are important. The Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Mesopotamian songs to Inanna, the I Ching, the great Hindu, Buddhist and Taoist works.
Among those I love the Bhagavad-Gita, the Tibetan Books of the Dead and Great Liberation, and noting can take you to the threshold of oblivion better and the Diamond Sutra, Lao-Tzu is essential. There are tons of Chinese and Japanese poets I’ve been reading recently. Shinkichi Takahashi is extraordinary. I still read the Zohar quite often. Among more recent works I like Blake and Baudelaire, Dikinson, Rimbaud, Artaud, Apolinaire. Mallarme is delicious. Stein is in a class by herself. Samuel Beckett is always good. Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Yeats. Of course there are the Beats, I’m especially fond of Kerouac and McClure. There are also people I’d call essential that I am also very fortunate to know. Among them is Jack Foley, Ivan Arguelles, Hank Lazer, yourself, Dan Raphael, and I mentioned the book my brother is working on the takes on continental theory and goes it one better, I also like the novels of Paul Auster and the fiction as well as theory of Blanchot, the philosophy of Levinas, Heraclitus, Heidegger. The ancient writings of the alchemists. Well, it goes on forever obviously.
Do you think a school could be constructed today like Black Mountain College?
Absolutely. Though perhaps with better management. There needs to be schools like that all over the world. Jefferson had the notion that one should attend school until one felt one was educated then leave. Also a kind of master-student apprenticeship form of education, especially in the arts would be much better than most of the art schools we now have.
Sigmund Freud stated that, “A dream is the fulfillment of a wish.” Do you think in your case this is true?
I have no idea. Freud seems to vacillate between brilliance and blindness. Of course a dream and a wish can be the same thing. What I’ve read of James Hillman seems to be more on the right track concerning dreams. Hmm, that statement is a conundrum to me.
You wrote in a poem entitled, Essay Empire Poets, “What a pitiful destiny, singing with your tongue cut out.” That’s an interesting line coming from someone who is both a singer and poet.
Yes, well, one comes up against the limitations of language very quickly, especially in poetry. And for that reason poetry is a very pitiful calling. Yet, one must make words do what they are not inclined to do by their own nature, or rather, one must restore words to their original nature which is an embodiment of phenomena or noumena by way of the tongue. And the tongue lives in the written character and makes the characters vital and sacred.
Harry Polkinhorn described you as the “preeminent experimentalist of your generation.” Hank Lazer called you “William Blake in Alabama.” Also, Bob Grumman put is best I think when he called you a “paleo-neurologist.” Are there words to describe your writing or is there any need at all?
These words are quiet accurate to what each of these writers were saying at the time. They make their point. And that is the use of terms like these. The problem arises when people take them too literally, as absolutes, or that these are goals that I have tried to achieve. That is the problem with categories, and Bob Grumman and I have argued about this through the years, that categories are too rigid and too legalistic to have anything other than transitory use, especially when applied to the arts.
The more experimental music you have recorded has its’ roots in many places. Have you been fascinated by some of the places it has taken you? Did you gain the same satisfaction when you performed this music as you did writing it?
Answering the first question: yes, I am fascinated by where it leads, that’s the beauty of it, the reason for it. Which leads to the second question: the music is written on the spot. We usually set a key or a scale but everything else is completely improvised. It’s ironic, performing a fully written piece isn’t very exciting. It’s almost a chore because you have to conform to the song enough to at least resemble the original. Yet, to perform while you compose, though it would seem to add pressure to the situation, I find it completely liberating. At any rate, it’s the creative moment that drives me. There’s not much joy in repeating yourself.
You mentioned that by working in a solitary work ethic you are inclined to work inward, in my own writing I have tried to limit myself to the human body, yet there is no limit there. There isn’t enough room there to move around and never explore it all. Have you ever considered publishing your journal or more personal writings?
You’re right about the human body. And you’re work is the best example I know of that kind of infinity. John M. Bennett does it too, but in a completely different way, so that’s apples and oranges. And the fact that the human body allows such breadth and depth is testimony to it’s richness. But no, I don’t think I’d care to publish my journals because they wouldn’t add anything significant. The work I publish is more personal than my journals and notebooks, and I often take sections from my notebooks and modify it somewhat for publication. If by personal you mean things one might write in a diary, I’ve never been able to do that, though I’ve tried many times. I think there are places in my songs that I touch on those emotions enough to allow them voice. Otherwise my personal life is of little consequence. After all, I am trying to live the poetry. There’s art and there’s love, everything else is just waiting.
One song of yours I especially wanted to ask about is Maggie’s Soldier/Tom Clark. This is in my opinion the most ambitious song you have written. Where did you draw the influence?
Tom Clark was a notorious outlaw in North Alabama and South Central Tennessee during the late Civil War early reconstruction period. When we began to write material for the first Bare Knuckles CD I thought it made sense to have a song about him. I liked around for a while, thinking that surely there was an old folk song about him, but nothing. So, I had to write one. I drew the song from a book called Bugger Saga by Wade Pruitt. The things that happen in the song actually happened. Then I wrote another song, “Maggie’s Soldier”, from the point of view of a young soldier on the battlefield discovering the girl he loved had been killed by outlaws and places it before “Tom Clark” to lend perspective to it.
Do the creative forces that drive you to create ever try and disable you to prevent you from writing something you should or shouldn’t? Is there a filter?
Oh, yes I argue with the muse all the time. Sometimes I don’t want to write something she is telling me, but she insists. Later, I usually discover what she was doing. There is a filter. I mean that the work is a kind of collaboration. Of course the line between muse and poet vanishes as one goes along. I heard Jean Cocteau say something recently in a documentary, that the muse or the god devours the poet. I thin he’s right about that.
Gerard Depardieu was asked why he became an actor and he replied that he had always had a need to communicate. Why did you become a writer, or did the writing become you?
When I first wrote poems, I think I was fourteen, I felt for the first time that I’d found something that I could do. It felt completely natural to me. So the choice was made. Poetry found me and I submitted gladly. I don’t think communication really entered into it because I had no concept at the time about publishing, or that anyone would see it. It was only much later, when I was twenty-one that someone asked me if I’d published and it seemed like something I should do. One wants to give the work away, to make the work available to anyone who might find something in it. One wants to contribute something to the world, something beautiful. Perhaps it is a very strange beauty, but given that mediocrity seems to be the rule, perhaps all genuine beauty is strange.
Physically, quite good, thank you. I’ve become a believer in exercise. Mentally, it varies; depression is a misnomer for a disease that seems to run in various kinds of cycles. But exercise is helpful there as well.
You told me once that if you thought someone would stage it you would write a play? If this could come about what would your play be about?
Recently Wayne Sides, hearing I was interested in writing a play, said if I’d write it he’d make sure it was performed. So I’ll begin work on that in earnest soon. I think the play will begin as an adaptation of scenes and characters from a piece Jon, my brother, has been writing. I’d like to do something character and dialog driven.
You are a self-proclaimed hermit, how has his affected your creativity?
For some reason unknown to me I have always been inclined toward a solitary existence. I regret this occasionally because it frustrates my friends. Still, one has to do what works best. Of course this means that I don’t do that much collaborating. I’d never make it as a film maker, I have, however, written collaborative poems through the main and e-mail and the Bare Knuckles recordings were very much a collaboration once we got into the studio, but this was in terms of production, the songs were already written. I also think that working alone might make one more inclined to go inward, and in my case the work became more visionary than it otherwise might have been.
At the Charles Olson festival in 1995 Vincent Ferrini stated that Olson lived his body as a poem. Do you think you have done this?
Well, one would like to reach a point where there is no longer any distinction between the poem and the poet. That would be the ultimate state of grace regardless of the emotional and mental complications. I’m not sure if I would say I live my body, perhaps my body lives me or that I am my body in this worlds, or that the word body could be a word that could be used to describe one’s traceable existence in whatever world and whatever form. I’m not surprised that Vincent would say that about Olson, it makes sense given the Olson wrote. It takes many years to get to the point where one vanishes into the work. I seem to be getting closer as I get older.
Speaking of Olson he has played quite a role in your writing, he appeared to you in a dream once. How have your dreams been lately?
Actually it wasn’t a dream. I was not asleep. If you’d been in the room I could have heard anything you’d said though I might not have been able to respond. It’s more one of those hypnogogic states. So Olson was actually there, that is to say, it was not an interior experience. Lately my dreams have been quite vivid and not always very pleasant. Nothing as profound as the Olson vision has happened recently, but poetry, at least in my case, so often proceeds from a condition that can not be said to be normal consciousness, whatever that might be.
When speaking of projective verse Charles Olson said, “ One perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception”, do you think this can be said for any type of poetry?
Probably not, but that is the ideal condition. One room opens into another and so on. Poetry is so many things to so many different kinds of poets that it would be impossible to make any kind of blanket statement. I think it is definitely true of projective verse. That one essay covers so much ground it’s staggering. The first time I read it I was astonished that Olson had mapped it so well. I rarely mark in a book. I tend to copy quotes into a notebook, but I’ve got about half that essay highlighted.
Since we’re talking about him, Olson’s essay on Projective Verse, his Maximus and several of his shorter poems. “In Cold Hell, In Thicket” is a tremendous poem. One needs to go as far back as possible. I’ve read several translations of Gilgamesh, that’s a vital work, Homer is fundamental. Also the bible, especially the Old Testament. Of the Roman period Ovid is best, at least I enjoy him more than Virgil. For shorter poems Sappho is always great, and I like Catallus. The great spiritual books are important. The Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Mesopotamian songs to Inanna, the I Ching, the great Hindu, Buddhist and Taoist works.
Among those I love the Bhagavad-Gita, the Tibetan Books of the Dead and Great Liberation, and noting can take you to the threshold of oblivion better and the Diamond Sutra, Lao-Tzu is essential. There are tons of Chinese and Japanese poets I’ve been reading recently. Shinkichi Takahashi is extraordinary. I still read the Zohar quite often. Among more recent works I like Blake and Baudelaire, Dikinson, Rimbaud, Artaud, Apolinaire. Mallarme is delicious. Stein is in a class by herself. Samuel Beckett is always good. Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Yeats. Of course there are the Beats, I’m especially fond of Kerouac and McClure. There are also people I’d call essential that I am also very fortunate to know. Among them is Jack Foley, Ivan Arguelles, Hank Lazer, yourself, Dan Raphael, and I mentioned the book my brother is working on the takes on continental theory and goes it one better, I also like the novels of Paul Auster and the fiction as well as theory of Blanchot, the philosophy of Levinas, Heraclitus, Heidegger. The ancient writings of the alchemists. Well, it goes on forever obviously.
Do you think a school could be constructed today like Black Mountain College?
Absolutely. Though perhaps with better management. There needs to be schools like that all over the world. Jefferson had the notion that one should attend school until one felt one was educated then leave. Also a kind of master-student apprenticeship form of education, especially in the arts would be much better than most of the art schools we now have.
Sigmund Freud stated that, “A dream is the fulfillment of a wish.” Do you think in your case this is true?
I have no idea. Freud seems to vacillate between brilliance and blindness. Of course a dream and a wish can be the same thing. What I’ve read of James Hillman seems to be more on the right track concerning dreams. Hmm, that statement is a conundrum to me.
You wrote in a poem entitled, Essay Empire Poets, “What a pitiful destiny, singing with your tongue cut out.” That’s an interesting line coming from someone who is both a singer and poet.
Yes, well, one comes up against the limitations of language very quickly, especially in poetry. And for that reason poetry is a very pitiful calling. Yet, one must make words do what they are not inclined to do by their own nature, or rather, one must restore words to their original nature which is an embodiment of phenomena or noumena by way of the tongue. And the tongue lives in the written character and makes the characters vital and sacred.
Harry Polkinhorn described you as the “preeminent experimentalist of your generation.” Hank Lazer called you “William Blake in Alabama.” Also, Bob Grumman put is best I think when he called you a “paleo-neurologist.” Are there words to describe your writing or is there any need at all?
These words are quiet accurate to what each of these writers were saying at the time. They make their point. And that is the use of terms like these. The problem arises when people take them too literally, as absolutes, or that these are goals that I have tried to achieve. That is the problem with categories, and Bob Grumman and I have argued about this through the years, that categories are too rigid and too legalistic to have anything other than transitory use, especially when applied to the arts.
The more experimental music you have recorded has its’ roots in many places. Have you been fascinated by some of the places it has taken you? Did you gain the same satisfaction when you performed this music as you did writing it?
Answering the first question: yes, I am fascinated by where it leads, that’s the beauty of it, the reason for it. Which leads to the second question: the music is written on the spot. We usually set a key or a scale but everything else is completely improvised. It’s ironic, performing a fully written piece isn’t very exciting. It’s almost a chore because you have to conform to the song enough to at least resemble the original. Yet, to perform while you compose, though it would seem to add pressure to the situation, I find it completely liberating. At any rate, it’s the creative moment that drives me. There’s not much joy in repeating yourself.
You mentioned that by working in a solitary work ethic you are inclined to work inward, in my own writing I have tried to limit myself to the human body, yet there is no limit there. There isn’t enough room there to move around and never explore it all. Have you ever considered publishing your journal or more personal writings?
You’re right about the human body. And you’re work is the best example I know of that kind of infinity. John M. Bennett does it too, but in a completely different way, so that’s apples and oranges. And the fact that the human body allows such breadth and depth is testimony to it’s richness. But no, I don’t think I’d care to publish my journals because they wouldn’t add anything significant. The work I publish is more personal than my journals and notebooks, and I often take sections from my notebooks and modify it somewhat for publication. If by personal you mean things one might write in a diary, I’ve never been able to do that, though I’ve tried many times. I think there are places in my songs that I touch on those emotions enough to allow them voice. Otherwise my personal life is of little consequence. After all, I am trying to live the poetry. There’s art and there’s love, everything else is just waiting.
One song of yours I especially wanted to ask about is Maggie’s Soldier/Tom Clark. This is in my opinion the most ambitious song you have written. Where did you draw the influence?
Tom Clark was a notorious outlaw in North Alabama and South Central Tennessee during the late Civil War early reconstruction period. When we began to write material for the first Bare Knuckles CD I thought it made sense to have a song about him. I liked around for a while, thinking that surely there was an old folk song about him, but nothing. So, I had to write one. I drew the song from a book called Bugger Saga by Wade Pruitt. The things that happen in the song actually happened. Then I wrote another song, “Maggie’s Soldier”, from the point of view of a young soldier on the battlefield discovering the girl he loved had been killed by outlaws and places it before “Tom Clark” to lend perspective to it.
Do the creative forces that drive you to create ever try and disable you to prevent you from writing something you should or shouldn’t? Is there a filter?
Oh, yes I argue with the muse all the time. Sometimes I don’t want to write something she is telling me, but she insists. Later, I usually discover what she was doing. There is a filter. I mean that the work is a kind of collaboration. Of course the line between muse and poet vanishes as one goes along. I heard Jean Cocteau say something recently in a documentary, that the muse or the god devours the poet. I thin he’s right about that.
Gerard Depardieu was asked why he became an actor and he replied that he had always had a need to communicate. Why did you become a writer, or did the writing become you?
When I first wrote poems, I think I was fourteen, I felt for the first time that I’d found something that I could do. It felt completely natural to me. So the choice was made. Poetry found me and I submitted gladly. I don’t think communication really entered into it because I had no concept at the time about publishing, or that anyone would see it. It was only much later, when I was twenty-one that someone asked me if I’d published and it seemed like something I should do. One wants to give the work away, to make the work available to anyone who might find something in it. One wants to contribute something to the world, something beautiful. Perhaps it is a very strange beauty, but given that mediocrity seems to be the rule, perhaps all genuine beauty is strange.
Thursday, March 17, 2005
ACLU Seeks Records on Use of Patriot Act ...
ACLU Seeks Records on Use of Patriot Act to Deny U.S. Entry to Prominent Foreign Scholars
March 16, 2005
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: media@aclu.org
NEW YORK -- Citing a serious and growing threat to academic freedom, the American Civil Liberties Union today filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for records concerning the government’s practice of excluding scholars and other prominent individuals from the U.S. because of their political views.
"The government should not be barring scholars from the country simply because it disagrees with what they have to say," said ACLU staff attorney Jameel Jaffer. "Nor should immigration and State Department officials be in the business of determining which ideas Americans may hear and which they may not."
The FOIA request filed today focuses in particular on Section 411 of the Patriot Act, which permits the government to exclude foreign scholars from the country if in the government’s view they have "used [their] position of prominence to endorse or espouse terrorist activity or to persuade others to support terrorist activity." While the provision ostensibly focuses on those who sanction terrorism, news reports suggest that the government is using the provision more broadly to deny admission to those whose political views it disfavors.
The ACLU’s FOIA request seeks records concerning the use of Section 411 as well as the names, nationalities and professions of those who have been excluded under the law. The request is directed at the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice and the Central Intelligence Agency.
"Unfortunately, the public has very little information about how the Patriot Act is being used," said Jaffer. "At a time when Congress is being ask to further expand the Patriot Act, the government should be more forthcoming about how it is using the powers it already has."
In its FOIA request, the ACLU cited several recent cases in which respected scholars were barred from entering the U.S. Among them:
Tariq Ramadan, a widely respected Muslim scholar who was named a "spiritual leader" in Time Magazine’s Top 100 Innovators of the 21st Century series, was forced to resign his position at the University of Notre Dame after the government revoked his visa. News reports suggest that Prof. Ramadan was excluded under Section 411.
Dora Maria Tellez, a leader in the 1979 movement to overthrow Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza (and later a democratically elected official), was forced to abandon a teaching position at Harvard University after the government refused to grant her a visa.
A group of 61 Cuban scholars was refused permission to enter the United States to participate in the Latin American Studies Association’s international congress in Las Vegas last October. The Bush administration deemed the scholars’ entry "detrimental to the interests of the United States." Those rejected include poets, sociologists, art historians, and economists, many of whom have frequently traveled to the United States to lecture at leading American universities.
The Patriot Act’s ideological exclusion provision, Jaffer noted, echoes laws that were used in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s to bar those who were associated with the Communist Party. Those laws were used to bar, among many other prominent individuals, the writers Graham Greene, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Dario Fo, and Pablo Neruda, and former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.
Jaffer also noted that the ACLU has successfully used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain information concerning other controversial provisions of the Patriot Act. For instance, documents obtained in response to a FOIA request about the government’s use of "National Security Letters" ultimately provided the basis for a court ruling striking down Section 505 of the Patriot Act. Section 505 permitted the FBI unilaterally to order Internet Service Providers to disclose sensitive information about their subscribers.
Today’s FOIA request regarding the exclusion of foreign nationals is online at: http://www.aclu.org/SafeandFree/SafeandFree.cfm?ID=17740&c=206.
Attorneys on the project include Jaffer, Ann Beeson, and Melissa Goodman of the ACLU's National Legal Department and Judy Rabinovitz of the ACLU's Immigrants' Rights Project.
March 16, 2005
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: media@aclu.org
NEW YORK -- Citing a serious and growing threat to academic freedom, the American Civil Liberties Union today filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for records concerning the government’s practice of excluding scholars and other prominent individuals from the U.S. because of their political views.
"The government should not be barring scholars from the country simply because it disagrees with what they have to say," said ACLU staff attorney Jameel Jaffer. "Nor should immigration and State Department officials be in the business of determining which ideas Americans may hear and which they may not."
The FOIA request filed today focuses in particular on Section 411 of the Patriot Act, which permits the government to exclude foreign scholars from the country if in the government’s view they have "used [their] position of prominence to endorse or espouse terrorist activity or to persuade others to support terrorist activity." While the provision ostensibly focuses on those who sanction terrorism, news reports suggest that the government is using the provision more broadly to deny admission to those whose political views it disfavors.
The ACLU’s FOIA request seeks records concerning the use of Section 411 as well as the names, nationalities and professions of those who have been excluded under the law. The request is directed at the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice and the Central Intelligence Agency.
"Unfortunately, the public has very little information about how the Patriot Act is being used," said Jaffer. "At a time when Congress is being ask to further expand the Patriot Act, the government should be more forthcoming about how it is using the powers it already has."
In its FOIA request, the ACLU cited several recent cases in which respected scholars were barred from entering the U.S. Among them:
Tariq Ramadan, a widely respected Muslim scholar who was named a "spiritual leader" in Time Magazine’s Top 100 Innovators of the 21st Century series, was forced to resign his position at the University of Notre Dame after the government revoked his visa. News reports suggest that Prof. Ramadan was excluded under Section 411.
Dora Maria Tellez, a leader in the 1979 movement to overthrow Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza (and later a democratically elected official), was forced to abandon a teaching position at Harvard University after the government refused to grant her a visa.
A group of 61 Cuban scholars was refused permission to enter the United States to participate in the Latin American Studies Association’s international congress in Las Vegas last October. The Bush administration deemed the scholars’ entry "detrimental to the interests of the United States." Those rejected include poets, sociologists, art historians, and economists, many of whom have frequently traveled to the United States to lecture at leading American universities.
The Patriot Act’s ideological exclusion provision, Jaffer noted, echoes laws that were used in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s to bar those who were associated with the Communist Party. Those laws were used to bar, among many other prominent individuals, the writers Graham Greene, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Dario Fo, and Pablo Neruda, and former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.
Jaffer also noted that the ACLU has successfully used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain information concerning other controversial provisions of the Patriot Act. For instance, documents obtained in response to a FOIA request about the government’s use of "National Security Letters" ultimately provided the basis for a court ruling striking down Section 505 of the Patriot Act. Section 505 permitted the FBI unilaterally to order Internet Service Providers to disclose sensitive information about their subscribers.
Today’s FOIA request regarding the exclusion of foreign nationals is online at: http://www.aclu.org/SafeandFree/SafeandFree.cfm?ID=17740&c=206.
Attorneys on the project include Jaffer, Ann Beeson, and Melissa Goodman of the ACLU's National Legal Department and Judy Rabinovitz of the ACLU's Immigrants' Rights Project.
Wednesday, March 16, 2005
MASH 4077th - Charles Emerson Winchester
Dear Dad,
I have recently been thinking of Charles Emerson Winchester III. While in Korea there were several times that the true decency and humanity shown through his rather blue-blooded and pristine exterior. Charles once related to me that the relationship between his father and himself was to a certain extent cold and cordial. Thinking of you Dad I can see with moist eyes and a heart filled with love that I had the best father, giving, understanding, and ever conscious and aware of my needs. Now in my seventies, I have never married. There were many opportunities, I won't lie and say that there were not. But maybe some of us are meant to be alone, like you for instance. Much to my surprise Charles married immediately after returning to Boston retired from the medical profession and spent his remaining years up until this last autumn, engaged in philanthropic activities. I guess the experience that I have struggled with for many years seemed to escape Charles' thick skin and let itself loose into the world. B. J. is still alive and living in Montana where he operates a clinic that is specializing in the treatment of battered women. His wife Peg died of cancer a few years ago. My two bunkmates from the swamp, the two men that I spent the most time with in Korea are always in my heart. They both wrote me constantly, and of course there were visits periodically, but nothing much. We were scared, lonely people thrown together in an insane situation and deposited back into the waters of a battered coast and told we were no longer needed.
Dad, there are just some things about that war I cannot explain. Some things that even now swell with disease and cover my eyes in a dark and dense shroud that Dante would have left out for the milkman to drop to the ground. Bleeding from the shards I am forever your son and merchant to my dreams, your loving son,
Hawkeye
I have recently been thinking of Charles Emerson Winchester III. While in Korea there were several times that the true decency and humanity shown through his rather blue-blooded and pristine exterior. Charles once related to me that the relationship between his father and himself was to a certain extent cold and cordial. Thinking of you Dad I can see with moist eyes and a heart filled with love that I had the best father, giving, understanding, and ever conscious and aware of my needs. Now in my seventies, I have never married. There were many opportunities, I won't lie and say that there were not. But maybe some of us are meant to be alone, like you for instance. Much to my surprise Charles married immediately after returning to Boston retired from the medical profession and spent his remaining years up until this last autumn, engaged in philanthropic activities. I guess the experience that I have struggled with for many years seemed to escape Charles' thick skin and let itself loose into the world. B. J. is still alive and living in Montana where he operates a clinic that is specializing in the treatment of battered women. His wife Peg died of cancer a few years ago. My two bunkmates from the swamp, the two men that I spent the most time with in Korea are always in my heart. They both wrote me constantly, and of course there were visits periodically, but nothing much. We were scared, lonely people thrown together in an insane situation and deposited back into the waters of a battered coast and told we were no longer needed.
Dad, there are just some things about that war I cannot explain. Some things that even now swell with disease and cover my eyes in a dark and dense shroud that Dante would have left out for the milkman to drop to the ground. Bleeding from the shards I am forever your son and merchant to my dreams, your loving son,
Hawkeye
Tuesday, March 15, 2005
MASH 4077th
Dear Dad,
Hawkeye here, it seems that the complete insanity of the war has followed me home. Now listen before you think your son has lost his marbles I imagined you would want to hear about this. When I was in Korea my friend Dr. Sidney Freedman told me often of writing to Sigmund Freud to relieve the tension and distress he often felt in his work. Well dad, you've only been dead a few years but the little time we had together when I got back home was treasured by me even if I never said it often enough or with enough love. Alas, to the subject at hand. I am having nightmares that I can't seem to shake.In one of the dreams I am in the O.R., a place where even in the horrors of war, meatball surgery, and total and complete exhaustion I am terrified far worse than any shelling we ever had at the 4077th. I am standing over a soldier, a kid barely 18. I look around and I am alone in the room. I look over to the air gauges are working fine and he is under anesthesia safely. I turn to the instrument tray for a scalpel to better expose the wound and all of the instruments are tangled into one. As I try to free them from one another I get a terrible urge for a drink. I think to myself the swamp is just a stone's throw across the camp. But no, I am a surgeon and a damn good one. I don't need a drink that bad. What am I an alcoholic? I've already been down that road once before. As I try and fight against the instruments the kid starts to hemorrhage. Blood begins to ooze from his chest. I tear off my clothes to try and stuff them into the wound to stop the bleeding. When I think I will scream the kid dies. I stand there Dad, for a long time until I know there is no hope for him or me. I walk out of the O.R. and I see Henry Blake sitting on the ground in the compound crying. Then I wake up and try for a half hour at least to figure out where I am. Dad if you can see your way clear put in a good word with the powers to be and see if they can help me with this latest installment of insanity. Kiss mom for me.
Love your tired, tired son,
Hawkeye
Hawkeye here, it seems that the complete insanity of the war has followed me home. Now listen before you think your son has lost his marbles I imagined you would want to hear about this. When I was in Korea my friend Dr. Sidney Freedman told me often of writing to Sigmund Freud to relieve the tension and distress he often felt in his work. Well dad, you've only been dead a few years but the little time we had together when I got back home was treasured by me even if I never said it often enough or with enough love. Alas, to the subject at hand. I am having nightmares that I can't seem to shake.In one of the dreams I am in the O.R., a place where even in the horrors of war, meatball surgery, and total and complete exhaustion I am terrified far worse than any shelling we ever had at the 4077th. I am standing over a soldier, a kid barely 18. I look around and I am alone in the room. I look over to the air gauges are working fine and he is under anesthesia safely. I turn to the instrument tray for a scalpel to better expose the wound and all of the instruments are tangled into one. As I try to free them from one another I get a terrible urge for a drink. I think to myself the swamp is just a stone's throw across the camp. But no, I am a surgeon and a damn good one. I don't need a drink that bad. What am I an alcoholic? I've already been down that road once before. As I try and fight against the instruments the kid starts to hemorrhage. Blood begins to ooze from his chest. I tear off my clothes to try and stuff them into the wound to stop the bleeding. When I think I will scream the kid dies. I stand there Dad, for a long time until I know there is no hope for him or me. I walk out of the O.R. and I see Henry Blake sitting on the ground in the compound crying. Then I wake up and try for a half hour at least to figure out where I am. Dad if you can see your way clear put in a good word with the powers to be and see if they can help me with this latest installment of insanity. Kiss mom for me.
Love your tired, tired son,
Hawkeye
Monday, March 14, 2005
Sunday, March 13, 2005
Philip Lamantia -- S.F. Surrealist poet
- Jesse Hamlin, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, March 11, 2005
Philip Lamantia, the blazing San Francisco poet whose embrace of Surrealism and the free flow of the imagination had a major influence on the Beats and many other American poets, died Monday of heart failure at his North Beach apartment. He was 77.
A San Francisco native born to Sicilian immigrants, Mr. Lamantia was a widely read, largely self-taught literary prodigy whose visionary poems -- ecstatic, terror-filled, erotic -- explored the subconscious world of dreams and linked it to the experience of daily life.
"Philip was a visionary like Blake, and he really saw the whole world in a grain of sand,'' said poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whose City Lights Books published four of Mr. Lamantia's nine books from 1967 to 1997.
"He was the primary transmitter of French Surrealist poetry in this country,'' said Ferlinghetti, who first met Mr. Lamantia here in the early 1950s. "He was writing stream-of-consciousness Surrealist poetry, and he had a huge influence on Allen Ginsberg. Before that, Ginsberg was writing rather conventional poetry. It was Philip who turned him on to Surrealist writing. Then Ginsberg wrote 'Howl.' "
That epochal poem made Ginsberg's name and set off a revolution in American poetry and culture. Ginsberg first read it aloud at San Francisco's Six Gallery on Oct. 13, 1955. The other four poets on the bill that night were Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen and Mr. Lamantia.
Rather than reading his own works -- his first book, "Erotic Poems,'' had been published in 1946 -- Mr. Lamantia read the prose poems of his friend John Hoffman, who had recently died in Mexico.
"Philip was one of the most beautiful poets I've ever known. He was a poet of the imagination,'' said McClure, who lives in Oakland. "He was highly original -- I'd call his poetry hyper-personal visionary Surrealism -- and he was thrilling to be around. Everybody would sit around and listen to him all night. The flow of his imagination was a beautiful thing. ''
A man of ecstatic highs and deep, deep lows, Mr. Lamantia suffered from depression, friends said, and had become a recluse in recent years, rarely leaving home.
But in his younger days, he was a dashing figure who conversed brilliantly on a wide range of subjects. An omnivorous reader, he delved into astronomy, philosophy, history, jazz, painting, ornithology, Egyptology and many other subjects that informed his expansive vision.
"He was very handsome, like a real Adonis,'' Ferlinghetti said. "He was a brilliant talker, a nonstop associative talker like Robert Duncan (the late San Francisco poet with whom Mr. Lamantia was associated on the pre-Beat San Francisco poetry scene of the late 1940s and early '50s). "He would talk in a continuous stream. One word would set him off in one direction, and another word would get him on another trip. He was a real polymath. And he had an encyclopedic memory.''
Born in San Francisco's Excelsior District, Mr. Lamantia worked as a boy in the old produce market on the Embarcadero, where his Sicilian-born father was a produce broker. He began writing poetry in elementary school and fell under the spell of Surrealism after seeing the paintings of Miro and Dali at the old San Francisco Museum of Art on Van Ness Avenue.
He started reading the poetry of Andre Breton, the so-called pope of Surrealism, and other writers in the movement. In 1943, when he was 15, some of Mr. Lamantia's poems were published in View, a Surrealist-leaning New York magazine. Breton gave the young poet his blessings, describing him as "a voice that rises once in a hundred years.''
Some months later, Mr. Lamantia dropped out of Balboa High School and moved to New York City, where he lived for several years. He associated with Breton and other exiled European artists such as Max Ernst and Yves Tanguy, and he worked as an assistant editor of View.
Returning to San Francisco after World War II, Mr. Lamantia took courses at UC Berkeley in medieval studies, English poetry and other subjects while continuing to write and publish poetry. In 1949, he began traveling the world, staying for extended periods in Mexico, Morocco and Europe.
Coming back to the United States every few years, Mr. Lamantia became part of the underground culture blossoming on the east and west coasts. Like other poets who felt estranged from mainstream culture in the atomic age, "he found in the narcotic night world a kind of modern counterpart to the gothic castle -- a zone of peril to be symbolically or existentially crossed,'' wrote Nancy Peters, who later married Mr. Lamantia in 1978 and edited some of his books for City Lights. "The apocalyptic voice of 'Destroyed Works' is witness to that experience.''
Published in '62 by Auerhahn Press, "Destroyed Works'' was Mr. Lamantia's fourth book. The San Francisco house had also published the poet's two previous collections, "Narcotica'' and "Ekstasis,'' both in 1959.
Ever searching to expand his vision, Mr. Lamantia spent time with native peoples in the United States and Mexico in the '50s, participating in the peyote-eating rituals of the Washoe Indians of Nevada. The poet, who taught for a time at San Francisco State and the San Francisco Art Institute, also embraced Catholicism. In later years he attended the Shrine of St. Francis in North Beach.
"He had a vision of the world that was completely unique,'' said Peters, who later separated from Mr. Lamantia, but they remained good friends. She edited three of his books for City Lights, "Becoming Visible" (1981), "Meadowlark West" (1986) and "Bed of Sphinxes: New and Selected Poems, 1943- 1993.''
Andrei Codrescu, a poet and NPR commentator who knew Mr. Lamantia well, called him "one of the great voices of our subconscious for the last 50 years.
"He was a very pure poet in the sense that he was one of the very few American poets who continued to pursue the Surrealist investigation of dreams and the unconscious -- and he connected those explorations to civic American life.''
A memorial is pending.
Friday, March 11, 2005
Philip Lamantia, the blazing San Francisco poet whose embrace of Surrealism and the free flow of the imagination had a major influence on the Beats and many other American poets, died Monday of heart failure at his North Beach apartment. He was 77.
A San Francisco native born to Sicilian immigrants, Mr. Lamantia was a widely read, largely self-taught literary prodigy whose visionary poems -- ecstatic, terror-filled, erotic -- explored the subconscious world of dreams and linked it to the experience of daily life.
"Philip was a visionary like Blake, and he really saw the whole world in a grain of sand,'' said poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whose City Lights Books published four of Mr. Lamantia's nine books from 1967 to 1997.
"He was the primary transmitter of French Surrealist poetry in this country,'' said Ferlinghetti, who first met Mr. Lamantia here in the early 1950s. "He was writing stream-of-consciousness Surrealist poetry, and he had a huge influence on Allen Ginsberg. Before that, Ginsberg was writing rather conventional poetry. It was Philip who turned him on to Surrealist writing. Then Ginsberg wrote 'Howl.' "
That epochal poem made Ginsberg's name and set off a revolution in American poetry and culture. Ginsberg first read it aloud at San Francisco's Six Gallery on Oct. 13, 1955. The other four poets on the bill that night were Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen and Mr. Lamantia.
Rather than reading his own works -- his first book, "Erotic Poems,'' had been published in 1946 -- Mr. Lamantia read the prose poems of his friend John Hoffman, who had recently died in Mexico.
"Philip was one of the most beautiful poets I've ever known. He was a poet of the imagination,'' said McClure, who lives in Oakland. "He was highly original -- I'd call his poetry hyper-personal visionary Surrealism -- and he was thrilling to be around. Everybody would sit around and listen to him all night. The flow of his imagination was a beautiful thing. ''
A man of ecstatic highs and deep, deep lows, Mr. Lamantia suffered from depression, friends said, and had become a recluse in recent years, rarely leaving home.
But in his younger days, he was a dashing figure who conversed brilliantly on a wide range of subjects. An omnivorous reader, he delved into astronomy, philosophy, history, jazz, painting, ornithology, Egyptology and many other subjects that informed his expansive vision.
"He was very handsome, like a real Adonis,'' Ferlinghetti said. "He was a brilliant talker, a nonstop associative talker like Robert Duncan (the late San Francisco poet with whom Mr. Lamantia was associated on the pre-Beat San Francisco poetry scene of the late 1940s and early '50s). "He would talk in a continuous stream. One word would set him off in one direction, and another word would get him on another trip. He was a real polymath. And he had an encyclopedic memory.''
Born in San Francisco's Excelsior District, Mr. Lamantia worked as a boy in the old produce market on the Embarcadero, where his Sicilian-born father was a produce broker. He began writing poetry in elementary school and fell under the spell of Surrealism after seeing the paintings of Miro and Dali at the old San Francisco Museum of Art on Van Ness Avenue.
He started reading the poetry of Andre Breton, the so-called pope of Surrealism, and other writers in the movement. In 1943, when he was 15, some of Mr. Lamantia's poems were published in View, a Surrealist-leaning New York magazine. Breton gave the young poet his blessings, describing him as "a voice that rises once in a hundred years.''
Some months later, Mr. Lamantia dropped out of Balboa High School and moved to New York City, where he lived for several years. He associated with Breton and other exiled European artists such as Max Ernst and Yves Tanguy, and he worked as an assistant editor of View.
Returning to San Francisco after World War II, Mr. Lamantia took courses at UC Berkeley in medieval studies, English poetry and other subjects while continuing to write and publish poetry. In 1949, he began traveling the world, staying for extended periods in Mexico, Morocco and Europe.
Coming back to the United States every few years, Mr. Lamantia became part of the underground culture blossoming on the east and west coasts. Like other poets who felt estranged from mainstream culture in the atomic age, "he found in the narcotic night world a kind of modern counterpart to the gothic castle -- a zone of peril to be symbolically or existentially crossed,'' wrote Nancy Peters, who later married Mr. Lamantia in 1978 and edited some of his books for City Lights. "The apocalyptic voice of 'Destroyed Works' is witness to that experience.''
Published in '62 by Auerhahn Press, "Destroyed Works'' was Mr. Lamantia's fourth book. The San Francisco house had also published the poet's two previous collections, "Narcotica'' and "Ekstasis,'' both in 1959.
Ever searching to expand his vision, Mr. Lamantia spent time with native peoples in the United States and Mexico in the '50s, participating in the peyote-eating rituals of the Washoe Indians of Nevada. The poet, who taught for a time at San Francisco State and the San Francisco Art Institute, also embraced Catholicism. In later years he attended the Shrine of St. Francis in North Beach.
"He had a vision of the world that was completely unique,'' said Peters, who later separated from Mr. Lamantia, but they remained good friends. She edited three of his books for City Lights, "Becoming Visible" (1981), "Meadowlark West" (1986) and "Bed of Sphinxes: New and Selected Poems, 1943- 1993.''
Andrei Codrescu, a poet and NPR commentator who knew Mr. Lamantia well, called him "one of the great voices of our subconscious for the last 50 years.
"He was a very pure poet in the sense that he was one of the very few American poets who continued to pursue the Surrealist investigation of dreams and the unconscious -- and he connected those explorations to civic American life.''
A memorial is pending.
Thursday, March 10, 2005
There is No State You are In (A line from the Koran)
Highway, a paved retrospective in sun shining night
Every aspect of human life blowing in the debris
that collects by the side of the road
I’m somewhere in there
Exits, parking lots, paths leading into the trees
The flowers that grows wild in the median
Are like lilies on the soul of America
Stretching past the morning
Murder on the highway, travels by night
Running without headlights
Parked under the overpass
I’ve been there even when it rained
Weakness repeats in God’s hand on man’s
From the obscurity of a bridge over dry land
An intimate procession of cars and trucks
Piling their exhaust into mine
The distances like artifacts of my youth rolling
Over the cuts in the road
Trees and grass, wildflowers zooming past
Reflecting in my eyes pressed against the glass
But now I sit at home and watch as the traffic
Comes down the road
Far away from a highway I’m waiting
And I can hear the highway in my dreams
Traveling toward another experience
Cut and drawing blood
Below the seams
- Chris Mansel
Every aspect of human life blowing in the debris
that collects by the side of the road
I’m somewhere in there
Exits, parking lots, paths leading into the trees
The flowers that grows wild in the median
Are like lilies on the soul of America
Stretching past the morning
Murder on the highway, travels by night
Running without headlights
Parked under the overpass
I’ve been there even when it rained
Weakness repeats in God’s hand on man’s
From the obscurity of a bridge over dry land
An intimate procession of cars and trucks
Piling their exhaust into mine
The distances like artifacts of my youth rolling
Over the cuts in the road
Trees and grass, wildflowers zooming past
Reflecting in my eyes pressed against the glass
But now I sit at home and watch as the traffic
Comes down the road
Far away from a highway I’m waiting
And I can hear the highway in my dreams
Traveling toward another experience
Cut and drawing blood
Below the seams
- Chris Mansel
The Gangs Of New York, The Crowds Of America
Turn any page of history and you'll end up with blood on your hands. You'll nightmarishly see, you'll horrifically understand, that whatever peace you have enjoyed, whatever serenity you found in the cries or the touch of a child's hand was brought to you like the swallow's nests stuck to the partition above your head, crowding your steps; this world, this world underneath the soil rotates on the blood of those who came before you.
The camera begins with a cornfield in the middle of the night. From the opening shot we are aware of nothing, only the darkness, perhaps the cold. The camera begins a slow tracking through the field only once in a while stopping and changing direction very slowly. Seven minutes later the camera switches off and the room fills with light. Did you think you were sure of what you would see next? At any moment something could have come into the frame and you could sit back and concentrate on it for a moment. Maybe you thought you would see a man digging alone. A scarecrow coming to life, mashing the corn stalks under his feet, or a fire erupting and the camera becoming trapped would focus on a single flame until the smoke crowded the lens? No. The trick of the seven minutes is that you never know. But you are always sure that something is there in the blackness. There is something there in the blackness, but you don't always see it. What is the moral of this story? Did the corn in the field represent all of that blood I mentioned underneath the soil? Did the corn stalks represent each man, woman, and child who died to bring you the freedom you enjoy? No. The corn was the corn, the stalks were the stalks, and the blood can only be reached in your own hands.
The Ashes Of Thoreau
Walking through woods you have never been in can be a sensory prayer. The trees standing and those that have fallen, the underbrush that is either scattered or almost non-existent, the smells and the sounds, are and can be a scattering of the senses with every drop of sweat and breath taken up a hill. Do you look around slowly and imagine a camera capturing the moment? Do you imagine someone is just over the next rise and waiting for you to pass? Standing alone in nature can remind you why you write, why you try and communicate, and can even remind you of how you will never be able to capture or translate to another what you have seen, heard, or tasted. Perhaps you begin with forests in state parks and imagine these lands are safe. You are already falling backwards into vines soaked in kerosene. Nowhere is safe in nature and no one in a way is more safe.
If you ever care to fully get the experience of the wilds of nature, then I suggest walking off into the forest, as far as you can go before having to stop to rest, and sit down and read a book or read over your own writing. Somewhere a few lines into your reading you will discover that the only one who cares anything about your writing, the only person for miles, is you. Perhaps you'll feel like the creatures of the forest are reading over your shoulder, maybe not. I guarantee if you seek to escape the noise of living, nature is your schooner to your complete consciousness. The writer who is afraid of writing either something bad or writing something they are afraid to show to someone needs nature, it needs the wilds of the forest.
Jake Berry writes, "The world is a rough silence on the brink of collapse." The mind is a disease nesting in the crop circles of the imagination. On your walk into the imagination you find a pathway cut into circles around the dreams you can remember and the ones that seem to crawl about your skin in waking time. These dreams are the poetry you were able to capture whether in the wilds of nature or the security of the door that is almost always about to open. Behind this door the Buddha rests Christ's head against the many arms of Kali. Books levitate and surround the hands of the writer as they grip the windowpane that will not break, and the floorboards that will give way just enough for the scent to escape but not the writer. Seclusion, like the wilds of nature, both contain wild animals. Are you one, or are you just the ashes of Thoreau?
An Open Letter To Creativity
Where in the wilderness of your soul can I find you nailed to a tree? Where would I find you naked and trembling, eating the shards of glass from the mirror you imagine you see? Is there where you keep those words you reserve only for you? You've already begun the wheel of time rolling toward you when you lifted the pen the first time. When you committed your thoughts to paper you began to die. It's said that Genghis Kahn and his followers would take out their knives and swords and cut additional holes in the body, so that more men could rape the woman. Why limit yourself to ten orifices I suppose was Kahn's reasoning. Why do you limit yourself to write only what you would want someone else to read? The flesh of a human being is weak enough to burst open when struck. The mind of a child is strong enough to shut down in the moment of tragedy. So why is it that your creativity suffers when you reach the place of suffering? Where are you in the wilderness? Tearfully recall the graft of intestinal nightmares you constructed in order to escape the dreams? Write it down, write it down until you reach the graying moments.
Thoughts Occurring After Listening To The Music Of Jake Berry
My life is like a ferrying delta of myth ruined by the towering steps of man. A trembling in the presence of a stampede doesn't always assure the passerby that indeed there is danger, thus a sad life have I led with many days of work left to do. Building a ship to concern the waters flowing beneath the floors, I have mistakenly sharpened my failing step. Sleep is for the unconsciousness to contemplate on a midwives salary, whether to wash before or after. Standing naked before my skin I am a musing of orange and blue, falling into seizures and an exposing lens left on the stable floor. My mind is a detonated mine whose shrapnel occurs beneath the lids of a very tired soul. The question to the answer of death is lost as the American flag goes up in flames.
A Horizon of Crucifixes in Still Life
Could you complete someone else's death? Could you stare right through the exit wound in the back of their head? Would you have the resolve to pick up the pieces of brain, tissue and skull? If you can't face someone else's death, how can you expect to face your own? More importantly, could you put it into words? The sun of enlightenment peers through your murky, rainy clouds and hovers momentarily. From the beginning, human beings face themselves into the first beam of light they can find. Running from death, they sometimes trip and fall and are witness to its beauty and its living peace. What must the respondents to the devastation of Hiroshima have thought? If you were to fall from the skies, would someone construct a net on your behalf?
Montagnards soak up the blood from America's hellish madness and re-name it. What do we know about death besides the fact that when it is shown on television we can't pull our faces from it. The Montagnards came down out of the jungle and moved into our minds. A steady convulsion of wrath over the many years has protruded into the way we look at death, the way we perceive it, the way we think it tastes, and the passionate disapproval we give it every time we retch into the communal gutter we call the American educational system. From our collection of writings since this country became aware, we have leaked into the space we keep between innocence and commissioned insanity.
You can pray into the dried grass you are trying to light. You can push your head into the rainwater you collect. You can employ every genius of taboo that Jan van Eyck displayed and use it to complete a debt. However, sooner or later you have to identify where the smell is coming from. You will have to bear witness to the montage spraying across the skies displaying images of the funeral of William Blake contrasted with the skin blowing away from every bullet ever fired in anger. If you can read you can understand the desire to put the book down.
A Temple Can Become An Altar
(for Hank Lazer)
When did the flesh become a prison we felt we had to escape from? True the body holds many nightmares from we cannot awaken: the worst of these being the thoughts of the mind. The aging process can normally be accepted but how do we conquer those thoughts that ease us out onto the window ledge? Simple, we jump. Stefano Guazzo wrote, "The ignorant in comparison of the learned, are worse than dead." Does that mean that if you are conscious of your body you will have an artifice against the evils of the soul? Forget the claymores under the skin and exist within the framework of vessel and bone.
A prisoner, like a prisoner, we are kept until we either die or perform an unspeakable act. Antoine de Saint Exupery wrote, "Horizon? There was no longer a horizon. I was in the wings of a theatre cluttered up with bits of scenery. Vertical, oblique, horizontal, all of plane geometry was awhirl. A hundred transversal valleys were muddled in a jumble of perspectives….For a single second, in a waltzing landscape like this, the flyer had been unable to distinguish between vertical mountainsides and horizontal planes…" (Wind, Sand and Stars, Reynal and Hitchcock, 1941, page 83.) But there can be ways to escape only briefly. That ringing in your ears after a sudden shock or loud noise may just be a calling to another. A brief shrug from another may be a brush against your shoulder where you look up to see not their face but a design the sun has made across the floor. A foray into the words of many dying children will reveal not only tears but also cries of wisdom and clarity. Those dying at an advanced age will draw you into a self-induced dramatic moment and say something profound but the real moment of truth is when the last breath escapes and you witness the expression. Does the heart stop with the mind?
The boat of Osiris may find its own path down the bloody river but man inadvertently created the wind that carries it. Dig your own hole but make it one where you can lie down in.
Waking Up, Decaying At Birth
You don't really need anyone else's words, even if you are not sure what you are trying to say. Looking up from the written page your ears will slowly become aware of the noise of the room: life makes quite a bit of noise. I think I know what it feels to be a teacher sometimes. If your creativity were to branch off into another of the senses would you be able to define it in such a way that you could identify it as creativity. With tears streaming down my face, I'm an illusion. The five senses caught in the water repeatedly lapping at the shore, unable to move out onto the lake.
If the larynx could specialize in the visual field of hypnosis could it get itself to try and stop talking? In the swell of a hurricane does a fish retreat to the bottom of the ocean or does curiosity get the better of him? Sever the trigeminal nerve on the left side of your head will you stop shaking in painful seizures or will you just become like the fish whose curiosity brought him into the winds of the storm and couldn't get back?
Barely legible to the handwritten page is the furious typing of an arthritic hand. Nightmares become poetry when documented on a computer screen. Writing down a dream upon waking in longhand brings the dream to life and somehow makes it real, unless you can't walk by and not see what you've written. Spending a life awash in the cold brutal sewer of creativity is best described in a quote from Samuel Johnson who wrote, "Going to sea is going to prison, with a chance at drowning besides." Working creatively is constructing a prison for yourself that will you will never be able to break yourself free from. Drowning? You'll have to answer that one for yourself. I know my answer.
I have had many dreams that repeated themselves and some that continued on with each instance. Like scenes being played out on a screen they just continued until they became oblivion and I began to get cold feelings and saw myself being cut up with a machete. Most dreams that have repeated in my festering sleep well of a life have occurred around watching myself do myself harm. I think my creativity springs from this underground river. Our dreams influence us as much as we would like to distinguish them in other ways. Stuttering, shaking and falling down into the grips of a human body shaking itself free of a chemical located somewhere in the body that corrupts the muscles into involuntary choices, I am like a bird in the utter atmosphere skirting the infinity of space and the screams of humanity that tend to hover somewhere between the heavens and creativity.
Anarchy (from six feet underground)
There's the eye of the storm, there's the point of impact and there's the blues. The south is like an old woman who has buried all of her children; she knows what is bringing up the roses and the weeds. Why do you think there is so much red clay in the south? There's so much blood in the dirt, so much mystery above ground and in-between there's the blues. An old black man said once to me about the blues, he said, "Well son, it's like this…it's just like the bible says, God made woman from man and man gonna cry for his heart and for his coffee." With electricity the south lit up but this only drove the darkness a little further back but it never went away. Rivers still overflowed and filled your bed before you had a chance to wake up. There was still that man who would slit your throat for making love to his woman or just walking across his land. Not even the invention of trains and automobiles could drive the madness from the south. Some believe the blues came from the fields of Mississippi, some believe from the tribes and hunters of Africa. The blues came from the bible. When Adam called out to god that he was alone and unhappy, that was the blues. Adam cried out, he cried out not in a spiritual voice because we both know what he was calling out for. No matter what brought you to the south, no matter what keeps you here or if you ever leave, the south will stay with you, kicking in your memory. You'll know you've seen where the lord sends all the evil and the dead. Where the lord keeps just in case heaven or hell lose their luster. The south can handle the dead.
The Secret of Writing Book Reviews is Reading The Person, Not The Book
Everything comes from the darkness, even the light. (Throw your head back in ecstasy and plunge your dirty fist into the open wound, the blood running down your leg to the floor.)The light will again light everything that is dark. Even a loving embrace can singe itself on the coldness brewing just under the skin that drapes itself ‘round the brain. Reading the writing of others can make you think more about their lives than the writing itself. To fully understand what a writer has written you would have to truly know the writer. This isn’t always possible as the writer may not actually be aware of everything in his or her own character. (Perspiration beads and falls down slow like a trickle of a waterfall beginning between the darkness of stones embedded in rock or earth. The clitoral wound bleeds itself dry when the victim is dead, the stomach as well.)Is it enough to know that you could kill? Is it enough to know that the darkness you sense upon waking in the middle of the night may just mean you haven’t fully opened your eyes? You know the old saying, “Don’t judge a book by its cover?” I’ll go along with this axiom because the true guts of the book could never be suppressed onto the cover. (A white male hangs from a deserted sweatshop entrance, his face flushed with steam from a pressing iron. There are no wounds to the body except for the strangulation. His hands are severed and placed in the opposite pocket from the use of the hand. His feet as well are severed and placed in the shoes beneath his legs in the same manner. There is no trace of blood so you take it that the victim was moved. There’s a tissue placed around the center of a rock, the rock hangs across the victims’ neck. Moving through the doorway, carefully not to disturb the body, you see before you another pair of shoes. In these shoes the feet are placed correctly in the shoes and the hands are in the correct pockets. There is no body just a pair of pants stretched out on the floor. It is determined the killer severed his own feet and hid in the darkness, nude, without his pants and awaited the darkness to come so he could escape into the light.)Stigmatized by what they have read, most writers listen to their muse and continue on writing by comparison. Becoming a lone voice in the beginning of their creativity is too cold a hallway to stand in alone. Too narrow a passage to crawl between, crawling past that slow trickle of water that becomes a waterfall. When a writer moves into the light and is opened like the petal of a flower and can receive the blessed water he needs to write on he is in desperate danger of dying and does not know it. First he must know when to go back into the darkness. The darkness that gave birth to this breath he quickly loses upon a mirror.
Immortality
When asked about immortality I always reply, not yet. What can a writer leave behind besides what he or she has written; a collection of books? Some will say that if someone still continues to read what they have written they will live on. What if no one ever takes the time to read his or her work? What if the writer was the only audience he ever had? With the invention of the Internet just about all you have to do is post it somewhere and the page will never go away, though you may wish it could. What can immortality give you that life could not? A quick, step ahead up the rung of complete conscience? A place where all your mistakes confront you? Oscar Wilde wrote, “He stands outside his subject, and through its medium produces incomparable and artistic effects.” Backing away from yourself, loosening the restraints on your creativity would be one way of describing immortality. Perhaps immortality is a room you’ve never been in but somehow your footprints are there, nonetheless. Post mortem, what Oscar Wilde described as, “The uncultivated mind.”
Writing must become more than a calling, more than something you enjoy. If you will, it must sometimes be more than you are. You can write a poem describing a flower on a Nantucket shoreline by using the hues and dew you are familiar with, the dew and mist you read in a book when you were young or the one you just read after visiting a website that featured the technical term of the plant. But before you back away from what you’ve written ask yourself if you have done justice to the struggle of the flower. It didn’t just pop up from the earth and open its beauty to the world. The metaphor can be the worst of the penal acts not restricted to the writer. Re-writing what you have read is a common ailment in the psychological arena of creativity in a writer. To be a writer you must give up your innocence.
Dostoyevsky wrote, “When man lives in masses, then man lives spontaneously.” You could write a five hundred-page novel in an afternoon by just walking around people and listening. The environment of the writer is never subdued, even when pressed into self-containment the writer can still squeeze an ounce of blood through the keyhole without lifting a vein. I advocate the usage of everything around you. Just remember what you write will follow you long after you are dead. That’s immortality.
Iron filings, pliers blown into windshields
I saw in a book today drawings of snowflakes by Descartes, Erasmus Bartholin, and Giovanni Domencio Cassini. Through the wonders of technology the drawings have become more and more detailed, so now we know more than perhaps we should, enough that a child can subsist on its magnificence until dinnertime. Water, frozen and falling to the earth or back down to earth as you may imagine either I truly believe. In the Rig Veda you find the line, “A seed of abundant waters, he comes out of the ocean.” Like birds circling a downed power line, looking for somewhere to land, we fail to notice the smell of refrigerant emitting its unnatural squall out over the fields. Are snowflakes man-made in the sense that they seem to appear from a tree’s limb or can December’s compelling grip cause the moon’s influential tides to soar and trickle down upon us through the dense garbage laden atmosphere? Likely not. Crop circles litter abandoned and freshly seeded fields and mathematicians at a loss but at a fraction of half time create their own boulders to move from their chests. We are our own hells and we create them at a staggering pace. J.D. Bernal wrote, “The full area of ignorance is not mapped: we are at present only exploring its fringes.”
Loose Trials
I’m only able to describe my own hell; I’ll leave you to yours. My ghostlike figures move motionless in the darkness of my dreams and erupt in my waking peripheral vision. The polluted symbolism of their chants reverberate into the orifices of my body and their smells cover me with a dry powder, passionate about the hundreds of corpses left by my mistakes, regrets and loves. I feel the sickening pages of the computer screen with the details of accident victims, I am one with the snake crawling into my mouth and feeding on my vital organs. Afternoons are the worst, the time between awakening and sleep. The time you have to reflect on the dreams the night before and those to come. Sometimes I can almost feel the characters preparing for their nights performance. The cameras swirl with film in order to capture the events of the dream so they will be able to repeat their performances again and again in days and months to come. Dreaming in color and watching the hues turn to a sickly gray, I challenge the kidneys to abstain from urinating and ask the muscles in my back to avoid the frequent pain they leave me in. However, the body works as one when attacking the senses, impaling the unconsciousness with its own steel spiked pole. When being hit by your own ammunition, the wounds become indentured and cannot be torn away from the point of impact. The seed falls into the earth and never hits bottom.
A Natural Excessive
Pray with me and my willingness to reach the skies by lying on the ground. Close to me this side of life. I so want to listen to the sound of the embrace that change brings to you. It's sullen and it's home to your heart. I have widowed peace and its ever-calming stillness by acknowledging pain. The struggle to give myself over to anything but my thoughts, my wants, my needs. To be at peace is more than being an offspring, or to be a Father, or a Mother. These things come about in life through your own will. It is quite difficult to even achieve sincerity, much less spontaneity or peace. If you were to define the human spirit, I would say compassion. Compassion translates to me as appreciation and acceptance. If you can achieve this then I think you are in the right frame of mind. The Dalai Lama was once asked. "Why do we come to this world?" The Dalai Lama replied, "Nature is nature. There is no answer." When I think of Buddhism I am deeply humbled by the history of the religion, the almost seemingly impossible task of understanding what must be done and understood. But I know the mind is always learning so the sentient being will also. It does fill me with love and a desire for understanding. Pray with me.
Taken In Hand This Dirty Appearance, Flies to the Wound
(A Treatise for a School of Writing That Can Never Exist, Nor Die)
--with great love and understanding to the hermit of Teks St.--
How long would you have to dig in the earth before you found someone that looked like you? An intense being whose very nature was dependent on ferocity and the gentleness of a child? How far would you have to look into your family tree before you found a pederast sitting happily on a limb and chewing an apple, core and all? Would you have to become psychoanalytic to justify your existence? In solitude there exists a demonic form of guilt that can tear a soul from the body of a man in just a few moments. To consecrate this form of surgery it is sometimes necessary to haltingly pour oneself into abstraction and drink. Pass a needle through the eye of a penitentiary, a prison of the mind, and you will feel the saintly coldness of the guillotine. To emerge from the needle, the fabric, you will have to give up your blood and last breath. Through great concentration you will find the ability to write and the necessary substitute of reading. However, obscuring this gift is the uncircumcised cock of insanity. What originates, as melancholia can become the rawest and intense need to pull on your clothes and wash your hands in the utter despair that eats away your constant requirement of creativity. Don't reinvent the wheel; learn to translate the path unconsciously into your own need to stay ever still.
THE NOISE OF YOUR BELIEF
Animals testify through their DNA. Humans expound upon the greasy terrain of civilization and clap their hands in despair. A fire burns out of control over the forehead of a child asleep in a dream of gray gardens. Me, I sit in the handshake of a woman who has lost a husband and a son. Her eyes unable to smile as her lips trace the familiar, the expression aging in phosphorous light, like white tile against a dirty skylight. Who’ll cry for her while she feeds herself in the presence of something holy?
Writers often speak of the abyss, but why try and explain this? If you’ve been there you know that there is no way of explaining it. Speak to a group of people and if you stop to look around you’ll see who is listening, who is thinking of what their reply will be, and those that are looking past you. I wonder, can you ever really express yourself? Just how surreal is it to see a piece of thread embedded in a tree after a great wind? Do you focus only on the thread or do you look at how the rest of the tree weathered the storm? The first thing a traveling man will tell you about the road is to look out for what you normally ride by unaware. He’ll show you the man crawling from under his car from a nap. The woman cradling her child over the roaring engine and trying to keep him warm when the heater has broken and the temperature has dipped below zero.
The next time you enter a depression and look around you for an escape, remember that all things being natural, you could do worse. Christ was nailed to a cross of wood, not stone. Stone radiates the heat from the sun whereas wood does not. The nails in his hands would have become heated in the sun and if they were hot enough could cauterize the wounds. Blood loss and flesh peeled away, the witches of Salem or the books burned by the Third Reich would suffer more in the fires? That depends on your opinion of long-suffering against the idea of the skin burning and falling away slowly.
The Shadow Passes Before The Light
Everything you write is important to you. That’s relatively simple to understand isn’t it? The reader is for whatever reason attracted to it and seeks it out. Thoughts are exchanged often in silence. The silence of the writer is now in the readers mind, and the reader giving voice to your words in his head, reads on and the writing you wrote is up to the conclusion of the reader. A transparent event is unfolding and the writer will almost certainly never know the outcome. Much like the blood coursing through your veins, the blood that gives you life, may or may not ever come to the surface in your lifetime and even if it does will you truly understand what it work in the way it does? Certainly there is a sort of electricity that occurs as the blood flows along its path in the body. So there must be a reaction from the reader to what you have written. If the blood stops, if it does not continue to flow the body will die, if the writer does not show his work to the reader or make it available to him then the exchange will never take place again. Then the voice of the writer will read his own words in his mind before they are written down, the very same voice that can hound the writer into insanity if need be. Nietzsche wrote, “The most concerned ask today: “How is man to be preserved?” But Zarathustra is the first and only one to ask: “How is man to be overcome?”
Turn any page of history and you'll end up with blood on your hands. You'll nightmarishly see, you'll horrifically understand, that whatever peace you have enjoyed, whatever serenity you found in the cries or the touch of a child's hand was brought to you like the swallow's nests stuck to the partition above your head, crowding your steps; this world, this world underneath the soil rotates on the blood of those who came before you.
The camera begins with a cornfield in the middle of the night. From the opening shot we are aware of nothing, only the darkness, perhaps the cold. The camera begins a slow tracking through the field only once in a while stopping and changing direction very slowly. Seven minutes later the camera switches off and the room fills with light. Did you think you were sure of what you would see next? At any moment something could have come into the frame and you could sit back and concentrate on it for a moment. Maybe you thought you would see a man digging alone. A scarecrow coming to life, mashing the corn stalks under his feet, or a fire erupting and the camera becoming trapped would focus on a single flame until the smoke crowded the lens? No. The trick of the seven minutes is that you never know. But you are always sure that something is there in the blackness. There is something there in the blackness, but you don't always see it. What is the moral of this story? Did the corn in the field represent all of that blood I mentioned underneath the soil? Did the corn stalks represent each man, woman, and child who died to bring you the freedom you enjoy? No. The corn was the corn, the stalks were the stalks, and the blood can only be reached in your own hands.
The Ashes Of Thoreau
Walking through woods you have never been in can be a sensory prayer. The trees standing and those that have fallen, the underbrush that is either scattered or almost non-existent, the smells and the sounds, are and can be a scattering of the senses with every drop of sweat and breath taken up a hill. Do you look around slowly and imagine a camera capturing the moment? Do you imagine someone is just over the next rise and waiting for you to pass? Standing alone in nature can remind you why you write, why you try and communicate, and can even remind you of how you will never be able to capture or translate to another what you have seen, heard, or tasted. Perhaps you begin with forests in state parks and imagine these lands are safe. You are already falling backwards into vines soaked in kerosene. Nowhere is safe in nature and no one in a way is more safe.
If you ever care to fully get the experience of the wilds of nature, then I suggest walking off into the forest, as far as you can go before having to stop to rest, and sit down and read a book or read over your own writing. Somewhere a few lines into your reading you will discover that the only one who cares anything about your writing, the only person for miles, is you. Perhaps you'll feel like the creatures of the forest are reading over your shoulder, maybe not. I guarantee if you seek to escape the noise of living, nature is your schooner to your complete consciousness. The writer who is afraid of writing either something bad or writing something they are afraid to show to someone needs nature, it needs the wilds of the forest.
Jake Berry writes, "The world is a rough silence on the brink of collapse." The mind is a disease nesting in the crop circles of the imagination. On your walk into the imagination you find a pathway cut into circles around the dreams you can remember and the ones that seem to crawl about your skin in waking time. These dreams are the poetry you were able to capture whether in the wilds of nature or the security of the door that is almost always about to open. Behind this door the Buddha rests Christ's head against the many arms of Kali. Books levitate and surround the hands of the writer as they grip the windowpane that will not break, and the floorboards that will give way just enough for the scent to escape but not the writer. Seclusion, like the wilds of nature, both contain wild animals. Are you one, or are you just the ashes of Thoreau?
An Open Letter To Creativity
Where in the wilderness of your soul can I find you nailed to a tree? Where would I find you naked and trembling, eating the shards of glass from the mirror you imagine you see? Is there where you keep those words you reserve only for you? You've already begun the wheel of time rolling toward you when you lifted the pen the first time. When you committed your thoughts to paper you began to die. It's said that Genghis Kahn and his followers would take out their knives and swords and cut additional holes in the body, so that more men could rape the woman. Why limit yourself to ten orifices I suppose was Kahn's reasoning. Why do you limit yourself to write only what you would want someone else to read? The flesh of a human being is weak enough to burst open when struck. The mind of a child is strong enough to shut down in the moment of tragedy. So why is it that your creativity suffers when you reach the place of suffering? Where are you in the wilderness? Tearfully recall the graft of intestinal nightmares you constructed in order to escape the dreams? Write it down, write it down until you reach the graying moments.
Thoughts Occurring After Listening To The Music Of Jake Berry
My life is like a ferrying delta of myth ruined by the towering steps of man. A trembling in the presence of a stampede doesn't always assure the passerby that indeed there is danger, thus a sad life have I led with many days of work left to do. Building a ship to concern the waters flowing beneath the floors, I have mistakenly sharpened my failing step. Sleep is for the unconsciousness to contemplate on a midwives salary, whether to wash before or after. Standing naked before my skin I am a musing of orange and blue, falling into seizures and an exposing lens left on the stable floor. My mind is a detonated mine whose shrapnel occurs beneath the lids of a very tired soul. The question to the answer of death is lost as the American flag goes up in flames.
A Horizon of Crucifixes in Still Life
Could you complete someone else's death? Could you stare right through the exit wound in the back of their head? Would you have the resolve to pick up the pieces of brain, tissue and skull? If you can't face someone else's death, how can you expect to face your own? More importantly, could you put it into words? The sun of enlightenment peers through your murky, rainy clouds and hovers momentarily. From the beginning, human beings face themselves into the first beam of light they can find. Running from death, they sometimes trip and fall and are witness to its beauty and its living peace. What must the respondents to the devastation of Hiroshima have thought? If you were to fall from the skies, would someone construct a net on your behalf?
Montagnards soak up the blood from America's hellish madness and re-name it. What do we know about death besides the fact that when it is shown on television we can't pull our faces from it. The Montagnards came down out of the jungle and moved into our minds. A steady convulsion of wrath over the many years has protruded into the way we look at death, the way we perceive it, the way we think it tastes, and the passionate disapproval we give it every time we retch into the communal gutter we call the American educational system. From our collection of writings since this country became aware, we have leaked into the space we keep between innocence and commissioned insanity.
You can pray into the dried grass you are trying to light. You can push your head into the rainwater you collect. You can employ every genius of taboo that Jan van Eyck displayed and use it to complete a debt. However, sooner or later you have to identify where the smell is coming from. You will have to bear witness to the montage spraying across the skies displaying images of the funeral of William Blake contrasted with the skin blowing away from every bullet ever fired in anger. If you can read you can understand the desire to put the book down.
A Temple Can Become An Altar
(for Hank Lazer)
When did the flesh become a prison we felt we had to escape from? True the body holds many nightmares from we cannot awaken: the worst of these being the thoughts of the mind. The aging process can normally be accepted but how do we conquer those thoughts that ease us out onto the window ledge? Simple, we jump. Stefano Guazzo wrote, "The ignorant in comparison of the learned, are worse than dead." Does that mean that if you are conscious of your body you will have an artifice against the evils of the soul? Forget the claymores under the skin and exist within the framework of vessel and bone.
A prisoner, like a prisoner, we are kept until we either die or perform an unspeakable act. Antoine de Saint Exupery wrote, "Horizon? There was no longer a horizon. I was in the wings of a theatre cluttered up with bits of scenery. Vertical, oblique, horizontal, all of plane geometry was awhirl. A hundred transversal valleys were muddled in a jumble of perspectives….For a single second, in a waltzing landscape like this, the flyer had been unable to distinguish between vertical mountainsides and horizontal planes…" (Wind, Sand and Stars, Reynal and Hitchcock, 1941, page 83.) But there can be ways to escape only briefly. That ringing in your ears after a sudden shock or loud noise may just be a calling to another. A brief shrug from another may be a brush against your shoulder where you look up to see not their face but a design the sun has made across the floor. A foray into the words of many dying children will reveal not only tears but also cries of wisdom and clarity. Those dying at an advanced age will draw you into a self-induced dramatic moment and say something profound but the real moment of truth is when the last breath escapes and you witness the expression. Does the heart stop with the mind?
The boat of Osiris may find its own path down the bloody river but man inadvertently created the wind that carries it. Dig your own hole but make it one where you can lie down in.
Waking Up, Decaying At Birth
You don't really need anyone else's words, even if you are not sure what you are trying to say. Looking up from the written page your ears will slowly become aware of the noise of the room: life makes quite a bit of noise. I think I know what it feels to be a teacher sometimes. If your creativity were to branch off into another of the senses would you be able to define it in such a way that you could identify it as creativity. With tears streaming down my face, I'm an illusion. The five senses caught in the water repeatedly lapping at the shore, unable to move out onto the lake.
If the larynx could specialize in the visual field of hypnosis could it get itself to try and stop talking? In the swell of a hurricane does a fish retreat to the bottom of the ocean or does curiosity get the better of him? Sever the trigeminal nerve on the left side of your head will you stop shaking in painful seizures or will you just become like the fish whose curiosity brought him into the winds of the storm and couldn't get back?
Barely legible to the handwritten page is the furious typing of an arthritic hand. Nightmares become poetry when documented on a computer screen. Writing down a dream upon waking in longhand brings the dream to life and somehow makes it real, unless you can't walk by and not see what you've written. Spending a life awash in the cold brutal sewer of creativity is best described in a quote from Samuel Johnson who wrote, "Going to sea is going to prison, with a chance at drowning besides." Working creatively is constructing a prison for yourself that will you will never be able to break yourself free from. Drowning? You'll have to answer that one for yourself. I know my answer.
I have had many dreams that repeated themselves and some that continued on with each instance. Like scenes being played out on a screen they just continued until they became oblivion and I began to get cold feelings and saw myself being cut up with a machete. Most dreams that have repeated in my festering sleep well of a life have occurred around watching myself do myself harm. I think my creativity springs from this underground river. Our dreams influence us as much as we would like to distinguish them in other ways. Stuttering, shaking and falling down into the grips of a human body shaking itself free of a chemical located somewhere in the body that corrupts the muscles into involuntary choices, I am like a bird in the utter atmosphere skirting the infinity of space and the screams of humanity that tend to hover somewhere between the heavens and creativity.
Anarchy (from six feet underground)
There's the eye of the storm, there's the point of impact and there's the blues. The south is like an old woman who has buried all of her children; she knows what is bringing up the roses and the weeds. Why do you think there is so much red clay in the south? There's so much blood in the dirt, so much mystery above ground and in-between there's the blues. An old black man said once to me about the blues, he said, "Well son, it's like this…it's just like the bible says, God made woman from man and man gonna cry for his heart and for his coffee." With electricity the south lit up but this only drove the darkness a little further back but it never went away. Rivers still overflowed and filled your bed before you had a chance to wake up. There was still that man who would slit your throat for making love to his woman or just walking across his land. Not even the invention of trains and automobiles could drive the madness from the south. Some believe the blues came from the fields of Mississippi, some believe from the tribes and hunters of Africa. The blues came from the bible. When Adam called out to god that he was alone and unhappy, that was the blues. Adam cried out, he cried out not in a spiritual voice because we both know what he was calling out for. No matter what brought you to the south, no matter what keeps you here or if you ever leave, the south will stay with you, kicking in your memory. You'll know you've seen where the lord sends all the evil and the dead. Where the lord keeps just in case heaven or hell lose their luster. The south can handle the dead.
The Secret of Writing Book Reviews is Reading The Person, Not The Book
Everything comes from the darkness, even the light. (Throw your head back in ecstasy and plunge your dirty fist into the open wound, the blood running down your leg to the floor.)The light will again light everything that is dark. Even a loving embrace can singe itself on the coldness brewing just under the skin that drapes itself ‘round the brain. Reading the writing of others can make you think more about their lives than the writing itself. To fully understand what a writer has written you would have to truly know the writer. This isn’t always possible as the writer may not actually be aware of everything in his or her own character. (Perspiration beads and falls down slow like a trickle of a waterfall beginning between the darkness of stones embedded in rock or earth. The clitoral wound bleeds itself dry when the victim is dead, the stomach as well.)Is it enough to know that you could kill? Is it enough to know that the darkness you sense upon waking in the middle of the night may just mean you haven’t fully opened your eyes? You know the old saying, “Don’t judge a book by its cover?” I’ll go along with this axiom because the true guts of the book could never be suppressed onto the cover. (A white male hangs from a deserted sweatshop entrance, his face flushed with steam from a pressing iron. There are no wounds to the body except for the strangulation. His hands are severed and placed in the opposite pocket from the use of the hand. His feet as well are severed and placed in the shoes beneath his legs in the same manner. There is no trace of blood so you take it that the victim was moved. There’s a tissue placed around the center of a rock, the rock hangs across the victims’ neck. Moving through the doorway, carefully not to disturb the body, you see before you another pair of shoes. In these shoes the feet are placed correctly in the shoes and the hands are in the correct pockets. There is no body just a pair of pants stretched out on the floor. It is determined the killer severed his own feet and hid in the darkness, nude, without his pants and awaited the darkness to come so he could escape into the light.)Stigmatized by what they have read, most writers listen to their muse and continue on writing by comparison. Becoming a lone voice in the beginning of their creativity is too cold a hallway to stand in alone. Too narrow a passage to crawl between, crawling past that slow trickle of water that becomes a waterfall. When a writer moves into the light and is opened like the petal of a flower and can receive the blessed water he needs to write on he is in desperate danger of dying and does not know it. First he must know when to go back into the darkness. The darkness that gave birth to this breath he quickly loses upon a mirror.
Immortality
When asked about immortality I always reply, not yet. What can a writer leave behind besides what he or she has written; a collection of books? Some will say that if someone still continues to read what they have written they will live on. What if no one ever takes the time to read his or her work? What if the writer was the only audience he ever had? With the invention of the Internet just about all you have to do is post it somewhere and the page will never go away, though you may wish it could. What can immortality give you that life could not? A quick, step ahead up the rung of complete conscience? A place where all your mistakes confront you? Oscar Wilde wrote, “He stands outside his subject, and through its medium produces incomparable and artistic effects.” Backing away from yourself, loosening the restraints on your creativity would be one way of describing immortality. Perhaps immortality is a room you’ve never been in but somehow your footprints are there, nonetheless. Post mortem, what Oscar Wilde described as, “The uncultivated mind.”
Writing must become more than a calling, more than something you enjoy. If you will, it must sometimes be more than you are. You can write a poem describing a flower on a Nantucket shoreline by using the hues and dew you are familiar with, the dew and mist you read in a book when you were young or the one you just read after visiting a website that featured the technical term of the plant. But before you back away from what you’ve written ask yourself if you have done justice to the struggle of the flower. It didn’t just pop up from the earth and open its beauty to the world. The metaphor can be the worst of the penal acts not restricted to the writer. Re-writing what you have read is a common ailment in the psychological arena of creativity in a writer. To be a writer you must give up your innocence.
Dostoyevsky wrote, “When man lives in masses, then man lives spontaneously.” You could write a five hundred-page novel in an afternoon by just walking around people and listening. The environment of the writer is never subdued, even when pressed into self-containment the writer can still squeeze an ounce of blood through the keyhole without lifting a vein. I advocate the usage of everything around you. Just remember what you write will follow you long after you are dead. That’s immortality.
Iron filings, pliers blown into windshields
I saw in a book today drawings of snowflakes by Descartes, Erasmus Bartholin, and Giovanni Domencio Cassini. Through the wonders of technology the drawings have become more and more detailed, so now we know more than perhaps we should, enough that a child can subsist on its magnificence until dinnertime. Water, frozen and falling to the earth or back down to earth as you may imagine either I truly believe. In the Rig Veda you find the line, “A seed of abundant waters, he comes out of the ocean.” Like birds circling a downed power line, looking for somewhere to land, we fail to notice the smell of refrigerant emitting its unnatural squall out over the fields. Are snowflakes man-made in the sense that they seem to appear from a tree’s limb or can December’s compelling grip cause the moon’s influential tides to soar and trickle down upon us through the dense garbage laden atmosphere? Likely not. Crop circles litter abandoned and freshly seeded fields and mathematicians at a loss but at a fraction of half time create their own boulders to move from their chests. We are our own hells and we create them at a staggering pace. J.D. Bernal wrote, “The full area of ignorance is not mapped: we are at present only exploring its fringes.”
Loose Trials
I’m only able to describe my own hell; I’ll leave you to yours. My ghostlike figures move motionless in the darkness of my dreams and erupt in my waking peripheral vision. The polluted symbolism of their chants reverberate into the orifices of my body and their smells cover me with a dry powder, passionate about the hundreds of corpses left by my mistakes, regrets and loves. I feel the sickening pages of the computer screen with the details of accident victims, I am one with the snake crawling into my mouth and feeding on my vital organs. Afternoons are the worst, the time between awakening and sleep. The time you have to reflect on the dreams the night before and those to come. Sometimes I can almost feel the characters preparing for their nights performance. The cameras swirl with film in order to capture the events of the dream so they will be able to repeat their performances again and again in days and months to come. Dreaming in color and watching the hues turn to a sickly gray, I challenge the kidneys to abstain from urinating and ask the muscles in my back to avoid the frequent pain they leave me in. However, the body works as one when attacking the senses, impaling the unconsciousness with its own steel spiked pole. When being hit by your own ammunition, the wounds become indentured and cannot be torn away from the point of impact. The seed falls into the earth and never hits bottom.
A Natural Excessive
Pray with me and my willingness to reach the skies by lying on the ground. Close to me this side of life. I so want to listen to the sound of the embrace that change brings to you. It's sullen and it's home to your heart. I have widowed peace and its ever-calming stillness by acknowledging pain. The struggle to give myself over to anything but my thoughts, my wants, my needs. To be at peace is more than being an offspring, or to be a Father, or a Mother. These things come about in life through your own will. It is quite difficult to even achieve sincerity, much less spontaneity or peace. If you were to define the human spirit, I would say compassion. Compassion translates to me as appreciation and acceptance. If you can achieve this then I think you are in the right frame of mind. The Dalai Lama was once asked. "Why do we come to this world?" The Dalai Lama replied, "Nature is nature. There is no answer." When I think of Buddhism I am deeply humbled by the history of the religion, the almost seemingly impossible task of understanding what must be done and understood. But I know the mind is always learning so the sentient being will also. It does fill me with love and a desire for understanding. Pray with me.
Taken In Hand This Dirty Appearance, Flies to the Wound
(A Treatise for a School of Writing That Can Never Exist, Nor Die)
--with great love and understanding to the hermit of Teks St.--
How long would you have to dig in the earth before you found someone that looked like you? An intense being whose very nature was dependent on ferocity and the gentleness of a child? How far would you have to look into your family tree before you found a pederast sitting happily on a limb and chewing an apple, core and all? Would you have to become psychoanalytic to justify your existence? In solitude there exists a demonic form of guilt that can tear a soul from the body of a man in just a few moments. To consecrate this form of surgery it is sometimes necessary to haltingly pour oneself into abstraction and drink. Pass a needle through the eye of a penitentiary, a prison of the mind, and you will feel the saintly coldness of the guillotine. To emerge from the needle, the fabric, you will have to give up your blood and last breath. Through great concentration you will find the ability to write and the necessary substitute of reading. However, obscuring this gift is the uncircumcised cock of insanity. What originates, as melancholia can become the rawest and intense need to pull on your clothes and wash your hands in the utter despair that eats away your constant requirement of creativity. Don't reinvent the wheel; learn to translate the path unconsciously into your own need to stay ever still.
THE NOISE OF YOUR BELIEF
Animals testify through their DNA. Humans expound upon the greasy terrain of civilization and clap their hands in despair. A fire burns out of control over the forehead of a child asleep in a dream of gray gardens. Me, I sit in the handshake of a woman who has lost a husband and a son. Her eyes unable to smile as her lips trace the familiar, the expression aging in phosphorous light, like white tile against a dirty skylight. Who’ll cry for her while she feeds herself in the presence of something holy?
Writers often speak of the abyss, but why try and explain this? If you’ve been there you know that there is no way of explaining it. Speak to a group of people and if you stop to look around you’ll see who is listening, who is thinking of what their reply will be, and those that are looking past you. I wonder, can you ever really express yourself? Just how surreal is it to see a piece of thread embedded in a tree after a great wind? Do you focus only on the thread or do you look at how the rest of the tree weathered the storm? The first thing a traveling man will tell you about the road is to look out for what you normally ride by unaware. He’ll show you the man crawling from under his car from a nap. The woman cradling her child over the roaring engine and trying to keep him warm when the heater has broken and the temperature has dipped below zero.
The next time you enter a depression and look around you for an escape, remember that all things being natural, you could do worse. Christ was nailed to a cross of wood, not stone. Stone radiates the heat from the sun whereas wood does not. The nails in his hands would have become heated in the sun and if they were hot enough could cauterize the wounds. Blood loss and flesh peeled away, the witches of Salem or the books burned by the Third Reich would suffer more in the fires? That depends on your opinion of long-suffering against the idea of the skin burning and falling away slowly.
The Shadow Passes Before The Light
Everything you write is important to you. That’s relatively simple to understand isn’t it? The reader is for whatever reason attracted to it and seeks it out. Thoughts are exchanged often in silence. The silence of the writer is now in the readers mind, and the reader giving voice to your words in his head, reads on and the writing you wrote is up to the conclusion of the reader. A transparent event is unfolding and the writer will almost certainly never know the outcome. Much like the blood coursing through your veins, the blood that gives you life, may or may not ever come to the surface in your lifetime and even if it does will you truly understand what it work in the way it does? Certainly there is a sort of electricity that occurs as the blood flows along its path in the body. So there must be a reaction from the reader to what you have written. If the blood stops, if it does not continue to flow the body will die, if the writer does not show his work to the reader or make it available to him then the exchange will never take place again. Then the voice of the writer will read his own words in his mind before they are written down, the very same voice that can hound the writer into insanity if need be. Nietzsche wrote, “The most concerned ask today: “How is man to be preserved?” But Zarathustra is the first and only one to ask: “How is man to be overcome?”
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