The maze of mind unravels where we act

Religion and Faith are complex for me.  At one time, I thought that I might be able to deliver a message of hope and salvation in the role of a pastor.  But I think I always knew that my own path would not be a path that others ought to follow.  I was more spiritual than religious and ultimately more carnal than spiritual.  This book, The Saviors of God shaped and changed my way of looking at myself and my spiritual journey. When Kazantzakis wrote in the chapter First Step, the Ego, " I am not good, I am not innocent, I am not serene. My happiness and unhappiness are both unbearable; I am full of inarticulate voices and darknesses; I wallow, all blood and tears, in this warm trough of my flesh." , I knew I had found a voice who knew me. I am not an ascetic, as Kazantzakis strove to be,  but his insights have inspired me.  They also inspired this poem.  In my handwritten notes are two quotes from The Saviors of God, although they are not quoted in the final typewritten version of the poem.  Nor does the poem have a title or date.

"The ultimate most holy form of theory is action" p.99

"It is not God who will save us - it is we who will save God, by battling, by creating, and by transmuting matter into spirit." p. 106 

I also have a note of my own: "To fear and in that fear to weep for God for hope for love. Death"


The maze of mind unravels where we act,
Pursue our thoughts to logic's ending place,
Where dreams like mist drift off the cliff of fact;


Where theory arms us, praxis sets the pace.
To act can answer queries of the heart;
To win the prize we must endure the race.


The die is cast when we decide to start,
Bolt out from logic, theory's starting block
To merge with racers who seek their part,


Like you, to act to break in God's deadlock.
God runs, He falls, we carry on to make
A place for God where with us he may walk.


The road of action God commands we take
So He we save in our warm body's meat.
We burn an arc across the sky for sake
of God's salvation . . . and our moment, fleet.

No Pure Air

My original plan for this Easter post was to quote Anne Sexton's 'Rowing' from "The Awful Rowing Toward God", a book of hers I was given a long time ago.  While traveling this week, I picked up The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton, but in rereading it this morning, I decided not to quote it today.  I thought it might echo my own ambivalent feelings about God and to some extent it does, but it just didn't feel right to me today, just a little too despairing.  So I went to my folder and this is the next poem that came up.  It started as a sort of Beat, 'stream of consciousness' poem that got morphed and clean up to this final version.  It is not a pretty poem, that is for sure.  I am sure that I must have been feeling lost and in despair that I could write anything at all.  The funny thing is over the six months or so I worked on the poem (six drafts, no less) from July 31, 1979 to March 25, 1980, the title changed with each draft.  So here are the title changes, a little bit of verse in itself.

Untitled

Crack!

Conversation with Lenin in exile in 1902

Conversation with Luther in exile in 1902 

Conversations with Luther and Lenin in exile in 1902

Conversations with Luther and Trotsky in exile in 1902

Poet in exile

Conversations with Luther and Trotsky in exile in 1902

Poet in exile

No Pure Air

Does that help explain the theme at all?  Maybe. I will admit that the end is full of pretensions and give that up to youth.  There are a few interesting images, perhaps, that make up for the rest. Glad at least to say that I seldom feel this kind of despair.


No Pure Air


Crack! split back spine
paunched fish guts
red glistening organs so
perfect and glossy   burst
spilt bile all over
snow white beaches already
so soaked as to be 
                              full.
Gross putrid failures
befoul us   bring us down
down into the sulphurous
depths   into the chamber pot
old fart hell of
                       failure.


No pure air
only gagging doubts like mustard
gas floating over barbed
wire   muckholes   agent orange
dead   rotting   leaves   babies   women
(how little war has changed)


Drunken piss covered pants   men wander
the streets   panhandling   scaring
the bourgeois hell out
of us in our patrician
                                 complacency.


Striving to give . . . .what?
there is no reality
only images we feel
                               make
                                          die for.

Peter Quince at the Clavier by Wallace Stevens

"Susanna and the Elders" . . . wow, google that for a history of porn in the arts!  Two thousand years of naked chicks by every master imaginable.

Critics have lots to say about this poem.  When I read it in 2003, I was struck by the fourth part -
"Beauty is momentary in the mind - 
the fitful tracing of a portal;
But in the flesh immortal.
The body dies; the body's beauty lives on." 
It turns on its head the Platonic notion of the ideal of Beauty.  It means (I think) that beauty is in the thing.  Beauty is - literally- incarnate. And the beauty that has gone into the dust of Israel? Like music played or words spoken?  We think we can capture and imprison beauty in an .MP3 or a .JPG or even on a written page.  But I don't think we can.  The experience of beauty is in the mind's reaction to music or words or images. We 'see' Susanna in her green evening, or the woman of the first stanza in her blue-shadowed silk in our minds, we re-create.  That is what poetry does, I think, takes rich, meaningful language and uses it to sketch an emotion or experience for the writer and the reader together.  Or maybe poetry is just an excuse to think naughty thoughts. Who can say?

Peter Quince at the Clavier


I

 Just as my fingers on these keys
 Make music, so the self-same sounds
 On my spirit make a music, too.

 Music is feeling, then, not sound;
 And thus it is that what I feel,
 Here in this room, desiring you,

 Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk,
 Is music. It is like the strain
 Waked in the elders by Susanna:

 Of a green evening, clear and warm,
 She bathed in her still garden, while
 The red-eyed elders, watching, felt

 The basses of their beings throb
 In witching chords, and their thin blood
 Pulse pizzicati of Hosanna.

II

 In the green water, clear and warm,
 Susanna lay.
 She searched
 The touch of springs,
 And found
 Concealed imaginings.
 She sighed,
 For so much melody.

 Upon the bank, she stood
 In the cool
 Of spent emotions.
 She felt, among the leaves,
 The dew
 Of old devotions.

 She walked upon the grass,
 Still quavering.
 The winds were like her maids,
 On timid feet,
 Fetching her woven scarves,
 Yet wavering.

 A breath upon her hand
 Muted the night.
 She turned--
 A cymbal crashed,
 And roaring horns.

III

 Soon, with a noise like tambourines,
 Came her attendant Byzantines.

 They wondered why Susanna cried
 Against the elders by her side;

 And as they whispered, the refrain
 Was like a willow swept by rain.

 Anon, their lamps' uplifted flame
 Revealed Susanna and her shame.

 And then, the simpering Byzantines,
 Fled, with a noise like tambourines.

IV

 Beauty is momentary in the mind --
 The fitful tracing of a portal;
 But in the flesh it is immortal.

 The body dies; the body's beauty lives,
 So evenings die, in their green going,
 A wave, interminably flowing.
 So gardens die, their meek breath scenting
 The cowl of Winter, done repenting.
 So maidens die, to the auroral
 Celebration of a maiden's choral.

 Susanna's music touched the bawdy strings
 Of those white elders; but, escaping,
 Left only Death's ironic scrapings.

 Now, in its immortality, it plays
 On the clear viol of her memory,
 And makes a constant sacrament of praise.

1915.

Hear the poem read out loud courtesy of wikipedia.org

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I dreamt of Perm

A characteristic feature of overvalued ideas is the patient's conviction of his own rectitude, an obsession with asserting his trampled "rights' and the significance of these feelings for the patient's personality.  They tend to exploit judicial proceedings as a platform for making speeches and appeals

Description of characteristics of 'sluggish schizophrenia' displayed by dissidents committed to psikhushkas during the Soviet period in Russia.  Quoted in Gulag: a history by Anne Applebaum.

I am not sure I entirely understood the details of the political situation when I wrote this poem on April 7, 1980.  I had certainly read my Solzhenitsyn and harbored no illusions concerning the Soviet Union, in spite of my leftist leanings.  More to the point, in this poem, I tried to imagine what it would be like to live in a country where you were declared mentally ill because you disagreed with the government. . . . hmm . . . . yeah, about that.  I also tried to consider what it would be like to be under systematic torture, the agony of waiting your turn and knowing it was coming.  The first part is the prisoner, obviously, the second part is me. Vladimir Borisov was, I believe, an electrician.  Hardly a literary figure or intelligentsia.  The final line? Oh please, do you not know me at all? Irony and an ice pick in Mexico City.


I dreamt of Perm
                              for Vladimir Borisov

1.
I swear I will not piss my pants 
again, no matter how scared or blind.
I wait and wait and wait; building castles
room by room inside my mind. Surely
I am still sane, still whole, still in control?
I wait here in this psikhushka
until the clicking steps stop before my door.
Then, with tremors in my bowels and ice knives 
in my heart, quivering, I am led below.


I still remember flowers and Spring
and laughing children and long, slow walks
along the river at dusk.  I remember
sunny rooms, hot tea and the steamy smell
of food, long ago eaten and gone.  I remember
love and softness and tender words and 
whispers and giggles.  I remember living.


Shocks run through me-
seared flesh and frozen heart-
tearless weeping desperation
melts into a jerking mass
Final saving lapse -
                              unconscious weight.


2.
I dreamt of Perm last night, of labor camps,
of last pleading goodbyes
in stinking, smoky railway stations;
Waiting and shuffling in the snow
or rain
or sleet
or beneath the muddy sky.


Remember
and do not lose faith in the future,
For truth, not lies,
is the motor force of progress.

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Underground System by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Underground System, by Edna St. Vincent Millay was originally published in 1939 in Huntsman, What Quarry?. Millay republished it in 1940, in her book urging action by America to enter the war in the fight against European Fascism.  I have copies of both books and have taken my reproduction from the original.  Why are we reading it today, after over 70 years?  Really? Read on and find out.  It certainly echoes my thoughts and keep in mind that ESVM wrote this poem while America was still in the throes of the Depression.  The threats to the Republic were as great then, or greater, and I think ESVM and I would probably agree on who the 'moles' are.  Whether the Fascists triumphed or not, I will let you be the judge. I hoped to have more information about this poem and I just tried to find my copy of her biography, Savage Beauty, in the slag heap that is my basement and former library, but of course, could not.  Well, carry on, right?

Underground System

Set the foot down with distrust upon the crust of
    the world - it is thin.
Moles are at work beneath us; they have tunnelled
    the sub-soil
With separate chambers; which at an appointed
    knock
Could be as one, could intersect and interlock.  We
    walk on the skin
Of life.  No toil
Of rake or hoe, no lime, no phosphate, no rotation
    of crops, no irrigation of the land,
Will coax the limp and flattened grain to stand
On that bad day, or feed to strength the nibbled
    roots of our nation.


Ease has demoralized us, nearly so; we know
Nothing of the rigours of winter: the house has a 
    roof against - the car a top against - the snow.
All will be well, we say; it is a habit, like the rising
    of the sun,
For our country to prosper; who can prevail against
    us? No one.


The house has a roof; but the boards of its floor are
    rotting, and hall upon hall
The moles have built their palace beneath us: we
    have not far to fall.



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