Thumos

I mentioned Fukuyama's coinage last post: isothymia, which is a joining of iso (equal) and thumos.

What does thumos mean?

In his Phaedrus, Plato figures the human psyche in three parts: a charioteer, and his two winged horses. The Driver is logistikon, derived from logos, the Reason -- and the two horses, one black and one white, are epithumetikon, representing bodily desire, and thumos, or "spiritedness." Reason keeps the two in check, and steers them through the sky toward "divine sights." While the black horse -- desire, concupiscence -- is unruly, and needs the Driver's whip, the white horse, beautiful and long-necked, will heed the driver's word. Both horses represent passionate parts of the psyche, but Thumos -- the location of pride, shame, indignation, and social recognition -- is the brighter side of passion, the more agreeable, manly, not quite as difficult to control part.

Jeffrey Walker, in his treatise on classical rhetoric called Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity, decides that thumos, or thymos, for the pre-aristotelian Greeks meant: "'heart' or 'mind' or 'spirit' as the seat of emotion, thought, wish, desire, intentionality, or will. In one's thymos," says Walker, "one considers things, draws inferences, becomes impassioned, forms desires, has intentions, and makes plans." He refers to uses of the word in both a Homeric hymn, and a poem of Pindar's, and says in these instances and others, "thymos as 'heart' is understood as both a principle or place of interpretation and a source of emotional response, urge, and intentionality."

Of Aristotle's conception of the thymos, Walker asserts:
"Aristotle typically associates both thymos and epithymia, "desire," with the "nonrational" (alogon), emotive part of the psyche, which he nevertheless considers to "partake of logos" in the sense that it has a "hearkening and obeying" capacity for interpretive understanding and response. [...] That is, depending on what perceptions are present to the psyche, and depending on the predominant cognitive frames within which those perceptions are interpreted, the "nonrational" part of the pschye, or the thymos, recognizes the significance or salience of those interpreted precepts and mobilizes emotions, desires, intentionalities, and behavioral scenarios (as well as bodily arousal for physical action) in response."

"Moreover, the specific emotions, desires, intentionalities, and bodily states mobilized by the thymos largely determine the predominant cognitive frames and behavioral scenarios within which the psyche's subsequent perceptions will be interpreted and responded to."

If Walker is interpreting these ancient sources correctly, the thumos begins to sound like a pretty darn important part of the psyche. If your body is a chariot, and Reason is the driver, then you've got two winged horses buried in your gut, one black, one white. The black one is pulling you earthward, and needs a good whipping -- but the white one? Well, the white one waits for you to say when.

Walker has a particular reason for talking about thymos -- a word he is very much concerned with, and a word that I have become very much concerned with, is derived from it. The word? Enthymeme. I'll talk more about that later -- for now I'm off to the premier of Arvo Part's 4th Symphony, titled "Los Angeles."

Panera

In line, I am witness to life, a bit of life
negotiated: this post-adolescent boy
awkwardly conscious of his boss's looming
platinum hair. Boy-man tries to concentrate,
but boss-man speaks, asks him to work overtime,
asks him to do this favor, just once. Our hero
fumbles over my bagel, hesitates until
the promise comes: you can take a loaf of bread home.
Who am I to say what is or isn't worthy?
There is no rule, but look, in certain moments
my own heart rises from it's mortal bed,
and feels the brief delight of someone else
smiling like a goddamn goof, because tonight
in spite of death, he'll have a loaf of bread.

Noise Reduction

Snug against a olive-green column, I'm at Panera testing the new noise-reduction ear-buds I just purchased. Cheapest brand (Philips) and yet with the music playing -- I really can't hear anything around me. This public space is transformed into a sanctuary ... well, almost -- between songs, I can hear a muffled chatter. Muffled just enough I think, to be able to ignore it. The "noise reduction" technology seems to consist of the "ear-plug" style ear-buds, coupled with a little bit of gentle white-noise. Mr.Philips recorded himself blowing into microphone, and called it worth another 15 bucks. I wonder how much better the Bose ear-buds are?

Moby, The Rain Falls And The Sky Shudders.

Works well enough. Anyway, the sanctuary starts within, right?

Right. Mulling over so many dark, little thoughts. Can't figure how to act in a world that, if I'm honest, leaves me in a state of constant bafflement. And if I ride waves of convention, I feel listless, I feel disingenuous --

I've been reading over, thinking over, a theory of the steps toward a religious life: first, the aesthetic life, then the ethical, and finally, and for only a select few, the religious life. It's a progression of the self, from being ruled by passion, to rule by ethics and social agreements, and finally by faith in God --

I think one thing we can agree on is the absurdity of the word "God." The closest I can come to saying what I mean is: "That which transcends that which we exist within," and then it becomes a problem of inadequate pronouns.

**Product Update: there is a slight electronic flicker-click in my right ear-bud. Is it picking up a cell-phone? Annoying.**

I feel voices in me disagreeing with the word "transcends." Why must their be something that transcends the world we exist within? I'm not saying there must be -- you can trust me to never say (at least when I'm in a sober mood) what must be -- but I am saying that we believe it to be so. Think past the language we use to describe our thoughts about the world (something, I know, not everyone is convinced we can do). We learn early to look at the world outside of us as a mostly predictable environment that we exist in, are a part of. We believe in this unification that upon reflection seems possibly to be a trick of the trick of consciousness. Of language. But we believe in it. We believe that as we move across space, the predictions we made a moments ago will hold here as well, as long as the conditions are similar. A continuity of space & time. No, not on a micro or macro level -- only on the level I'm currently knowing, the one in which we live and move and have our being.

This unity of the world, this continuity, this world-ness, "transcends" the particulars that compose it.

I've long held that living "ethically" means two things: first, living with the ability to sympathize, living "isothymically" (living with a desire to be equal to everyone else)(a term coined by Fukuyama in The End of History and The Last Man); and, second, acting with the future in mind. Both require a good imagination. I guess that's a way of saying a proud person, or an evil person, is suffering from a deficient imagination.

We believe, whether because of conditioning, or because of observation, that when we die, the world continues -- not in the way we imagined it, the way our minds represented it to us, but in the way that it "is"...

Unity, though, is also an act of the imagination? The ability to see something as a distinct, unified object. (A little Sigur Ros coming on now, layered over a cottony blanket of white noise, layered over muffled chatter and some distant saxophoning.) So, if all imagining humans died right now, would all the world dissolve into nothingness? We don't buy it. There'd be the world, though oddly devoid of all connotation. And, yes, we believe the earth would still be a ball, upon which an animal could act by an instinct that would cause it to function correctly, oh, imagination, oh say, unification. Who's doing it? Something still transcends. I can keep taking out potential characters, and the oneness will still be there -- even if I reduce the universe to a slovenly spin of rocks in the void, they still collide, still operate according to some system -- and that, my friends, is unification. Is an act of the imagination. We believe it. And so we can't escape belief in this thing we often call "God."

Or a sense of the meaning of the world. Or a sense of the heartbreaking loveliness of sympathizing.

Our own impending deaths. What dream, or lack of dream, may come.

Wonderstruck

Wanting to name my post "Existential Wonder" I typed it into google to see what sort of hits I'd come up with. The second link, which I clicked after dismissing the first, was the title of a blog post. My heart sank a little, as it always does when I realize I'm just one of the millions of bloggers out there prattling on about anything that would make me sound the way I feel -- like a philosopher! Then I realized that the post was about a reincarnated dog. It had nothing to do with existential wonder, except for serving as a heart-warming example of it. Think "Marley & Me" for vaguely eastern folks.

So, I retreated, and clicked the third link. Boon!

From Mark Kingwell's Practical Judgements:

"In losing our ability to be amazed in a strange environment, or indeed to see a familiar environment as sometimes very strange, we may have obscured the origin of philosophizing. But an obscuration of origin does not mean we have lost philosophy. Modern philosophy – now made traditional, ruled by convention, canonical – continues without full regard for the experience that gave it rise. Wonder, even if in reality the origin of philosophy, may not be considered an experience deserving philosophical attention. On the other hand, simple wonder cannot be viewed as sufficient of itself to be the philosophizing it sets in motion. The tradition, with its conventions and rules, must be evaluated alongside the experience of wonder. Such a tradition may be rejected as ossified, conservative, or misleading, as Husserl attempts to do, but it cannot simply be ignored."

...then a few lines later, concerning analytic philosopher Ronald Hepburn...

"True wonderment in its philosophical connotation, says Hepburn, must be distinguished from astonishment at ‘mere novelty’ – a distinction to be found not only in Kant but also in Heidegger (curiousity vs. marvel). The thrust of Hepburn’s distinction is thus that ‘legitimate’ wonder must always be wedded to a concern for truth, ultimate causes, reasons; the wonderer wonders only to the extent that he gets his ‘real’ inquiry going. ‘Existential wonder’ at the sheer facticity of the world may not be of legitimate interest, Hepburn suggests, since it opens up no set of reasons to be investigated. It is a kind of wonder, but not one that leads to anything further. […]"

...and a quote from Hepburn...

"We can give no reason for the world's being rather than not being. We can meaningfully ask why it exists, but we have no resource for answering the question. Wonder is generated from this sense of absolute contingency; its object the sheer existence of the world. I shall call it "existential wonder." All reasons fall away: wondering is not prelude to fuller knowledge, though the general interrogative attitude may persist."

Kingwell goes on to point out that many philosophers disagree; in fact, most call this existential wonder the very source of philosophy. Take Plato for instance, who puts into the mouth of Socrates these words:

"[The] sense of wonder is the mark of the philosopher. Philosophy indeed has no other origin, and he was the good genealogist who made Iris the daughter of Thaumas."

Thaumas was a sea god of Greek mythology, whose name meant wonder. Iris was the goddess of rainbows, and a messenger of the gods.

Anyway, to get to my point -- although I think rambling may have been my point -- I recently decided that I've moved out of a state of religious wonder, into a state of existential wonder. Or, that my wonder has lost some of its epic ghosts, and has been whittled down to a dumb amazement that the world is here, around me.

And, conveniently, I think I may agree with Hepburn. Being wonderstruck, in the existential sense, kind of leaves one with a zen-like feeling -- no desires. A vague "interrogative attitude" persists, but with "no resource for answering the question" other than reference to existence itself, all we can do is sense its meaning, and keep quiet.

Wittgenstein said: "It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists." (TLP, 6.44)

He also said, "What we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence." Which makes me think of rainbows, conveniently -- the feeling of being left speechless.

Last Few Days of 2008

Usually you have your youth to reach over and touch in times of existential worry -- well, (you might say to yourself), at least I'm still young. And then suddenly, it's four days after your 29th birthday -- still young, granted, from many perspectives, but I guess what matters is your own sense of when your free-pass license of youth is all used up. And, for me, it suddenly feels like it is; at least, I'm reaching for that familiar box of inexhaustible do-overs, and not finding it.

And so I'm trying to get a taste for these last few days of 2008. Though I've forgotten nearly everything of consequence I ever learned, some residue has remained, and this strange post-Christmas space between two years is slick with the wetness of knowledge lost. Also, the wetness of the downpour of rain that fell earlier today, while I sat in Portland, sipping coffee and feeling romantic. Feeling a heck of a lot.

And I like feeling. My body seems made for it more than it's made for retaining verbal information. What exactly "verbal information" means, I couldn't quite tell you, and though I'm interested in trying to figure out how, right now I'm riding the feeling-wave of the song that's echoing from my ear-buds; and I'd rather feel it, than figure it out. Than make a system of figures for it. Organize that system -- literalize it. Whatever that means.

My stomach is full, and I'm 29, and 2008 is about to sputter out, a candle flame, wet with waxy residue, flapping like a tattered flag. I salute you, banner of those who keep their minds mostly free of entangling alliances. Who like to feel, instead, the free association of a world of moments, disconnected but by a certain simple animal-faith. Let's shake hands and admit that as far as we know, we're alive, and we're dying, and we have a little time together. And that no one has ever figured out more than that, and that it's enough. That all of the faith one needs in life is packed into that little seed.

And there are a hundred men and women like me tonight, earbuds sunk in waxy-wet time-canals between two years, typing out their heart's expression. Thumos, as the Greeks said -- logic of the gut-heart.

And we're all original, those of us typing, those of us sleeping, eating, urinating, making love, watching television, looking at cats, rubbing our feet across lineolium, laughing, reading magazines; we're all located somewhere in this world, doing something that's never been done before, in exactly the way we are, by someone exactly like us. Performing it for the first time, in time. Theme and variation.

Everything is new under the sun, Solomon. Everything, that is, except for the age-old whining about not being able to know anything. But no one has ever whined quite like me, so fine, so free.

Winter Sonnet?

Working on these is a mostly meditative practice, and as that is true, I feel for them as one feels for ones neighbor's pets: very little indeed. And yet I post them -- which is an interesting psychological event, is it not? No, no it's not.

Stuck in snowy ruts, then at intersections
fish-tailing, as they say, between the icy banks
in an unhorsed black sedan, we spent the day
wasting it. Christmas shopping, we called it,
and why you went, you couldn’t quite say.
A backseat hotshot, pouting in your borrowed coat
while nit-pickers picked on pointlessly
about which way to turn, which time to take.
A theoretical believer in free-will, now losing faith,
you inwardly recounted the ways you were
coerced to act against your nature – today,
and since the womb. Which was a thought, of course,
and buzzed cathartic. Determine this,
you said aloud, gesturing, and no one cared.

Winter Sonnets, V

Suppose the sleet keeps falling all afternoon,
and suppose I continue having nothing to do,
until I picture Dante mounting the stairway's
ivory steps -- the steps he climbs to see you,
Beatrice, standing at the high end of the embattlement
all dressed in white, and snow-white all around you
falls gently, and still through the near blank slate
where light makes any black seem brilliant blue
your green eyes gleam. Oh, any mundane room
and cold-footed waiting through a dreary day
will suddenly take flight. Oh, I’ll speak in couplets,
oh I’ll get up from my chair, and walk down past
the kitchen lights, and stare awhile at Dad,
at Mom knitting by the tree, and think of you.

Winter Sonnets, IV

After a morning of sorting through some music,
of waiting for some feeling to accrue,
white maybe, on the sill, the snow has pushed against
the house in drifts, and sleet has fallen, and I
haven’t made much progress. Mom and dad
are clanging pots in the kitchen, making lunch,
and my brother, the youngest, is killing electronic
warlords. I’d help, but I’m bent on finding songs
to make the melancholy lift, like my dad said
the weather won’t, at least today; he presses
his face against the back window to see
the spears of ice. He smiles. And now, my mom
tries to come in, but the door’s stuck – she taps:
“Justin,” she says, “It’s ready.” And maybe it is.

Winter Sonnets, III

A guest in my parents house at twenty-eight,
and still no mortgage or child of my own,
I’m up at two and picturing the tree
still bright at the house’s other, warmer end,
still gently raining red from it’s star-crown down,
making the heap beneath the bottom branches
look huge. It always did. These gifts, this year,
aren’t for the pink-cheeked hopeful version
of myself—no, he’s gone, and in his stead
two little Christmas angels, my brother’s,
asleep in bed, will be at the downward end
of the yuletide avalanche. I’ll say it’s clear
up here, Children— it’s fine. But I won’t say climb.

Winter Sonnets, II

The winter’s slick white hand rains down the glass
and slithers five blurred streaks, that bend in five
the lawn’s gray face. Half-white, half-snow, the grass
looks limp, looks up at least, and will survive
the winter. I’ve seen it do just that most years,
though none as hard as this— and none so cold:
my bedtime water froze stiff on the sill.
That was days ago, and now the melt spears
the pane into murky limbs, one lit dull gold
as something like the sun begins to spill
into the corner. The lawn looks happier.
Once, it was, I had to march out, mud-gilled
and dig a grave beneath a too-dead yard;
I’ve done it for myself. It isn’t hard.

Winter Sonnets, I

There’s no reason to believe that after this
there will be something; except that always before
it’s come: something else. I’ve woken to it daily:
a new set of conditions, a new pattern
of clouds stretched across the sky. I’ve never
been surprised by it – by my father coming in
and saying the silly phrase he just concocted
coming down the hall; new, for the fact
that never before has anyone who looks
like he does, right now, hair speckled silver
just so, glasses askew at 5 degrees, with that
body, that sweater, leaned in this guestroom door
and said those words, just the way he did.
And who says death won’t bring its one word more?

Que sais-je?

In the end, isn't all of this working to establish systems of language that we feel most accurately account for the state of things ethical.

That is, we want to know how to live. So we do live, some of us, ironically enough, lives of leisure concentrated on finding out how best to live. And to be honest, most minutes of the day I wouldn't want it otherwise. Occasionally, dailily, a panic will descend on me, saying, Justin! Why aren't you working your fingers to the bone!

I answer him with silence. I have no reason, except for a soft conviction concerning the value of work: quality and not quantity. Working to the bone and working well are not mutually exclusive, but it's easy enough to let them be.

Science! Funny when you think of it. I suppose it's contribution to the control we humans have over nature has provided me with my leisure, and yet... Mightn't I be just as happy in a medieval world, and act just as ethically? I might, yes, as self-righteous and naive as the question sounds. Montaigne, in his aristocratic leisure, sitting at home, translating, with more than a twinge of Irony, the work of Raymond Sebold...

Ethics: acting in a way that elicits confidence in and love for your person from the most people.

Knowledge (n.): The relationship between yourself and the world. Some call this our mental and physical impressions of the world's information. Also, the mental and physical categories we make for this information -- distinctions and organizations that continue to produce the capacity for more knowing.

To Know (v.): to develop a relationship between yourself and the world. (Also, the categorizing of impressions gathered during this relationship)

Belief: To be convinced of the relative accuracy or usefulness of some part of your worldly impressions.

Certainty: To be overly convinced of such.

It's all in Montaigne. Who got it all from Plutarch. Who got it all from ... Heraclitus? We've harped on this same chord for more than 2,000 years and yet...

Someone might say that without curiosity, we would wither away. But curiosity implies a light-hearted pursuit of knowledge. One that opens the eyes softly, rather than one that eats at the gut. An enlightenment, rather than an emburdenment, an embitterment, which always follows a perceived empowerment.

Adam and Eve ate from the fruit rather than naming the animals, both of which were kinds of knowing.

Which brings me to Human Dogma. The wonderful thing about complete skepticism and nihilism is that none of us are convinced by them. There are a few impressions, which we believe we've managed to communicate to each other, that we are all completely convinced of the accuracy of. I've named them before in this blog, but again: 1. That we have a self. 2. That it exists in a world (implying a web of things, given boundaries by and categorized according to their meaning in our lives). 3. That there are other selves.

And if its true that we share some basic beliefs, and that all other beliefs are made of impressions whose accurate naming we merely make ourselves feel convinced of -- well, before I finish that sentence, I suppose I should stop and consider that this idea would be impressed upon others and elicit conviction its accuracy only with great difficulty -- i.e. by being very convincing. I.e. rhetoric.

The role rhetoric plays in a world of seeming is indivisible from the role knowing plays -- what we know, we know by conviction. What has convinced us of what we know? Do you know you are sitting at your computer? How? Because you believe your senses, which are a power you believe in due to your capacity to categorize impressions, which is a power you believe in. Which isn't to say anything about belief in the statement "You are sitting at your computer." But we believe in our power of making useful phonemes and morphemes the same way -- we are convinced by certain impressions.

Try to convince me that Abraham Lincoln lived. You can't do it completely. If someone brought to me what I considered overwhelming evidence that Lincoln was a hoax perpetrated by the Illuminati, I would likely believe him. Especially if others started to hold that idea as accurate.

But try to convince me I don't exist, and gol-dernit, I won't quit.

Perhaps after some pretty extensive brainwashing, but I'm fairly certain it wouldn't stick. I'd stop eating and talking, to adhere to my new conviction, and then... I'd get hungry... and I'd ask for food...

Try to convince me you don't exist, and I'll only believe in your existence more.

So, what do we call it when people act on kill each other over impressions/idea/conceptions that neither party are fully convinced of (relative to the Human Dogma)? What else, but foolishness?

Sitting pretty in my ivory tower. Come down, come down, little fool.

An excerpt

Throughout this long development, from 600 B.C. to the present day, philosophers have been divided into those who wished to tighten social bonds and those who wished to relax them. With this difference others have been associated. The disciplinarians have advocated some system of dogma, either old or new, and have therefore been compelled to be in a greater or less degree, hostile to science, since their dogmas could not be proved empirically. They have almost invariably taught that happiness is not the good, but that "nobility" or "heroism" is to be preferred. They have had a sympathy with the irrational parts of human nature, since they have felt reason to be inimical to social cohesion. The libertarians, on the other hand, with the exception of the extreme anarchists [Robespierre!], have tended to be scientific, utilitarian, rationalistic, hostile to violent passion, and enemies of all the more profound forms of religion. This conflict existed in Greece before the rise of what we recognize as philosophy, and is already quite explicit in the earliest Greek thought. In changing forms, it has persisted down to the present day, and no doubt will persist for many ages to come.

[Well, at least we've established a bias, Mr. Russell]

The Rise of Greek Civilization

So, Russell left us last week with an oscillation -- the pitch between social-cohesion/tradition/authority/dogma and individualism/empiricism/science.
Which makes me think of Galileo, sitting before the Catholic tribunal, feeling convinced of what he had observed and reasoned, and yet perhaps also feeling sympathy for the concepts that the Catholic Church had draped her authority, and therefore her empire, over.
Perhaps the best image of this oscillation is the French Revolution. France swung, in a matter of ten years, from a Monarchical society, where Aristocracy and Clergy held places of power, to "forms based on the Enlightenment" -- individualism, science, democracy. Many hold that the conflict came because of the clash between the capitalistic bourgeoisie and the aristocracy -- which sounds again like this oscillation.
Russell chooses, I think, a middle way. He is all for science and subjectivity, but he also knows that Storming the Bastille might mean you get, along with a Republic, The Reign of Terror. You might get blood-thirsty mobs running through the streets.
Which makes me respect the original United States Government all the more -- for striking a delicate balance, or seeming to at least, between centralized power and individual freedom. But then, I have libertarian leanings.
Money -- so much has been said about it -- symbol of individualism, issued by a centralized power.

Which has nothing yet to do with the Rise of Greek Civilization.

Blue Angel

written at Squaw...

My brother chose Bubba Shot the Jukebox
For God knows why. He bought some snakeskin boots.
This was our brief Summer of Country, and
I did it my way: more secretive, no
Tight jeans, no cowboy hat – I hadn’t yet rung
Puberty’s bell. I still crept through starless vaults
Rat-like, even as we learned to line-dance,
Both hands hooked on bighorn buckles – Angel
It was then I chose you. That night
The newly buxom white-fringed girls
bootscooted the hardwood, invisible to me.
A lonely tune began to conjure you
from another, darker, world. Blue Angel, he crooned,
And my rat-eyes gleamed, and my brother, dimly, knew.

One more post from Richardson

This collection also has aphorisms! I love this guy. Here are some that caught my eye as I flipped through them:

219. It takes more than one life to be sure what's killing you.

221. More than you remember stays green all winter.

222. Worry wishes life were over.

224. Water deepens where it has to wait.

227. I am saving good deeds to buy a great sin.

234. Why should the whole lake have the same name?

242. If I can keep giving you want you want, I may not have to love you.

395. Disillusionment is also an illusion.

475. We have secrets from others. But our secrets have secrets from us.

32. If you're Larkin or Bishop, one book a decade is enough. If you're not? More than enough.

39. The will is weak. Good thing, or we'd succeed in governing our lives with our stupid ideas!

128. Intimates: the ones it's hardest to tell everything you're thinking.

212. Happiness is not the only happiness.

276. No gardens without weeds? No weeds without gardens.

Encyclopedia of Stones

(These are entries from James Richardson's Encyclopedia of the Stones - a Pastoral.)


1.
They do not believe in the transmigration of souls.
They say their bodies will move
as leaves through light.

Everything would be perfect if the atoms
were the right shape and did not fall down.

2.
They resent being inscribed
as if they could not remember,
but they congratulate us on the wisdom
of using them to mark graves.

3.
Sand makes them nervous.

4.
They perceive the cosmos as the interior
of a mighty stone.
At night this is perfectly clear.

5.
Long ago
they began to give of their light
to build what we now call the moon.
It was almost finished.

6.
Tradition says they were the paperweights of a lord
whose messages rotted beneath them.
So they think hard.

The old remember being flowers,
but the young ridicule them and remember fire.

8.
This is their heroic myth:
"One afternoon the great stone set out."

It is not over.

9.
They are unable to perceive moths.

10.
They have a dream, but it is taking
all of them all time
to imagine it.

13.
Knowing them to be fond of games, I asked
why they did not arrange themselves
according to the constellations, but they said

Look.

22.
Here is another one of their stories:
"One Stone."
Like the others it is characterized
by control of plot and fidelity to the real.

24.
They are experimenting with sex
but are still waiting for the first ones to finish.

28.
When it is unbearably clear,
the stones have taken a deep breath.

35.
When I describe to them how we see a shooting star,
they say "That is how you look to us."

When I tell them how they look to me,
they are elated and describe in turn
something I have never seen and do not understand.

37.
Some of their favorites: October,
salt, flowers, 10 P.M., starfish,
Paul Klee, stories, waiting, the moon.

38.
You know the sky is blue
from the accumulated breath of stones,
or will, next time you are asked.

48.
I told them my favorite story:
"One day."

They liked it except for
the surprise ending.

49.
They know the infinitesimal ways
to the center of peach and oyster,
cherry, brain and heart.

63.
I say "How do you get to the river?"
They say "It will come."

Squaw Valley, James Richardson, and Russell

I've been a week away, and so Russell has had to wait by the wayside. Whatever that might mean. I've been in Squaw Valley, which is a lovely dip in the rock, a meadow lined with Aspens, twenty minutes away from Tahoe. I was there for a writing conference, and did write, some of which I will shortly post.

Today I've been catching up on the centuries -- that is, regaining the speed necessary to not be flung far off when I lay a hand back to Russell. Charting the 15th. If the 16th century was the beginning of the modern era, then the 15th was the ending of the middle era, the middle ages -- Constantinople fell, Brunelleschi painted perspective, Gutenberg invented the Press, and Columbus sailed the Ocean Blue.

And I've also been reading James Richardson's poetry -- suggested to me by Jim McMichael, who is my professor here at UCI, and was a nominee for 2006's National Book Award.

It's a collection called Interglacial. The first three poems -- one which serves as an epigraph, and two from his first collection called Reservations -- are fantastic. They don't give me the feeling of beings rhetorical tricks, which of course merely means they are better at being rhetorical, at convincing me -- more convincingly speaking of some True.

Here is one of his published in the New Yorker (I like it):

End of Summer

Just an uncommon lull in the traffic
so you hear some guy in an apron, sleeves rolled up,
with his brusque sweep brusque sweep of the sidewalk,
and the slap shut of a too thin rental van,
and I told him no a gust has snatched from a conversation
and brought to you, loud.

It would be so different
if any of these were missing is the feeling
you always have on the first day of autumn,
no, the first day you think of autumn, when somehow

the sun singling out high windows,
a waiter settling a billow of white cloth
with glasses and silver, and the sparrows
shattering to nowhere are the Summer
waving that here is where it turns
and will no longer be walking with you,

traveller, who now leave all of this behind,
carrying only what it has made of you.
Already the crowds seem darker and more hurried
and the slang grows stranger and stranger,
and you do not understand what you love,
yet here, rounding a corner in mild sunset,
is the world again, wide-eyed as a child
holding up a toy even you can fix.

How light your step
down the narrowing avenue to the cross streets,
October, small November, barely legible December.

Introduction to Russell's "History"

I was taught to consider "evil" all those who spoke out against the tradition in which I was raised. To look on them with a mixture of pity and hate.
I found Russell's "Why I am not a Christian" when I was in high-school, and promptly assigned him to my growing blacklist. I found his arguments to be outrageous. I decided, almost immediately, that they were juvenile, inflammatory, and empty.
Of course, they aren't. They are, for the most part, compelling. They do still prickle my skin, simply by being polemics aimed at the heart of my mind -- however, he himself has since been granted (by whom?) a pardon. His horns have fallen off. I've read a bit of a biography of his childhood as well as bits of other works, and they've convinced me of his sincere desire to believe what he feels are honest and justifiable things to believe.
"Why I'm not a Christian" ends by advocating the leaving-off of dogmas -- "A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men," Russell says.
20 years later, in the middle of the second world war, Russell finished writing his History of Western Philosophy, with the help of his wife Patricia (who did most of the research for him). The issue of dogma factors heavily in this work as well. Dogma is on one end of the pendulum swing that Western Philosophy has been beating out since the beginning -- the other is Science. The No Man's Land between the two is Philosophy -- "something intermediate between Theology and Science."

All definite knowledge ... belongs to Science; all dogma as to what surpasses definite knowledge belongs to Theology. ... Almost all the questions of most interest to speculative minds are sych as science cannot answer, and the confident answers of theologians no longer seem so convincing as they did in former centuries.

He lists a series of unanswerable questions, questions that require dogmatic belief, or ... philosophy. He asserts that this book will be the answer to the question of why, historically, philosophy has bothered to ponder these unanswerable questions. Action depends on belief, and to understand why people acted the way they did, is to understand, in part, what they believed.
Science tells us what we can know -- not much -- and Theology purports to fill in the rest. Russell clearly doesn't appreciate this gesture. He would rather live bravely through the uncertainty he believes himself to be in, but "it is not good either to forget the questions that philosophy asks..."

To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.

Russell then proceeds to give us the brief outline of history, through this oscillation-lens. He links to dogma any sort of cultural tradition that unites a people in a unified belief -- thus creating civilization of some sort -- and to science he ties any individualism or free-minded exploration of the world that tends to dissolve societal bonds. The cycle of history, according to Russell, follows this track, back and forth, rigid tradition to a relaxation to the beginnings of free-minded genius, to dissolution, to tyranny, whereby a new tradition is instituted ...

Russell ends his introduction with a rally-cry quite similar to that of "Why I am not..." His vision of a brighter future, in this instance, comes under the title of "Liberalism":

The doctrine of liberalism is the attempt to escape this endless oscillation [the one I've illustrated for you above.] The essence of liberalism is an attempt to secure a social order not based on irrational dogma, and insuring stability without innvolving more restraints than are necessary for the preservation of the community. Whether this attempt can succeed...

...only the future can determine.

One of a Kinds

The ones
who each think
that they are the one
not of, but distinct
from the kind.
They are right --
for the kind know
it's wrong to seem
to themselves as anything
but the one who is
very much like
every other.

To say "I like you"
is to make this claim.

"Thoughts that are at peace"

When you find yourself awake at 1 am charting the events of the 16th century, you should ask yourself: Am I insane? Am I doing this out of anxiety, or pride, or because of strange love?

I'll agree with Wittgenstein, who was in turn agreeing with a great many philosophers before him, starting with Socrates, who first said: The goal of philosophy is thoughts that are at peace.

That is, the product of loving wisdom is thoughts that are at peace. Wisdom is -- so the cliche goes -- knowing that you don't know much. Loving wisdom -- that is: humbly observing and meditating on the world and its ways because you just want to, that is: philosophy -- is the process of untangling what you think you know and why you think you know it. It is therapeutic. It is freeing oneself, and humbling oneself, at the same time.

Knowledge is what we call our belief concerning the experiential relationship between ourselves and the world. It is a relationship. Certainty is the name of a feeling we have about that relationship. It is not the result of mathematical deduction. One becomes more or less convinced that what one says about the relationship between oneself and the world is an accurate way of saying it.

I for one am glad for the few simple human dogmas we all, or nearly all, share: 1. That we are existing in a world (I've never met or heard of someone not considered crazy who did not act on this belief) (if you say "Buddhism" I say read the story of Siddhartha's enlightenment, and think on the significance of the way he comes to it) (If you say George Berkeley, I say that saying that the world is actually there or saying that it is just perceived aren't really different, practically speaking) 2. That the world, existing outside of us, is governed by laws that we perceive, not that we create. 3. That reflecting on and talking about our relationship to the world, revering the existence of and power of objective reality, is a good thing: Sursum Corda -- lift up your heart.

To that end, some stay up late charting the centuries, mulling over the course of human thought and action. We are strange creatures -- strange that it fills me with feelings of wonder and of its strangeness -- strange compared to what?

I think it is strange compared to what I once thought of being human. Which wasn't much -- not much thinking, that is. Or, thinking that happened behind many veils.

So, to get to my purpose: I am reading Betrand Russell's "History of Western Philosophy" and will be doing little summaries of the chapters here, for my own benefit. I have an awful memory. Fixing this online, forever!, will be helpful for me, and maybe also for anyone else who happens to stumble upon it, and doesn't have the time to read the actual 800 page text.

A Difficult Grace

I've been reading the essays of Michael Ryan, one of the professors of poetry here at UCI. Which is an interesting title, I've always thought - professor of anything. A public declaration of your expertise in a field, apparently, from the Latin verb "profitieri".

Anyway, his essays, as Pinsky tells us on the front cover blurb, are "crisp, passionate, and learned." I like "learned", thanks Bob.

Crisp, though, yes, they are crisp. They slice well. Many of them are short, and full of clear expressions of a simple philosophy of poetry, form and purpose.

This Mortal Coil

This blog has been on hiatus again. It seems to happen for a few months, every few months. It usually corresponds to some new swing of thought and action -- in this case, a series of actions, that led to a series of thoughts, that led to the neglecting of this blog.
I've been reading Shakespeare, and Hass, and Heidegger -- that is The Poet, a poet, and a poet-philosopher. I am thinking about Hamlet, and that too much introspection becomes inaction. As Coleridge says, "I have a smack of Hamlet myself, if I may say so."
You may.

Anamnesis

I found some previously unpublished blogs, sitting in draft-form in the "Edit posts" section -- this one from early 2007 (about Anamnesis -- the process (to state it simply) of remembering what you have forgotten) (So strange to think about the history of your own psyche) :

"It's that time again - cycle, cycle, cycle - wheel of time churns its melancholy way, me hog-tied to a cross beam, coming up for air.
Asleep in the water, bewildered in the light.
Shall I make written language the memory I don't have? Shall I correspond with the visible - make symbols for the abstract concepts in my head?
The answer to that question is yes. Yes I will do this, having found it the best way to maintain the livelihood of the eternalhoodness of my head. That is, keep the body in step with the "me" that has been a-ponderin for some years now, gnawing at its favorite bone, but forgetful. Forgetting everything it loves, always - its okay. We start again.
Principal #1: Express the yet-unexpressed intuitions of the world and its loveliness.
Principal #2: Wholeness and soundness of being.
Principal #3: Be still and know the voice, the hand, the shepherd. Know the worlds Maker as best as you can, and let the goodness of that knowing change the way you talk and step.
Principal #4: Don't ever hesitate to say what you mean, regardless of what nonsense it seems to be.
Principal #5: Don't try to sound cool. Don't try to be sexy. Don't believe the sugar-lie.

The Sugar-lie? Thus: the lie my body believes, told to it by sweet sweet voices, that hunger must be filled immediately. It must not necessarily. Maybe not evil to fill it -- what is the definition of evil? Who defines evil? Say God, yes, but how do you know what God says? Who made you Lord over the world's knowledge?

All of the symbols of my life stand before me mute, waiting for the signal. I have none. I am listening to Gorecki's 3rd symphony, and I have none. I am holding up a finger.

Objectivism

Ayn Rand, your spirit hovers over these american waters. Since Atlas shrugged, many of us have been following suit. I'm not sure what it was that makes me hate you so much. I think that it's because, like everyone, you failed to say the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but. And you wouldn't admit having failed.
Of course, I have figured it all out. All of the unfitting pieces of your systematic assembly of the puzzle of existence I have removed and filled the gaps with light. You left me your mantle like Elijah, and I've cut it to pieces, patched it into sails, tried to catch the wind.
The world exists. In this we agree, apparently. Knowledge is a relationship to this actual existent and orderly world. Yes, this order that we perceive hovers between two layers of flux - our minds and mystic fields of energy - yet it exists.
Certainty is a feeling about the relationship of our minds to this world. Concepts, we agree I think, are abstractions of perceived objects and their relationships - or that language, the ability to perceive ourselves lucidly and conceptualize and step back and speak, is grounded in things. So if there was a chain, our minds perceive things and relations between things, and this is grounds for language, symbol for thing, which causes communication, which causes the ability to abstract, which causes language about abstractions, which causes self-awareness, which I have right now. I am aware of my flesh in a tilting chair in Irvine, CA (we give names to geographical locations!) (language is beautiful) and I am aware that I am aware, and it allows me to circle around myself as I speak, to check myself, to say to self:
"Self, as ye listen to Thomas Tallis' lovely ancient music through two ear buds sucking electronic juice through long black root to release wave-sound-scent into your head's chambers remember that ye are capable of commiting the sins of your foremother, our dearly beloved Aynnie Randoferous. You are capable of speaking too soon and saying a dishonest word. You are capable of flinging words unwinged out of the nest, and they will fall hard to the real ground. Self, come to me, let me hold you, let me kiss you, yes, we are crazy, but it is the kind of craziness I desire, the kind that does not hide from itself, that kind that stands willingly in the hard light of the world, not even turning from the hope that is here, not even turning from the happiness of it. "

Thread of the Amnesiac

The thread often slips. I try
to keep it clasped tight between my pincers
through the long-winded goose
chasing. I fail.
Even in this moment as I clatter backwards
on all fours recounting
all of the ways I have fallen short – all of the music
I began, with what heat!, and promptly cut off cold
turkey. Oh, I’m sorry, yes,
an accident of course, just
slipped my mind. Socrates
stood motionless for days on end
to keep a palsied grip on the kite’s
elusive tail that whips up sometimes, pulls taut, 80 degrees
skyward, significant
I’m telling you, easy to follow.
We get this hallowed sense of self, religious
inflation, which, in the course of things, is lost
when the kite dips and the rope
goes limp,
and I’m left alone
in one place, trying to re-collect the story,
trying to patch together clues
to my amnesiac life, amidst a rabble
of circumstantial evidence, and this ridiculous
rope strung backwards through time,
tied always - strange now that I think of it -
to the successive images of me.

Vivaldi

Don’t try and tell me
all of the ways
that eagerness fails –

it does yes, perhaps,
in the end. But do we ever have the end?

We have only now, this: mop of hair
on the Red Priest’s pate jouncing back and forth
to the cheerful cadence, raised arm
announcing each arriving beat.

We wait expectant for the bright descent –
for the opening of the next gate, ajar,
daylight betraying the world behind.
We follow the hand that runs from room to room
throwing wide the doors of the house.

Don’t try and explain away
the smile on Vivaldi’s face,
or mine. Let tomorrow worry
about itself.

Won’t eagerness wend its way off some distant cliff
of meaninglessness? Yes, and how the hell should I know.
Too many monolithic syllables in between.

And such delight in the next.
Such vivid delight in the next.

Arcangelo Corelli

Jumping back to one of Vivaldi's influences, Corelli's music sounds more like Scarlatti than the later more complex Baroque sound. Listening to his violin sonata opus 5.
He was born in Ravenna, which was one of my favorite stops in Italy when I went a couple years back. Lovely old Byzantine city, cobblestoned and courtyarded - home to San Vitale, an exceptionally beautiful Byzantine Basilica of the 6th century.
His melodies are clear and fluid. They are refreshing.
Click on Corelli's flowing mane to hear Concerti Grossi, Opus 6, no 8, allegro.

Mortaldi

Get it? "Viva" means "live" and "morte" means "die" so "mortaldi" would be... nevermind. This is the last day of Vivaldi's ornate moment in the spotlight. Listening to a random concerto for violin, strings, and the harpsichord right now. I read somewhere that the historical category of "baroque" as its own era is questionable because of the vast differences between early baroque, and late. I can hear them. Vivaldi was a bit of a jump into the mid to late baroque for me, and his music is quite different than Scarlatti's. Much more... classical - you know, complex and varied. Lots of tempo changes. Violins dancing around like fruit flies - the strings in the back like an industrious cityscape. Bom, bom, bom! (puffs of smoke) Scarlatti still had that careful, reserved simplicity of ye olden days.
As I listen, I'm prepping to jump back into the waters of Rhetoric and Critical Reading. Met my new class. They seem swell. Not so much in the swollen sense, as in the neat-o, allright.

The Man and His Soul

The man sat next to his soul on the sofa touching it occasionally to see if its feeling would change from moment to moment. It did not. He only asked it questions when he became lonely. I would encourage those inclined to object to the ambiguity of the pronoun usage in this scene to remember that when I say "he" in any moment, it does not matter to whom I am referring - either way it is one and the same. The soul abstracts the man, as does the man, away from himself. They are, however, and ever will be, the same creature.
So, as I said, the soul asked questions to the man who touched, and he replied in kind with light and encouraging puffs of language. His sentences, it became clear, his words to himself, were wrapped about something.
This made the soul touch faster - the man began to ask his questions in rapid succession - poppop pop -like a derrick pumping oil, bad and noxious, from the world's snake bite wound. They watched his words unravel. Something was appearing. Loneliness evaporated into mystic glee. Harder and harder they went, language greased and gunning, and then
the thing itself revealed.
Was laid bare.
I saw it.
I was watching.

The man and the soul, however, had fallen asleep. Three times this happened. Before the fourth could find its culmination, the ground had taken back its own.

The Consolation of the Soul

After all the doors have had their handles
twisted off. After all the roads out to the lake
have been erased. (Leaving me stranded)
After we have stood and faced
what it is

that we aren't capable of calling you,
Soul, come, and sit with me.
I need an arm,
a bit of flesh,
to lean my weight upon.

You dont refuse an old man
it? A moment ago I was young
and building -
Then the raucous vacuum
came and orchestrated the renewal
of the dark. It meant to.
Oh, it feels that it meant to
do that to you.

Come, then, let me touch your face
so you can know
you are.

And we shall lean again into the wind -
Soul, do you hear me
calling down the funnel?-

the dark and ravishing wind.

Viva Vivaldi

Buona vita nel'anno nouvo. Is that the way its said? I guess that would be saying that the good life, buona vita, is in, "inside of", nel, the new year. Which isn't what I meant, but sort of nice. Poetical. And thats my question. Does the poetical blurring of reality by language create some of the meta-substances we base so much of our lives on? I don't think so, but its a question anyway.
Vivaldi! He, formidable master of the Baroquean pitch, is the composer of the week. I've been listening to the Four Seasons, which you've heard nearly in entirety even if you think you haven't. La Stravaganza is next in the queue. His music feels like the Californian New Year: bright, busy, wealthy.

Come now, let us reason it together Soul

We must be frank,
for the days are short -
It being winter.

It being the climate.
It being the mustard sandwich
we wave when bereft at lunch
of the thing itself -

whatever we happen to be speaking of.

Soul? Are you my gesture's pith or sandwich?
That's not the question I brought you here to ask,
but it seems pertinent.

It seems like it will fit.
It always fits.
It was made to.

I'm asking: there's you, and there's your flesh -
in English, two extremities, and two hearts, composite
acting as the thing we wave
when we speak of you.

My lips, bread.
My tongue, processing meat -

I am waving myself out over the dark lake.
I am conversing of you.
With whom?
With whom?

------
dedicated to the Hofer

What the Soul is making

In the mornings, over the stovetop.

With an arched neck,
lays an ear to the fleshy divet
between his chests pectoral lumps
and listens to the metronomic
drumbeat of blood.

Oh Soul, can't you see I'm dying
to know where it is you're making
your habitation?

(This is not about the beauty of the language!
Come out, my hands are clean!)

The soul remains quiet,
flexing in the dark

to whom I addressed my next question:
And what are you the lack of?
And why do I hate you so much?

The blood pumps.
A waft of pancake batter cooking lifts,
pungence of a morphic creature.

Vegas

It means the meadows! I was thinking of warrior Amazon goddesses, not grasslands. Apparently it was named thus because the Spaniards who christened it found natural artesian springs as they passed through.
It was a clean place, and gracious.

Ulysses and the New Year

I have just finished reading, here on this lovely and bright January the first of 2007, the opening chapter of James Joyce's Ulysses. It is, to be blunt, amazing. The last time that I can remember enjoying a bit of prose so much was my brief liaison with the journal entries of Gerard Manley Hopkins.
The syntax is a veritable freak show of perfection, the slipping between thought and dialogue smooth and sweet, and the characters livid with animation. Buck Mulligan is doing wonders for my heart.
This may be presumptuous, but if the first chapter is a clue, this book will be one of my favorites long before I reach its faraway final word. It is, after all, not in the least a short novel.
And the new year is here. As you might have induced from my last two poems, I spent some of it in the desert. Mojave National Preserve, 100 miles southwest of Satan's National Preserve. No, I'm not talking about Death Valley - that's 100 miles due north. I'm speaking of Vegas. Las Vegas. The Vegas. And what are the Vegas? No one really knows, but shoot, can they put on a show.
Sorry, my verbosity has been aroused.
Back to Stephen Dedalus.

on the graciousness of light to the desert

the sun and moon are both good to the desert.
they do no harm to it.
it is so simple. it is not listening
to the babble of the way things
should be. it is even, steady,
and rises quickly in both lights
when it wants to.
these rises, these white peaks, granite
and dry scrub,
are silent in that hour
when the sun and moon meet -
they want to be silent -
they have nothing more to say than being there.
they let the sky speak its smallest most
neglected songs: the low swish of cirrus clouds
unraveling, the faint clap
of stars appearing. these love the desert for its humility,
and fear it.
who is this, so wise, so simple
as to let things be how they are?
the sun reveals it.
the moon makes it bright with joy.

What the Soul is doing in the Desert

Oh Soul,
I am thinking of a new kind of year.

As the late year folded down
old behind the last range,
red and thin, flapping in the hard winter wind,

I clapped my hands -
a new idea.

I waited, not speaking a word to any soul,
not even you,

until the sun blushed its sphere
and sank. Until the last spot of light winked.
Until the dimming sky screamed,
ripped the last pink
gauze off the dying thing and slapped it

back into the universe, I waited,
every inch of my skin bristling -

and when the old man howled and collapsed back,
I clapped

and the sky said "Ma cosa fai?"

I replied "I am inventing again."

The Soul

I am asking myself a question
when I write those two words.

It has been said that God will not be mocked,
so I am not afraid to ask.

I am in a small room
typing on a black plastic keyboard
having just read the words of a friend about
the desert he is in;
Iraq, war, separation,

the soul.
Some of us are forced to stand still in the dark and face ourselves.

I lift my trembling hand out over the dark lake.
What do I hope for, oh Soul, in all of this reaching,
say it back to me:

joy.

Hanukkah

It’s such a small miracle –
1 days oil stretching to 8.
No one come death-ragged from
the gaping tomb,
no one taken up
in a whirl of fire.
I almost believe it
like I would believe you if you told me
that you made a cake yesterday
and it came out
with the shape of a feather on it.
Feathers mean something to you and I,
vaguely. Just enough. But if none had come
no one would be weeping.
No souls would plummet to the earth.
We’d wait awhile
till we got the oil
and come up with a reason
why it was all perfect timing –
light the candles,
call it “When the Oil
Finally Showed Up Day.”
But it stretched.
You pulled the cake
from the hot tomb
and across its yellow face
a feather had been mysteriously swirled.
You called me.
I remember.

A Native Hill

I am heading back toward home soon for Christmas - early this week.
For awhile, I thought that it was good to call whatever place I was in, I was living, my home, in order to fully define myself as a man - a rock - carrying his home on his back like a manly snail. Snails are manly in this sense.
Irvine is lovely, and I can feel myself acclimating to its oceanview desert scrubbrush wilderness. But it is not home. It is not in my blood. And the ridiculous suit of armor, concrete and plastic, that has been pulled over top of its rooty desert beauty, makes it nearly impossible for me to love it fully.
Can a man love a city? Yes. A city, glass and chrome, does not seem quite as much of an insult to land as this sprawling suburbia that Irvine is made of - that shrieks when it sees an open spot, diving to clap a strip mall over it.
The Lord is making me sane in an insane world. I am afraid it is going to be painful. I am afraid of the pain of sanity in America.
Wendell Berry, author of the essay A Native Hill, has his land in Kentucky - he can stand back and say "Well at least I settled in a place, and raised a family, and did not destroy, but shepherded, made good." Wendell, I am a wanderer - I am a shepherd only to a flock of wild visions.
Can a man find a home in an idea? Can he find home in a Spirit? Can he find home in a woman?
This below is one the last poems from Shepherd, which I've been working on over the course of the last year.

______

If in the wild places of the world
you come across the cloaked figure
of a man clenching a black bag
pacing or perched in a squat
on the high point of a desert rock,
violently sweating,

leave him be. He
is looking for his home

and he does not have a home.

Listen to the Italian for a Moment

click on Scarlatti's wig to hear a snippet of his music

Scarlatti!

First, a shout out to Google for revamping Blogger.com - it's much more excellenter now.

Second, a shout out to Allesandro Scarlatti. A prominent figure in the landscape of Baroque composers, Scarlatti's pieces have levity, energy and clarity even through their relative complexity. Music beyond the Baroque era is often full of a complexity that can become a sort of heaviness - like hearing Joyce read aloud. Its beautiful, but too much. Scarlatti's music seems to be a perfect balance, for my ear, between simplicity and complexity, joy and sorrow. I am listening to Sinfonia in C Major, and I don't have any idea what this means (specifically the Sinfonia part), but I am enjoying immensely even in my ignorance.

Third, a shout out to the students in 39B Rhetoric & Critical Reading, section whatever-the-stink-it-was, who learned a thing or two I think, and enjoyed themselves in the process - this is all a way of saying that I liked my students, and am sad to part with them. They will always hold a place in my heart until they don't anymore.

Christmas is coming. Listen world - the One you long for has come. Let's tell each other the story again.

l'Orfeo, favola in musica

Orfeo, fable in music, is the earliest work considered to be an opera. Monteverdi composed the music, and another Italian with a rad name, Alessandro Striggio, wrote the text. Orfeo, or Orpheus as he is commonly known in English, could sing and play the lute so beautifully, so powerfully, he could sway the gods themselves with its loveliness.
Euridice, his new bride, dies suddenly, and Orfeo descends into Hades armed only with his music.
This is the prologue to the Opera, in which the single female vocalist sings of the power of music.

And this is the first four stanzas of William Wordsworth's "Power of Music":

AN Orpheus! an Orpheus! yes, Faith may grow bold,
And take to herself all the wonders of old; --
Near the stately Pantheon you'll meet with the same
In the street that from Oxford hath borrowed its name.

His station is there; and he works on the crowd,
He sways them with harmony merry and loud;
He fills with his power all their hearts to the brim --
Was aught ever heard like his fiddle and him?

What an eager assembly! what an empire is this!
The weary have life, and the hungry have bliss;
The mourner is cheered, and the anxious have rest;
And the guilt-burdened soul is no longer opprest.

As the Moon brightens round her the clouds of the night,
So He, where he stands, is a centre of light;
It gleams on the face, there, of dusky-browed Jack,
And the pale-visaged Baker's, with basket on back.

More "Animal"

He is blind, that grim and rawboned god,
black smoke,
and the world now dark –
he didn’t see me
flat behind the back of the creature,
my lamp clapped dim
between our bodies.
Or did I put it out?

I would ask – lift my tongue
into your matted hair –
if I thought you cared to, or could,
answer with any sort of luminous
word.

The sound of death’s footsteps
made me forget almost everything.

Yet he passed,
and did his sullen work
to lift the wooden hatch,
as the night rumbled forward on its track
toward the round horizon.

Monteverdi = Greenmountain

Claudio Monteverdi is seen as the last of the Renaissance composers, and the first of the Baroque composers. Plus, he's got a sweet name.
In his most famous work, Vespro della Beata Vergine, you can hear both the influence of the monophonic plainchant of the Gregorians, and the markedly different instrumental intricacies of the new styles.
The first movement opens with a male voice chanting, in the old style, the phrase "O God make speed to save me." Hearing only the single voice, I thought I was still lost in the familiar mystic realm of the ancients, out in the shadowed wilds. But then, like a ceiling full of chandeliers suddenly lit (I actually shook in my chair), comes the full orchestral and choral response, "O Lord make haste to help me." This ain't early music anymore. He combines masterfully the old and the new.
I wish it was easier. I find myself thinking of this constantly: how do you proceed through life so that the lessons you learn stick with you, and show up in the new situations - so that what you learn is added to, is gained upon. Monteverdi's music represents the giant snowball of Western music that had been slowly growing, collecting new techniques and instruments, having begun as a simple chanted melody during the time of the Byzantine empire. His Vespro is a huge ball of lutes, harpsichords, violas, counterpoint technique, new harmony, and choir voices.
Hot damn, I want that. Every word should brim with the knowledge of the learned - of time experienced. I think this is called wisdom.
My poems are my memory, and my teachers. They walk behind me in a motley gang, making strange noises - birds, creatures, plants, robed figures - heads bobbing. I want to feel them there, reteaching me what they taught me, so painfully and beautifully, once before.

Deliquence

You'd think a man about to step through the ornate gates of the world of Baroque music would have a better grip on his daily habits - you'd think he'd have a track of well-placed steps upon the daily race. Nope. I hiked up, however, some green scrub-desert hills south of Irvine, just east of San Juan Capistrano, which is the town famous for its mission swallows. Sparrows? Birds.
Ate a tasty turkey sandwich while perched on a rock overlooking a ridged valley. Felt like an Indian, or a hawk. Tried smoking my pipe, but it wouldn't light in the wind.

Where to begin with this new world. The thanksgiving meditation was good. Paused from posts - is how I would describe what I did If I didn't feel so deliquent.

But, I do. I owe something now to this electronic page. A lesson, at least, in the ways of ancient music. But no longer! - will I be deliquent. (That's not true)

Moving forward into a brave new world.
If you been reading and would like a cd & short guide of the music I've described during the study of early music, let me know. I'll send one to you.

I haven't posted a new poem in a few light years. Which is a measure of distance. Which makes no sense.

So here's one, from my new series, Animal:

--

Today these hands are mine.

I say it in a dream – a dismal haze.

Today I will do what is good and mindful.
I will do what is natural to the light.

I move, mistaken, on the inside.

Today I’ll writhe up from this hole
and take a bite of all the brightest things.

But even as I say it, twisted with pleasure,
I rap against the inner notches of my ribs and wake
silent in the dark wet,
where the heat of a distant noon sun seeps through
the outer skin of the sheath pulled close around this cavity,
this suffocating world,
and I hear the sound of mine own voice, speaking, above me -

Today I am animal.

Review of Thanks & von Bingen

Well, I decided Thanksgiving week would be a good time to do a wrap-up review of early music - it certainly has created a new room in my mind & heart worth being thankful for. I am thankful for Palestrina, Machaut, the Franco-Flems, the British buds - they are all friends of mine now, in some capacity or other.
As a backdrop for a week of meditative reflection, I have chosen to kick it way back to the roots - to the early of the early birds. This includes gregorian & ambrosian chant, as well as the mystic Hildegard von Bingen.
Hildegard was a mystic from the 12th century - she claims to have received visions from God, as well as the command to "Write what you see." She wrote: three books of descriptions of her visions with interpretations, poetry, as well as musical compositions.
I was just listening to "Fire of Creation," from The Origin of Fire.
That's Hildegard in the blue doorway, with her scribe Volmar.
Um... I want a scribe named Volmar.

I call and cry unto Thee

... is the name of the last song I am listening to by Thom Tallis. He and his licensed compatriot are being swept off the lens.
I don't know who I will choose next. I might break the bubble of the baroque tonight - step in from the strange & vast medieval landscape to the intricate interior of the Baroque.
Went on a walk tonight with Alan, my good fiction friend - he is not a fiction, I'm fairly certain, but he does write it. We walked through some of the wild Irvine brush just west of my apartment complex. There is a certain dip in the path where the air cools. Irvine, as she was meant to be, comes alive there. Sparrows dart from the bushes, white-tailed rabbits do the same, plunging back in moments later, and the wild scent of all the local herbs culminates into something like music.
I call and cry unto Thee, Being whose presence shines in this world you've made, whose voice mutters joyfully in the dry stick-bushes where the path dips.
I am a wild creature, tied to a lamp, tied to a bag of broken words. The sparrows don't accuse me - they don't notice. They assume I am an animal, like themselves, singing my song, walking along, eating seeds, maybe, they think, or meat - (all along the trail piles of coyote dung betray other wild eaters).
If we are full of the hot air of language disconnected from experience, then we must slowly exhale, paper bags puffed up and crushed, squeezed like bagpipes - to the point of being small and compact and ourselves. Wheeze with me awhile, and return to find that things have meaning. This is not existential moping - I pray it is not. This is not a task that many, most, have the pleasure of undertaking: To know oneself. To drag every last creature out of ones head & flesh and ask them "Who are you, little one, with a life inside of me?"
I am Animal. I am Lamp.
Unfortunately, this all has the flavor & tone of solipsism - to become wise, a man must walk through many doors, and the door of the self is one of them. At this point, he will not be sure if he is an egotistical ass or not - chances are, he is. We, most of us, are.
I draw my pictures. I write my words. I learn about music. I look for love. I strengthen my body. I whistle. Like a bird sometimes.
But after this, after a man walks through this door once - (I call and cry unto Thee with the hope of it God) - he can turn the lamp upon other things, other people. He can sweep the self from the center of his head's light, and fill it with other worthy creatures.

To Be Perceived

...as such and such; To be regarded highly; To be known as someone who is different - as someone who has done something great; To do something great; To reach out to the world, great Philanthropist, and rescue many, heal wounds, lift the downtrodden of the world; To make sure that someone sees the thing you do for good in secret; To do a thing for good in secret and roll it under your tongue like a caramel; To distract yourself from the pain of not doing something great; To hide the fact that you have never acted because you have been afraid of the failure of not being perceived as having acted greatly; To know exactly what it means to do something great;

all these are chains that stop a man from doing - what? From living as himself. From doing the thing that is his thing to do. I am not entirely sure what this means.

But here is the world. Here I am, contraption of flesh & light. Here are others, near me. Push the whole damn dark world of fear aside - the fear of not being perceived by oneself or by the world as great - and suddenly you are very small, and very much yourself. Reach up and touch your nose. That is the sort of thing you can do.

And if there are things happening to you, things that you are choosing, that have the smell and texture of greatness, ingest them as the skin does oil - soak, and do not say a word, but keep doing things. Keep touching your nose. Keep combing the hair of the good thing. Listen to William Byrd's keyboard music. Smile and bend your knees and eat some food. It will break apart, back into the flesh & light it came from, and nourish you - a creature - an animal - a soul.

Spem in Alium

Not a beautiful phrase, (the first word being a near homonym to everyone's favorite meat-product), but, indeed, a beautiful song. Spem in Alium is a motet (a type of medieval musical composition) by Thomas Tallis, written for an 40-voice choir. The title translates as Hope in Another. I think.
Music is becoming the lense through which I see the world - or, to use a more apt metaphor, the ear, with curled and ornate lobe, through which I hear. If you say something to me, it's likely being filtered through the haunting sonic matrix of Spem in Alium, or Lamentations of Jeremiah - another piece by Tallis. Lamentations is a 2-set, nine part piece based on the Biblical book of Lamentations - it has also set camp in my cranium. Which is now covered in long hair. Which, as my sister tells me, looks like Mom's. I'd like to think I look like Dad back in his italian-soccer/beach-bum days (sorry Mom).

The lyrics (as you listen) (click the colored words above and wait - it's a big'n):

I have never put my hope in any other but in you
God of Israel
who will be angry
and yet become again gracious
and who forgives all the sins of suffering man
Lord God
Creator of Heaven and Earth
look upon our lowliness

Byrd & Tallis

William Byrd and Thomas Tallis were the first two composers in England with enough musical noteriety to earn themselves acknow- ledgement from the finicky hand of Music History. In fact, they were the only composers with a license to publish music in the 16th century in England. Yes, the whole century. They worked as a team at the Chapel Royal in London, and danced around waving their licenses when no one else was around. I would have. I bet the Chapel Royal has some big aisleways.
These two English blokes are the composers of the week, pushing the Franco-Flems out of the spotlight, though I have, as of yet, no idea what their music sounded like, nor how the mechanics of it worked. So here's hoping for the best [note: at this point, one would raise one's pint of Guinness awkwardly and nod]

Drupelets and Splices

Today was an interesting day - mostly because I spent it with good people. First: eggnog pancakes & basic drum lessons with some old friends in Santa Ana, next: wild raspberry jam & lessons in comma splices with a friend here in Irvine, and last: Korean BBQ with my roommate Steve.
Theres a lot here, so I'll give you the basics. Keep the 8th note beats on the hi-hat, bass drum on 1, snare on 3; raspberries are not berries, but aggregate fruits, made of an aggregation of little fruit-droplets called drupelets; a comma splice is a common punctuation error made by 39B writing students wherein they use a comma to divide 2 independent clauses, which should only be divided by either a semi-colon or an em-dash; Korean BBQ involves a grill in the center of a table with various meats one applies to the grill, and then many little white dishes full of fermented cabbages and fish cakes and pickled onions.
My stomach is packed and my head is wriggling with new creatures.

Jackson Cade Rigamonti

To a Little One

You are small right now. I have prayed
that you would grow. I have asked the Shepherd
to help you find your way into this field.
Your father is a tree, faithful,
firmly planted - your mother is a light;
full of bright laughter. Your brother
is a growing thing, green and more than a little
silly. I love him. Music never met us
except within a dream - but still it seems
not right to leave her out. Her?
I'm not sure why I call her her, since we never knew;
neither do we know who you, little one,
will be - will you join your brother in the underbrush,
or your mother in the spaces in between?
Well, either way you come is fine - but come,
little one, come now, let us see. If you please Dear
Shepherd, if you please.

To Medieval Music

The old ones are mourning
for the new ones. Yes, long dead,
but they made their songs wise;
their music reaches forward into time
so that its beauty rings with sorrow
for us. This song, now wrapping
round my chest its arms
from somewhere miles and miles
ago, when men & women bent
their heads to older loves,
must feel the dark and growing
scar that’s hid beneath my shirt.
I hear, in the tremors of the wrists
pressed tight to me, a weeping.

Figures of Speech

Yesterday in workshop words were getting thrown around that, yes, I have been acquainted to, but never really had any substantial relationship with. I know what they look and sound like, but don't know where they're from, how many brothers and sisters they have, if they're dating anyone.
IDIOM for instance. So... knowing it was a figure of speech, a figure within speech, i.e. not plain speech itself (when is speech ever plain?) - I looked it up on wiktionary.org.
An idiom is any group of words that can't be translated literally into another language and retain its meaning - E.g (the example they give) "kick the bucket". If I told my my italian cousin to "scosse la benna", even if I am saying it correctly, it won't mean "death" to her. It will mean "kick the bucket". Which is not the meaning of the phrase, though it is the literal meaning, that we think of when we say it. So, it is a group of words, usually an image, that is assigned an alterior meaning different than the literal meaning of the phrase.
The other major figures of speech they listed were SIMILE (My love, you are like a cananda goose, filling my heart with brillaint honking) and METAPHOR (My love, you are a canada goose, filling my heart with equally brilliant honking).
Oak Titmouse! click it

Veni Redemptor

Here is a lovely old monophonic Ambrosian hymn, translated Come Redeemer.

click here to download and listen

Counterpoint & Elsewise

Counterpoint is a form of POLYPHONY. Are they the same thing? Well, as far as I can tell, yes, they are, but you know, in the all-asians-look-alike sort of way. What then are they? Polyphony is the layering of distinct melodies, that interweave and play off of each other, but remain their own separate creature. This below is the first line of the oldest recorded notation for a polyphonic composition, called Sumer is Icumen In. To translate this from the old english, read it aloud. Its in 6 parts traditionally, and this is a delightful version of it, that brings me great joy. Tidings of them. Listen to the way they counter & point at one another.
Click on the picture to download the song.




HOMOPHONIC music, as distinct from homophobic music, is different than polyphony in that it is carried by one strong melody. The separate musical parts, voices, harmonize with the lead meoldy, creating chordal sounds. Notice how the four parts of this old hymn are laid out, following one another, forming a four note chord with the four parts. Click on the picture below to listen to a homophonic hymn composed by Thomas Tallis, an early English composer.











Lastly, we have MONOPHONY, from which both of the crazy chickens above hatched. It is the form of music that is composed of only one single melodic line, which all the singers sing together. Gregorian chant and other varities of single melody chant from early western culture are examples of this. Click here to listen an example of Gregorian Chant.

The Franco-Flems

These guys keep coming out of the wood work - now I've come upon the MOST importantest of all the 15th century Franco-Flemish composers: Gilles Binchois. His fine melodies had an arguably greater influence, apparently, on composers of his time, and in centuries to come. I don't really know, so I choose to love them all equally.
Still listening to Ockeghem this morning. Ockeghem studied under Binchois, and took his place as most important Franco-Flem of the 15th century. Guillaume Dufay was writing at the same time as Binchois, and Josquin des Prez took up the tail-end of all four of them, pushing forward into the 16th century. J des Prez, as I like to call him, took what his Franco-Flemish ForeFathers had proffered to him, and wrought a style very near to perfection - so thought Gioseffo Zarlino, a musical theorist of the time. He may have studied counterpoint under Ockeghem. What is counterpoint? Tune in next time to find that out, and other secrets behind the technical wizardy of the Franco-Flemish composers.
The picture below is of Ockeghem (with the glasses) and his singers.

Low Volume

And I mean, amount of weekly posts. Interestingly, we usually associate this phrase with sound intensity. It comes from the Latin word which signifies a series of pages of writing, in the Book Volume sense, and I suppose it made its way to Quantity after that - it does mean that though now as well: quantity, how much of something there is. I suppose that the Sound Volume evolved from the Quantity Volume, which evolved from the Book Volume, which did not evolve, but was created directly, because books are angelic beings.
I spent a weekend up in the woods up in the mountains with 12 other poets. We read poetry and ate hummus and sat on big rocks. It was good life. It didn't help the already pressing problem of weekly time management. Hence and thus, last week's low volume.
Speaking of low volume, we need to choose the weekly composer. Guillaume de Machaut must make way for another man who was writing in France, a hundred years later, in the 15th century: Johannes Ockeghem. He was a Franco-Flemish composer, and I think that since I have so little on his two Franco-Flemish neighbors, Guillaume Dufay before him, and Josquin des Prez after, I will talk about the three of them together. Yes, this is 15th century Franco-Flemish week. I'm listening to the Kyrie from Ockeghem's "Missa L'homme Arme" right now - definitely some polyphonic refinement on the music of Machuat. A little of that Franco-Flemish polish.

Le Voir Dit

Translated A True Tale, this collection of poems set to polyphonic music is considered Machaut's masterpiece. It is the tale of the author's sorrowful separation from his beloved. It is absolutely lovely. He has been considered the "last great poet who was also a composer."
While in Minnesota, Eric Alness, Ben Wright, Tim Beardshear and I, walked downtown in the crisp air and sunlight to a Dunn Brothers coffee shop, and a great used bookstore. Where I am going with this is right here: I found a book of Petrarch's sonnets - in the Italian, with translations. As some of you might know, as I didn't know before this week, his best sonnets were love sonnets written to a certain Laura.
So I have Dante and Beatrice, Petrarch and Laura, and now Machaut and his lost love, all milling melancholy in my mind.
I went on a run in Minneapolis - down into the heart of the city, back to a cathedral we had seen - a lutheran church. A woman was at the enormous organ practicing. I sat in the cruciform building, under the stainglass light, and listened in shorts and a white bandana. This has almost nothing to do with Le Voir Dit, except that it is a true story, and was full of music in many ways. Joy always surprises us when we least expect it.

Guillaume De Machaut

After a 3 day visit to Minneapolis Minnesota, and its neighboring towns and cities, I have returned to my little black laptop computer, my potted plant, and some Bailey's on ice. Palestrina's week in the limelight has passed, and now I find myself listening to the spare, and very different, Messa de Nostre Dame by Guillaume de Machaut. He was composing in France in the 14th century, and was apparently the most prominent figure of the French Ars Nova - a musical movement in France that consisted essentially of 14th century music and its innovations. It sounds quite different than Palestrina's Misse. I can't quite describe it - it's clear that Machaut's music was much earlier. It is polyphony in its youth - healthy and strong, but simple. The picture below, an early illustration for a manuscript of his music, depicts Nature giving a gift to Machaut: her three children, Sense, Rhetoric, and Music.

(No such bird) VII

It wasn’t a conspiracy.
Hers had been the shop
he’d come upon in his urgency
to know, and she had known.

When the third syllable had
dropped he had waited for another
word, but none had come.
He shifted, hesitated,
wanting her to catch herself,
to take it back, wait, you know,
there is one just like that,
yes, let me think,
it’s called…

The animals had crunched their seeds
audibly, and stared.
The parrot turned away –
looked out the window.

(No such bird) VI

He stood in the center of the city street.
Manned cars mashed their horns in angry loops around him,
but he did not pull in his feet – he did not blink.
Sunlight angled down, clear and bright, between
the glass and steel - a solvent, and the air grew
thin enough for hurried forms to cut right through it.
Round and round him, without effort - there was
no conscious struggle. Some sentiment,
yes, between apathy and wrath,
but the city flashed around him easily.

Nothing escaped his notice.
The light went through his hair and skull.
He knew better now: this was not confusion.
It was the quiet aftermath
of a detached hope – variation in the repetition,
but always some form of the same answer.

The bells of the shop were still jingling.
The trees in the park moved only for the wind.

(No such bird) V

The branches domed above his head.

Lifted up, the leaves
would press against the light

and translate through their porous flesh
the story of heaven.

In the still air,
on the soft floor,
he would turn and read the prophecy
written in that brilliant green,

looking for the figured one
that would come: Postured
centerward, a heralding of red
amidst the native green.

A scribe, he waited with his pencil ready.

(No such bird) IV

“It’s time to grow up,”
he lipped with observation’s
overaction. He lifted a hand
to the mirror and crunched it
tight. “To be a man one must

kill everything he loves.”
It made him glad to say it.

Meanwhile, she flipped precisely
through blunt-cornered, hardbound books,
looking for a name. Funny, the feelings one has
despite being sure.