day 29
We were ideally happy. We had reached that stage in our perennial evolution where holy thoughts no longer exist and one can speak one’s mind freely, and the night shot back an answering fragrance: too far to the stars, but it was here in its intimacy that wraps you in permissiveness, leaving you free as it wanes to learn more about your special thoughts or any ideas you might have. …
Young people might not envy this situation, perhaps rightly so, yet there is now interleaving the pages of suffering and indifference to suffering a prismatic space that cannot be seen, merely felt as the result of an angularity that must have existed from earliest times and is only now succeeding in making its presence felt through the mists of helpless acceptance of everything else projected on our miserable, dank span of days. One is aware of it as an open field of narrative possibilities.
—John Ashbery, from “The New Spirit” (p41, Penguin Poets edition)
image: last night’s storm travels inland
“The poem reads like a trance, no? Maybe it IS the record of a trance, and Ashbery is the healer priest in it, albeit a super-debonair one.” —Daniel Kane on “The New Spirit” for the @flowchartfoundation post today (cf. Collective Ashbery)
Harold Bloom apparently wrote somewhere that Three Poems (of which “The New Spirit” is the first), “in resonance and spirit’s strength, can stand near Rilke in visionary achievement.” Visionariness is a category I hope we can get to later on. ‘Resonance’ suggests it’s been felt in some form before; ‘spirit’s strength’ is an infelicitous turn of phrase that I suppose Bloom intends to be forceful and somehow in line with his own Gnostic beliefs. But for the vision: what is being seen? And then, what of what is seen can be shared?
In the introduction to his authoritative collection of Eckhart’s writings, Bernard McGinn provides a theological summary that for me sounds like it could as easily be applied to John Ashbery’s prose poetry. Here are a few excerpts:
“Eckhart’s thought, like that of most other Christian Platonists before him, can be viewed as a dynamic system whose basic law is the flowing out (exitus, effluxus, ûzvliezen) of all things from God and the corresponding flowing back or return of all to this ineffable source (reditus, durchbrechen, îngânc)” (30).
“[T]he task of theology for Eckhart was not so much to reveal a set of truths about God as it was to frame the appropriate paradoxes that would serve to highlight the inherent limitations of our minds and to mark off in some way the boundaries of the unknown territory where God dwells. Here too theology is ordered to preaching and through preaching to life…
Eckhart used a number of verbal strategies or approaches to fit different circumstances and audiences. None of these strategies, taken in itself, is final; all of them taken together exhibit an inner coherence and unity of purpose as ways to explore those ‘limit-situations’ in which God becomes present to us in a more conscious way” (31).
As usual, when working from a disenchanted, materialist modernity, the reader will want to substitute the word ‘God’ for any of the following which least offend: spirit; soul; intelligence; consciousness; awareness.
Let me adapt one of those excerpts to ‘New Age’ lyric theory:
The task of the lyric for Ashbery was not so much to reveal a set of truths about consciousness as it was to frame the appropriate paradoxes that would serve to highlight the inherent limitations of our minds and to mark off in some way the boundaries of the unknown territory where consciousness (Spirit) dwells.
Does this transference hold water? I have to think more.