1. [No Decrees, No Manifestos]

I can no longer enter those old writerly debates, the ones that end up trying to establish official decrees. The moments of inspiration where words come are supreme ones—like love—& it’s only in between those moments (waiting for those moments) any need is felt to “explain” them, to codify them, to make what is at best a mystery & a metaphor into a fact, a list of rules. The best I can do anymore is identify patterns, feelings that crop up, ways of writing that seem better than another. But these things are so personal & private trying to explain them is ridiculous—or, rather, not trying to explain them, which enough babbling can do fine, but imagining it’s a fixed law, something other poems can be strung on to make them work, or that it’s a bulleted list for other writer’s to follow exactly—that’s the ridiculous thing. Joyce tossed out his allegiance to “stream of consciousness” when he needed to, calling it a bridge that might have gotten him from one place to another at some point, but a bridge that could be blown sky high for all he cared, once he was done with it. This is what I mean. I love hearing how writers write, or about the experience of Saints, but it’s the small anecdotal stuff that lasts the most, that’s hovering out there with no other rule or attempt at explanation—since it’d be even more ridiculous to find St. John of the Cross’s Five Rules to a Divine Vision.

2. [Fragments]

More & more the fragment is the only thing I can write in—like these two paragraphs: not a fixed argument, buttressed on all sides by proof & reason & logic & many examples, but a simple statement that’s more true than any reason or argued out principle. How can one possibly prove that one way to pray is better than another?

3. [Art, Tradition, & 40,000 Years]

Learning about Gothic art there’s a part where the French monarchy buys a bunch of relics, portions of the True Cross, or the Crown of Thorns. What must it have been like to believe those things literally—not just that Christ was the son of God, but that now you can go see the Crown of Thorns that were on his head? What did it mean for artists of the time & up through the Renaissance to have a solid tradition to work with—stock scenes from the life of Christ or from the Bible or the lives of Saints? What was it like to study so many Last Suppers before trying to paint your own? & the same in ancient Greece or Egypt, with their catalogue of myths everyone knew, communicating a common vision, from the rich to the poor?

& what do we have now? Our conceptions of “tradition” & “age” are so skewed that fifty years of rock music is a long time, or a hundred years of sports statistics, or ten years of reality TV, or a long-running sitcom. I’m not much for modern art, & just glancing at a few huge Art History-type books, it’s hard to see a lot of beauty in the stuff towards the end, & impossible not to admire the stuff much older. I don’t mean we should force everyone to start doing scenes from the life of Christ—but what does it mean to not have that tradition? Even with composers, it’s great to listen to dozens of composers each setting the same Latin from the mass to different music. This means something, as does reading how the ancient Greek sculptures of Zeus or Apollo (themselves influenced by those in Egypt further back) came to influence, in the early centuries AD, the earliest depictions of the face of Christ & Buddha. This, too, means something.

& I don’t even mean the focus needs to necessarily be specifically religious. Van Gogh isn’t famous for any obviously religious paintings he did, but to look at how he paints cypress trees, or even his own mailman, you know he’s after something deeply meaningful to himself, as much as another pieta would be an act of devotion for another artist. I think this has something to do with actually seeking the beautiful, which most art doesn’t seem concerned with anymore.

But my complaints about “modern” art are just as easily skewed since I mean the last hundred years. It’s always humbling to realize Egyptian civilization lasted 3,000 years. What right do I have to complain about a hundred years? I’ve already given up on caring about fame, so what does it much matter if I see very little art, or read very little poetry, or hear very little music composed in my lifetime that seems to stand up & concern itself with the art & poetry & music that means most to me? Isn’t it selfish to bemoan a century when there are (if you go back to the earliest cave paintings) close to forty centuries of art behind it, & more than enough that’s miraculous?

4. [Privacy]

People talk about the crisis in literature. The real crisis is in the value of privacy. When the entire outside world is geared toward telling you all the things you need & all the things you need to do—& all this only so others will see you doing or eating or listening or driving or seeing these things, & when the greatest & supreme value is placed on how you appear (by & large) to complete strangers, or even to those you may be close to (who are just trying to impress you)—is it a wonder people can’t find value in closing a door & being alone in quiet & reading a book while no one else is watching? & is it a wonder that those who write—or compose, or paint—are more & more obsessed with being noticed, making it, being heard, making themselves hamburger salesmen & their creations equivalents to a side of fries?

These are all for other people. I’ve been lucky to latch onto artists—unbeknownst to me as I gathered & came to all of them—who are largely by themselves: Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Robinson Jeffers, Cormac McCarthy. (& I have to say I learned it first from James Chapman) & recently I read that Michelangelo, for all the Popes & rulers he knew, was largely friendless & kept to himself. Long ago I read about the scene of Modernism in Paris & London—Joyce & Eliot, Picasso & Stravinsky, Yeats & Woolf & Bloomsbury—& was thrilled & enthused & wanted to be there, & the same for the fifties & the Beats. Now I’d much rather have the Big Sur of Jeffers than of Kerouac, & when I read a bunch of bios of Eliot recently I wasn’t nearly as sympathetic with all the worry & anxiety he put himself through as he intentionally set out—& succeeded, after all—to become the preeminent Man of Letters in English poetry. Because really, what does “Man of Letters” mean anyhow? & the moments from his greatest poetry—I’m thinking Four Quartets—are entirely personal & private moments that’ve nothing to do with his standing in the world of poetry. & nothing seems more boring—even destructive—than reading about the poets who came of age in the 40s & 50s—Lowell & Berryman & the like—who taught at dozens of universities, attended seminars & readings together & paved the way for the MFA industry, & yet only seemed to end up miserable, drunk, suicides, addicts, divorced & remarried & promiscuous. I don’t know what the point of all that running around was—it would be something if great poetry came from it, but I’m not sure it did! Eliot at least was aware of the game as he went along; he’s still the only poet I know with the guts enough to have said “The poetry does not matter”—& the best images I have of him are living quietly during World War Two in such a manner his own maid thought he was a monk, not a writer.

5. [Privacy & Creation]

No, it’s become perfectly clear to me now: the most meaningful moments of my own life, the ones filled with the most love or revelation, the most intimacy & intensity, have been quiet moments far away from crowds, & usually only shared with one or two people, or when entirely alone. The value of privacy is immense, & beautiful in its anonymity. For an artist it creates a place where a thing is made—a poem written, a painting painted, music composed—from the most pure place, with no care or concern for the market, for its potential success, or anything. It’s the ultimate freedom, too, from worrying about a million things—how a book is selling, how it’s being reviewed or “received.” When the creation of art is approached in the same way prayer is it all becomes clear—& even there, Jesus warns of praying in public, making a show of your devotion. The only reception one is worried about with prayer is how it’s received by God, & while the difference with art is that others will read what you’ve written, it’s only worth it to care about that supreme reception, the deep part of you that made the creation possible in the first place. It’s only these things that last, it’s only the things created in tremendous privacy that will end up—paradoxically, miraculously—speaking to the most people, & being revered by history. & it’s not that “reverence by history” is the goal—it’s not the ego of that—but just what history means, the millions of individuals you will never know about—& who largely will never know about each other—who will come to what you’ve done at any age, in any time, in any place, & when they’ve read what you’ve written, or heard what you’ve composed, or seen what you’ve painted or sculpted it will become one of those few dozen things that orders & sustains & adds real joy to a human life.

6. [Your Funeral]

The common wish of wondering who would come to your funeral seems one of the worst things, & it’s awful how our need for attention won’t even let us go after death. In a way we create to communicate genuinely with other people—but can only really do this when we aren’t among them. We need to be away from people, & their peering eyes & judgments, in order to create something worthy of real attention & judgment. While carving his David, Michelangelo surrounded it with a fence so no one could see his progress. Surely this is part PR stunt, but just as much a protection against criticism. & how freeing it is, too, when you read of criticism of Michelangelo—how freeing when I read someone who says Dostoevsky is nothing but freshman year existentialism. If they can be criticized! Well, I’ve even less reason to attempt to please everyone, & so can continue—even more—doing exactly what I set out to do.

7. [Mark 1:1-12, & Storytelling]

Just look at the first twelve verses of Mark’s Gospel:

8. [The Pleasant Man]

A month or two ago an older guy walked into where I work—tall, thin, walking slow & with a cane—& I immediately felt sympathy for him. When he turned around I saw he had one of those hands-free phones in his ears, like a little piece of fruit stuck in there sticking out, & I thought it would make a great poem. A few years ago I would have been able to throw some small thing together, something about technology & old age, or people becoming like machines, or how the first time I encountered the things was when people would be standing at the counter, talking out loud (& I thought to me), & it was only as I got closer I saw they were using one of these, & how nowadays I can’t be sure until I’m close enough whether someone’s a little messed in the head & talking to themselves, or on one of these things.

& sure that just made a nice paragraph, but how can it make much more than that? I could be cynical & say it’s all wrapped up in how people no longer engage with people directly, but personally it’s been because of email & IM & cellphones that I’ve made my closest friendships, & met my fiancée, & in fact I’m much closer & have a better connection to the disembodied emails from friends, or only my fiancée’s voice on the phone during day, than I do anyone I actually encounter physically, & see.

I’ve been thinking about this for weeks, it’s very strange, but the only conclusion I can come to is that the guy really wasn’t noticeable other than his slow walk, & the phone in his ear. He wasn’t a jerk, wasn’t in a hurry, wasn’t loud, & in fact he was very kind, humble—he was coming in just as I was leaving, & sat next to me, & assumed I was leaving to give him some space, & he said, “Oh, don’t be in any hurry.” It’s not his age or cane or the easily distracting details of technology that would make a nice, small monologue; but the rare pleasantness of him would, a quiet & almost invisible face would—so invisible it took me two months or so to see the real poetic possibility of that encounter.

9. [Robinson Jeffers & WWII]

For some reason, Robinson Jeffers was against the U.S. involvement in World War II. I can’t fathom this, especially after spending two months recently reading about nothing but Hitler, who was willing to do anything (even sacrifice millions of his own people when Germany’s defeat was obvious) for the sake of some Wagnerian dream of German supremacy. No amount of reason can convince a mind like this to stop, & nothing but the horrendous force used against him could have made him stop, & even if Truman & Roosevelt & Churchill (who are all skewered by Jeffers) had horrendous faults or made horrendous decisions, it’s unlikely any of them would have ever put into action anything like what Hitler did in Germany, & was prepared to do in all of Europe had he won. Yet still Jeffers says this in “Invasion”:

Let no one believe that children a hundred years from now in the future of America will not be sick

For what our fools and unconscious criminals are doing to-day.

Jeffers has a way of covering all his bases—here the American government are “fools and unconscious” in the stupidity & criminality of their actions; yet elsewhere his anger stems from how obviously the government encouraged & even intended war, & their eventual participation in it. The poems from his two main books critical of the U.S. (Be Angry at the Sun & Other Poems & The Double Axe & Other Poems) are essentially reiterations of these points, put either as bluntly & obviously topical as this (which tend to get tiresome & repetitive), or to other poems of great power & vision.

More examples of the former are from the poem “Fantasy”:

On that great day the boys will hang

Hitler and Roosevelt in one tree,

Painlessly, in effigy,

To take their rank in history;

Roosevelt, Hitler and Guy Fawkes

Hanged above the garden walks,

While the happy children cheer,

Without hate, without fear,

And new men plot a new war.

I can agree with some of the cynicism of this (which pre-dates Eisenhower warning of the dangers of the military-industrial complex by more than a decade), but to put Roosevelt & Hitler side-by-side is ridiculous. In his long poem (really a short play), “Bowl of Blood,” Hitler visits a prophetess in the woods & his doom is essentially foretold to him, & Hitler is presented as the suicidal dictator that he was. While Roosevelt & Churchill & Truman are never given center-stage like this, they are constantly put on the same level as Hitler, as in the lines in “Bowl of Blood” that describe Hitler like this:

This man and the light-minded American

Are the two hands of the destroyer.

Whoever thinks this man is more wicked

Than other men knows not himself.

Again, this is simply preposterous; & as at least the poems in The Double-Axe weren’t published in book-form until 1948—long after the true extent of the Third Reich’s attempts at genocide became well-known—Jeffers, an obvious student of history, still had no room for ambiguity, & every leader is obviously a crook & a liar & equally ridiculous & evil as any other. Jeffers also makes the worthwhile case for having a larger view of history, & the inevitability of human violence & stupidity, but even from the perspective of a few thousand years of recorded violence & stupidity, the difference between someone like Hitler & Roosevelt is still obvious.

I only write any of this because of how good most of his other poetry is, &—no matter how bizarre or wrong-headed his poems on World War Two—how much I admire his self-creation as a prophet; in one case, in the poem named for the Greek prophetess who was doomed to never be believed, he ends it with the blunt statement, “You and I, Cassandra.” Jeffers is capable of profound insight with lines like these (again from “The Bowl of Blood”) where he says

power is a great hollow spirit

That needs a center.

It chooses one man almost at random

And clouds him and clots around him and it possesses him.

Listen: the man does not have power,

Power has the man.

& in “Watch the Lights Fade” he says

The strong struggle for power, and the weak

Warm their poor hearts with hate.

& in the title poem for Be Angry at the Sun—a poem that seems to cancel out his own complaints by proclaiming the inevitability of the war, yet nevertheless he continues to rant—he says:

Be angry at the sun for setting

If these things anger you. Watch the wheel slope and turn,

They are bound on the wheel, these people, those warriors,

This republic, Europe, Asia.

Yet in “Come Little Birds” he is also capable of such bizarre banalities as “God curse every man that makes war or plans it.” Having been writing about very little but war for the last few years, this simplistic notion is almost childish in its wish for a violence-free world. My guiding principle for my own poem hasn’t been to stress the importance of support or rejection of war (or any cruelty), but rather the importance of dealing with the realities of life as they actually are. It is fine—even necessary—to say that certain things should not be done, but the fact that they still happen everyday isn’t a reason to hate the entire world. It is, as he says in “Be Angry at the Sun,” as inevitable as the sun setting. The real problem is in dealing with these things when they happen, & retaining the best of our humanity & dignity.

Jeffers’ views are obviously a product of his personal philosophy, which he called “Inhumanism.” Jeffers’ explained it in his preface to The Double-Axe; the preface itself was edited in the published version, & only recently has the original version been printed. It says, in part:

[Inhumanism] presents, more explicitly than previous poems of mine, a new attitude, a new manner of thought and feeling, which came to me at the end of the war of 1914, and has since been tested in the confusions of peace and a second world-war, and the hateful approach of a third; and I believe it has truth and value. It is based on a recognition of the astonishing beauty of things and their living wholeness, and on a rational acceptance of the fact that mankind is neither central nor important in the universe; our vices and blazing crimes are as insignificant as our happiness. We know this, of course, but it does not appear that any previous one of the ten thousand religions and philosophies has realized it. An infant feels himself to be central and of primary importance; an adult knows better; it seems time that the human race attained to an adult habit of thought in this regard. The attitude is neither misanthropic nor pessimist nor irreligious, though two or three people have said so, and may again; but it involves a certain detachment.

A man whose mental processes continually distort and prevent each other, so that his energy is devoted to introversion and the civil wars of the mind, is an insane man, and we pity him. But the human race is similarly insane. More than half its energy, and at the present civilized level nine-tenths of its energy, are devoted to self-interference, self-frustration, self-incitement, self-tickling, self-worship. The waste is enormous; we are able to commit and endure it because we are so firmly established on the planet; life is actually so easy, that is requires only a slight fraction of our common energies. The rest we discharge onto each other—in conflict and charity, love, jealousy, hatred, competition, government, vanity and cruelty, and that puerile passion the will to power,—or for amusement. Certainly human relationships are necessary and desirable; but not to this extent. This is a kind of collective onanism, pathetic and ridiculous, or at noblest a tragic incest, and so I have represented it.

But we have all this excess energy: what should we do with it? We could take a walk, for instance, and admire landscape: that is better than killing one’s brother in war or trying to be superior to one’s neighbor in time of peace.  […] We could even be quiet occasionally.

[…]

“Love one another” ought to be balanced, at least, by a colder saying,—this too a counsel of perfection, i.e., a direction-giver, a guide though it cannot be a rule,—”Turn away from each other,”—to that great presence of which humanity is only a squirming particle. […] Turn outward from each other, so far as need and kindness permit, to the vast life and inexhaustible beauty beyond humanity. This is not a slight matter, but an essential condition of freedom, and of moral and vital sanity.

[…]

A frightened man cannot think; and the mass mind does not want truth,—only “democratic” or “Aryan” or “Marxian” or other-colored “truth,”—it wants its own voices.

[…]

Man, much more than baboon or wolf, is an animal formed for conflict; his life seems to him meaningless without it. Only a clear shift of meaning and emphasis, from man to what is not man, nor a man-dreamed God, a projection of man, can enable him in the long run to endure peace.

There’s a lot here I can agree with—the turning away from materialism, the self-interference (that is even more so nowadays) that is typified by all the distractions of the media that keep us from really considering things of lasting value, the ridiculous clinging to one set of –isms over another, & the wish for an emphasis on something that is called God—but Jeffers’ embrace of nature as our saving focus seems even emptier than a complete focus on human beings & human worth. In his poem “Teheran” he says simply—Jeffers is a genius in his angry poems at this kind of blunt lyricism—”When man stinks, turn to God,” which is fine; & in “Pearl Harbor” he speaks of “the prehuman dignity of night,” the time before human beings populated the earth. This is one thing too, yet he continually goes further; in “Advice to Pilgrims” he says

Walk on gaunt shores and avoid the people; rock and wave are good prophets;

Wise are the winds of the full, pleasant her song.

Which seems a standard romantic reflection—if the lines were shorter & rendered into couplets, it could be something by Shelley or Keats. Yet facing the horrors of World War Two, as his poems are trying to do, this naiveté isn’t nearly enough to sustain a human life. In “Drunken Charlie” he offers this:

Oh my dear there are some things

That are well worth fighting for.

Fight to save a sea-gull’s wings:

That would be a sacred war.

This, finally—in the face of the ovens of Auschwitz—is also something I cannot fathom. If the horrendous violence of World War Two means less than “sea-gull’s wings,” why complain at all? Why bemoan the fate of nations if they mean nothing anyway? The fact is they do mean something, & are worth complaining about & mourning over, but simple nature-worship teaches us very little. The regular courses & repeated patterns of nature (the course of the stars, the waxing & waning of the moon, the rising & setting of the sun, flowers that open during the day & close at night, etc.) are, undeniably, beautiful, & worth considering, but are far, far, from actual empirical & final guides for how humans should conduct themselves. Because in reality there’s nothing inherently admirable about the sun rising and setting everyday—there’s nothing admirable about that pattern (or any of the patterns of nature) since none of it is consciously undertaken. It isn’t as if the sun started out as a lazy thing & eventually worked its way up, through trial & error, to see just how long it should take to rise, & remain up & out, & just how long it should take to set & should let the world remain dark before he rises again. The perfection of the sun, however mathematically or even intellectually or emotionally perfect, or capable of being heaped with metaphorical meaning, is essentially an empty perfection, since it has no choice but to do the same thing over & over, & the only meaning all of these patterns ever have (at least for human beings) are the meanings that human beings themselves attach to them. Jeffers says in “Calm and Full the Ocean”:

Sane and intact the seasons pursue their course, autumn slopes to December, the rains will fall

And the grass flourish, with flowers in it: as if man’s world were perfectly separate from nature’s, private and mad.

But I would much rather take a “private and mad” world, even if it is the result of innumerable failures & shortcomings by human beings, since it is a world that can be changed & made better or worse by intention & conscious action, over something “sane and intact” with the mindless perfection of mere nature.

10. [Faith is Uncomfortable]

I used be looking for a final answer & a final system to align myself with, & I used to think that nature, or one or two religious systems, might even offer this, & that finally—someday—I would have the discipline & live my life in a completely ordered & patterned way. But that’s not human, & while small patterns come & go (rising the same time for work every morning) & are supported by larger patterns & habits (of marriage, or writing), that final system will never be, just as “world peace” will never be, just as everyone in the world will never—no matter how many political theorists or religious missionaries—agree on politics or religion. The point, alas, isn’t to make everyone agree with you, but to live as perfectly as you are able in a completely imperfect world. The real accomplishment isn’t to convert everyone to what you’ve suddenly discovered or hold dear, but to be able to hold what you cherish & consider holy while always being faced with the meaninglessness, vulgarity, ambiguity, & perpetual change that fills our human world.

I’m only writing all of this in response to Jeffers because of how powerful a poet, in his other work, he so obviously is, & how wonderful a prophet he’s made himself. Yet being a prophet he’s inevitably sure of (as all prophets are) that the “present generation” (which is always every generation) is witnessing the Decline of Civilization as We Know It. Jeffers even mentions Spengler & his Decline of the West outright in his narrative Mara, yet this too—for all Jeffers’ apparent desire for “inhumanism,” selflessness, & a wish for a broader vision of history—seems a pretty selfish & small-minded observation to make. Consider that the 2,000 years since the birth of Christ is still only two-thirds of the (roughly) three- or-more thousand-years that Egyptian civilization lasted, & the complaints of the first forty years of our twentieth century is quite small. & consider too that Egyptian civilization fell into a kind of dark age at least twice, only to emerge each time to new brilliance.

But more on accepting the way the world is, & the value of finding happiness & meaning not in the eradication of all the ugliness & cruelty there is, but in spite of it. Thomas Merton says this:

Let no one hope to find in contemplation an escape from conflict, from anguish or from doubt. On the contrary, the deep, inexpressible certitude of the contemplative experience awakens a tragic anguish and opens many questions in the depths of the heart like wounds that cannot stop bleeding.

If even contemplation—something so outwardly quiet, isolating, something that is the inward awareness & union with God—if even contemplation brings anguish & doubt & all else—how can we hope not to find anguish & doubt outside ourselves? & if we make the conscious decision to see God in all things, how can our entire lives not be imagined as one huge contemplation, & how can we ever view or even experience the worst doubt & anguish & suffering & give up, & assume there is no hope or meaning at all? Or—just as bad—how can be take this awareness & this witness (or experience) of doubt & anguish & suffering & cling to something purports to answer all our questions, all our doubts, & cleans up all suffering (I mean fundamentalist religious thought), & proclaim that the goal of all our lives is to make everyone like us & agree with us, rather than truly wrestle with the uncomfortable & painful & ambiguous challenge of a faith where peace & happiness doesn’t come from certainty, or the promise of justice or fairness, or from imagining that if only or finally now nothing will ever go wrong—but where peace & happiness comes from sustaining our faith & hope amid uncertainty, injustice, unfairness?