Previous
Posts:
2008:
#51-60
(7/13)
#41-50
(5/27)
#31-40 (2/15)
2007:
#21-30 (10/3)
#11-20 (6/28)
#1-10 (3/31)
On St. Augustine (2/3)
On St. John Climacus (1/26)
2006:
12/25
9/24
9/5
8/23
6/1
An Introduction (5/10)
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5.10.06
I've avoided
the idea of doing a blog for a long time, since they largely seem--&
here is the hermit in me talking--for people in the media to post (&
boast about) their opinions on politics or whatever, or others as
simply an online diary, both of which I can't conceive of doing
myself. I can't quibble with either though--especially since the
latter led to meeting my fiancee--but I think I can offer something
else that I'll explain in the following, in what will probably be one
of the few truly personal posts I'll make.
From my
association with
Six Gallery Press
(as founder & editor & author of a few books there, from 2000-2004) to
even sometime last year, I was hoping, even actively striving, to
"make it" in writing, whatever that might mean--a level of financial
security, not having to work a dayjob, even actual readers who care
about what I've done. Granted that one of my favorite
poets--Whitman--was nothing if not a self-promoter, too much of the
modern writing game seems to have become just that: a game, a game
where the writer is no different than a hamburger salesman, no
different than an adman, no different than a musician trying
desperately to get signed, no different than someone in the business
world trying to connive & weave around to get ahead.
I suppose,
to be as simple as possible, that I don't want to consider writing a
business anymore. I know it is a business to lots of people, & I know
that some very good writers are published by big houses. (Cormac
McCarthy comes immediately to mind, but so does his desire to be a
recluse, & the poor-writer's life he led for most of his career,
living in hotel rooms & making sure to always have a high-watt
lightbulb with him so he could write. A rare
interview
with him at the New York Times became an early beacon for me
in retreating from "the business.") & while I hate to say that I write
"literary" stuff, I can't deny at the very least that what I write
isn't written or read for the same reason The Da Vinci Code
is, so there is even less reason for me to care whether I attain any
great success or notoriety in my lifetime. Even the old battle-cries
of the "underground" or "experimental" trying to break into the
"mainstream" have lost all their previous meaning, & all the desperate
passion I used to attach to it.
I've always
believed that the greatest works of literature are not basically
different than religious literature, & that at its deepest level it
can draw from the same wells as the Bible, or the Bhagavad Gita,
or the Irish Tain, or Gilgamesh. I've always taken
my raised-Catholic status & my perpetual interest in mythology &
religion & (like my good friends & first models Eliot & Joyce) have
always tried to imbue contemporary experience with the sacred & the
religious & to try, as any good mystic will, to see the reality of God
radiating from everything. From the start this has always been my
ambition, & about the only thing I really do well.
This slow &
gradual realization has even led to me abandoning nearly all of my
other writing, save for two books. Anyone who knew me even two years
ago was aware of all the different things I was always juggling--a few
novels, books of poetry, or nonfiction--that I picked up when the
desire hit me. Now there are only two, which the reading of all the
ancient stuff will more than inform: my epic of the American Civil
War, To the House
of the Sun, & its companion, Time &
the River, which consists of a grown & potentially endless
sequence of poems about history & mythology & religion.
Writing
this, I'm surprised that I didn't retreat from the game sooner, but it
took moving across the country to live with my fiancee to really
become more bored (than the usual baffled) with most of the publishing
industry & most of the academic industry that exists alongside it.
This probably sounds too harsh since there are no doubt dozens of good
writers & publishers & magazines who juggle the business & stay pure
to the art, but for me, my perpetual equation of Art to Religion has,
finally, forced me to realize that I am--or that my fiancee & I
are--more the monks in the woods rather than the pastor publicly
engaging with the flock.
So, as I
wrote awhile go, "Instead of reading stuff that wants to mirror or
echo the Bible--or stuff that doesn't even want to do this--why not
just read the Bible?" So this blog will be the place where I record
all the thoughts & essays on all those books I happen to read--& for
the foreseeable future they'll be the Sumerian myths & poetry,
Egyptian mythology & their Pyramid Texts & Coffin Texts & stories, &
the poetry & history of the Hebrew Bible, of Genesis & Job & the
Psalms.
The late
Catholic monk Thomas Merton says something wonderful about the Virgin
Mary I feel like mentioning here: "Mary's chief glory is in her
nothingness, in the fact of being the 'Handmaid of the Lord,'
as one who in becoming the Mother of God acted simply in loving
submission to his command, in pure obedience of faith.... The glory of
Mary is purely and simply the glory of God in her, and she, like
anyone else, can say that she has nothing that she has not received
from Him through Christ. As a matter of fact, this is precisely her
greatest glory: that having nothing of her own, retaining nothing of a
'self' that could glory in anything for her own sake, she placed no
obstacle to the mercy of God and in no way resisted His love and His
will."
& I love
this idea immensely, that even the wisest of the other Catholic
writers that we know by name--Aquinas or Augustine, etc.--are even
less than Mary simply because we do know their name, &
know about their lives. So that so much of the game of publishing goes
entirely against this, is entirely about getting your name out
there. & so the slow journey from me trying to be a Public Poet &
Public Publisher obsessed with all that goes with it, of coming up
with a new -ism to describe mine or a group's kind of
writing, has come to something very far from what Merton said but, I
hope, something similar: a wonderful quiet & a wonderful peace where
the writing is first & foremost, & whatever follows will have to be
considered when the writing itself is done--or, when submitting myself
completely to the Muse, to God, to the gift I've been given, is done.
It's a
matter--as I'll note soon in an essay on a few translations of the
Bhagavad Gita--of realizing who you are, what your duty is, &
simply doing that, & nothing else. & there is something to be said for
this kind of focus, even if it means being a courier for the next
fifty years, & it's for all this that I'm sure, in a previous life, I
would have been a Jesuit. & while I used to take solace in the idea
that so many poets or novelists were finally known after
their death (what vindication, I used to think, despising the ignorant
masses), now the solace is in what they found, while perfectly alive,
in wonderful anonymous invisibility.
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