To the Disbeliever in Reality

 Once death was admitted

               every horror was allowed

You cannot believe one moment

               this was just

               an inconsequential slip

There is no other universe

               could sustain you

               so desperately wanted

               so monstrously loved

All will be forgiven on the other side

               of the shredded curtain. 

The Problem with Poems

 

The problem with poems

if you’re the kind of person who’s always anxious

until he pulls into the driveway

turns off the light locks the door

replaces the toothbrush in the toothbrush

holder, feeds the dog, kisses the wife

switches out the burned out bulb

greets the morning with a smile

opens the file

pulls the lever

lets out a singular sigh

 

The problem in short if you’re a person whose heart

cannot rest

until you are safely there

the problem with poems is not that you never arrive.

The problem is

 

you never arrive.

For the love of poetry in all people

 

 It sounds as though you're not particularly interested in exploring the experience a poem wants to give you. There's nothing wrong with that. Some people are not interested in what poems do. Some people are not interested in baseball, some are not interested in poems. If we go to a baseball game for the final score, there's no point in arriving before the ninth inning. And if we go to a poem just for the meaning, we can search the internet for a convenient paraphrase--which may or may not be there or accurate, but which is not the poem anymore than the box score is the baseball game. We have to learn to enjoy baseball or we can't enjoy it. The same again is true of poetry. I'm always concerned about the fact that we encounter poetry most often in school. School is where we learn about poems because we not yet at the place where we can experience the poetry of poems in the way a baseball fan experiences a game of baseball.

Because it's the poetry in baseball that makes it fun. And it's a lack of sensitivity to that poetry that makes it boring to the uninitiated. Learning what poems do is something that happens all in the head, in the same part of the brain that does math. (There's also a poetry to math, but you have to be pretty good at it before you can experience it.) That part of your brain where you learn without experiencing is always boring. With all these things: math, baseball, poems (also grammar, cars, sewing, pottery, cooking, rearing children or raising chickens) there is the poetry--where a part of your brain explodes with fireworks and orgasms--and there's the "what the hell does that mean? How on earth does that work?" “What in God’s name just happened?” part. Boring, frustrating. I hold out the hope that everyone loves poetry. But some people never experience it. And some people never experience it in poems. 

Weird

I think I must be odd.

Not odd, weird.

I think my friends think I am weird.

I think when I am not there they tell each other how weird I am.

I think they tell each other this, that I am weird, even when I am there, among them.

They look at each other and nod and roll their eyes, and their heads say, “That’s just Alan. He’s weird.”

I think they think they tell me I am weird.

I think they think if I would just stop doing these weird things and saying these weird things I wouldn’t be weird anymore. I think they would like it if I wasn’t weird.

I think they tell me directly and clearly right to my face in no uncertain terms that I am weird and also what it is that if I stopped doing it I would stop being weird, instantly. I think they think that that would be better. 

That would, of course, be better.

I think they think I hear them, they are so clear and so direct and so unequivocal.

The Line that Makes the Face

  

 

The line that makes the face

old is easily traced, but the one

that isn’t there, isn’t there

to be erased, that one’s, that one’s

 

Why do I feel the need to wear a hat

when I go outside? I’m not that bald

yet. Yet, voila, old man,

a hat.

 

Talk, make a numbly sound at least

when there’s clearly nothing to say

nothing you could say; the word that startles

the spring that releases

the drawer that hides the clue

doesn’t exist, has never existed

for you. 

The Fishes

penetrated

impenetrable

jade, seed through

utterly inky black

ness. Order fell past

injury

to tatters, re

ordered, scar

red rein

jured.

 

Go fish

in the heap of

letters

scattered and

piled at the bottom

of the page.

How to Catch a God

The key to catching a god,

sprinkle little salt onto its tail.

But you gotta to be fast.

You have to drop the cage before it flies.

 

Soon’s you got it locked away,

you can carry it wherever it’s needed,

threaten to pull back the covercloth,

tell everyone what it would have said if would’ve talked

to them. But then

it only talks to you

of course.

 

Just don’t let it sing. Jesus

 

like a million years ago

got hold of a cage like that,

let one go.

Yanked away the covercloth, smashed open the door.

 

Couldn’t wait to get shed of these crazy salt

people.

 

               But we caught it again—caught it right way.

Stuffed it in a bright new cage. Kept a steady rain

of salt upon that ragged tail.

 

Hasn’t hardly sung once since.

 

 

A Note on Girard and the Desire that Generates Mimesis

 

I don’t think Girard fully explains how desire functions as language. Not all desire is mimetic. Some desire originates in an attempt to be imitated. If I want to be what we may call the alpha male, I may want to win the mimetic war by achieving the alpha female whom everyone desires. Or I may want to create desire in others by my desire for the woman not yet on anyone’s radar, the woman whose eyes are nothing like the sun. In this case I create her as an object of desire for others only after I have won her, my Helen. And this speaks of a desire deeper than the desire that is manufactured by mimesis. It is the desire that generates mimesis. My desire to be the king at the risk of losing the object my my desire to Paris, at the risk of becoming the sacrifice.

Brian Cox and the Insignificance of Earth

The folly of glibness and of bumper-sticker sized statements came home again to me when I wrote for Facebook this:

On earth when something is rare we call it precious. In the universe when something is rare we call it insignificant.

It was in response to a short video I’d just watched in which respected, in fact brilliant, physicist Brian Cox made a statement (which I quote from memory) to the effect that this is undeniable that the earth is insignificant in the vastness of the universe.

It wondered as soon as I heard it why he would call this rarity undeniably insignificant, given that on earth rarity has the opposite meaning in most instances. Gold is rare, precious gems are rare, love is rare. To make things more valuable, we limit with availability, diamonds and art prints. Rare means precious.

Of course that’s not always true on earth. But is it obviously false in the universe? Could earth not be insignificant but all the more significant because it’s rare. Could it be precious?

If I can say of the same thing with equal logic that it is “precious” and “insignificant,” at the very least I can deny that the earth is “undeniably” insignificant.

But can I arbitrate between the two? Can I look at the universe and say with any authority that it is precious or that it is insignificant?

I cannot. As soon as I say “in itself” precious or “in itself” insignificant, I run into the old nominalist/realist problem that things don’t exist in themselves. These concepts have to be put into a context to give them meaning. Precious or insignificant—compared to what? For what purpose? What makes something one or the other.

Take of loaf of bread. In it put a single molecule of some radioactive material. Is the molecule in that rising loaf precious or insignificant? Well, if I want to eat the bread, it is insignificant. One molecule of this radioactive substance will not harm me. But what if I need a molecule of this substance for some experiment or just to test my Geiger counter? If I can find no other molecule but I know this one is in there, it now becomes precious.

This is how the concepts of precious and insignificant work.

But Brian Cox will insist that life is insignificant in the vastness of the universe. And he will use this as evidence that human life is existentially meaningless and that God does not exist. He may well be right. These are not points I care to argue. But I must also observe that he is using a circular logic. The cart is pulling the horse. It’s not the insignificance of life in the universe that produces logical godlessness. It is godlessness that produces the insignificance of life in the universe. This discussion highlights the difference, the nonparallel difference, between the position of a theist and an atheist. The theist can rightly claim that life is precious because God made it. The atheist cannot make a claim one way or the other. The words “precious” and “insignificant” in this context are both theological. They invoke the meaning of a universe in reference to something, and that something can only be God. It’s true that God may not exist and that that nonexistence renders the universe itself and everything in it without “in-itself” significance. But you can’t logically argue from insignificance to the nonexistence of God. You can’t establish the insignificance without first positing the nonexistence. While the theist believes he has a standard against which to declare life in the universe precious, the atheist has no standard against which to proclaim anything in the universe insignificant. A subatomic particle in a radioactive molecule in a rising loaf of bread cannot declare the loaf insignificant.

But let me be clear: nothing I’ve said bears any relevance to the question of whether God exists or does not exist, whether life is precious or insignificant. The only point that can be made by this analysis is that a scientist, however brilliant, cannot meaningfully declare anything in the universe insignificant without first declaring the context in which that judgment is made. And it cannot be made is evidence for or against the reality of anything outside of or apart from the physical universe. 

ABC

 

If A is B then C.

But A is never B.

A is always A

if names mean anything.

The morning star is the

evening star is

Venus. No.

The morning star is the morning star

The evening star the evening

Venus Venus.

If words mean anything.

If A were B

and A and B were C

they would earn only one

name. And nothing earns

only one name.

Limerick LXXII

 Given all the times he tried

To laugh when he should have cried

(And all that he did

Not to show what he hid)

Are you really that surprised to hear that he died?

The Incautious Goat

Once upon a time there was a goat

Who spied delicious tin down in a moat.

He jumped right in.

He could not swim.

And even worse for him, he could not float.

 

And then there was the time another goat 

Got pearls of wisdom stuck inside her throat. 

She baaaa’d and brayed 

But there they stayed. 

She never should have dinnered on a quote. 

 

                              

And then there was the time the hungry goat

Expounded on a soapbox, and I quote:

“Oh you dear friends of mine,

I thank you for your time.

Now, please ignore the sign and feed the goat!”

 

Grammar Lesson

Noun is a noun

and verb is a noun.

Verb is a noun till you verb it.

Verbing a word makes it a verb.

Verb is a verb when you verb it.

The question of ontological status

Stone

Constellation

Money

Carnation

Poem

Fear

Meeting in the Afterlife

 We invited Nietzsche and Kafka and Dickinson and Van Gogh to a meeting of all the people who died without knowing the huge cultural significance their lives and works would have.

Nietzsche couldn’t figure out why he’d been invited.

Kafka was pissed off.

Dickinson snickered. She understood why she’d been invited but was confused as to why the meeting was happening.

Van Gogh alone was gratified.

The Way Poems Mean

 

There are two ways to say this.

You can say that, reading a poem, you use the object, the words, their sounds, their appearance on the page or screen (or in the air if you’re listening, if listening is a form of reading), to create meaning. That meaning exists in your consciousness and nowhere else in the universe. Only God, in voyeur mode, has any access to it other than you. Or you can say the poem uses you to create meaning. The poem does not “have” a meaning. The poem is just an object, physical or aural. It has no more meaning than a rock or twig. But like a rock or twig it can become a meaning, or, more specifically, it can be the material from which meaning is created. If you don’t like the idea here of creating meaning, I could say that the rock or the poem is the object via which meaning accrues in your consciousness. There is something in the middle here between actively creating, like God, ex nihilo and passively receiving, like a Calvinist, salvation. You can’t be entirely passive. You can’t be entirely active, or you would need the object (or work in a language). Any object can become meaningful, can become no longer, for you in your mind, just a rock, or a thing. This second way of thinking is closer to the truth than the first, I think.

But this is how a poem (or any intentionally made human object) differs from a rock. The poem transmits, imperfectly, a meaning that was formerly in the consciousness of the poet.

It’s useful to think through the simplistic communications model we all learned at some point in school. Meaning transferred from one consciousness to another via language like the voice through a telephone wire, starting whole, ending whole.

The poet creates in words; the words manifest the poet’s intention. This is what I wanted to say, and how I wanted to say it, or comes as close as I can, close enough for you, when you read it to share my intention or meaning. Or experience. It would be beside the point to quibble about that vocabulary here. The point is this: rocks are different from poems in that rocks don’t sit in streams so that they can become metaphors, let alone metaphors tied to a specific meaning. But the poet turns the rock in the stream into a metaphor, seeing a possibility of meaning that the poet can use to make a poem, to transmit to your consciousness.

I understand the inadequacy of the model. But the point I hope is clear: that meaning exists not in the rock, not in the poem, but in the mind of the reader who reads the poem or interprets the rock. The difference is that the poem has behind its creating an intention to mean that the rock does not, and that intention informs the reading, making the poem more than sound or the imitation of sound, and print, and visual object. Meaning does not exist in the poem, it does not reside there. Meaning exists in the consciousness of the reader and only during the act of reading or thinking about the poem. Only in the moment of active consciousness. It fades like the light of an old TV screen until or unless it is turned back on.

That’s step one. There are now two ways to take this thought, two roads we might travel from this point. The first is the road of how limited this notion of mind is. It’s the road to the after effects of the processing of meaning, the road of how the poem comes not merely from the conscious attempt to embody fully-conscious meaning on the part of the poet and how the processed meaning in the reader seeps down into the body of the reader, of how the poem is processed not like a math equation (though I suspect math equations are processed more like poems than we usually think, especially good ones, that math equations are also poems) but like nutrients: stomach : brain :: body : psyche.

That road is pretty well trampled. I won’t go any further down it now.

The second road is more interesting to me today. It is the one that understands that this meaning, which I now need to broaden from that inadequate concept into the concept of experience, of which meaning is a major part, in the consciousness of the reader, existing only now, when consciousness is on guard and alert, always uses, as its meaning-producing tools, the circumstances of the reading, as understood by the reader. In other words I’m reading the poem today, in this context, this class, this leisure, within my highly flawed notion of what poems are and what language is and what meaning is and what interpretation is and what poems are for and what they do. And all these things both enable and interfere with my reading, with my experience, with my attempt to convert the artifact into an experience.  

So the better the model I have for how poems work and what situation I’m in when I read, the better, the richer, the more rewarding, more unimpeded will be my experience not just of poems but of everything, every human artifact, every natural object—like air through the vocal cords, the unimpeded vowel, the partly blocked consonants.  

The now of understanding. So let’s return to this fact. The meaning of a poem exists only in the consciousness of the reader. It is important to note here that the poet, the writer, is, as far as interpretation goes, just another reader; this is exactly true; the reader and the writer are on the same side of the poem; there is literally no difference. If one reader is different from another, if one reader can become, in fact must become, different from herself over successive readings, or even from beginning to end of a single reading, if indeed this process of reading is the process of becoming different, then the poet differs from the reader in exactly the same way that one reader differs from another or one reader differs from herself over time.

The meaning goes away when it is no longer present in consciousness, when I am no longer thinking about it. But the having-read, the experience of the meaning, the memory of the experience, does not go away. Where it goes cannot be determined beforehand. Am I overstating the case? Possibly. There is the possibility of forgetting, of utterly losing not just in the mind but in the body, in the consciousness and the unconscious, the experience. This is a corollary of any experience. I may learn what poison ivy is and then become wary of the plant and then, having perhaps moved to where the plant doesn’t grow, forget what it looks like, utterly lose my wariness of it and absently touch it when I return for a summer. And I may even at that point still not be aware that I had ever learned to identify the plant or that I have ever felt the itch of it. Losing the effect of a poem in the body so utterly may be possible, losing it beyond the zero, deeper than any dream or hypnotism could recover because it’s just no longer there.  But it’s as unlikely as that. If the body ever knew it, the body is likely to retain some vestige of it, like a forgotten language.

The now of meaning. The most productive, satisfying (oddly truest even) way of approaching a poem is to treat it as a potential experience. And then as an experience. Don’t search for a meaning. Have an experience. Meaning will be part of that experience. Analysis may come later; analysis will tell you why you had that experience of the poem, you in particular, at that moment of your life, on that day, in that context in which you read the poem; sanity requires that your reading not be entirely your own. A community readers will have experiences of the poem that overlap with yours. But analysis comes later, if it comes at all. We don’t have to read poems in order to analyze them. And even if we do, experience and analysis are two distinct activities.

I have in the back of my mind still the experience I imagine we all have of reading at least some poems, or even some part of all poems, particularly of difficult poems, the experience I have with any number of poems by T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Charles Simic and once had with poems that now seem to me without mystery, the works of Keats for example. I can’t have this experience when, despite concerted effort, the words just wash over my mind as sounds or as words unconnected to the other words in their sentence. Likely, the words are trying to do something in this context that these words have never done before. I have to come up with a new way of processing these words in order to make sense of the poem (to “make sense” is both to create meaning and to have an experience). I struggle with a poem that may or may not want me to struggle.

Meaning happens now. In my easy chair, picking up a book of poems I may have lying around, reading because I am in a mood to read, I can struggle with the poem, or I can turn the page or I can close the book for now or forever. No meaning happened for me and the experience I had was the experience of not knowing. I am guaranteed to forget the poem I tried to read. I probably won’t forget the experience of not understanding it, the experience that may lead me to give up on poetry or to take a class that teaches me how to read poems. In that class, if I want to succeed, I don’t have that luxury. This is a different reading context. And now I have to bring to bear all I think I know about poems and language and meaning (and school and everything else that for me at this moment might impinge on the process, on the thing I am trying to do: read a fucking poem).

So I ask myself, why am I trying to read this poem? I have so many overlapping and nonoverlapping answers. To prove I’m smart. To see if I can do it. To have the experience others have reported that you have when you read a poem; to find out what that experience is, to see if I can have it. To expand my mind, myself. To understand poetry better. And on and on.

If those things are interfering with my experience of this poem, I should put them aside. Read the poem. If I’m in a college course on how to read poems, I bring my confusion to the class and seek help. If I’m alone in my comfy chair I do whatever I need to do. If I don’t close the book, if I don’t give up on poetry, I get out of my chair and go to reference works or talk to people who like this stuff and ask them what their experience of this poem is. I read critics. I join poetry societies. I keep reading the poem. Or I read a different poem. The only goal I need to have is the goal of feeling satisfied with my experience of the poem.

Readers tend to become satisfied in one of two ways. They either use all texts to confirm their preconceptions, rejecting any that don’t serve that function, or they use or allow the new text, the poem, but also (though it’s a greater challenge) the rock in the stream to extend their being (mind, consciousness, self). They become more, closer to their potential, if that is something they have. More of who a person can be.  

No, We Don't Write Poems--a formless excursion

 Or music. 

One of the most misleading and perhaps intellectually damaging legacies of the Enlightenment is the idea that people write music or poems. These things are no more written than equations in math are written. They are put down. There is no right word, no single word anyway, that will adequately name the thing that is done when a poem is put down. It is captured, it is discovered, it corresponds to a being or reality that preexists it and that can be perceived when the conditions are right. All artists attest to this fact. A written poem like a written equation is false. E does not equal MC cubed. 

But the Enlightenment needed to create a way of increasing the stock of the commodity "writing." And so it created an author and authorship, a capitalist unit subject to reward an punishment. It's a false equation. Locke's philosophy was written. He can claim it. Whatever is false is written. Whatever is true is found. Locke figured out how to pay people for lying. For making mistakes. For getting it wrong. 

The advantage of math over poetry is that math's equations can be demonstrated to a much higher degree. People who understand math and physics can show that E in fact equals MC squared. But is Hope a thing with feathers? 

Still, I will not say that math or science establishes objective truth. The facts of math or science correlate to human perception and experience. E doesn't equal MC squared in heaven. If asked, God would say not "that isn't true" but "I wouldn't put it that way." 

The two people whose thoughts I'd like to refine are Gervais and deGrasse Tyson. The former says for example "there are 3000 gods, what are the chances you have the right one?" And "I just believe in one less God than you do." I'd like to say, giving God 3000 names does not multiply gods. But I'd also like to say "that doesn't mean there's only one god." The question before this conversation is "does number exist without human brains." And my answer is no. If there are no numbers in reality, no platonic form for number, then the question "how many gods are there" is a nonsense question. 

Why Don’t They Just Say What They Mean?

 

Unless the words were put down in that order in that way it could not do the thing it does to those to whom it does it.

Because the words were put down thus it does nothing to you.

Your move.

F*ing Computers

 

In trying to make our lives simpler, computers have made them hopelessly more complex. What used to be simple, straightforward, intuitive processes now require us to solve a rubrics cube a day to figure out how to store, edit, find, save, and retrieve files. Where is that thing I was working on this morning? I now have ten paths to it, half of which take me nowhere near it, three of which take me to some alternative universe version of it, two of which disappear when I try to click on them. I never know if I do get a file open if this is the one I wanted, the latest version, the best version. It's one of the versions the computer saved for me without my permission when I was thinking about options. The lost bits exist still in the ether. Now I have to train myself in the proper recovery method. I've lost my actual train of thought because I have to inhabit the amateur computer scientist section of my brain for twenty minutes and even to the thing that I dread most in the world: search the HELP menu in a desperate and fruitless attempt to get help. I put in search terms, carefully using the actual terms the computer used with me to tell me what my problem was. But the words a computer uses to talk to you are never the words the computer will allow you to use to talk to it. “You need to verify your username and password.” Ok. Since there’s no useful information there, I go to help, “How do I verify my username and password.” One of two things will happen: “Your query yielded no results.” Or “here are the 10,239 things you might be asking about, including a recipe for blueberry anchovy muffins.”

If I ever to get to the old version of the document without the 20 hours of work I’d already added to it but which, starting from, I’ll save at least 20 hours re-editing that would have been wasted looking for the version I actually wanted to work on I may start working on it again. But before I can do that, I have to offer myself up to a Buddhist monastery.

You Great Unknowns

 

WE know Emily today not because she had great talent

that’s a given

but because she had great luck.

She wrote a letter to the one person who would help her.

We know Kafka today because his best friend betrayed him.

I could go on.

 

The observation is not that we came so close to not knowing these visionaries

but that we don’t know the ones who wrote the wrong letter or had loyal friends.

 

How very many sages remain unknown to history?

We can’t answer that.

When all is finally over, earth exhausted by its native evil

and God gathers God’s own into God’s kingdom

will you finally get your reward, you great unknowns,

or will there be so many of us that we remain

anonymous?