Poems Got Legs?

Still exploring the possibility that this impulse toward poetry has legs.  --Yesterday morning, pen poised over notebook --which is what I do every morning after my first cup of coffee, just on the chance I might have an idea-- what I did was not write down an idea or analysis but some "verse".  Verse is in quotes because it seemed more a mental disposition than any need to express an emotion.   The verse is questionable:

The green flower blooms near death.
After the rose there only are thorns;
without the rose, there only are thorns;
better the rose than only the thorns
but better thorns than death.
   It's wealth to write.
   But if not Homer,
   Why not Galt?
    If not to write,
    Why poor?
    Why rich?
Better the green stalk flush
Than a dry stalk withered.

I know what this means, I don't know if it was worth writing... except, as in everything, something is better than nothing, and maybe I did learn.  I do concentrate, that should mean development.

Later in the day, driving many miles out of town, the snippet of yesterday (that had no poem behind it) did reform itself (pretty much unbidden) as a legitimate poem:

Out of the woods but
still in the meadow.
How far yet to a green grass
firm to the stride, and known?

Legitimate, but minor.  This does argue that snippets are worth putting down, but also argues that it's only force of feeling that can make the mind do a good poem.  --It also might argue that "force of feeling" (by which I mean pain) might make the poem seem good just because a successful poem is a temporary release from that pain, and that release itself might be the judgment that the poem is good?  --I actually don't think so.  I think force of feeling is gift.  Presuming a poem can be written at all, it's the force that makes the poem.  --(I have diddled a bit with these as I typed them up and they are improved, so there is such a thing as simple skill.)

(I referenced Homer, by-the-way, because he was seen not as the beginning of Attic culture, but its culmination; none before him were preserved.  I still have the thought that the last century has been only a pit, but not a descent.  I still see it possible that Western culture can pop back up, that we can resume, that we can have good writers again.)
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The little Fraud
is an evident fraud,
defrauding only frauds,
but harming all:
fools, frauds, and freemen.

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Sunrise Century

The Tea Party's still on my mind.  I think I'll define it as a revolt of contempt against the visible elites.  Those visible seem to encompass pretty much anybody who has any position of influence, a very few conservative standouts excepted. These elites have assumed authority for themselves, their purpose being aggrandisement of self and class; their attitude towards all those not themselves, contempt.

The marvellous thing about contempt is that it's always mutual, and what's happened with the spiteful over-reach of the last two years is that Americans have now seen that contempt.  There's no longer any effective pretense of "for the children", it's "take it and shove it".  The contempt so clear, contempt's returned.  The conceptual underpinning for the Tea Party revolt is Constitutional limited government, but the energy, the anger, hopefully the staying power, is contempt for those who have appointed themselves masters over those who merely wish to be left alone to live their lives.

The significant thing is the contempt.  Any rebellion merely based on concepts or policy differences can be co-opted, but you can't co-opt contempt; once it's formed it's not going to leave.  This is why this movement may last a generation.  It's class-warfare, where class is not economics but attitude, and each hates the other.  How good how good is that!  And the class now newly despised can not change, their self-identification depends on their need to have a class to which they can feel superior.  Lose that contempt for that class, lose all sense of self-worth.  But it's been noted now, and once noted it can't leave, so the war is on and there will be resolution.  --When I say the elites can't change I mean of course individuals.  The class itself, over time, can change because new blood can enter; and as well, those silent and marginalized, with this new citizen support may now find voice, and thus can somewhat mitigate the tone of the class as a whole.

I'm immensely hopeful.  The intellectuals of the West have made themselves trash, but the intellectual heritage of the West is immense.  The current class has made itself negligible through an inflated ego-separation from that past, defining themselves as superior by defining the past as insignificant.  Their entire production has been "new".  It has to assiduously be new, other wise it will lap with the past and that past will be seen as superior.  But the past was true, so necessarily all that is new must be false, that's why it's crap.  There is no wholesome American who does not see that, because all those wholesome have a sense of the true (even if not an expertize).  This is why the esteem socially granted the elites will be like the legitimacy granted authoritarian government: at some point everybody finally recognizes they agree each with the other: This government is filthy rotten to the core; and at that moment authority disappears, government falls.  Splat!  Exactly this will happen to what passes now for our present high culture.  Perhaps in a year we can get rid of a century of "Piss Christ".

We'll see.  But if there is collapse we're not then in a hole.  We're not the Soviet Union.  We're the West, especially, we're America.  There is so much powerful that can be drawn on from the past.  We can be students again!  Get rid of the disease and in short order health might again blossom.  I see this as a possibility.  This may be a sunrise.

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A good article on the same theme, which though not considering the psychological underpinnings, well states the poor training given our elites as to those philosophies and values that make possible such a democratic experiment as America.  Last paragraph summation:

Those who doubt that the failings of higher education in America have political consequences need only reflect on the quality of progressive commentary on the tea party movement. Our universities have produced two generations of highly educated people who seem unable to recognize the spirited defense of fundamental American principles, even when it takes place for more than a year and a half right in front of their noses.

That defense of course is of limited constitutional government, and in general of those values that classically have been understood to produce the virtuous self-regulating citizen.

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Is there any value in a snippet that comes in a moment but has no sense of a poem behind it?

Out of the woods but
Still in the meadow
On it will go how long?

Have you ever tried to scan a line
With Albaquerque
in it?

Both could be manufactured into poems; the first is about escape, the second about nothing (though suggesting something funny).  Each could be made complete.  But with no sense of a larger poem already behind either, would the result be worth the candle?  Maybe I'll try it as an experiment.  ...I've tried a number more lines on the first.  They're all silly.  It seems that if there's no poem right off there's no poem at all.

Tomorrow I will consider how many men it takes to start a cultural revolution.

Doldrums, Let Me Count the Ways...

It's better to write bad poetry than absolutely nothing at all.

My intellect seems very private,
It shyly hides from me.
It hides so well
It seems it's gone...
I wonder.
..........

Does she love me does she not,
I've been there.
Will she write or will she not,
I'm there.

It seems there is no brain.
Not true.  It's there,
But hanging in the waft
Of only yes or no--
The single thought it knows--
Twisting.

I could look left,
I could look right,
I could turn upside down.
If then I choose I'd get it right,
It would be one,
Or maybe not.
Twisting, twisting, twisting.

This has got to stop.  This is the most time I've ever wasted in my life.  Waiting.  Yuck!  Can't I get in a fight or something?  Then at least I'd be doing something.  --Sometimes I feel like the dog who might catch the car.

This poetry impulse is interesting.  It does seem that poetry is a way of perceiving, it accords with something structured in the brain, it's not mere artifice and convention.  The first proof is satisfaction: exactly the same idea expressed in prose does not satisfy in the way as does that same idea expressed in a poem.  The second is that often poems simply "come", they're simply there as suddenly expressive of the presently dominating emotion.  Virtually all my poems of the last few months (my "poetic episode") have been of that nature.  All of a sudden there's the first line, and everything else follows.  With the appearance of that first line there's always the sense that "the whole poem is there", although there's never a certain sense of just what it is.  Sometimes it can be written straight out, in the matter of a minute; sometimes it may take ten, each next line coming slowly but with a sense the line was always there,found finally; always merely a line uncovered, not one created; something finally apparent not through effort, but patience (and some focus).  If this is so, then it's the structure of the brain doing the work, and not an achieved artifice.  --And anyway, in my case, it can't possibly be artifice.  I don't write poetry, and have no developed skills.  Yet what finally comes is a poem.  It's can't be training, there is none.  It has to be the structure of the brain satisfied.

But there was the above poem.  I was just sitting waiting for the mail.  My general concentration was horse-crap.  I started to write the poem as a way to pass time.  It didn't come like the others.  It came slowly, with many drafts, fairly topsy-turvy, but finally it was a poem, and it did express the unease and anticipation I felt  --far better, by a long ways, than similar words I'd already put down as prose in my notebook.  --I conclude that in this case that the brain merely hadn't yet done its work.  This isn't a sharp emotion, it's only a disturbing one.  Perhaps it's just that the brain hadn't yet been compelled to face an emotion that for the most part I try simply to not note at all.  Yet finally something satisfying was completed.  It had structure --though it accorded to no known structure; what it did accord to though, was to that peculiar perceptive capacity which is the poetic, and which is determined by the structure of the brain itself.  So finally it was a poem, and gave the satisfaction of a poem (the temporary release from the unpleasant tensions of this particular emotion).  It was, finally, what prose is not.

I think I'm stating the obvious, that poetic form is innate, not cultural; it's perception, not artifice.  Still, though obvious as it is, it's a new perception for me.

So?  So what?  It does seem that each brain has its own talents. My only talent seems to be the expression of an immediate emotion (perhaps it would be categorized as "the lyrical").  Whatever, although it's never been a part of my ambition I may have discovered something of value,and so may do many more.  Anything that gives such satisfaction has to be worth doing.  --But I have absolutely no conscious concept of what constitutes a poem; I have no aesthetic.  I should work on that.

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If there's a hunger for communion,
Does that hunger mean it's true?
Though hunger can't create it can perceive,
Thus hunger can establish God exists;
So hunger can establish that on earth
(If good for heaven why not earth?)
That there exists that one communicant.
(Actually, "Proof by Desire" is not a proof, but instead, given
the loving and seeking nature of God, a plausibility.  Confused
thinking aside, I am unable not to hope on earth the plausibility.)

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May be starting on my first poem that's not just an encapsulation of the moment's feeling but instead is the expression of a concept I don't yet understand.  The idea would be that the understanding would come through the work on the poem, something I've never done (though I did to a degree in the sonnets I wrote when I was nineteen; I remember the last one as being of exceptional value.)  I think there is something in me now that's felt.  The meaning of such a feeling is normally discovered through analysis, the restatement and restatement and restatement of the feeling/concept until by slow accretion of small insights something solid is finally achieved.  Such a developing concept can be revisited for weeks, or days or months, abandoned, resurrected years later and worked on again.  The only difference this time is that I might try to make the process a poem instead of analytic prose.  Maybe.  This is an idea of the last hour, so I don't know if it will last.  --I haven't gotten very far so far, despite a lot of scratching:

I'm not sure what's real on earth
If Heaven's but a fraud;
But if it's true that Heaven's real
And everywhere is all that's real
How could it be that earth
Would not have Heaven too?

I'm not prepared to defend this concept, I don't even very well know what it is, but it's certainly connected to the idea that the transcendent as it exists in men's minds is real, and so through application must have some real expression.  In the deepest things, while certainly there can be death and tragedy, there simply can not be bitter disappointment; something, somehow, still has to exist.

Potpourii Progress

("Potpourri Progress".  Another way of saying "Doldrum Driftings".)

No sleep last night, too agitated; no sleep today, too hassled.  Finally slept a bit late afternoon.  Woke, the sun plunging, and hurried to get out in the daylight yet for my walk.  Needed coffee first.  As I stumbled past my notebook on the way to the pot I paused a moment and wrote down this poem:

If she doesn't love me
she doesn't serve me;
If not her business,
not my gift.
The image gone...
The real girl gone...
No Beatrice &
No Patricia.

(I pronounce Beatrice with the same three syllable accent as Patricia.)

Then walking quickly across the St Anthony Bridge to get to the West Woods, already the sun set, I paused to hurriedly write this one:

How far from the face of the cliff?
"This far,"
(He held his fingers nearly touching)
"But not falling yet."

And noted: The image gone, good riddance, I don't need it anymore, but I sure hate to lose that hoped-for Patricia.  She sent me some photographs, God she's cute.  The point is, there's been a change in personality, I just have no interest anymore in a semi-Beatrice type image, however perfectly that image might understand and support my aspirations; I want a real girl, one who will pat me on the head and say she thinks I'm a nice guy, (thinking, "God, he's a stud.")  So anyway, is my dreaming, and I think it's sane.  --I will pull-up my Cervantes poem in a bit; and I continue to speculate on why I'm putting down on a public access blog things I otherwise all my life have kept to myself.  I think in part it may be because I'm finally ready to enter my society, I've been an observer long enough; and I think in part that readiness might be because now I'm not alone.  I have an immense contempt for the intellectual West, I've had it all my life.  But I'm no longer the Lone Ranger, there are millions now who share that same contempt.  They're called, the "Tea Party."  They not only rebel against the bossiness of the elite, they find them stupid.  Welcome.  I find them fine company.

Will consider this more later.  Have to go buy stuff.
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There's just nobody around
When everybody's dead.
If there's nobody "out there"
There's nobody "in there".
You can imagine an
existent friend existent
--and have a chat.
You can't imagine
a new friend existent.
You can chat with Cervantes
--and I do.
But if you don't have a friend
to chat about your chat
--there's nobody there.

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Wretchard's quote: "When you come right down to it, any sentient being with a foreknowledge of his own death is either motivated to achievement by a dry sense of humor or the intuition that he's part of a game whose ends are not immediately discernible, but is worthwhile playing anyway."

That "...the ends are not immediately discernible" in any absolute sense is a given, so people chose their own.  Those choices can be clear or vague; there may also be, in the wholesome individual, a sense that what ever choices are made they may not in fact be those for which he was created, but there will be a faith yet that if the effort is made, in the end, finally, the purpose, whatever it may actually be, will be fulfilled.  This is faith, faith that there is meaning, somehow, in every life well lived.  I believe this is how I've lived my own odd life --energetically-- if not particularly well in any other sense.

The comment that strikes me though is the first part: "...motivated to achievement by a dry sense of humor."  This is Wretchard speaking.  I pay attention to him.  I don't really know what he means.

I know that in daily life I can not have a conversation without cracking jokes.  I do like to make people laugh, and it has in the past been called a "manipulation"; but while it can be that, and while it certainly greases the social skids, I don't think that's really what it is.  Somehow, when I'm with people, there are just a lot of jokes to be made.  My emails contain wit.  I note though, that in my notebooks --millions of words-- there may not be a single joke.  So it may be that humor is the way I must necessarily --preferably, anyway-- relate to my fellow man.

This doesn't clarify Wretchard's point, but it may move me closer to understanding Cervantes, who didn't find his genius until he found humor.

He certainly was uncomfortable in the literary society of his time, with fundamentally no good work until late in life that humor broke everything open.  He didn't find comfort until he stepped outside his society and created his own world, making it perceptible through humor.  The humor is of treatment, verbal and episodic, but primarily of concept, the Don, so far removed from sanity he couldn't be taken seriously, but so deep, true, and vital he couldn't be ignored.

There is no such character in my present imagining, but I do think I need something of that nature if I'm again to write well.  I just do not like my society.  I speak of "art", "serious literature".  It reeks.  I don't note it, it's been thirty years since it's even occurred to me America might have culture.  It doesn't exist.  I read a great deal, I've studied paintings --but absolutely nothing "serious" that's contemporary.  There is good genre work, there's absolutely nothing presently "serious" that's worth the dirt between my toes.  I pay little attention to the dirt between my toes, no attention at all to present "important work".  But it is a huge isolation not to have a serious culture.  --I do not think this culture can be faced.  It would be like facing stink.  Stink can't smell itself, everybody else knows it's stink.  I think there has to be a "Don" somewhere, something totally outside of present opinion, a totally different world.  If such a world were created, such a personality, it would resonate with those who still can think; and some note might be taken of academia and "culture".  It would be mockery, but only as an aside.  I could only be an aside, or the work wouldn't be truly serious.

Note on Wretchard's writing:  It doesn't contain humor, it does contain wit.  The wit could be seen as "dry humor", but I don't think that's at all his reference.  I think his reference is his life; he knows how far he's moved outside of the elite circumstances wherein he was educated.  An extraordinarily gifted man.  He must have hoped for recognition from those people, but the more he works the further he moves away, and the less chance then he'll have that he'll ever be respected by that class to which in a better society he would naturally belong.  This might be the "dry humor he sees: The harder he works, the further he sinks.  The greater his insights, the more he fails.  He just ain't gonna make it.  Initially that had to hurt, now he probably sees it as an inescapable fate, and so sees it with humor.  Irony would be an appropriate term.  He emphasizes the humor --"dry humor".  --He does have a great following though, among those who have sunk so low they're actually concerned with what is true.  Losers!  --These are good men.
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Can't sleep.

I'm eighteen, she's lovely.
Not eighteen, not even close;
She's lovely still.
I've no idea
what makes it so.
She's lovely.

(Slight touch-ups on this thing three times.  Think I've finally got it right.
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Of Dead Men & Mice

Since I've been big lately into thinking of dead people (friends I no longer have), and since in this blog I may sometimes chat about little mice (which I find complex, stunning creatures), I thought I would maintain character and write some on the death of mice.  Actually, I'm just going to post two short emails I sent to a friend some time back:

Dear T,

I lost a little momma mouse last night, Chinchin.  She was a pretty, very bright, active little mouse.  I decided to mate with Hot Shot, my oldest mouse ever, even though she herself was a little old for pup bearing.  I knew it was dangerous.

From shortly after she became pregnant she began to struggle.  I didn't know if she should make it to delivery.  She did, but after that I didn't know if she would make it through nursing.  "One more day, little girl," I kept saying: "If you make it through seventeen days you'll all make it."  She would come out from nursing, struggle, choke, make whimpering, complaining sounds, regain her strength, and go back in.

She made it through seventeen days.  The pups continued to nurse after that, but less frequently, some not at all, and unless there was a weak one, nursing was no longer crucial.  She made it through 20.  Between 2:00 and 4:00 A.M. last night I saw the pups start to come out and eat hard food.  I had seen them nibble before, but in that 2 hour period they went from nibblers to voracious eater.  Clearly they had made it.

There was one weak one yet.  Not puny, not really distinguishable from the others, but a little behind.  Chinchin went up into her hut and nursed that little pup one last time.  And died.  Hot Shot, the papa mouse, stroked her face afterwards.

And

Dear T,

I'm just now losing the last of my super mice --actually a son of the super mice, Hot Shot, consort of Chinchin, son of Hot Stuff and BT-- but the last one.  He's lying out at the far edge of the condo, alone, waiting.  That's how mice do things.  The one dying leaves the others.  If I didn't have up a fence he would pull himself over the edge.  The healthy huddle together in a far corner.  There is no activity in this mouse condo.  That's how you know a mouse is about to die, and not merely ill; the mice know.  Dying is a somber business.  There might be a visit.  A mouse might venture up, cautiously.  He might sniff noses, the dying one slightly lifting his head.  There might be a brief groom on the top of the head.  These visits last the small part of one minute.  --Actually, this time I do think there's one male pup anxious for the old man to kick the bucket.  For a moment he ran on the wheel, then went back with the others.   Funny guys, these little mice.  It could be ten hours yet, or one minute.

I started my mouse book some weeks back.  Some parts are going very well, some are very hard.  I mean only to portray mice as a delight...the first year, before there are any deaths.  I think people will be entertained by a good story, I can't expect them to face the pain of the second year.

Feels odd to feel these years with these special mice come to an end.

                                  See you, M.

--He died as I wrote this, I didn't see it; he was trying to leave the condo.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

There is that hill in Brittany
I've never known nor ever will--
Yet know so well as thirst, as need;
Or the coming bend behind
The darkly foliaged road,
The distance misted tops of far off hills,
The flat line of disappearing sea;
Always always, anywhere, horizon,
Toward which I've turned
Yet have not reached.
Strongest in youth, not yet lost--
Longing.
In longing there is direction--
Forward.

 Bellmont ,  Poem, comment 27.  Of note, comment 75.

Doldrum Driftings

     On the general notion that it's better to write something than nothing, and since I certainly am writing nothing, I thought I would start a new blog and write something.  No rules, whatever matters to me at the moment.  More accurately, whatever might be drifting through my mind at the moment.  Anything, just so I put down words.

H'mmn, seems in this new dash top I can't place the picture where I want.  --Well, there it did move off to the left.  Fine.  At the top center of my keyboard is a mouse --Office Girl-- and on my right forearm --Pixie.  These are my assistants in all my labors.  --Now to post, just to see if it works.  Then have to go gather around a bonfire and latter will post

more.

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Monday, 11th.

     I simply have no inclination to chat.  Think I'll dump some poems:

               I had hopped for a rounding,

               Past brought Present; passing.

               It may not be.

               If there's no front to life,

               does life just bumble out its end?

               Waste?

               If there's no front,

               was ever there a middle?

               If no circle,

               is even there a line?

               "Whose name was writ

                      on water."

             At Chantilly Wood so many died;
             Out of the trenches, forward, dead.
             They had to do it --dead.
             I'll have to face her
               --Soon or late--
             Out of the trenches--
             Something's gotta give.

(Actually, the Battle of Chantilly was a Civil War engagement, fought in a thick wood amid a thunderstorm.  I  have in mind instead a First World War battle, but can't come up with the right name.) (Could go with Passchendaele, pronouncing it with four syllables: Pass' chen dae le'; many battles in mud and trenches.)

            An arid time, this time of late,

            And people in my woods.
            No loneliness, no peace.
            So sharp!
            I don't know them,
            And don't want to.

               After fifty years,
            How real is feeling?

            If feeling is response,
            If after fifty years
            that thing responded to
            Has changed,
            Is feeling real though
            Memory be exact?

            In what's past what's real?

            To say: "Nothing;
            Now is Now,"
            May be true but yet
            Not right nor real.
              Something...yet...is real.

            It appears there'll be no circle
            Thus no line;
            Ill-spent energy, a lifetime.
            No pieces, dashes, dots,
            Vapor.
            Nothing can be made of vapor,
            Only fantasy...
            I could suppose that could be true.
            Truly there is fantasy.

     Not sure why I write these things, except that I don't really write them; they come to mind and I write them down.  It's always the first line that comes first.  Sometimes I immediately know I have a poem, though I don't yet know what it is; sometimes it's only that first line, but the rest of the poem comes over several minutes as I walk.  It seems very similar to composing a tune, except that the material is verbaly conceptual; and as with a tune, what's put down is "true" to the emotions of the moment.  That's the first demand.  I would prefer of course, that those emotions be fully true perceptions... but I'm not always certain.  --Having a lot of trouble with font size and spacing.