The following is a kind of prologue to my recent book of Poems, “On The Bestial Floor.”
Our curse is our awareness. Our culture, our very humanity, is shaped as much by what we don’t know, as by what we do. And our acute knowledge of that line is what took our species from out of the primordial muck among the forever lost, and thrust us upon ourselves, doomed to peel the endless onion of self knowledge. We hide from death. We hide like a fawn in the forest from those eyes that lurk in the blackness, those eyes that swim violently through the brush awaiting the pouncing moment. Life, because of its finite and fragile nature is, at times, mortifying. And our anxiety breeds both an obsession with the fear itself, and a romantic idealization of continuity. As such, human art can be partitioned into two categories: The Art of Fear, and the Art of Avoidance. Both are equally valid, and both are equally important to who we are. Both are based on how to psychologically deal with dread.
Our religion is fear. Even here, in this age of knowledge, we are lost in the caverns of darkness. For, no matter how much we know about the external world, or the inner workings of the human mind; no matter the mathematics worked out detailing the structure of a singularity; no matter the drugs that keep us breathing: we will die. We know it, even when we don’t. Man needs God, indeed redemption, to save him from death. Not from sin, but from death.
Nicholas Malebranche said that Adam fell so that Christ may save us. Christ did not save us because Adam fell. That is, God came down to earth, so that man may go to heaven. God became man, so that man could become God, immortal.
We are dismayed by the thought of our mortality conferring upon our soul a meaninglessness. We long for a soul with substance. But with death, all the drivel that fills our days is put in stark relief. So, we search for meaning, and invent it. In times of stress, we watch romantic comedies. In times of happiness, we read Dostoevsky.
Nessun maggior dolore che ricordarsi del tempo felice ne la miseria.
As Dante had Francesca da Rimini say in the Inferno. That is, “There is no greater pain, than the remembrance of happiness, in a time of misery.” And yet, that is what artists do. Miguel de Unamuno took it a step further and flipped it around, declaring that it is disgusting to look at past misery during a time of happiness. But this too, is the work of the artist. Not to dredge up the facts of the case that prove a state of emotionalism, but to present the emotionalism itself. It is a wholly irrational profession. One built upon suffering. And it is in this suffering, that the soul finds its meaning.
Wisdom is a strange and overused word. I am of the mind that many never attain it until the moment of their last breath, or the moment their doctor tells them they have cancer, or the day their husband is killed in a car crash, or their child is torn apart by a grenade in Iraq. It is an illusive state, the state of the wise. And it is by design. To be wise is to fully comprehend ones own inherent mortality, and in so doing, the inherent mortality of all mankind. But, this comprehension is horrid to the human mind, it is in fact, unfathomable. How does one comprehend the inability to comprehend? How does one see the un-see-able?
We don’t. Yet, we are constantly drawn towards those things we cannot understand. And so, in our attempts to grasp the elusive, we have invented Art, Music, Theater, Film, and Poetry. These medium of the ethereal. We use the voice of the unreasoned. We shun clarity. Logic is torn in two.
Poetry, as an art form, straddles the river that runs wild in the wilderness and separates the mind of music and the mind of language. Music (ie. Sound) rips on emotional centers of the brain without need of logical understanding. The sound of birds chirping is soothing to the ear, and yet we have no idea what they are really saying. Bach is beautiful with or without knowledge of German.
Language, is quite different. It is the very mode of our logical communication, and is bound up in those centers of the brain that govern logical thought. It is always bound. Bound to the language (or languages) of the author. Bound to the cultural significance of those words. Bound to the history of letters, the history of ideas, the history of humanity. As it should be. (We certainly wouldn’t want to live in a world of totally illogical language. We’d get nowhere!) And yet, to write poetry is to defy the logic of ones language. To defy the history of ideas.
The Poet is faced with quite the challenge. He must use language (more over, written language) to create a symphony of sounds that will affect an emotional response within his audience. Few have been any good at this. Dante is clearly the champion for the Italian lexicon. Goethe in German. Basho in Japanese. And in English, it is likely Shakespeare (for shear influence alone) if you count his plays as poetry. (though, I’d choose William Butler Yeats.)
What the great men and women of the form have in common is their supreme use of the sound of the words. How the words interrelate. How phraseology can become musicology. And it is in this “soundification” that the poetry frees itself from the shackles of reason.
It is the role of the artist to paint the invisible. His work, in the end, is to be the umbra of remembrance.
And so it is that I come to write this book.
