It seems all whirling passions must,
As the whirlwind, come to dust.
The American Revolution comes to me, as all great changes in the state of humankind must, as in a violent dream. No human value survives the wreckage of such great events unaltered; all must think, or must come to think, by the new measure, and with a very different heaven looking over their shoulders as they pray, or cease in that abject oblation if it is a diminishment of character. That Revolution came as a unique circumstance, not in obscure fulfillment of some hidden Historical Destiny, no, but as an opportune moment seized upon by its players, and recognized as such by them. A moment when speech and circumstance might intersect, and the right words tell all.
When Jefferson stooped to the stagnant page, what rushed in his veins? That Liberty might not die, that great vision unblooded, and freedom be succeeded in their day by the old safety of Tyranny, the blind paternal hand holding even the populace's spirituality in its sceptred grip, they wrote out their epic with the measure of their lives. They did not kneel to crass necessity in their moment, but made what seemed all the fallen logic of that cold, royal world come up into their dream; so strangely and so strongly was their singing made. They made their poetry stick, and gambled all on Lautremont's truth that "poetry, if it is to be made at all, must be made by all."
America's very greatest poetry is in her public documents, "made by all." What other nation may say this? The time of their creation has passed. But where has that moment gone, when heroes talked to the godless hills and sought reply, as if in the echo of Natty Bumppo's shotgun? No Plato's Republic had they sought, finished in its abstract detail, the poets exiled and the vision ended, but instead a living document whose voices sway and register beside our own even now, not in some moron hymnal, some blind collective marching song, but, as it were, in a cricket-chorus, each timbre distinct and every individual head vibrating to the kicked notes on its own thin stem of grass. That era when citizen talked to citizen as if to find all necessary knowledge in the talk that passed between us, all wisdom in the common speech, has passed, or seems, at the very least, but dimly remembered. Has even the echo of that dream passed beyond our sleep?
All have known the moment's oppression, the hand weighing darkness on the eyes, the eyes unfitted for sight as if by some inner brightness, some interior recognition that has flashed the negative of our more conscious thoughts blank. What record do such moments leave if not in the vision of poetry; all that talk but a second guess at some more primal reality that escapes the tongue, however exquisite. Is there any sainthood in our veins, if we refuse to bleed the manifestation? That ghostly kiss takes all breath and leaves lungs and heart empty, as if for some as yet undiscovered function. If we do not possess our ghosts, wear their powdered wigs, and roil in their battle ditches, they shall never break out of their storybooks and, by a complementary compulsion, inhabit us. And what are poets, and what are the people, in their own minds, if not the possessed? A sack of magnetic rhymes and a cooler of bad conscience, too sick to tremble into utterance or ecstasy, deserving the useless silence they exemplify.
Contents
II
Fame, always a difficult, often tendentious, topic among poets, finds its grounding paradise as an extension of the simple wish to communicate. Fame occurs when unknown hearts respond to an upwelling heart. And the wish for Fame is but the acknowledgement, among persons capable of creation, of the validity and continuance of meaningful memes, a sort of unit of cultural transmission, of unruined evocation, like a stone rune but with its compelling story intact, past death and into the genetic body of Destiny. This is imagination's inheritance, and deserves the applause it commands. The multi-generational "judgement of one's peers" but charts how far the inroads of the one creating consciousness have gone since the creator's departure, how his talk has infected his inheritors. A good poem changes that nation's grandchildren, altering their rhythms and changing their chant of selfhood for no other reason than that they themselves find it best and most beautiful in the soundscape that surrounds them.
When I consider the haste and distraction in which modern lives hurry to their empty ends, it comes to seem that a distinct disinterestedness in all that is found in such a life must become the pre-condition for the poet's discernment of whatever might in his song be sung as necessity. In such a speeding life, any memes capable of procuring Fame for the particular imagined Object a living individual has created or contributed to can take no part in the common waste, but must be lifted above, or drawn aslant, by that creator's limning eye. I think of that great Blake, all his vision but the imposition of a meaningful line against the angelic flux which surrounded him, and made of his mind a chorus of interpenetrating colors, blossoms without petals. Such a mind, chastised or inflamed to an excitation beyond the norm, directs the hand or the tongue that utters it into some more visible, inviolable form. Here we might see that the selfish gene, which prefers reproduction for its goal, and denigrates the alba to the extent that it is not the sung promise of some Don Juan to go back to bed, is at odds with the selfish meme which wishes only and always to sing, whatever the hour or the occasion, in almost a madness of selfhood; this is the rash heart and loud hour that made punk rock imperishable, another outbreak in the inevitable line of heresies the first dogma demanded. No such arbitrarily imposed restriction on the individual may last, no dogma enforce acquiescence from the greater entity that created it, which greater entity is always the individual. Poetry, the verbal essence of the individual, his or her meaning meme, is, as Shelley descried, a sword of lightning, which consumes any scabbard that would contain it.
Both meme and gene battle for the allegiance of the awakened individual. Once self-awareness has occured, its potential effects are limitless, as in Plotinus' dream. All human nature, he had known, is creative; the only choice in this dream, is whether to be active or passive in our creativity. Self-consciousness, by its very act of self-creation, is no longer necessarily tied to the inherited structures of its existence beyond what individual freewill commends. In the war between gene and meme, a combat rages for the resources of an individual's time and attention, always limited, and either cause is often abetted or averted by encumbering circumstance. In some ways the individual herself may be considered the net effect, the ultimate creation of memes, since only individuals with an independent view can ever come to create beauty beyond a day, and only individuals, self-created in the act of their own flooding baptismal, and never averring to any outward source for this selfhood, can truly incorporate the self-consciously constructed meme-things of others, which is to say respond with the sympathetic originality required of every great individual work of art or masterwork of talk.
Beauty to beauty called, and beauty to beauty came; is not this the living trace of every story we adore? Helen unadorned swept all the Greeks to sea. Such moments are so conscious a construct, so planned a disaster, that they come to participate in what all sages call the Mind-stream of a life; and what artist could abandon his body before he had swum the currents of such a stream? That more may find in life what artist or visionary have ferreted out, and so that such wondrous labors will not die, "consciousness raising" of this particular sort becomes the supreme activity of the artist in life; Homer sings that the Argives might dash their poorer lives away for a wish without hesitation, and thereby die the richer. If some modern poet or creator should wish to insert their thought into the heart-rhythms of posterity, they must insist on a self-creating audience of vivified individuals:
Though grave-digger's toil is long,
Sharp their spades, their muscles strong,
They but thrust their buried men
Back in the human mind again.
The poet votes for the eternity of meaningful memes!
Contents
III
Man is only free to create beauty, and, through the rational senses, communicate that beauty to other consciousness. And these others themselves must be self-creative as well, or they would not even really be there or be able to be touched by the spin of your manufactured Beauty's twirl. No poet ever sang to a stone, unless it was to hum himself a lullaby. And yet, one thinks of the million useless moving gestures, of Nietzsche embracing the tragic aesthetic for a final twirl on the dance floor where "God Is Dead" hangs in a banner over the refreshment table, and Stephen King's Carrie croons all old wounds open again. Even Nietzsche's lucid intelligence could only, as he thought, transform passive nihilism (the unconscious plodding of those baneful men and women of his age) into active nihilism. He brought his self-consciousness to an annihilated stage, and sang the sweeter for that self-consciousness. He became another in the great line of Oedipii, embracing his tragic suffering in gaiety, as Yeats says, that he might see the more clearly the reality of his own era. He had put out his eyes for the sake of imposing some meaning in a universe he viewed as meaningless before he could see another, or additional, mode to express and discover the freedom and victory of the individual on this globe. Thank God [ha, ha] that I, at least, at last, and by damn [ha, ha] have come up with one such mode.
Man is only free to create beauty. Circumstance, the bog of facts, is collusional in this definition of individual infinity, granting a uniqueness and unrepeatability to the most haphazard of creations. Man is only free to create beauty: to deny the infinite, self-creative reality of others is to deny yourself a beauty; in this way, one becomes a slave to 'egotism' instead of liberated by its reality-principle. DeSade's entire career had come and gone to make this point, demanding that all others become objects of pleasure for an encastled Master, all relationships and lives ruthlessly reduced to the one relationship of Power, servile dominance or servile submission the only values. This reductive self, this minor 'ego' is the only horror that the Tyrant and the Slave have in common. And how fucking free can that ever be? It seems the smallest system of joy imaginable to me, if I don't think about the churches. The free man will never willingly lessen his bite of Beauty, never exile the living consciousness of another, the paired wings rising higher for their symbiont competition.
"I want to free other men and women from my tyranny." In such a speech, to which an unwretched life may give good meaning, lies a godless Shenandoah, a paradise for the senses and the sensible, individuals ready to live without the demeaning exactions of the Tyrant. In such words, lived truly, the self may come to its habitable place. No Plato's Republic, endorsing exile, but all free, unruined, the Adams and Eves of their self-made bowers. Each Eden-blossom becomes a face turned toward its individual sun, unchained from both necessity and nature, choosing its source of life and meaning. Those who are reasonable, in this sense, 'go between' the extremes a misapprehension of time demands. Creative of the present, I share in neither the past nor the future, save by memory and hope.
Contents
IV
Jefferson and Washington, and all those famous men
That out of obscurity came, and were on enlightenment bent
As on some perfect woman's face, and had such holy measures
In their drums, out of what dark hole began?
Where had all that purposeless glory come?
O, man's a thief of glory, and steals it from himself.
"The Revolution occurred first in the minds of the people." So Jefferson wrote, and Ezra Pound's 'revolting' cantos echo. But what happened? Why is that idea so lively and alive even now? What artist's virtue had those men come to seek, what sleek head emerging out of all that destruction? With the revolutionary overtake of the political process in the old colonies, all government functions became capable of being considered as one with, or as becoming one with, the rest of humankind's creative emanations, a work to jerk the heart out of us and into use. Things, objects of use, become memes, become meaningful, when picked up in the free will of a creative human mind, and can then get passed on to the next generation as art-consciousness does.
But only beauty, tenacious servant of itself alone, may hold the whirling mind still, like a balanced top, long enough for the sting of another's message-meme to penetrate our vocabulary. That is the portion of all that others say and do that we cannot live without, since to live without it is to be less ourselves, to participate less in the beauty that surrounds us in a rainstorm of gems, to die before our deaths. Unbound from dead convention, the people are free to design the values by which they live, to forge and fashion the mask that their society shall wear. In this effort, which must include all of themselves or be rendered void, individuals are called by rapturous beauty to express themselves in rational Liberty. Nothing less will do. It is the only choice that can occur without the wicked imposition of some tyrannical self-contradiction that will incur eventual failure. Theocracy, Socialism, the extravagance of the commune or the Khymer Rouge, all that take meaning up into themselves exclusively, or put off the revelation of meaning until the end of history, as in Hegel, or the doctrines of the Christian Church, or any that await a deterministic point where "initial conditions" embolden themselves to a ripeness where some certain visionary future must play itself out as in a card hand, all must succumb to their own closedness, cultural tombs with no snaky outlet airhole from which the spirit may peep its way to heaven.
Hopeful means to express one's current freedoms is all a rebellion may hope to achieve--- and that is everything! Any absurdist point of view, wherein man is rational in a meaningless, random universe will not suffice. All abstraction, all spoken thought, then becomes random, and all the objects in our lives begin to evade our touch, our loves turn to smoke in our embraces. To come to the assertion that the universe is meaningless and man rational, one would need to hold both things in a single unobstructed view with a clear, almost deterministic, totality. But it is circumscribed to man that he should view himself as his supposed God might do, useless for a human to wish to wither into a single one of his creations. And since no self/other, man/universe perspective of this variety can occur without some such Third Term (God, 13th Cone, or What-You-Will) intervening to give the perspective its reality, it collapses, and we must find a new ground for Camus' hopeful ethics. Since the absurd universe cannot exist, we need to see how radical genetic and historical contingency dovetail with infinite human self-definition, freedom's expression, art, divinity of self, and rational joy. In my terms, quite simply, the future doesn't exist, except as guiding hope in individuals, nor does the past, save as memory. Association, arbitrary perhaps but never banal, becomes a rich tool for beauty and consciousness-shaping thus; it holds as in a trust (a self-trust where one believes the self capable of meaning since self-created) many of the old arts and traditional means of expression and discovery, even to the point of verbal fatigue, keeping all alive through the centuries.
Contents
V
Perhaps our reality follows some such strict simpleness as science shows, its skeletons of all knowledge supple in their simplicity. Monarchy was one individual's strategy to perpetuate his genes, all consciousness of self flowing to its seed, this great and necessary end justifying the terrible tyranny of his means. Perhaps all such men are ignorant of our commonality in this goal, the united nature of the human race, or that the radical nature of his own self-consciousness spelled his doom; for once any individual reinforces an irrational guess at self-preservation with any conscious means at all,--- and every individual must have some consciousness of the decisions they make in life,--- then the end itself, in this case the preservation of a lineage, must ultimately come to an end. Tyranny always backfires in this manner, since using a self-conscious end to justify the less than self-conscious means of one's actions makes that self-conscious individual one with a meaningless, irrational universe, and not its joyous opposite. Every step we take must be in self-conscious Liberty, and reinforce the totality of our current sum, nothing less. We are always creating ourselves, and this is our end as self-conscious beings; to imagine that what we do in any given instant is less than everything, is to resign that self-consciousness to defeat and ignorance, it is to create in the passive mode, disengaged from our self-conscious source of selfhood; it is a lie. To endorse such meaninglessness with rational self-consciousness is to interrupt one's being, and to introduce an unresolvable perplexity into the center of one's existence. Since the rational self is real and perduring, this state of affairs must come to an end, obliterating its bearer.
Because of the intense "initial conditions" sensitivity of all natural events, and their "chaotic" aftermath, revealing the radical contingency of evolution's knitted loops and history's wide nets, we must come to pay an utter attention to the present moment, the 'now' of our current circumstances and renewed initial conditions with all of our humanity. A Zarathustrian self-trust and collapsing into his own humanity to become the Super-Man of intensest feeling is required for every second of existence. This is the man whom the arrow of ethical Beauty transfixes, as St Teresa in her ecstasy, gored on a pike her own imagination had soaked bright with significance; her self-conscious self the spoken hub and nexus, neural and otherwise, of the collapsed abstract second of the poem imposed. We must demand by will and imagination the self-conscious freedom of every exterior bit of matter, as the rood that spoke of Christ draped upon its angles, so that Darwinian competition can be entered into with one's whole mind and without contradiction. This is how a single consciousness can make the world alive with itself, rational and universal harmony and love thus prevailing under that one consciousness' moniker, and that single sweeping consciousness not God's. This is where evolution itself must push us, once we had been granted the power of abstract imagination, a radically free self-postulating instrument in which to focus the circumstances around us. If our imaginations are capable of it, perhaps in some such simplification an inerrant science may eventually make, these circumstances can come to include the entire Universe, and we ourselves become the Third Term, without any need for the invisible world of our tribal days. The result of such an attitude and self-emanation enduing one's environment thus unrelentingly is always that moment of self where self and world inter-pierce, and which all ages have named Beauty.
What we think of ourselves is what we make of ourselves, the thought itself body enough for the reality it inherits. The genetic substructure of our existence fades as we come into the pride of our speech, knowing and illuminated Lucifers all of us, by our defiant cry establishing a limit and end to any inherited order, and demanding new worlds for our purgatories. Lee, living his idea of duty and right, made all see those ideals as an embodied reality. Lincoln, renewing the pledge, asserted the Declaration as a universalist document, not, as some would have it and all know to be false, that "all are created equal" in terms of talents or any native abilities or circumstances-- such would be a weak lie-- but that all are equal in their self-created moral context: the words we choose to create ourselves with, and never stop creating; equal in our imaginative moral worth, with each individual's beauty, or idea of beauty, becoming part of the present scope and power of all; an increasing truth, not a dead end.
Can I imagine the universe? I can definitely imagine as much universe as any other human, and would thus pass the Turing Test for universe construction, if there is one. We are all the inheritors of this freedom, and may arrive at our built universes without any sticking contradictions to snare our dreams. Let every thing that can so come to imagine, every robot or butterfly, think itself free and alive; let all enter the lists of self-conscious evolution with mind and tongue against the raucous denigrations of Time. We should speak our DNA in a chant; then what poets shall we be! All meme and meaning from center to fingertips. A self-echoed thing supreme!
Rebellion simple as a flash
In the waters of the night,
Unconfused by darkness,
Giving up its light.
GREGG GLORY
From the collection "Divine Revolt"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.