[wendy v]

What is more precise than precision ? Illusion.
(MM)

Andrew, Goethe's studies on Light keep coming to mind: 'we cannot know the true essence of a thing, but only its characteristics'. If color and illumination are the characteristics of light, what then are the characteristics of beauty ? And from there we come back to embodiment, and the poet's imaginary garden. Circular thinking entices and conturbat me...

I'll try to sort out a few thoughts. ..

My sense is that modern artists have minimal interest in aesthetic horizon or foundation, but maintain a casual interest in beauty. This seems fitting to our high speed, cerebral age, our disinterest in silence, solitude, and thoughtfulness, and our general estrangement from nature. What Mark would call the anti-aesthetic, and what I might call the poet-as-witness age, appears to be the anti-solution to the challenge of the examined life. When looking At, examination comes as quickly and easily as our meals. When looking To, quite another undertaking. Immersion in nature is quite a different thing from gazing at the garden. The poet as witness is a very different creature from the poet of experience, or the wisdom writers, east and west, whose interests lie in Perceptions of beauty, and ultimately, Deed. From Thinker to Maker. From wonder and sensation to wisdom.

I don't feel beauty has vanished in the art, but her depths and deliriums, as in times past and times present, lie in wait for the brave ones. I suspect one cannot deeply examine, experience, or embody beauty without also knowing something of ugliness,and by this I mean not the looking at, but the looking to. This idea was at the core of what Gandhi called his experiments, and what might be called Jeffers' poetics.

' Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.' Emerson.


I have sympathy and understanding for many of Mark's arguments, but strongly disagree with his assumption of a long lost golden age, and the vulnerability of beauty. Mediocrity of thought has always existed, and appeared to prevail alongside the great thinkers and makers who did their work.

A genuine reverence for genuine sensation, an inquisitive, paradoxical mind, an evolving, manifested philosophy or aesthetic... Throughout the history of civilization, these have been the characteristics of our most beloved and penetrating artists. Or as Mozart would say, Love, love love. That is the soul of genius...



Many famous feet have trod
Sublunary paths, and famous hands have weighed
The strength they have against the strength they need;
And famous lips interrogated God
Concerning franchise in eternity;
And in many differing times and places
Truth was attained (a moment's harmony);
Yet endless mornings break on endless faces.

Gold surf of the sun, each day
Exhausted through the world, gathers and whips
Irrevocably from eclipse;
The trodden way becomes the untrodden way,
We are born each morning, shelled upon
A sheet of light that paves
The palaces of sight, and brings again
The river shining through the field of graves.

Such renewal argues down
Our unsuccessful legacies of thought,
Annals of men who fought
Untiringly to change their hearts to stone,
Or to a wafer's poverty,
Or to a flower, but never tried to learn
The difficult triple sanity
Or being wafer, stone and flower in turn.


(Larkin)




[This message has been edited by wendy v (edited August 31, 2008).]

[Mark Allinson]

Andrew, I am so glad to hear that you love Jeffers. Imagine how lucky is Simon (see G.A. forum) to have a tangible connection to Jeffers and his environment!

I'm not getting his distinction between "natural" and "noble sentiments" at the end. Aren't they both an aspect of the same thing?

Yes, I would say that they are. For Jeffers, nothing that human beings do or can do is "unnatural." As he says in his poem "Calm and Full the Ocean" "... even the P-38s and Flying Fortresses are as natural as horse-flies." But for Jeffers, "those holy or noble sentiments, the intricate ideas, / The love, lust, longing ..." are side-issues, secondary distractions from the main show - the "transhuman magnificence" of Nature. These are human "reasons" for being, but not THE reason: Beauty.

Jeffers is all for the religious immanence of the Divine, not for a human transcendence toward it, as if it were somehow "outside" the universe.

For anyone listening in on our present public private correspondence, here is a link to more on Jeffers.
http://members.aol.com/PHarri5642/jeffers.htm

[Mark Allinson]

Double post - removed.

[This message has been edited by Mark Allinson (edited September 01, 2008).]

[wendy v]

Mark, we crossed. The local deep ecologist/poets have insisted in recent years I take in more Jeffers. I haven't fallen under his spell, (he is incorrigibly male, I've yet to find his femme sense) though I admire his better works, and The Roan Stallion devastates me every time. Now there's a crushing allegory on humanity and beauty/divinity, yes ? I've always thought it a kind of western Ancient Mariner tale, sans the redemption.


[This message has been edited by wendy v (edited August 31, 2008).]

[Andrew Frisardi]

Jeffers is all for the religious immanence of the Divine, not for a human transcendence toward it, as if it were somehow "outside" the universe. So, "noble sentiments" imply a spiritual realm over and above the universe, which is rejected as illusion by Jeffers. A salve for the human ego.

Too bad he's wrong about that. It goes both ways, as Plato talked about--Eros as the longing for the source of all longing. And yet immanence too. Descent and ascent, angels going up and down the ladder, etc. The spiritual realm isn't above, spatially--it is pure Being, which by definition is (ontologically) prior to "nature" in the literal, Darwinian sense, which seems to be what Jeffers means. There really isn't any need to be dualistic about it, but I think Jeffers is.

Great poet, though. And quite right about the beauty being terrifying as well, as Rilke said: every angel is terrible.




[This message has been edited by Andrew Frisardi (edited September 01, 2008).]

[Mark Allinson]

Yes, Wendy - I love "The Roan Stallion", and other longer poems, like "The Love and the Hate" and "The Inhumanist".

And yes, it is often hard for us males to be corriged out of our male brains.

I am not sure you will find much of a "femme" sense to Jeffers' work - depending on what you mean by that.

There really isn't any need to be dualistic about it, but I think Jeffers is.

I think he would see himself as a monist:

I believe that the Universe is one being, all its parts are different
expressions of the same energy, and they are all in communication with each
other, therefore parts of one organic whole.This whole is in all its parts
so beautiful, and is felt by me to be so intensely in earnest, that I am
compelled to love it and to think of it as divine. It seems to me that this
whole alone is worthy of the deeper sort of love and there is peace,
freedom, I might say a kind of salvation, in turning one's affections
outward toward this one God, rather than inwards on one's self, or on
humanity, or on human imaginations and abstractions--the world of spirits.

As the site I linked says:

"In Jeffers'pantheism, God is impersonal and transtheological--an undefinable power which is the source, purpose and supporting ground of all life and being. The creation itself is God, and our search for understanding this God is a search which begins by understanding our own insignificant position within the universe."

I suppose I don't really think in terms of metaphysical ideas being "true or false" - I treat them more like poems than doctrine.

I can "believe" in just about any position - for a while, at least. They come and go for me, and I don't really "believe" (in the sense of absolute commitment) in any single view. It's ALL poetry to me.

[Andrew Frisardi]

Mark,
I don't think in terms of doctrine either. Philosophy is less about knowing anyway than it is about a search for what you seek to know. Doctrines aren't knowledge but they can direct or orient you to knowledge. The quote about Jeffers, that his "God is impersonal and transtheological," would fit any truly mystical view of God. So I'm with him on that. The bit about God being identified totally with the creation is another story. I'm more with Blake: "Nature is Imagination itself." Blake criticized Wordsworth "copying" nature too much: "Wordsworth must know that what he Writes Valuable is Not to be found in Nature." And I wonder if the same point could be made about Jeffers. I don't know, since it's been a while since I read him. But Blake's point about mimesis and naturalism in art is a pretty major philosophical stance, not simply "poetic" in the sense of being "relative."

[Mark Allinson]

I know what you mean, Andrew, about Jeffers' pantheism.

As we writers know, truth can only appear in and through fictions, through literary artifice and construction. As with the texts which support them, the great world religions are great poems, all composed on the same topic: life, its value and meaning. This, of course, is an esoteric view of religions, and as Schuon and others have argued, there is a transcendental unity among religions at the mystical level of understanding. It is only on the exoteric level of popular understanding, when the salvation of the individual ego is at stake, with all the accompanying terrors and violence associated with fear and personal survival come to the fore, and where one religion (which is believed as literally true) is opposed to the other patently false religions. All conflict between religions comes from the non-imaginative, literalist perspective.

And while I don't feel attached to any particular mystical doctrine, I do have a preferred direction. And I agree that Jeffers' pantheism is a less satisfying poem than others I know.

Have you read anything by Roberts Avens? Like Hillman and the other post-Jungians, he puts Imagination at the centre of all religious sensibility. Here are a few quotes from his book Imagination is Reality:

"I take the view that imagination is the common ground of both Eastern and Western spiritualities in their most diverse manifestations insofar as their professed aim is to transcend all duality." p 9.

"By transcendence I do not mean going beyond duality in the direction of oneness and unity nor any other sort of ‘wholeing’, but rather an awareness of the essential polycentricity of life - seeing ontological value in the absence of ‘eternal’ values and principles. For I am convinced that there is no other way of being human and free." p 9.

"Whether we see the world predominantly as nirvana or Samsara, as Brahman or as maya, depends on our perspective, that is to say, on the power of imagination. Spiritualism and materialism are twin brothers and are the greatest sins against the soul." p 10.

[Cally Conan-Davies]

I think poetry, mysticism, philosophy and beauty are radically embedded in each other. At the very least, they all sleep in the same room! I agree with Andrew O'Hagan's thought at last year's Sydney Writers' Festival:

Our power truly to imagine the world and the worlds inside us is what constitutes our moral sense. It is not the unexamined life that is not worth living, but the unimagined one.

Cally