Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

 

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Volume 15 Number 1, April 2014

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 THE WORK AHEAD

“[…] artistic content and spiritual communication are, after all, precisely the same thing.”

W. Benjamin in letter to G. Scholem, October 22, 1917.

 

 

that it all came from God through the creative word

he once saw

 

later it all came from the class struggle and dialectics

but auras were mixed in

 

then he made passages speak by strolling

and wondering

 

always an angel followed him

its back to the future

 

recording the debris

left behind

 

one fellow had trouble with his materialism

and the other with his mysticism

 

he defended himself to the one

saying, “you don’t get it, but you may be right”

 

to the other he said, “you may be right, but maybe

you didn’t get it”

 

mysticism without dirt becomes delusion

materialism without spirit becomes specious

 

he listened for resonances, thinking

eventually the answer has to become one

 

rehearsing what the angel taught

that the shards must be put back together

 

before the messiah can come

 


 

 

JIM

 

bringing back messages

from altered states

 

is a noble quest

perhaps, just as rituals

 

Dionysian and others

speak to us

 

of revels and the need

for what’s uncommon

 

break on through

(to the other side)

 

where death is always

dancing close by

 

but we need the shaman

to stay alive into old age

 

dying young and disappointed

is no achievement

 

break on through

(to this side)

 

where the mysteries

are more perplexing

 

because death is just as near

via boredom and belongings

 

whereas the beauty of embraces

shimmers more truly

 

when lived together

on this side

 


 

 

MISNAMING

 

the necessity of spirit

in naming

and misnaming

 

is often misunderstood

though arguably

naming is spirit

 

the American Studies

Association boycotts Israel

in what spirit?

 

when asked why not

Iran, the answer, we have to

begin somewhere

 

makes the point

discernment crumbles

from the top

 

reducing the spirit

of freedom

to absurdity

 

the same place

it flows

when too fluid

 

not that I don’t fumble

in my naming

of values, too

 

but I try only to boycott those

who would silence me

 


 

 

 

READING AN ESSAY

 

reading Geoffrey Hill’s “Our Word Is Our Bond” in his Collected

Critical Writings you’ll come across a quote by Benjamin Whichcote,

leader of the Cambridge Platonists, actually stating, “If it were not for Sin,

we should converse together as Angels do.”

 

except I read it as, “If it were not a Sin, we should converse together

as Angels do.” Which made so much sense to me, understanding

sin as mistake, as not on the mark, as missing the mark,

because it would indeed be a sin to converse as Angels do

 

apart from no one knowing how Angels do converse, the attempt

itself would prevent us from becoming more fully human;

aiming to become anything but human would give us a false target

and that makes me wonder why Whichcote would ever wish for it

 

 

- Per Brask