Where Seas and Fables Meet
Page 7
You will see the mark of the Structure in leaders (political or corporate) who have to be programmed to appear human. These are called “photo-ops.” Translation: make an image where the leader looks capable of feeling, of experiencing joy or delight. He or she will appear to be sharing. This, too, is a sign that the Structure is threatened: its spokespeople become replicas of the human, miming the ideals of a just, sympathetic society.
5.
“We are not backing down!”
This was the slogan of the student protest mobilizations in Quebec in 2012. They were protesting what happens when a society – the Structure – goes to war on its children. The Hunger Games (books and movies) are parables of this war on the young: Saturn eating his children.
The children began to push back.
6.
The students were rising in Montreal and Quebec City streets with a demand for new meaning. The iBrain generation (supposedly unfocussed and self-absorbed) found focus in the cry against calcified thought.
Online flash gatherings – the students were beginning to
create their messaging streams through cellphones and blackberries. At any moment they could call upon fellow protestors to appear. (The riot police eventually snatched up these techniques, too, radaring in on the messages, the rebellion’s points of mandala gathering. This inspired the protest organizers to move even faster.)
7.
By creating their own dataflow, the student protestors used social media to flame the fires of activism.
8.
The student mobilizations spell the obsolescence of the daily newspapers and Big TV. They’re perceived to be the mouthpieces for the Structure. The students are making moves to become the news themselves.
Small screens are small beginnings: seeds.
Light Against Death-in-Life
1.
Can you see the light’s effect on the weight and pressure of the Structure?
Try this.
Darken your room. Make it black, utterly black. Feel the weight and presence of the dark. Light a match. Just one match will do. Watch how the darkness recoils, rolling back, roiling off into corners, losing its substance, becoming shadows. The darkness will look agitated because of a single light. All it takes to churn up the darkness is a lit match. The match serves notice to the dark: much more light will come.
You’re a match and a single light.
You can strike a light at any time.
2.
The match may waver and sputter out, but there will always be more.
Many lights and matches together form global city illuminations.
There are more matches being struck now than at any time.
3.
Whenever I come close to being discouraged – this shows up in me through fatigue and melancholy – I perform this exercise. I do it in my mind or I do it for real. I think of others doing it, too. The darkness seems less daunting, almost frightened.
Imagine multitudes lighting candles in vigils.
Imagine multitudes in protests holding up the emanant lights of their iPhones – that gleam so much like a single candle or a match, except the light doesn’t sputter out, it waits for you to shut it off.
Wilde Things II
1.
A theory of fun is no joy.
2.
On Steve Jobs: being inventive – he created employment opportunities and opportunities for editorials and commentaries. Jobs made jobs.
The magic in a name: Bill Gates opened gates.
3.
Only the shallow never judge by the screens appearances.
4.
Memorable overheard remarks:
“She was my life-partner for six months,” he said.
“The rumours of his life were greatly exaggerated.”
“The only exercise I get these days is from shopping and sex,” she said.
“He’s been dead for a long time. He just doesn’t know it yet.”
5.
The maxim of a corrupt politician: “Once bought, stay bought.”
6.
A tense negotiation between businessmen: “Are you screwing me in this deal?”
“Why would you think that? Why do you ask?” “Because if you are, I want to be there to enjoy it...”
7.
The sign of maturity in a young person (they say) is when you stop blaming your parents for everything. The sign of maturity in a parent is when you stop blaming your children for everything.
8.
“I read all the book half the way through” – Sam Goldwyn
Untimely Political Remarks
1.
Those on the left wing should wake up each day and consider that God may be a fascist.
2.
Those on the right wing should wake up each day and consider that God may not be a fascist.
3.
Those in the secular centre should wake up each day and see if there could be more – much more – at play.
4.
A cynic’s review of political actions:
“The right wing will screw you because they enjoy it. “The left wing will screw you because it’s for your own good. “The liberals screw you to develop a make-work program for their cronies.”
(Interesting test: which line did you smile at first?)
5.
Unity without diversity is totalitarian. Diversity without a unity of souls is incoherence, segmentation slipping away into isolation.
6.
Imagine a society without kings or queens, without a court, without nobility, without inherited privilege – where eminence is achieved by intellect, effort, imagination, skill, spiritedness, will and diligence. Privilege will shudder over great experiments in social mobility and the cry for more democratic participation.
7.
Remarks and questions for the global guerrilla theatre: We are suffering from an outbreak of truth –
Truth is breaking out everywhere –
Does anyone believe that people would voluntarily dine out at a food-bank if they had alternatives?
What would happen if another international crash occurred and we’d dismantled the policies of protection and care?
Globalization is capitalism on steroids –
Flash occupations are temporary rebel zones –
Wilde Things III
1.
The democratic snob: he condescended to everyone.
2.
The interpreter’s dilemma: take a three minute pop song or 30 second infomercial, or a half-hour sit-com or a piece of pithy ad copy, and write volumes on it. Maxim: A blurb needs a long interpretive essay.
3.
Power in the hands of your friends is no guarantee that you will have any access to that power.
4.
This dull leader: he was a good argument against evolution.
5.
His eccentricity was taken for vigorous intelligence and independence of mind.
6.
“You’re reading too much into what I say,” she said.
The writer replied: “But my dear I have to read too much into things. It’s part of my job description.”
Readings
1.
Art, literature, scholarship, reading are useless activities. When I’m asked about teaching poetry, I reply: “I teach something useless.”
But reading, like poetry, is neither pointless nor worthless.
2.
Poetry won’t teach you how to repair a car or fix a leaking faucet. It won’t show you the easiest way to paint a wall or how to make a rocket escape earth’s gravitational pull. Poetry will tell you how the stars sing, and speak of the dream where a single lotus becomes a great city. It can show you tears on the clock’s face, happiness in a handful of atoms.
Useless, then,
but not pointless...
3.
My neighbour – an electrician – while fixing the battery in my car, said: “Everyone has their own way of contributing... I couldn’t go into a room and talk about Shakespeare.”
4.
I start my classes with the declaration: “If you continue with your studies in poetry, in literature, prepare to have your income earning potential slashed in half. Prepare to have your parents and possibly even your friends ask: ‘What’s the practical purpose for this course of study?’ And be prepared to reply: ‘There is none... I’m learning how... to see a world
in a grain of sand, heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand, eternity in an hour...’”
To my astonishment and delight, most students stay.
Re-visions
1.
Re-reading Dante’s Divine Comedy in Allan Mandelbaum’s translation... At the moment I’m stuck in Hell.
2.
Nine weeks later, now in Purgatory: things are looking up.
3.
Arriving at last in Paradise: it seems too late... Is paradise an acquired taste? Soon it starts coming back to me. I remember being here, once, long ago.
Then the book becomes light.
4.
Observation: the only character in all three volumes who is alive , who isn’t a shade – not one of the damned, not being purged by fire or one of the blessed circling in the singing radiance – is the poet-pilgrim, Dante. And therefore, can we say, outside the story, along with Dante, you – the reader, and in the case of the English versions, the translator, too? The pilgrim reader, the pilgrim re-visionary... To be a re- visionary means you can learn to have second-sight...
5.
On reading Dante with my students:
His certainty of belief is matched by the certainties of their disbelief. Is theirs a true scepticism, which could rigorously undo their disbelief? That is, is theirs an iconoclasm strong
enough to turn on itself and see what the result would be? Do they recoil from his certitude because the pattern of his narrative, Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, resembles the raptures of evangelists who seek to condemn the modern world?
I strive to remind them: Dante is first and foremost a poet, not a theologian. His faith is in his rhythmic implacability, the authority of the beat: it is the sound and pace of a poet devoted to capturing the unfolding integrity of his vision. His poetic dreams have the intensity of the visionary, and the beauty of a finely shaped fictional line.
The irony is Dante’s visions have transformed our visions of the otherworld. We may try to separate the poet from the eschatology, but it’s hard to do because Dante successfully altered our imaginations to include his images, and the imagination will revise reality at every chance it’s given.
Soul Veils
The angel visited the struggling poet. He was struck down by an epileptic fit after his conflict with city politics. He’d been an honest Florentine councillor for years. Now he was to be exiled. He was to be torn from his family. He’d have to journey northwards, seeking sanctuaries. He would find none.
But she visited him and showed him the heart of the world. He would have to move with this heart, and make poetry out of its beat.
The poet called his visionary work a comedy. He did this, even though his life was scarred by misfortune.
•
The angel visited another aspiring poet. He was lazy and vague – a teacher who disliked his pupils, a sometimes printer who disliked the process of hot type, an occasional journalist too inattentive to be a good reporter, a stay- at-home who dreamed of travelling the world but rarely ventured beyond the zeal of his burgeoning city’s streets. But through her he found a voice. This voice amplified freedom. Suddenly the loafer caught fire. He wrote and wrote. He didn’t recognize the being burning with life in the words. But he wanted to become it. He spoke to this life, caressingly calling it soul, spirit, self, lover, O and you. When he forgot her, or when he was disturbed by the sufferings of war, he sometimes shrank in his aspirations. He penned miniatures addressing the cramped quarters of
a troop in a bivouacked tent. He wrote in terms that the soldiers might understand.
The more readers he had, the more he changed his way of writing for them.
But when he aged, he began to add pieces to his one long poem – the only one he ever truly wrote – that reflected her absence. While breath began to leave him he called out for her, knowing that she’d already moved on. He wrote goodbyes, more and more only farewells, in the tone and pace of someone already slipping on to the other side.
•
The angel visited a poet who lived between the new world and the old. An American who chose to live in Europe, he found the shades of the past were visible to him. In the new world he heard only wind across the dusty plain, the wind whispering down empty streets in cities beside a great river and the sea.
Her visit was short. But he felt her presence in the way he once saw a darting reflection on an abandoned pool whose surface was almost clogged by lilies. He began in his vocation with a love song. He later caught the wind’s desolations in fragments, in Europe. He extended his long poems with minor variations. He ended his vocation with a promise that air, fire, water, and earth would one day – out of time – become one, the quintessence, the heart and soul of the world. (There would be more writings but these were the truest ones.)
His vision of her was broken.
Sometimes he remembered her visit as if it had been like a breath over a pool filled with dust. Afterward he felt parched. Then she became the girl who hesitated on the stairs, the girl showered in rain and hyacinths.
At times he would fold himself back into a shield, dressing in an armour of dark suits and forced courtesies. He tried to become a minister, in a way, but people kept giving him awards for his poetry. The angel left him long before too many awards had come.
•
She visited the singer when she was young. She had a voice; she already sang of beauty. She was so startling in her gifts that she was herself taken for an angel – though a fallen one, so she sang later.
The visit increased the charm of her songs. They recalled ancient chants when she moaned and hummed and whooped and sighed. At the singer’s side, the angel placed the originator of plain songs, the Abbess of the Rhine, to strengthen her will and to help her reach the eerie high notes.
The singer learned something profound from the visit. She learned how to enter into experiences that she herself had never had. (This was the same gift given to the playwright who’d given birth to so many characters he’d caused a stir in heaven; he was rivalling the inspiration of the source: he had the capacity to imagine what he was not.) She wrote a generational anthem, and yet never visited the site where that generation gathered one summer weekend on a farmer’s field.
The singer lost her visitor’s trace for a time. She hunkered down into experimentations meant for a charmed few. She rose again at her side when the singer’s voice dropped almost an octave (“coffee and cigarettes,” she explained), and started to revise her original inspirations. She found both loss and sprightliness. The sorrow was a channel of emotion. The spritely side showed that the old singer was very much alive.
•
The angel opened the hearts of well-shielded people. Their souls had grown. When people opened their books, or opened up a channel to the songs, they grew by assuming the awareness or the emotions that were in the words, in the musical notes in the tracks. These had been mostly private activities. The experiences became public when the poet’s book was published and circulated, and when the singer went on tour and her albums went into circulation. Now the angel could enter into many individual psyches. The screens were portals of discovery. She could ask many people to rise. She’d entice them or fire them up. She wounded them and inspired them. They had to have cracks or nothing c
ould come through.
Her fire entered the many because an age was ending and another was full-throttle underway. Technology and the soul were becoming one.
The soul’s growth caused anguish. It was painful beyond belief. New stories, films, songs, and images showed people twisting into barely recognizable forms. These were the
Super-comics, the alien stories, the tales of magicians and possessions, the vampire chronicles, the visions of watchmen and watchwomen, the stories of hunter games and the films about transformer robots who protected humanity against interfering demonic sentient machines and Hobbits and knights who fought for power and a just use of it but who sometimes succumbed to the addictions of magnified being... Human forms were changing with unimaginable speed...