I am an echo. Born

                       in a sound breathed:

the coupling

of my parents, undone soon after,

yet still

                       there was a sigh.

Released in the canyon

                       of satisfaction

the quivered air began

      its first rush to the other side.

One of the things I enjoy most about used books are the scribblings prior owners leave behind. Sometimes they are bland little comments and all that is sparked is the sense that here was a mind that, while moved to write, the nudge was only just enough to move the pencil and not enough to perturb, and others, well, that’s what this post is about.

I bought a school edition of Selected Poems and Letter by John Keats that some student of long ago (published in 1959) used in a term of reading John Keats – although I doubt the student was in class as long ago as 1960. (Some of the notations and comments suggest a more recent youth in class with a used text.) The book is marked by both pen and pencil, a woman I think because of the curvature of the script. I can tell what readings she was assigned by what poems and letters are marked. Read, for example, were “The Eve of St Agnes” and “La Belle Dame sans Merci.” “Endymion” of course, or at least parts of it. (Parts of that poem are suspiciously empty of notation.  It is rather long, I suppose.) “To Homer” “Ode to Psyche”  to Nightingale, Grecian Urn and Melancholy and lastly “To Autumn.” But not “Bright Star.” Imagine that, but I suppose the class was long pre-movie.

It is the odes that come in for the most attention. There is hardly a line that has not been noted, commented upon. Some of those comments are quite revealing. There is a comment, for example, against “Ode to Psyche” that says “Psyche: winged creature, moth, butterfly.”

I imagine this young woman looked her up or perhaps more likely, was shown a picture as part of the class and was told the story of Psyche and Eros.  There she was, this student, who was being fed the cultural background necessary to roll inside Keats’ poems, to feel the empyrean pull, the net of connotations that Psyche weaves in someone who reads widely. Yet her comment, “winged creature, moth, butterfly” tells me that irrevocably her mind fell instead into channels built in her own life – a life of imagined earthly transformations, of animal metaphor, of compound eyes and multi-faceted truths, of a world based profoundly in the post-Romantic.

This is the thing about students, they are of their own time. When Keats wrote to Bailey that

I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of imagination – What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth – whether it existed before or not – for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty – in a Word, you may know my favorite Speculation by my first Book and the little song I sent in my last – which is a representation from the fancy of the probable mode of operating in these Matters – The Imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream – he awoke and found it truth.

he meant it literally. Truth is sought in the imagination, in the sensation Keats understood as Beauty, as the sublime. Not for us this. Truth is grounded at the moment. When we seek to understand we do not follow the pull of connotation into airy realms with earthly mirrors as Keats did. We link along more corporeal lines – Psyche – winged creatures – moths – butterflies.

Keats, his mind flew out to Milton  and the idea of the world he helped shape. The Imagination that is comparable to Adam’s dream is a reference to Book VIII of Paradise Lost, the stanza starting at line 452. “As with an object that excels the sense, / Dazzled and spent, sunk down, and sought repair / Of sleep, which instantly fell on me…” There I imagine Keats being pulled by the idea of overwhelmed senses, understanding as he did the intensity of feeling, of sensation, as the gateway to Truth. Not that I agree (nor would Milton have gone there with Keats either, I suspect), but regardless, I am not from either Milton’s or Keats’ time but from mine and so I think that truth is more usefully thought of as a multifaceted eye.

And then in Milton there is the dream itself and what Adam perceives while sleeping at god’s behest. Adam knows what goes on: he sees the wound in his side that presages Jesus’ own, Adam saw Eve grow from the rib, shaped by god’s hand. This ability, to perceive true in the divine sleep (imagination and/or death?) – Keats took this as reality. That is, there is another reality, a spiritual one if you like, in which truth is still perceived, still sensed but with less tempest. When he says (from the same letter to Bailey) that

we shall enjoy ourselves here after by having what we called happiness on Earth repeated in a finer tome and so repeated – And yet such a fate can only befall those who delight in sensation rather than hunger as you do after Truth – Adam’s dream will do here and seems to be a conviction that Imagination and its empyreal reflection is the same as human Life and its spiritual repetition.

he means it.

I see no evidence that the student who had this book before me understood that. It is clear from what she underlined that she was learning the rudiments of the Romantic Imagination but did she understand it enough to (temporarily) swim with Keats along his imaginative connections? I doubt it.

To be fair, I am much more likely to follow the winged creature-butterfly road myself. I am of now, just as the woman was who marked up the book with the sign posts of her mind. And to be even more genteel of spirit, I have to say that I am likely much older than the woman was when she studied Keats. This means, of course, that I have had more time to read, to think, to imagine the world as Keats knew it. I wonder if she still lives, and if she does whether she still reads Keats? And (my mean side rearing) does she know anything more about real winged creatures than she does about Keats? (I mean if you are going to base your connotative and metaphorical life (that is “meaning”) on something, it might be good to actually know something about that “something.”)

That’s the problem with now, I think. Most of us have lost the old links that allow Milton to speak about dreaming in our minds when we read Keats, but as of yet, we have not taken the material world seriously enough to understand reality as it appears from the compound eye of a winged insect. So we are adrift in life (as was Keats), but most of us (unlike Keats) are without a mental umbilical cord developed enough to keep us from drowning in such pools as existential nihilism. To be honest, most of me is really glad I no longer teach. I am no lifeguard and I strongly suspect one must first understand the “now” (for us that is the compound eye) in order to step off into the “then” with any chance of actual understanding. So what hope do young students of today have of understanding the ferocious richness of the past when they can’t even see the ground upon which they are standing?

Miserable old coot aren’t I?

The poet Robinson Jeffers developed a concept called inhumanism. The idea is to shift the metaphorical center of the universe away from what it is to be human to the larger non-human world — in other words, to be able to appreciate the startling beauty of existence human beings need to be able to recognize our limited role, and therefore, our actual place in the greater organization of all-that-is.

That’s all good as far as I am concerned. The problem is that in much of Jeffers’ work there is still that moral stain of “what should be.” Morality, a human invention to meet our evolutionary needs, is not inhuman.  Judging our place in all-that-is through the lens of what-should-be falls short of the idea of booting us out of the center of the universe.
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The title poem from Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest has a stanza (the middle of three) that goes

Cattle stare at flat-bed haulers gunning clumps
of black smoke and lugging damaged drill pipe
up the gullied, mud-hollowed road. Road, this
road. Roustabouts shouting from the crow’s nest
float like Ascension angels on a ring of lights.
Chokecherries gouge the purpled sky, cloud-
swags running the moon under, and starlight
rains across the Ford’s blue hood. Blue, this blue.

I know what he means by “Blue, this blue.” I understand that “blue” the word, and that colour, they both hold the same things, this set of experiences, these feelings. The memories float under the word and when it is used; there they are, pushing up against awareness, skewing perception a little to the left, a little right.

Rudbeckia hirta

The Rudbeckia, for me, is like this. In its Fall form there is a bag it carries, full of memory and feeling that transfer — onto a poem, an essay by Searles, my sense that the moon pulls at me, sliding as it does, invisible across the day-sky.

Bits from that Rudbeckia bag spill out at the oddest moments. Sometimes I can figure it out, but others? No. But I trust it, this ability to transfer meaning acquired one way, and then transfered to some other entity, by some other process, to be used some other way. The thing I would love to know…how are we able to do this?

Which is, of course, is how I come to be reading Searle and Lakeoff and Johnson.

By the way, the moon has set and the leeks are soaking in the sink.

I’ve been gardening interspersed with reading Searle’s “Minds, Brains, and Programs,” poems randomly selected from Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest and Lakoff and Johnson’s Philosophy in the Flesh. All the while I have been deeply conscious of the fact that the moon has been crossing the day-sky unseen.

The moon rose sometime around midnight (it is at last quarter) and is, as I sit here writing, close to setting. It will set before dark, and since I have been poorly this weekend, it was daylight before I woke and so, for this day, although I can feel the tidal pull of the moon on my awareness, I have not seen it for at least two days now.

I feel better today, having slept the lion’s share of two days and when I went out this morning for tea, the garden presented itself as a “must do.”  Some plants are still strong, even though the nights have been a bit frosty, but others have long since died back. The tomatoes, cilantro, the lupins, the sweetgrass and the poppies have become dried letters from summer.  When I pulled the dead tomatoe branches today, there was a faint smell left, and I even found one small orange tomatoe left clinging to a wizened branch. The poppies dried to leave architecturally beautiful seed pods on elegant stems.  I have saved those and put them dry into a ceramic pot outside my door. On dark moon next I’ll cut back the lupin pods and place them there along with the poppies.

The moon will be in Cancer at the moment, sinking to the horizon, just north of west. That’s how it feels, that the moon in Cancer is sinking to the west, but of course what is really happening is that I, on a spinning earth, am backing away as I stand and look to where I know the moon to be – that as I spin backwards, the edge of the earth is rising up and hiding constellation after constellation, until finally, it will hide a moon already hidden.

What has that to do with Searle and poetry? More on that after I go pull the remaining leeks.

I have a little book about poetry and thinking that I return to over and over. It is called Thinking and Singing: Poetry and the Practice of Philosophy. I have read, over the years, a number of books about poetry but it remains my favourite.

When I first opened the book, it was to the first essay. By Dennis Lee, it is called “Body Music: Notes on Rhythm in Poetry.” The first bit of the title is OK but the second?  Bland. But then…

What makes a poem cohere? How does it mean what it means?

It starts where the poem does: in the preverbal flex and coherence the words arise from. A poem tries to enact that wordless tumble and surge in its own medium – in line breaks and pauses, syntax and sound, the ripple and clarion strut of sense on the page. It tries to recreate the cadence of how things are, through the nitty gritty of craft.

I was hooked.

Because, I suppose, of my sensory oddities, I completely understood what he meant by “the preverbal flex and coherence.” The craft bit, well…that’s work.

The next bit of the essay – “But how do you get a handle on that? How can you understand technique as more than just a bag of tricks? As witness, and cosmology, and desire?”

What follows are moments like these:

– It starts with rhythm, that much I know.
– A poem thinks by the way it moves.
– What the poem mimes is not a static structure, but an active cohering. Kinetic rhythms of being. A cosmophony, more than a cosmology.
– Free prosody says, the world is coherent – but its coherence emerges in the interplay of variable systems of order. There is no absolute measure which antedates the poem. Coherence is local, provisional, contingent in the flux.
– For you are not just a self-contained subject /observer – you’re embedded in kinaesthetic space.

And that’s just the first essay.

I am Regina Waterhouse. And I have complete faith
that man will keep on going right to the end.

I am the queen here, but the people assure me,
gathered in the square, dust kicked up by their boots,
jacked by their power, that they know

what’s right and I am inclined to agree. All the women
here, crow clothes flapping in the hot wind, sing
free to be who they naturally are. And the men,
ordained by the river, to be more.

I am a Waterhouse and just a god here, but the people
assure me, gathered by their pillars and posts,

that eternity is theirs because I am here. And I –
I am assured — will maintain. And I expect I will,
right unto their end.