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Brian George, Head with Snake Projecting out of Forehead,
oil pastel, 2004
***
The gigantic Rakshasa, with a hundred wounds on his body seemed to lie cheerlessly, as if dead, on the field. The Kaurava
bulls then, regarding Ghatotkacha dead, uttered loud shouts of joy. Soon, however, he was seen on all sides, careering in new forms. Once more, he was seen to assume a prodigious
form, with a hundred heads and a hundred stomachs, and looking like the Mainaka mountain. Once again, becoming small about the measure of the thumb, he moved about
transversely or soared aloft like the swelling surges of the sea.—The Mahabharata, Book Seven, Section 175
Like their human counterparts, the active powers of creation
cannot go forever without praise, which serves as a kind of food. Even some amount of hatred might be welcome. We have plenty
of it to spare. Starved for feedback, these friends we have forgotten may choose to turn against our cause. "If they are mad,"
we say, "so be it! They are only imaginary, so who cares what they do?" Taking masks out of their skeleton-filled closets and
brandishing in each of 10,000 hands their hallucinatory weapons—their Tuning Forks and their Mirrors and their Geomagnetic Bows and their Species Changers and their Nets,
their Bags of Wind and their Scalar Tornadoes and their Gongs and their A-Ankara Bolts—they will then appropriate the blood
we have been too myopic to give. Fear spreads its hypnotic field across the architecture of the vacuum, a dark cloud mass,
prompting "interspecies" hatred, and disrupting any sense of how the two halves of a symbol interlock.
We must stare into the sun. We must set fire to the Google dreaming apparatus. In the darkness that follows we will once
more see our friends, those who blow on thousand-foot trumpets, those whose chants have pierced our amygdalas, those whose
armies come at first as changes in the weather. Our near total inattention has transformed these friends—our faithful
cohorts—into threats. They are indeed threats, but they are also something more. They are luminous. They are primal. They are
reservoirs of knowledge. We are linked to them—our past to their future, their right to our left—by the psychotically complex
machinations of a sphere. It is they who have called us to remember what we are. We must roll the ocean up. We must thank the snakes who have swallowed our atrocities. It is they
who have prolonged our youth, who have given us time to grow. We must share our wealth, as tiny as it seems to us, with the birds who terrorize the back side of the mirror.
***
Yves Tanguy, He Did What He Wanted, oil, 1927
As I have said, the art of memory was already in decline in what we now view as the ancient world, which was little more than a
comma in the long sentence of devolution. In Plato's Timaeus, Socrates tells the story of how Thoth, the inventor of letters,
travelled to Thebes to bring writing and various other arts to Thamus, King of Egypt. Thamus praised some and criticized others. When it came to writing, Thamus said,
O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own
inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own
children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create
forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written
characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only
the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing…
Sadly, such cautions would be taken with a grain of salt, even by the illustrious Plato. The light cast from the antediluvian world
descended into writing. When writing was then lost, an enormous part of our lineage went with it. It was no easy matter for poets to
sell shovels to the dead. In addition, the dead tended to boast about their state of perfect health. Laws were passed that
prohibited us from inhabiting our metaphors. The world and its description were kept at a careful distance. The fact that the birds
had turned against us did not help. Since then, the general tendency has been to "point" at the Beyond. If Thoth, being an
Egyptian demon, was wrong to have given us writing, he was right to assume that our ties to the Aether had been cut, that the Beyond had chewed us up and spit us out.
We can ask for guidance, yes, but such guidance may be quite slow in arriving. This is no doubt just as well. In 391 A.D., for
example, the New World had at last descended from the stars, but in the form of a belated hate-crime. It was then that Christians set
fire to the Great Library of Alexandria—or rather to the remnant that was left by Caesar and Aurelius—along with all of its well
-meaning but just barely adequate texts. Simultaneously, the Mithreum was cleaned out, as if it were a whorehouse. Its relics
were smashed, and before jeering crowds, the phalli of Priapus were paraded through the Forum. Now, even the debris of the
First Age has disappeared. No ashes are left, only see-through bones, and the chunks of a broken sky, as we wander through a land of giant radioactive tear ducts.
***
Victor Brauner, The Surrealist, oil, 1947
Unlike Rumi or Blake, we tend to see ourselves as the direct products of our environment, which we use our tongues to
describe. At least this is what we prefer to believe that we are doing. The world just is the way it is. We do not recall how many
times the world has been created and destroyed, or that we are more than casual bystanders to this process. We have gone to
great lengths to disown the alchemical powers we once wielded. Like many recovering addicts, we have swung to the opposite
extreme. We do not trust poetry. Our mode of vision is literal. We do not pause to note that our descriptions seem to act like
conjurations, that our words are not the abstract ciphers that we think. This tendency may be vestigial, like an appendix; it is nonetheless still there.
We accept that the role of language is no longer "ex nihilo" to create, even as we torture it to create our own reality. For
example, in a theory that YouTube has recently revived, a cabal of international Jewish bankers was behind the First World War.
Germans are the inheritors of the occult powers of Hyperborea and/or Darwinian Evolution has stamped them with a guarantee
of fitness. Therefore, millions must be sacrificed on the altar of racial purity. More recently, Jews no longer kill Christian babies
to collect their blood for matza. No, Democrats torture children to harvest their Adrenochrome. A "Storm" is very soon to sweep
both Jews and Democrats from the Earth, last month perhaps, any day now. How lucky it is that Fukuyama had already ended
history. Since 1989, no ideological clashes have been allowed to occur. The richest 26 people control as much wealth as the
bottom 4.25 billion. As this proves, history has passed judgment on the ideals of the Supreme Soviet. The free market is the most
efficient way to allocate the world's resources. A rising tide will lift all boats.
"This perception that we would run out of oil," write Bill Murray and Carl M. Cannon, "and sooner rather than later, became more
than a theory, one that went by the name of 'peak oil'…Today, the question is how policy makers should react when the
conventional wisdom is proven so spectacularly wrong." In short, a finite planet can contain an infinite quantity of oil. The Arctic is
melting. In 2020, wildfires leveled 4.2 million acres in California, the equivalent of the entire area of Los Angeles, Orange, Santa
Clara, and Santa Cruz counties combined. We have "done our own research," have we not? We have simply to declare that global warming is a Chinese-invented hoax.
"We are free," we say, "so we have chosen to repeat the words that others have assigned to us." Hundreds of corporate logos
insure that we have dozens of exactly the same products to choose from. We are free to pick from the range of dreams provided by the six large media conglomerates. We are free to
perfect our voice-activated lifestyles, to designate our homes to do our living for us, to dispense with the primitive mechanism of
the hand. We are free to believe that any and all signs should be self-explanatory, that there are experts who will inform us of our
every need and want. We are free to believe that, before birth, we did not have a face. We are free to believe that we inhabit the
freest empire on the Earth. We are free to believe that a big heart proves our innocence, that the poor should be more grateful for
our random acts of kindness, that a positive self-image is enough to make us good.
We are free to believe that our shadows do not rise to stalk their prey, that they do not go in search of foodstuffs to consume. We
are free to believe that skilled hypnotists do not occupy our bodies. We are free to believe that we are actually alive. We are
free to believe that the dead do not have power over us, just as other, even more archaic forces, do not have power over them.
We are free to believe that a random mutation brought us into existence. We are free to believe that we are infinitely younger
than we are. We are free to believe that a metaphor is a way of obscuring the simple truth.
The bandwidth of the sky contracts as the hubris of the technocrat expands. The more we learn, the smaller we become; the bigger
we grow, the less open to disjunctive new experiences we are. After birth, the fontanelle does not take long to close. We are free
to believe that we have access to more than one percent of our memories, that our ancestors were children and that we are the
adults. Much energy is needed to maintain the seals that serve to keep the worlds hygienically apart.
***
Petroglyph, Khakassia, Siberia, circa 3000 B.C.
We've come to believe that books are written by humans and for humans to read. That's not at all how it started out or the
way these things were meant to be. But bit by bit, when everybody's back was turned, that's how it ended up.—Peter Kinglsey
Aeschylus wrote 90 plays. Of these, only seven have survived. If all the plays had been lost, if they had only been heard by
audiences at the Athenian Festival of Dionysus, could we say they had not been written? If a Persian arrow had found the teenage
Aeschylus's throat, would the plays have chosen a new author? At the age of 37, Sufi mystic Suhravardi was charged with heresy and killed. Did the Alam al-Mithal, the "Imaginal Realm," even pause
to notice that his words were interrupted, that the thread of their
conversation had been cut? If mid-20th-century critics had not reconsidered Blake, would his prophetic books still be the
scribblings of a madman? Would he have been too depressed to sing as he lay dying? Would Rintrah not have roared? If a book is
written but not published, if a poem is published but not widely read or understood, many would say that the writer's efforts had
been wasted. They would argue that this writer wrote only for himself, just as a lost play might just as well have not existed.
I have sometimes asked myself, "Why did it take you so long to publish your first book?" I then warn, "Time runs out by the
minute. Your sense that some presence hears you is no doubt a delusion." I then proceed to ignore my best advice. I slow my
breathing. I shift my perspective point. I think, "Just as death redefines the context of our lives, some larger space may redefine
the context of our speech. While we may throw away a large percentage of our words—more than 99 percent—perhaps we
could learn to aim them more correctly. Some few may be answers to questions we did not know had been posed."
In his poem "Sense of Something Coming," written at the turn of the 20th Century, Rilke writes,
I am like a flag in the center of open space.
I sense ahead the wind which is coming, and must live it through…
I already know the storm, and I am troubled as the sea.
I leap out, and fall back, and throw myself out, and am absolutely alone
in the great storm.
If such a writer feels alone, this sensation is provisional, only, a necessary fantasy. The writer is not and cannot be alone. Rather,
the public is within him, as he is within them, even if the writer is still struggling to be born and his public is not yet more than a
gleam in the zeitgeist's eye, even if it does not yet and may not ever exist.
Certain voices may tempt such an emptiness to define itself as a "brand." The writer may want to be loved. He may want to live
inside and not outside of a house. His response must be "Aha!" In Rilke's term, a true poet is the embodiment of "Weltraum," or
"World-space," as well as its translator and interpreter. If a metaphor is a lie that rips open a larger truth, a poet is a space
that can be misread as a person. He must rigorously take note of the vision that escapes him. Death will reward him with
ambiguity. The inwardness of the writer leads to a body without edges, to a presence that subverts the ground on which it stands,
to a world always in the process of emerging from the throat. There is much work to be done, and somebody has to do it.
Regular arrogance will be of limited use to such an end. The writer should be aware of the overwhelming difficulty of his task;
he must then rush foolishly ahead. A particular kind of creative arrogance is required.
No amount of high seriousness or philosophical subtlety is enough. The challenge is not to wrap beautiful language around
more or less important ideas. It is rather to see the world as if on the first day, with all of its horrific gulfs and archeological layers.
Can you see and still be innocent? If you are, then how can your poetry be good? Space is no respecter of privacy. You have
courted her, so why should you be shocked that her answer should be "yes"? She has little use for clothing. You would like to
think you could get used to such exposure. You must keep in mind, however, that she will present you with an ever-expanding
list of your new chores, that she will tear through your defenses when and where she will. There will be pleasures, yes, some
might call them "ecstasies." These will tend to be less frequent than expected. They will also come at a cost. Upon learning of the
full scope of your crimes, you must be willing to weep, with no shame, for a leaf. You must yearn to discover more than you would ever want to know.
***
Anselm Kiefer, The Starry Heavens Above,
and the Moral Law Within, oil, 1980
As if from nowhere came the word. And from the word came the form of the unknown. But why should it be necessary to coagulate
the ocean? What, is there not an adequate supply of objects the world, so that, from the luminous mist, must we conjure a few
more? Are there not already enough humans in the world, about
8 ½ billion, 8 billion of whom contribute to the chaos that surrounds them?
Why add to the countless books already in existence when we cannot read even one page of the Ur-Text? If we are all just the
refractions of a single primal body, to what end should we multiply the images that divide us? In the Fourth Age, with all of
its hermeneutics of corruption, why do we still pretend to be as young as in the First, and that our hearts weigh no more and no
less than a feather? Surely, we are overdue for a return of the repressed, for some judgment on the worth of our inventions?
Why should we add when it would be better to subtract? Why do we not see that the Earth has withdrawn from the agreement that
held fast from the dawn of the Anthropocene, that her children should be allowed to play with toys? The ocean may already be
far above our heads, and the ocean we see may be just the shadow of another. What we have wound, our vengeful critics will unwind
. Of what use is art in the face of an invasion by the Absolute?
If the question is a complex one, the answer is direct: We should not pretend that we and the Absolute are strangers. We must put
our bodies where our consciousness would go. We did not evolve; we descended. Our play has always been dangerous. The Absolute
has need of us, as much as we of it. We were not meant to passively surrender; we were meant to laugh as we threw our bodies on the barricades. We were meant to make our mark. We
were meant to indifferently detach ourselves from all that we created. Having acted, we were then meant to move on. Mini
-death precedes mega-death. "To be enlightened is to be present at one's funeral."
At the end of each Mahakalpa. a shockwave flattens the luminous cities of the gods, leaving nothing except a seed from which will
sprout the non-existent. Of what use is art in the face of an invasion by the Absolute, when the Absolute has annihilated
every being in its path? Who is left to create? Who is left to observe? How can language give form some thin edge of the
Absolute without obscuring the reality with which it interacts? How can humans presume to grasp what lies beyond imagination
? Mystic transport may tell us there is no more to be said. Deep memory may tell us otherwise.
The potency of language is the potency of Maya, this is true, and the mystic is correct to warn us of its dangers. If the word gives
life, it can just as easily kill. Yet this shape-shifting potency also points to a way beyond our dilemma. While the word "Maya" is
often translated as "illusion," its roots as well as early Vedic usage suggests meanings of "to measure," "to manifest," to intoxicate,"
"to get lost," "to conjure," and "to make art." Who can tell, at a given moment, how these meanings intersect? The poet-seer must
. He must make a virtue out of being caught off balance. He must hone his skill at being coolly overwhelmed. Maya's potency is
nothing if not volatile. The limits of the imagination are not in any way fixed, and what may seem its monstrous guards may turn out to be catalysts.
Of what use is art in the face of an invasion by the Absolute? How can language describe a reality that begins where language stops?
The way we have framed these questions implies that the role of words is to describe. We are assuming, too, that the Absolute has
no interest in art. If this is so, then why did something come from nothing? Blissful emptiness would have been simpler. Why do
waves disturb the ocean? It should be as still as a corpse. Why does light erupt from an atom? It should be as black as the sun.
The nonexistent is our all too temperamental teacher. What was done before, we do. The role of speech may be to provoke, to
liberate, to bear witness, to mourn, to exorcise, to name, to commemorate, to bless, to cast from the center, to attract from
the periphery, to celebrate, to impregnate, to invoke. There, where the imagination failed, the Pyramid of Cheops has been
swallowed by an ant. The moon of Phidias buries the bones of the October Revolution. Madam X installs a piano on the Alps, just a moment after the Deluge has subsided.
***
Victor Brauner Endotete, oil, 1951
As I contemplate the arc of the Anthropocene, the loss of tens of thousands of species per year, as I wonder how factories will
function when the last reserves of oil have been pumped, as I measure out the footprints of each "hyperobject"—the sum of
waste from all nuclear reactors, let's say, or the movement of faux-estrogen through the water cycle, or the web of plant mutations
that were prompted by Chernobyl—and as I brood on the displacements that will come from the redrawing of Earth's coasts
, a voice quite often taunts me, saying, "Isn't your faith in the power of metaphor a form of circular self-defense? 'Creative
arrogance' is just arrogance with an adjective tacked on. No matter what you say or do not say, your cries will not be audible.
Who will read your essays at the bottom of the ocean?" I can only affirm that speech is not the opposite of silence; a mystery connects them.
Over and over, I stare at a clock. From the inside of my body looking out, from the outside of my body looking in, I turn the
relationship of speech to silence in my mind in order to probe whether a poet might be able to speak out of the space of world
destruction. Although I hesitate to make a comparison so extreme, a comparison that might seem absurd and monstrous to some, I
cannot help but think of the dilemma faced by post-war Eastern European writers. For some, the trauma of the Holocaust was at
first thought to make all literature irrelevant, as though any metaphor were an insult to the dead.
In his 1949 essay "Cultural Criticism and Society," Theodor Adorno writes,
Even the most extreme consciousness of doom threatens to degenerate into idle chatter…To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.
Adorno later modified this statement in his essay "Negative Dialectics," in which he says,
Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream…But it is not wrong to raise the
less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you can go on living—especially whether one who escaped by accident, one
who by rights should have been killed, may go on living. His mere survival calls for…coldness.
This is certainly an odd reversal of perspective: It is now possible to write poems, just so long as you are not alive when you write
them. In such statements, I suspect that Adorno is using cultural criticism to express what is actually a mystical insight. Adorno, of
course, does not see things in these terms; it is a mystical insight as filtered through the haunted sensibility of a rationalist. I will
not argue with the substance of these statements, let alone with the experiences from which they come; at the same time, my
questioning of the claim that one cannot write poetry after Auschwitz is one of the key things that prompted the writing of
this essay. To my way of thinking, the cloud of unknowing is as much of a beginning as it is an end.
Framed in terms of Sufi mysticism, Adorno's insight might be summarized as follows: As the Masters of Spiritual Poverty have
informed us, if we would attempt to approach the Absolute, we must go by way of "fana," or extinction. When we come face to
face with the Absolute, our lives look very small. Our intellect becomes irrelevant; our very existence is called into doubt. If we
are not, in fact, hallucinations, do we have any right to exist? Why is there something rather than nothing? Words can only
betray the vastness of such a face-to-face confrontation, and thus silence is the most appropriate response.
If there were, in fact, no connection between opposites, then no more need be said. Rumi would have had no reason to dance. He
would not have squandered the time and energy it took to share his insights with his students, and the Mathnawi would be
shorter by some 26,000 couplets. Adorno would have followed where his intuition led, to an early death from despair. He would
not have bothered to write his "Negative Dialectics." Auschwitz had stripped the baroque façade from culture and Hiroshima had
shown that there was no place left to hide. An abyss yawned at the center of each atom. Our goodness was—at least potentially—as
violent as our evil. Our collective psyche had been pressed into the dust. Chatter did indeed take over, with the installation of TVs in tens of millions of homes. Ironically, however, this post-war
period in Eastern Europe turned out to be an explosively creative one, one of the most fertile of all poetic periods, for in it, writers
dared to play with the unspeakable. From out of the depths, they radically redefined the relationship between silence and expression, between memory and the external world.
Brian George, Letter Tree, photogram, 2002
Such writing provides clues as to how language can be fractured and cleansed and tested and transformed in order to place it
beyond the limits of the writer's capacity for expression. If the extremity of one's experience has made most literature irrelevant,
this does not relieve one of the responsibility to speak; no, on the contrary, one is required to invent a language that is somehow
equal to that experience, as flawed as one's attempts might be. Such flaws may be key parts of the new mode of expression. If the
poet is dead, his voice may still exist. In his "Speech on the Occasion of Receiving the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic
City of Bremen", Paul Celan, a Rumanian Jew who wrote in German, says,
Reachable, near and not lost, there remained in the midst of the losses this one thing: language. It, the language, remained,
not lost, yes in spite of everything. But it had to pass through its own answerlessness, pass through frightful muting, pass
through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech. It passed through and gave back no words for that which happened; yet it passed through this happening. Passed
through and could come to light again, "enriched" by all this.
Statistical renormalization had cut the zeros from large numbers. The cost of memory was enormous. Already, the Apocalypse had
happened. It was possible to begin beyond the end.
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