Robert Kelly said:
>So we have not the artifact of the poem, but the (fifty years ago Olson
>called it) transfer of energy, the gift of transform/ing, over to the
>reader.
This I agree with completely. But what's numbing isn't individual death, one
at a time, which the transfer of energy outlives, or perhaps feeds from--
it's the idea that this energy is, in cosmic time, merely transitory. And
once it's gone it is simply as if it never was.
The Buddhist teaching of impermanence is one thing: Things arise and fall
away, yet always within an encompassing sentient field (traditional Buddhist
teachings, so far as I know, don't contemplate the termination of the
world); but the coming asteroid/comet wipes out all sentience (though there
may be a few smaller impacts causing only partial extinctions before the Big
One-- something like Shoemaker-Levy-- hits).
Of course, if there is life seeded here and there throughout the universe,
maybe this is no big deal. Or if Henry's fingernail-paring God exists, maybe
no big deal either.
But this issue seems to go beyond your typical existential awareness of
mortality. If the poem has some kind of eternity to it, I can bear it, I
think. But not that the poem as good as *never existed*.
Well, as Ramon, my astonishingly handsome Honduran friend in the 1980
Nicaraguan Literacy Campaign would say (soon to die in a botched commando
bank robbery-operation in Tegucigalpa): "My dear yanqui, that's life in the
tropics."
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Get more from the Web. FREE MSN Explorer download : http://explorer.msn.com
|