----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Stephen Vincent" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, March 16, 2006 1:41 PM
Subject: Re: Snap/3-15-06--"The God Thing"


To what degree, however, is the vocation of poetry (calling) & practice of
making poems a religious practice? One that I suggest is not particularly
sweeping this world, which I guess these days provides us poets some sense
of a particular kind of Virtue! (Is not Bush an Anti-Christ - as I want to
understand the killer implciations of that term - and an Anti-Poet - at the
same time. (I would, and I cannot imagine many, drawn to repeat his speech
(language)), or personally be shaped by it).

I suggest there is something (in the faith of writing and reading poems)
that is comparable to prayer. A place where the invisible becomes articulate
as language. A mystery by definition. As curious as a featherless dinosaur.
As science now points out that dinosaurs did not disappear, but that they
are the birds now flying about and still very much living amongst us.

I better "trip" back into my work - my secular obligations du jour!

Stephen V

There's some slippery categorizing here.  I follow Blake (and Yeats and 
Stevens) in regarding religions as ossified poems.  Rather than being a 
dynamic form of imagination, they constrain it; their hold over the mind is 
based on fear, superstition, and unmet social needs.  I don't rule out 
religious poetry, but I have a hard time seeing any written after the 17th 
century as more than second-rate.

I realized long ago that the most unfashionable, combative, annoying values 
I could uphold - especially in poetry - were Reason, Science, and Progress. 
Nobody, outside of a few scientists and philosophers, wants to claim them. 
(And Libertarians, in a selective, propagandistic way, to conceal the 
unreason of capitalism.)  Otherwise educated people are at one with 
subliterates in feeling that some wistful vague-mindedness makes them 
morally superior to people who think - about string theory, say, or cancer 
cures, or fusion reactors.  For me the poet's true brothers - whether or not 
they have any use for him - are the scientist and the revolutionary. 
(Scientists who are also believers are merely trying to "belong.")  Now that 
socialism as a political movement is itself in the dustbin of history, I see 
a great future for it as a personal creed and metaphor.  And someday, who 
knows ...  In the face of death, pain, fear and loneliness we retreat to 
mental categories that were in place during the Stone Age.  Some believers 
see in this fact evidence of a need for faith; it makes them feel communal 
and timeless and justified.  I see it as proof that we haven't come very 
far.

I like to play with an idea of God - the God the Gnostics called Ialdabaoth 
and the Demiurge, whom Blake called Nobodaddy and Shelley, Jupiter: the 
eater of pain, the cosmic bully, the God Hitler invoked.  HE strikes me as a 
valid, or at least a stimulating, metaphor.  The kind of "emotional slither" 
I'm talking about pretends that Love is an ontological counterweight.  I 
think it's moving when people like Gottfried Benn, Wyndham Lewis, or William 
Burroughs invoke Love on their last pages.  But I see no evidence that love 
is more than an occasional motive for interpersonal kindness.  Infinitely 
precious, of course, but vulnerable.  For the Good to be real it cannot be 
an alternative to power - there is none - but a different use of power. 
(And, please, don't anyone brandish "non-violence" at me.  Its success 
depends on the susceptibilities of its target, whether the British Raj or 
American whites.  Nazis wouldn't have been impressed.)  My spiritual horizon 
is that of the triumph of intellectual power, that of humans plus anyone 
else we find, over death, space, time, entropy, finitude, and - to borrow an 
expression Christianity borrowed from the Gnostics - the prince of this 
world.

I don't see the point of the "featherless dinosaur" metaphor.  Birds evolved 
from dinosaurs but they aren't dinosaurs.  If dinosaurs were around, we 
wouldn't be.

As for Bush's language: billions of people - not only Americans - speak like 
him.  They don't need to be "shaped" by his speech-patterns; they share 
them.  The "deep structure" of this language contains certain assumptions: 
that "sincerity" is a virtue; that it shines through inarticulateness, which 
even demonstrates it; and that there is such a thing as "justification by 
faith."  As for the "Antichrist" comparison, again I don't see it.  Probably 
I'm not qualified, since "Christ" isn't one of my favorite images.  Bush is 
narrow, cunning, limited, and vicious; his policies are disastrous; but the 
Antichrist?  Hitler deserved the term more, and people used it of him; but 
he was never excommunicated by the Pope or anathematized by major German 
churchmen ... and these facts make me wonder how useful the "Antichrist" 
metaphor is.