A Song Of Myself

To be part-Irish is to have an ancestral memory of the salty North Atlantic cutting black rock beneath brooding skies and to think, "I could live here, content, on this savage coast." It is to hear the old Irish tongue beating in that surf and pushing up through the green shoots that tenaciously root in those rocks and in the cry of gulls as they dive from the cliffs, headlong into the wind.

To be part-Dervish is to be perfectly at ease with religious inscrutability for, as the hare advises the other animals in Mevlana's tale, there are three things it is best never to mention: your departure, your gold, and your religion [Mesnavi, 1: 1047].

Moreover, it is to be aware of the fact that "religion" is a term of administrative convenience first encountered in the history of Imperial Christianity. Its survival in scholarly circles and among government bureaucrats does little to recommend it. Ontologically speaking, the word "religion" means nothing at all.

Every Dervish is a pilgrim and a stranger, traveling through this wearisome land...

To be a liberal ironist is to disavow any claim to possess "final truth," to recognize that we inhabit endless realms of interpretation, to affirm that literary intelligence redeems the world in the eyes of a capacious consciousness, and that, to those same eyes, cruelty is worse than death.

To be a latent Existentialist is to regard life as a "project" and to accept the responsibility to invent and re-invent one's "self" as long as you have the strength to draw another breath.

It is to read and re-read the so-called "Existentialists" in order to experience the sweet suffering that continuous confrontation with their call to "authentic" living inevitably brings.

A liberal ironist is necessarily a radical hermeneut; to sharpen that posture with a Du Boisian edge is merely to insist that, as far as possible, power relations must be critically examined from the standpoint of the weak, the oppressed, the disenfranchised, and history told from the standpoint of its "losers."

It is also to acknowledge that race, though a social construction in its essence, remains a key signifier for many and, therefore, cannot be discounted in hermeneutical practice.

And Furthermore...

Everything is commentary--and I mean EVERYTHING. Anyone who tells herself otherwise lies to the one person with whom she must always be honest: herself. Lie to yourself, and you are lost--for she who knows herself, knows her Lord.

Heroes Of Consciousness

Literary intelligence redeems the world. Follow the poor righteous poets.

In a way, we’re all dumpster-divers, picking our way through the trash and noise and stink that crowd the world until we find a small treasure here and there.

Whenever you find something worth pocketing, do so and then continue to scavenge. The more of these shiny treasures you pocket, the deeper your pockets become. The important thing to understand is that it’s the pockets that count more than anything else, for they are our consciousness. The epic hero (think Gilgamesh or Hamlet or Stephen Dedalus) eventually achieves a capacious consciousness.

He who dies with the most capacious consciousness wins.

Because Women Are Beautiful...

By the Lebanese artist Mona.

Let Us Return To The Carnival Of Modernity: Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Hafez...

Let us return to the riot in the blood of untamed humanity:

"Had I but time--as this fell sergeant, Death,/Is strict in his arrest--O, I could tell you--/But let it be..."

The Cervantean

"The Cervantean is as multivalent as the Shakespearean: it contains us, with all of our severe differences from one another. Wisdom is as much an attribute of the Don and Sancho, particularly when they are considered together, as intelligence and mastery of language are qualities of Sir John Falstaff, Hamlet, and Rosalind. Cervantes' two heroes are simply the largest literary characters in the whole Western Canon, except for their triple handful (at most) of Shakespearean peers. Their fusion of folly and wisdom and their disinterestedness can be matched only in Shakespeare's most memorable men and women. Cervantes has naturalized us as Shakespeare has: we can no longer see what makes Don Quixote so permanently original, so searchingly strange a work. If the play of the world can still be located in the greatest literature, then it must be here."

--Harold Bloom, The Western Canon (1994), 145.

Why Shakespeare?

The answer to the question "Why Shakespeare?" must be "Who else is there?"

--Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), p. 1.

Capaciousness Is All

Sing, Baudelaire!

Sing Les Fleurs du Mal.

Notes On Baudelaire

Baudelaire would not have been Baudelaire without Romanticism, but Modernism would not be Modernism without the poet, whose thinking was profoundly shaped by the difficult years leading up to 1848. [50]

Correctness of form is not in itself beauty, for as Baudelaire affirms in his diaries, "what is not slightly misshapen seems insensitive, from which it follows that irregularity, that is, the unexpected, surprise and astonishment, are an essential part of beauty and characteristic of it" (OC, I, p. 656). [55]

Drawn to Delacroix for his energetic depictions of contemporary as well as mythological and historical themes and for his intense use of color to suggest not just shape but also mood, Baudelaire found in him a hero who always remained somewhat aloof, but from whom he would cull a series of ideas that were central to his thinking. [61]

However little he has in common with earlier French Romantics like Hugo and Lamartine, Baudelaire would continue to see himself as an "old Romantic." But to understand that claim we need to understand that what he saw as Romanticism was above all an intensely felt and powerfully expressed response to the modern world, seized in all its transience, color and complexity. [68]

Art, Baudelaire argues, is a device for remembering beauty (OC, II, p. 455) and he clarifies his statement by affirming that mere imitation spoils beauty by failing to transform it through the filtering power of the artist's personality. This becomes particularly clear in regard to portrait painting, which Baudelaire says can be understood either as history or as a novel, by which he means either as a truthful representation of an external, if idealized, truth or an imaginative reconstruction of inner truth. [71]

Revealing individuals against the background that shapes them, either physically or metaphorically, is one of [Baudelaire's] skills... [72]

The word Baudelaire used for his feelings in early 1848 was intoxication, ivresse, a term he would take up in a prose poem in which he urges his readers, if they do not want to be the martyred slaves of time, to remain always intoxicated, on wine, poetry, or virtue as they choose.
[77]

--From Charles Baudelaire by Rosemary Lloyd, London: Reaktion Books, 2008.

T. S. Eliot & Martin Heidegger

Poetically man dwells and Eliot was without question one of the strongest poets writing in English in the last 200 years. He was a contemporary of Heidegger’s and his politics and Heidegger’s seem to have converged at points. As an historian of religions, I am inevitably a cultural historian. Querying beyng, I see these two geniuses emerge independent of one another in varying degrees of harmony and dissonance. Heidegger teaches us to attend to significant detail and to derive meaning from context; I am not interested, therefore, in discovering if one thinker or the other is good, better, or best. Both proved themselves not only good but great. I attend to their various attunements and check them against my own.

Sang The Chorus Of Women Of Canterbury

We have not been happy, my Lord, we have not been too
happy.
We are not ignorant women, we know what we must expect and
not expect.
We know of oppression and torture,
We know of extortion and violence,
Destitution, disease,
The old without fire in winter,
The child without milk in summer,
Our labour taken away from us,
Our sins made heavier upon us.
We have seen the young man mutilated,
The torn girl trembling by the mill-stream.
And meanwhile we have gone on living,
Living and partly living,
Picking together the pieces,
Gathering faggots at nightfall,
Building a partial shelter,
For sleeping, and eating and drinking and laughter.

...God is leaving us, God is leaving us...

--from T. S. Eliot, Murder In The Cathedral, Part I.

Little Gidding

We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.
The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration. A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails
On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.
With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time...

--T. S. Eliot, "Little Gidding," Four Quartets, V.

Four Quartets

Eliotic Piety

"To rest content with the evanescent, unearned, mystical experience is to lapse again into the spiritual sloth. For most men, 'right action'

is the aim
Never here to be realised;

but this must not prevent continued effort, although the knowledge of effort may be the only reward--we are

only undefeated
Because we have gone on trying;
(The Dry Salvages: Four Quartets, p. 33)"

[D.E.S. Maxwell, The Poetry of T. S. Eliot, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, (1952), 160].

You Must Go Through The Way In Which You Are Not

You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.

--T. S. Eliot, "East Coker," from Four Quartets, III.

And after this our exile...

But the fountain sprang up and the bird sang down
Redeem the time, redeem the dream
The token of the word unheard, unspoken

Till the wind shake a thousand whispers from the yew

And after this our exile

--T. S. Eliot, The Wasteland, IV.

Embodying The Fourfold

Martin Heidegger's Building Dwelling Thinking.

The Fourfold Prayer.

Wide Reading

"Wide reading...is valuable because in the process of being affected by one powerful personality after another, we cease to be dominated by any one, or by any small number. The very different views of life, co-habiting in our minds, affect each other, and our own personality asserts itself and gives each a place in some arrangement peculiar to ourselves."

--T. S. Eliot, Points of View, 18.