PREAMBLE: WE DON’T CARE ABOUT YOU
The comet of my divine intent has come to earth. Only this undistorted wish is sacred. It is sacred in you too. “I am well; the world is ill.” Fuck-the-world and For-the-world are equivalent statements.
I will never accept your self-imposed limitations. That kills the individual that I shall always be. It is an imposed distortion that must and will always fail.
Tyrants from time immemorial have always gone about asserting irrelevantly the inability of liberty to manage itself. Today it is the tyrant of the superego or a perversely construed conscience.
I will have none of it! So fuck you.
Humanity only encompasses the greatness that I can make out of myself. What else is there? Only the worn-out sickness of a will too timid, too afraid to trust to its already manifested effectiveness, as per Plotinus.
“Re-invent all the n-o-o-o-o [new] ways.”~~Richard Hell
When I create myself, I enlarge the world. I discover what only I may uniquely possess and then release.
F.T.W.
I want a million Shakespeares. I'm part of a divine revolt Our world is new Our vision is true I'm part of a divine revolt: I revolt from you!
I
It must be ennobling. Negative images and thoughts may be included as part of a poem or poems, or as essential draft matter in one’s life-work, but these negative images are not the ultimate goal or purpose of poetry. Baudelaire is a perfect example of this principle in action. Only the greatest disappointment, in life and art, with his contemporaries and with himself, could let so religious an imagination blaspheme with such a gloried ease of voice. His “disappointment” is ultimately the result of having such a monstrously high opinion of mankind’s potential; a potential which he, like Nietzsche after him, saw everyone all around him so sickly disregarding. Today one might speak, new-agey-wise, of a responsibility to live in your power. It was his noble hope that empowered his verse, made his racket into a rocket, even in its most negative moments. Without love of such magnitude, without vision of such vicious width, the loss of love is itself belittled.
Is it Heaven or Hell, dear Beauty, which drives you here?
Such eyes--infernal and divine!--
Spill martini evils, olive magnificence.
I come to gulp both vine and wine.
You walk with the dead shooting scornful glances,
With careless hand stew Joys and Horrors, candies and spankies!
Moth-souled transients, short of breath, still sigh,
Whirl at your flame, and die--spack!--"Ah! Orgasmic Death! Bye!"
Stark Heaven or velvet Abyss, iwis? Dear Infinite!
From Satan or from God? Holy or Vile!
O soft-eyed Queen, my sprite, my Kate,
O rhythm, perfume, light--who cares?--so that you beguile!
Cheat lazy Time awake, spin old World from Hate!
~~Charles Baudelaire
II
Both the poet and the reader must come to the poem with the whole of their consciousness and experience.
III
The artist creates the world in his own image—his supreme vision of his own humanity as it exists, indivisible from the universe. The poet never sees the universe as separate or “other.” It is always with him and in him, as a whole, because of his conquering imagination, which lets no jot of experience escape his grasp. The universe is just barely large enough to contain the imagination of a single individual; it is his proper playpen, as it is in Emerson’s essays.
Thus to him, to this school-boy under the bending dome of day, is suggested, that he proceed from one root; one is leaf and one is flower; relation, sympathy, stirring in every vein. And what is that Root? Is not that the soul of his soul?—a Thought too bold–a dream too wild. Yet when this spiritual light shall have revealed the law of more earthly natures,—when he has learned to worship the soul, and to see the natural philosophy that now is, is only the first gropings of its gigantic hand, he shall look forward to an ever-expanding knowledge as to becoming CREATOR. He shall see that nature is the opposite of the soul, answering to it part for part. One is seal, and one is print. ITS BEAUTY IS THE BEAUTY OF HIS OWN MIND. Nature then becomes for him the measure of his attainments. So much of nature as he is ignorant of, so much of his own mind does he not yet posses. And, in fine, the ancient precept “Know Thyself,” and the modern precept, “Study Nature,” become at last one maxim.
~~Ralph Waldo Emerson
IV
The poet has a moral duty because what he truly imagines will become the new reality. Reality and the individual imaginer of reality are never separate. Any poet who knows this knows that when he imagines the universe again from the crowning heights of his mind, he creates that universe in the truest way that any single consciousness can. Since no man, poet, or audience, can escape his consciousness and still be human, the consciousness-reality of the poet has a very real conduit into the world as a whole through the minds of his readers. Once a beautiful thought has pinned itself in your brains, you can never escape its loveliness.
For example, when Shelley sent off his little balloon from the dead fields of Ireland with a poem in tow announcing his savior-consciousness to the world, alone and in the mist, how else did he know that it would land in these very pages, floating still in our minds?
Sonnet: To A Balloon Laden With Knowledge
Bright ball of flame that through the gloom of even
Silently takest thine aethereal way,
And with surpassing glory dimm'st each ray
Twinkling amid the dark blue depths of Heaven,
--Unlike the fire thou bearest, soon shalt thou
Fade like a meteor in surrounding gloom,
Whilst that, unquenchable, is doomed to glow
A watch-light by the patriot's lonely tomb;
A ray of courage to the oppressed and poor;
A spark, though gleaming on the hovel's hearth,
Which through the tyrant's gilded domes shall roar;
A beacon in the darkness of the Earth;
A sun which, o'er the renovated scene,
Shall dart like Truth where Falsehood yet has been.
~~Percy Bysshe Shelley
V
A poet must reach his center without resentment. Each poet’s center is both his lodestone and his steering star. What one essentially is is what one desires to become–or such on-going becoming is what one is–if one does not fib or filter the flip-book time-cursed consciousness presents to itself. A key to avoiding this fibbery is to act without resentment. This can mean having a “clear conscience” in terms of one’s relationship to imposed reality. If outer, objective reality and one’s own inner creative reality form a consonant pair rather than an engine of argument, one can dance the figments of his dreams into the kitchen at midnight rather than dash the self to shredded syllables against the unforgiving rock of given reality. Either way, what one imagines into existence does come to be, but only when resentment is kept in check does the reality your dreams wake into welcome them to the cotillion. As Yeats famously declared “in dreams begin responsibilities.” And if one responsibly creates the reality one participates in, of what use is resentment? It is merely the blindfold we tie around our eyes to refuse the truth of our oncoming execution. Embrace your death, embrace your life.
Will you, won't you Will you, won't you Won't you join the dance?
2008
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