Summa Poesia

I.Pagan Fete
Having traversed many miles
Of flowery fields who shout
their yellow songs to the open sky
I came to the foothills of the Black Mountains
And into the village of the chapel of St. Roche
Fires light up the valley on the feast of St. John
chanting triola spinning and dancing around a second sun
pagan revelry---cooperative wine
and the peasants handing out saucisse sandwiches.
Kim, my beloved Poile dur Terrier,
I confess that I love that her more than any creature on earth.
on and on the highest hills with wild horses running free
I lay down in the blowing tall sparkling grass
with 7 winds howling in my ear
Chanting praises to all created things:
The blue velvet sky, the pale brown stone, the melody ringing in my heart:
Crystal mountain
endless vista of the pyrenees
creeping purple flowers and bumblebees...
Journey of my soul to the highest hill inthe youth of my youth.
No St. Thomas in those days, but memories
of Heidegger and lyrics ofLed Zeppelin rising in my heart:
“There’s a feeling I get
when I look to the West
And my sprit is crying for leaving…”

I conceived myself in possession of a
rare inevitable mystery- even shamed,
to take to the rivulets and streams
to convene with my inner spring.
Damp hidden things:
wet rocks, mushrooms and shepherd’s huts.
The tricele talisman---Symbol of all powers and interface between these worlds
It was mine and mine alone.
To build my religion around
these sacred mysteries- not reveal my
hidden “priesthood” to anyone else
Not even Chantal, who encouraged me to go to the dolmen beyond
the village
to marry at midnight under the full moon.
Always the idea of dances
The rhythms of threes---triola.
End of ends, all things end in farther fields,
And visions all end in the incommunicable vision.

The end of all actions and human affections is the love of God, that is
why these is no measure regulating that love; it is itself the measure
and measures everything else, and can never be too great. 
(St Thomas Aquinas, ST., II-II, 27, 6 Corp. and ad.3)

And so I traversed many miles, amidst the yellowssongs of flowing fields around Arles came to the foothills of the Montagne Noire into the chapel of Saint Roche.

What do Saint's Peter and Paul mean by “living stone”?
Teilhard de Chardin has written:
We may say that the dominant concern
of priests in the first centuries
of the Church was to determine the
position of Christ in relation to the Trinity.
In our time the vital question has become the following:
To analyze and specify exactly,
In its relations, the existence of
The influence that holds together Christ
And the Universe. (Christology or Evolution)

But, I say that the concern for the Trinity
Remains of the heart of the Church:
As it was in the Beginning,
Is now and ever shall be. Amen.

The villages from the mountains gathered for the feast of St. Jean. The pagan revelry of the purple blood, wine from the cave cooperatif-peasants on wagons handing out saucisse sandwiches, and Kim, the poile dur terrier
whom I confess to loving more than any other creature on this earth.

Chanting, dancing around our second sun.
Q: Can the fire replace the celestial sun?
No, but in it stands in its place proximally in the dark of night.
This reveals the meaning of idolatry.
Idols are proximal divinities, which
Surrounding upon continued investigation, 1000 faces
Of God, the angelic doctor describes
The use of analogy to describe God.
On the highest hills wild horses run like water,
where I lay down in tall grass with the winds howling in my ear
chanting praises to all the creatures: the blue sky, the pale stone, the purple flower and the melody rising in my heart:
Open, crystal wonder
Endless vistas of the Pyrenees
Creeping purple flowers,
Majestic bumblebees….

Q: Is the revealed all there ever is or will be?
Yes. Without a doubt perception is everything.
Or nothing is held back..

Q: Does this entail history?
No, everything all at once everywhere is flashing and standing there. This does not contradict creatio ex nihilo but rather substantiates it. To create from nothing is a mystery--–naming this mystery does not undo its essential mystery.
It is not the source!

It is contrary to our human nature and
Knowledge for something to be born
Before the eternal ages, yet in these matters
We believe God’s testimony about Himself.
(St. Hilary of Poitiers, The Trinity P. 520)

Concerning man’s relation to God,
St. Thomas Aquinas writes:
Man is directed to God, as to an end that surpasses
The grasp of his reason: the eye hath not seen,
O God Besides Thee, what things thou hast prepared for them 
That wait for Thee. (Isu IXVI, 4) ST.I, 1

I answer, that from the view point of perception which is all that we can speak of in equivocal languages the world is the totality of all that ever was or will be, at the same time alongside the real things there is a super added sense which cannot be accounted for in any rational sense, or even spoken of, since by definition it is that moment or glimpse is found in eternity.

II. Heresy
Torches of my soul to the highest hill in the youth of my youth. Many the day I pray alone in the cool chapel in La Liviniere, the red candle smoothly flickering before the tabernacle and all else gray limestone. Memories of poetry on the high hills, of the forests springs and meadows. But I would not receive eucharist on account of my private, ecstatic religion.

Q: Does being a poet in fact render one outside
Communion with the Church?
Yes, poetry relies upon a direct comprehension
Of reality whereas theology relies upon the mediation
Of revelation and the Church.
Hence the poet when he accounts for his encounter with truth not relying upon any authority save for experience will stand forth heretic.
Further, a poet understands that all is bathed in one time, and will not separate the truth of the oak from the squirrel, hence he or she is Pantheist.
On the contrary, poets are like the disciples on the mount of Transfiguration, who were forbidden to bear witness to their vision until Jesus ascended into heaven.
Reply 1: It is not necessary that a direct encounter with reality render one heretic, reality in either case understood poetically or theologically, is only grasped thanks to faith and revelation. And the ultimate source of both escape mental grasp.
Reply 2: The squirrel is a squirrel even for the non-poet. But the poet’s unique talent is to find the squirrel the full density of its being, its maximal truth as squirrel. Prof. Jan Van Veken said that the truly miraculous events are the every day; hence, it is the poet who is in a closer encounter with God’s Creatio ex nihilo than the scribe or the priest.

III.Lyricism
No St. Thomas in those days but memories of Heidegger lingering and lyrics from Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven:
“There’s a feeling I get when I look to the west and my spirit is crying for leaving…”
Q: Why do lyrics hold sway to such a great extent over your mind?
A study of certain lyricism indicates an angelic contribution. However, we know that there are good and bad angels. All angels tower intellectually over mere human or human contrived intellect. Hence, angelic contributions expand the lyricist’s intellect. Here the singer points us to the end of the day when the spirit is melancholy and wants to leave the body.

At a county fair in Carnac, Bretagne I had found a talisman which harnessed all of these powers---it was precious to me, mine and mine alone.

Q: What is the origin of this symbol?

It is an ancient, pagan symbol which is universally found. It is also called a wheel of fire. The Christian fathers adopted it as a symbol of the trinity thus guaranteeing its longevity in wood-carved pews and in stained glass windows. Cirlot's Dictionary of Symbols: the number three and its significance. Zero is very mysterious since a circle stands for “nothing” yet is one."Nothing cannot be conceived." (Parmenides)  Hence, all is one.

Number one represents the complete totality of all objects. (Plotinus) Or one specific member of a class. Two is the number of division, and otherness – recognition that all is not the same. The possibility of sex---male, female; night and day.

Three is the first possibility of restoring unity after the break involved in the one into Two. Three can always function to gather opposites into a higher unity, cf. Hegel's dialectic.

Q: Is the trinity merely a dialectic synthesis upon the highest level?
I possessed my celtic talisman, more ancient than the church like a toddler with his shaker, I carried it everywhere, and in none of my sketches was it absent. I would build a religion around it, a private religion, because I could not bear to share these “sacred mysteries” nor reveal my “priesthood” to just any one.
This is the very core of pagan and shaman religious religious practices, they are private…Even my lover who encouraged me in these ways more than anyone else, was beyond the reach of these mysteries.On midnight visits to the Dolmen beyond the village I envisioned dances in patterns of three in the full light of the ancient moon. I had sworn all of my academic studies so far away-–-I wanted to burn my class lectures from The Higher Institute of Philosophy.

Q: Is it possible to integrate such soul experiences into everyday life?
Art is a rapture of the unconscious, and were it not for the effect of sublimation, would result in psychosis. The breakthrough of the unconscious is a pure, elemental force for which society is exclusively built to resist and repress.

Yes, such experience can be integrated. The artist can produce a living selling pieces of artwork which the market deems worthy to buy.

Sed contra: If the market determines what the artist produces--–or if he produces what can sell, the artist will sacrifice the totality of his or her sacrifice to art via subterfuge.

Respondeo: I understand that at the time of the eruption of the unconscious there is no way to integrate such prophetic experience into any other mold. However, years later as the fires have cooled it is possible to detect a stable pattern in all of the flux.

Reply: Such art as emerges from radical encounters may indeed be marketable, but that is not the reason for its production. Its production is necessary as it is the only possible link or bridge of humanity and the Source.

Q: Is artwork done for humanity or for the artist’s sake?
Neither. It is not for the artists sake for the reason stated above.
It is not for humanity’s sake because it is in no way gratuitous---it is a necessary act. Neither for the artist, nor for humanity, art satisfies humanity by satisfying the deepest need in the artist.

I had sworn off my American identity when I flew to France on a one way air ticket. I had saved my money from teaching at a junior college and talked about a trip to France, but failed to return. The dream of realizing my inner artist would cost everything--–house, family, money-–-and was more valuable than any sacrifice I could make.
The total demand…Jesus’ pierced hand! Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man I moved toward “the artist” as the ideal projection of my soul–--it was my proximal divinity.

Q: Is the ego, in fact, an idol?
Yes, said Decartes.
Yet ego is the ideal of Modernism. To worship the ego is Post-Modern.

The achievement of my task, however, called for the destruction of my incarnate, material identity---hence my obsession with fire.
Husserl’s Ideas Veil after veil, in any artifact God can be sought for in ways that are only approximative – things and relations can be taken as God-–-this is idolatry.

Q: How can we know that we have finally found the bedrock truth?
Q: Isn’t every philosophical system idolatrous?
Q: What is the analogy method of describing truth?

Such acts of mind and devotion are idolatrous but do not appear as such to the idolater. There is a nearly complete fusion-–-when art is all consuming as we see in Kerouac.

My specific task was to convey my vision of self, nature and God through poetry.
Can poetry succeed at this task?
Is this in any way truth?
God is completely implied or fulfilled in my vision---so any description of God remains abstract. To speak of God would subtract from the truth of the experience, all speech is drunk with ecstasy. It is like taking a glass of water from a spring and carrying it away from the source. How can God be fulfilled in my vision?

Q: Are all attempts at description necessarily negative? 
This was an exalted time. I freely exchanged sacred language for my daily journeys onto the high hills: “standing on the threshold all lit up with a sense of everlasting life (Van Morrison)."

IV.Art and Truth
Q:Can there be a Christian art today?
Respondeo:
Thin gray sky turns
the wheat fields over
reflected light reaches up to touch the source again:
wild red flowers sing at the roadside…

Each field and every vision is a temporary dwelling of the Lord of all Creation and what starts as a passing glance is taken up first in twelve thousand veils one after the other reveal yet one more veil and God is grasped for, but never consumed.