TAMAS PANITZ Reviews
Heart Thread by Robert Kelly
(Lunar
Chandelier Collective, 2016)
Intellectu cordis audite. Hear with the understanding of the
heart, as Thomas Vaughan quotes from Agrippa. Heart Thread, 323
sections: themselves discrete and continuous events of hearing, where the
singular is exchanged for its place of understanding; the universal heart.
Rather, the singular and universal heart. The metaphysics. The heart is altered
by what it hears, empathizes, and its covering is re-characterized. Island
metaphysics and “brooms for breakfast.”
“There was an analyst who worked for
free/ and no one believed him.” Kelly speaks from beyond self (the self is
distanced, ex-pressed by one’s own analysis), on the far side of religion, any,
to whose providence belief belongs.
Belief is an act of living stuff,
and the heart its dark religion. But the fact remains, and its changing
expression belies the scrying stone of the world, or is here, importantly, the
world itself.
Kelly shows himself here as the
slippery master of Truth. His play with particulars is inseparable from
the understanding that takes all to its highest value. “They lift the hill like
heroes and go in.”
107.
From the arrow that flyeth by day on the south wind
protect the cradle of the infant thought the blue trees
reach down to us to stifle unbelief
throw your fishing rods away your lariats
because everything but what you see is real
deep in the truth of the unthought
lila the uncontrived with whom we play
night more than day and the wind knows it all
broken clouds your mother on the phone in every wind
islands change their flags like underwear
we belong to nothing but the sea from which we come
religion is an ailment of the mainland only.
108.
Hydrangea Himalayan flower favorite blue
has blossomed early in Tara’s gentle hand
I saw her tossing them on the hillside south of Sonada
and here by the sea in Betty’s other garden
a few blue already the many on their way
always like that, profit and followers, udambara path
assigning meanings to each thing I go ahead
listening to what I stumble through leave the self out
have no favorite flower no mountains no name at all
the names are all asleep in you
that’s why you love us best
the colors you chose to smash over the world.
How do we
understand a fugue? The perception, the line, the section, are by their
continuance an expansion of consciousness– changing what’s past and present and
following futurewards, nosing Bach-like through the edge of duration until it
turns into space, each note flying off with the radical force of language that
is the world. What returns is the real.
Not a religious
poetry in the overt sense but a poetry of the religious impulse, as religion or
language or art has served it at various times, allowing a process or a “Mysteries”
of radically configurative clarities, which reveal to us the real, the
very grounds for the creation of a reality.
I say religious
because there is a level of meaning here akin to a “test.” The way fishing rods
or having no favorite flower is a test to the spiritual traveler. Any thought
or least particle is a test, and the richness of this fugue lies in part in
Kelly’s ability to hear those thoughts– hear the fugue at its periphery and
remain attentive, listening out along that cutting edge of the unknown, in its
rigorous expansion.
I use several “spellings”
of religion as I am taken by a renewed uncertainty at its exact workings and a
renewed sureness in its meaning. Kelly has given us a vital text free of the
irony and intellectual (not to mention ontological) chauvinism we are these
days fed as a very limited “world.”
***
The ruin
I find in Robert Duncan (Faust Foutou especially, A Letter to my Dentist)
and at times in Jack Spicer haunts my reading of Heart Thread, as an encounter
with that same gesture. Duncan’s lyrical and theatrical force echo’s that of a “world-soul”
on a microcosmic level (anima mundi scienced by the personal anima,
“What, indeed, then if my teeth go before my appetite?”), so the radical decay
and super-human crumbling of the processes of “earth” expands into the realm of
spirit in like proportion. Rudolf Steiner says in Ascension and Pentecost:
During the Atlantean epoch the earth
was, so to say, in the middle period
of life; it teemed with inner life; it had upon it no such formations as the rocks and
stones, which are gradually crumbling away.
[…] The crumbling of
the rocks is evidence that the earth is already
involved in a death-process.
Heart Thread is
the next “phase,” is not an abnegation but acceptance paired to one’s own
energies, an expansion of spirit as it is paired with the lingual landscape:
where we change the real by recognizing more within it, opening the death-process
of samsara. Opening the door.
It is indeed
Pentecost, when the tongues of flame descend on the disciples not gifting them
with all languages (as if there were such a thing), but as Steiner says,
[…]they feel their hearts borne far, far away, among the
different peoples of the
earth-sphere, and they feel as if something lives in their hearts which is translatable into all languages,
and which can be
brought to the understanding of the hearts of all men.
RD, from The
H.D. Book, Part 2; Chapter 4 (in Caterpillar 7):
“Form, Gestalt,” Pound notes: “Every spiritual form sets in movement the bodies
in which (or among which) it finds itself.” So Love
starts from form seen and takes His place, as subject not object, as mover, in the idea
of the possible.
Rectus &
Inversus
Solve et
coagula.
Gebura &
Tiphareth.
Steiner, again:
In the
Baptism by John there stands before us the picture of the Spirit as the dove; now,
however, another picture appears, the picture
of the fiery tongues. It is in a single dove, a single form, that the Holy Spirit manifests
itself in John’s
Baptism: it is in many single
tongues that it manifests itself at the Pentecostal Festival.
46.
Draw a picture of the Temple here
as you imagine it so it shall be
here is a photo of you building it
here is a rainbow to wear around your neck
keeps you safe in battle with the sky
who taught me to work this damned machine
all moving parts are still, only the electrons move
rich men keep getting richer as drunkards just stay drunk
there is no doorway to their castle
a house goes on forever like the old Winchester place
money has no natural frontier
the violin mourns the new-fallen king.
Thus, Kelly
writes on the back cover:
Through the tumult of our names, months, seasons, runs the
line of the heart. The cordial, the central, the nerve that springs us into
thinking, moving, speaking. Body, Speech, Mind –– what else have we? The heart
is the thread that links them together, the theme that runs through all the
voices and variations of our fugue, our flight, our flight from Eden, from
dependency, from servitude, towards freedom of mind and action. Towards being.
I learned the
name of the poem slowly, after hearing at Bard a performance of Lou Harrison’s
choral setting of the heart sutra, the radical Buddhist text that speaks to the
primacy of mind. It made me think of the way Buddhists point to the heart to
mean the mind. Sutra means thread, and that was my instruction, suddenly
focused as I listened one afternoon to George Quasha’s Axial Music ensemble in
Barrytown, and I knew the name of the thread that held me, that I held.
*****
Tamas Panitz lives and writes in
Hudson NY, where he edits The Doris
magazine with poet Billie Chernicoff. He is the author of Blue Sun (Inpatient Press), and most recently Uncreated Mirror (Lunar Chandelier Collective) and The Way of the Tower (metambesen.org).
Another view is offered by Alana Siegel in GR #26 at
ReplyDeletehttp://galatearesurrection26.blogspot.com/2016/07/heart-thread-by-robert-kelly.html