JOEL NEWBERGER Reviews
Uncreated
Mirror by Tamas Panitz
(Lunar
Chandelier Collective, Hudson, New York, 2016)
1.
Tamas
Panitz says, in the 23rd reflection of his Uncreated Mirror:
Steal the black ring
see what comes
be anything that doesn’t.
Or
23rd psalm: the cup he gives us runs over. He gives us more than
most. I once read this book and felt my mind made metal, a ring the poem runs
through, and felt myself as distant from the poem as a rock from the river it
lives in. It was hard for me to be as much as the poem. It poured through me
but would not marry me. I was inevitably everything that did not come; the
stoniness and speed of Tamas’ images made me everything other, but would not
even bind to me in this difference. He says a poem fluid and supple, which
dissolves all its own perverse fixations and fatal stares, which undoes in
itself what Tamas calls on us to undo: “the crime of saying it twice.” A crime
we had been determined to commit. The abomination of mirrors.
This
book was once a “black ring,” slipping off this tongue that wanted so much to
heed it. This finger slid through the smooth and cold stone, and it was not
held. It was harder for me to read this book that is read so easily and
quickly—to, as Tamas requests, “do the opposite of thinking.” To make us do the
opposite of thinking he reminds us of nothing, for the sake of eternal
presence, tranquilizing that mnemonic faculty that would make ideas in the
“re-finding” of objects. But even then how arousing it was to be urged on, led
on from where I wanted to lie by such multiple signs and wonders, mysterious
images of nothing to come. How pleasing to drop down his lines, his stanzas, now
fast, now slow, into our common depth—a descent by images, but to a realm that itself is imageless, uncreated, and more
than scary, because there’s nothing to hold or be held by.
Signs
and wonders, mysterious images. They were initially, but not eventually,
terrifying images of nothing to come. At last they are indeed omens of nothing
already existing, but of a new birth, in fact of the speaker of the poem, who
has been buried under the mound. That mound is of images, but those images are
of himself, and in the poet’s mind they become sharp stones, instruments of his
own excavation.
Mound,
or the infinitely uncreated, where Nothing is buried. Nothing but a man. And
“there is no second creation from the uncreated.” In that self-refracted point,
he is made; thence he will begin to come forth for us to feel; to there he has
retreated, leading us, if we have read him rightly, beyond images.
It
was reading Uncreated Mirror a second
time that brought him, breathing, embracing, touching and not touching, so near
to me. It was a faint or subtle feeling of giving birth to him, in my own mind.
Reflection 33:
say me until you mean you
the directions are clear except for who’s
talking
every me Abraham every you Sarah
This
is no confusion of identities, but the indefinable precision of love. In
communion with any other, we feel this mysterious clarity. Walt Whitman said,
to the sea, “I mean tenderly by you and all.” Tamas, too, gently intends and
gently makes meanings, by all and by us. There are lines in which we feel his
speech as intimately as we feel Walt’s. We don’t know who’s speaking, but we
are called, called to go forth—out of the house of memory where we grew up, into
these words,—and we shall.
Walt
Whitman would be our tongue, the earth under foot. Tamas is our tongue, an
almond tree, stones. Let us hear him again, in the 11th Reflection:
do the opposite of thinking, the way stones
do
full of words, no arguing, since before
the back of the mirror itself uncreated stuff
with no time to wait, no time at all
He
recognizes no base matter, no mute beings. He wrote this poem by listening to
things, and they have spoken to him.
The
horizon, the flags, the princess, the roses, the wood, the tree, the fire, the
water—are “full of words” that are flesh of the poet’s sleeping body. His birth
is the total animation of all being. It is eschatological: he comes when the
stones are full, as Christ comes in the “fullness of time.” Or cosmogonic: when
the cup flows over.
2.
All
this flows from the book’s prelude—it is contained there and spills from there—
where
Tamas identifies himself with Moses:
I lived as Moses. Lived through infinite
lives, so many infinite lives that they grouped themselves into five distinct
strings or threads. Each life consisted of a presence, I won’t say it was
“mine”…My lives were interjections into other lives, lifting them by my presence
from some state which they, in their sphere, had no other means of rectifying.
It
was a fever dream. The book does not return us there, to dream, but goes forth
with an exactitude only death can bring. At this Mount Navo, looking over into
the book that is coming, he has
already lived as Moses. He already knows and will speak the secret language of
things, this telepathy, which the Biblical Moses only begins to learn when his
fate is sealed. In his last great speech, the prophet who had rashly disobeyed
God’s command to “speak to that rock” (Numbers 20:8) to call forth sweet waters
for his thirsty people, now publishes the name of the Lord: “He is the Rock” (Deuteronomy 32:4). And
he proclaims that his “doctrine shall drop as the rain, my speech shall distill
as the dew” (32:2).
Receiving
the tradition of Moses’ second birth from the Nile and the etymology of his
name (“Because out of the waters I drew him”), Tamas says, in section 44:
They took me from the water
but I came away with its secret
The
secret of saying so. The secret of speaking to the rock so that it spills God
or gives birth to you. The secret of speaking to the rock to hear it speak,
speaking to God so that He speaks your words and gives you a new name. Not a
second birth, but a second phase in your emanation. A second reading.
There
is a famous mystery in the last eight verses of the Torah—the five books or
strands of Moses—that does not explain the secret of Tamas’ poetry, as I feel
it here, but makes it present. For tradition holds that Moses is the author of
the whole Torah, and yet he dies, and God buries him, before the book ends.
A
second poem, Guadalcabal, follows Uncreated Mirror in this book. Here
Tamas brings to blossom, now, the
“words and characters” of a proto-Sinaitic script, found 1999, in Wadi el-Hol,
in Egypt. Hand, or hands, inscribed them there in stone, but here they speak
like water.
I
mean, ultimately, that the poet Tamas becomes in this book—who, after his
death, doing the opposite of thinking, keeps writing, not with an undimmed eye
and undiminished vigor, but with expanded vision, with a “twisted” tongue
encompassing worlds—is a poet who can go back down to Egypt, as Moses did, and can
receive their wisdom or that other script. He can receive us who
still labor there, having never left, and (who’s talking?) free us from our
silence.
*****
Joel Newberger is a teacher and poet living in
Brooklyn, NY.
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