ROBERT KELLY Engages
Uncreated Mirror by Tamas
Panitz
(Lunar Chandelier
Collective, 2016)
KABBALAH AND
THE YOUNG POET
Preface
to Uncreated Mirror of
Tamas Panitz
In any patriarchy, every
innovation spiritual or mechanical comes to serve the patriarchy.
So, in every patriarchy, the Holy
Spirit, Wisdom, in Her mercy, sees to it that visionary souls speak out some
other way, Way, path to liberate us from the deadening
power of popes and sanhedrins and ayatollahs who freeze the soul into
unquestioning obedience to sharia, halakha, canon law.
The voice of the poet (Blake’s
term) has been over millennia one of the strongest adits of such wisdom—yet
poetry too comes to subserve the patriarchy — the way the beauty of the Odyssey
makes all too clear the hideous brutality of the Iliad — the text that Germany
imposed on the modern world as the great
classic of antiquity — not the girlish, playful, tricksterish Odysseus, but the
sulking proud testosterone-toxic Akhilles.
But poetry keeps rising from the
stifling boys club atmosphere of (still!) colleges and universities, rises and
breaks conventions. Finding its way. Finding the Way.
Every people has its Holy Spirit,
and we do well to linger fondly in the indigo light of each our own traditions,
as I, from Irish and English stock, would linger in the gift of Brigid and
Merlin. I am not a Jew, and have no right to the Kabbalah, though I claim a right to make
myself available to wisdom.
Interesting how the rabbis
(the misnagdim, enemies of
enthusiasm and vision) rule that only men may study Kabbalah, and then only
after thirty — by which age they are married and full of responsibilities and
possessions, have bought into the patriarchy, in fact, and are afraid of the
antinomian biases of the secret wisdom of the alphabet. No more adolescent
revolt left in them, no more urgent animal of poiesis.
So we look to the young poet,
always the young poet, who half-hates the establishment he half-hopes to enter
and conquer. Rimbaud. Nouveau. Ducasse. And Pound tearing up the syllabus
all over Europe as he walked his way through Provence into the poetry we call
Modern.
I am permitted, though, to urge
on poets an appetite to explore their own blood’s old sagesse— and thus beg young poets who are Jewish (in the sort-of
way that anybody is anything these days, forgive me o Flemish
great-grandmother) that they enroll in the Celestial Academy and follow through
the jungle of the alphabet’s Hebrew radicals to learn the testimony of their
own exact intersection point of time, tradition, eternity, energy, protest,
damnation, salvation—everything we mean by truth.
I am not a Jew, so cannot have
Kabbalah. Alas. My heart is circumcised and yearns for such mysteries,
and the maidens who bear them to us. But they smile at me and turn away,
murmuring an English word, or scratching some Celtic ogham in the turf.
But I have, we all have, the
alphabet. And while I don’t have a right to the Hebrew words the alphabet
encodes/decodes, I have a right to the letters themselves, which by now are as
Egyptian as Phoenician, Slavic as Goidelic.
Because they speak the innate mantric energy of the body
itself. The alphabet speaks the body. That’s where language comes
from, the body, the sounds the body makes to say its mind, and that’s what the
phonemes of any language tell us. Beth doesn’t look like B or like Birka, but
that voiced labial plosive says the same in any language that uses it.
Hence the sacred monosyllables of
the proto-language hypothesis.
But to Kabbalah itself come the amazing
new poets of this time, Ian Dreiblatt and Alana Siegel and Billie
Chernicoff and before us now the texts of of Tamas Panitz.
Panitz, born in Budapest, a
youngster in Maryland, has grown through an energetic devotion to poetry almost
unprecedented in my experience to a ranging, singing, endlessly investigative
probing of myth and history, as they bear in on the love of this person, this
moment, this car on its way to the sea, this sea.
More than any poet I know of his
generation he reminds me of the great ones of the inquiring muse — Duncan,
Olson, Blaser, Lansing, all who used music to chisel open the stone gates of
the past, or charm our socks off with the tenderfoot language of the present.
And in these ventures he has
dared to strive with Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions, with the muscular integument
below the Sunday School topics of Genesis. He knows that
language is not just now, and not just him. But knows too that it is only
through the rapt engagement of the living body now with the whole thundering
archive of written texts that the poem can come into meaningful being.
Because Kabbalah is written. That is the obvious
mystery. We receive from the written word the energy of the spoken
whisper behind it.
Panitz has Judaism in his line,
but also that archaic Rajasthani dialect that crept into Europe and lingers,
summoning music (Liszt, Bartok, Kodaly) and thrilling countless children by the
hope —and sometimes the reality— of a flight from the patriarchal, away from
settlement and into endless pilgrimage: the language of the Roma, who
were once thought of as Egyptians and are still called Gypsies.
Roma, Kabbalah, Ezra Pound,
Magyarul, all language and music, deep scholarship, the Chinese researches of
Joseph Needham, the sonorous mysteries of Thomas Vaughan, the enigmas of the
inexhaustible Athanasius Kircher— all these rattle and rumble through Panitz’s
work, and thank heaven they do:
he writes long. He gives
the language space to think, he takes our time and plays with it, nothing is
too obvious for song, nothing too arcane. Shameless puns, breathtaking
turns of scholarly connectingness—and all the while, it is a man in our midst,
caring, worrying, beset with desires and refusals. Like everybody
else. And that’s why poetry works, because it’s written in the sacred
language of Everybody Else.
For we too have our own
lower-case kabbalah, our intimate receivings.
*****
Robert Kelly, currently the first Poet Laureate of Dutchess County, is the author of many books of poetry, fiction, and essays. His most recent publications are A Voice Full of Cities: Collected Essays; Uncertainties; Opening the Seals; The Hexagon and Heart Thread and The Secret Name of Now. His website is http://rk-ology.com/ and his blog is http://rk-ology.blogspot.com/ . He teaches in the Written Arts Program at Bard College, and is married to the translator Charlotte Mandell.
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