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The Voice of the Turtle: Reverential Notes Towards a Definitive John Fahey Discography, or, A Lenten Meditation at the Atlanta Botanical Garden
For J, again
Rain smashes the petals of a reluctant Spring:
the weather, as usual, provides endless parallels
to psychological processes. You pays
your money, and you picks your metaphor.
Random walks in between mundane errands
do more to clarify one’s personal absurdity
than hours of deliberate introspection.
This has given rise to my idiosyncratic habit
of visits to organized Nature in those rare places
where clouds and rain give rise to reflection
instead of, say, to hours of brooding or
pointless addiction to crossword puzzles
or games of Scrabble. All of which are,
in many houses I have known, venerable
family traditions. I prefer to walk.
“And now, we’ve seen it all.” So one vivacious retiree,
and later, to a less ambulatory companion,
“Well, you simply have to keep going, just because
there is no other way to get you out.”
What are supposed to be the lessons of age
are so often instead only literalizations
of Samuel Beckett’s wry, bleak visions
of ultimate immobility. This is how it is.
We remain utterly laughable.
We age. We decay. We can’t
go on. We fall, or fall in love.
They are blowing up the great stone Buddhas
of Bamiyan province, a few miles west
of Kabul. Revolutionary Afghanistan
is drowning in self-devouring rancor.
Iconoclasm thrives because stone statuary
is decidedly the oldest surviving manifestation
of the birth of human imagination, twenty or so
thousand years ago. The Ice Age sculptors
already scratched marks on stone, but not just
any rock. What they hacked and scratched fit the hand
as snugly as any useful object ever did,
and the so-called Venus of Dolni Vestonice
was formed in fired clay as a finely proportioned
object that also begged to be cradled or clutched
as though our earliest ancestors already lived
in symbols cast far beyond the merely functional.
All men and women are born servants of the True Way,
and only later turn to their own perverse opinions.
The human heart, John Calvin said, is a factory of idols,
a psychological observation perhaps more piercing
than the anti-aesthetic of other cultures of the Word.
In general, the pain and pathetic repetition
of desire and destruction continue.
Babies die of starvation, small children die of cold
on the endless road of flight to Herat. Philippe
de Montebello of the Metropolitan Museum
begs for the preservation of the Bamiyan Buddhas.
It is spring, sort of, and all types and conditions
are entrapped in their usual, predictable fashion.
The petals fly in the wind like ridiculous symbols
left over from a previous century of emotional excess.
John Fahey is newly dead, who recorded American roots
decades before the Coen Brothers reinvented
the music of the nineteen-thirties. Years ago in California,
in love with young women three thousand miles away,
I listened to Fahey’s re-creations of old blues classics
and longed for a South that I knew was already lost;
not the Lost Cause, but the fragile chords of family memory
kept by some widowed aunt in Tennessee or Miami.
The downfall of the Adelphi rolling grist mill, or
the transfiguration of Blind Joe Death; Fahey’s
personal mythological transmutations
made sense of a South that had long since lost itself
in downscale auto racing and crappy imitations
of Nashville’s overpriced Grand Old Opry.
A tale from Townes Van Zandt, also gone early:
“The other day I heard my aunt singing ‘The Rivers
of Texas.’ Figuring
that here was a chance to learn the truth at last
about the methods of Folk Transmission,
I asked her, did she remember where she learned that.
She said, ‘Well, Townes, I heard Uncle George sing it.’
So I asked Uncle George, and he learned it from Cousin
Scott, and Cousin Scott learned it from his brother Jim,
and his brother Jim learned it from me.”
This is how, after enough passage of time,
shrines are born, and legends of sainthood.
The Japanese garden at Golden Gate and the
one at Atlanta’s botanical garden
are both echoes of an absent original,
like faint, flickering, barely cast shadows
that may for that reason be better teachers of
an elusive, yet ineluctable realization :
life is literally fleeting, and in some vague way
stone and water and twisted evergreens
reflect its essence. Whether we go out
through the bamboo gate or the moon gate’s exit
all is tangled in desire, even if only “le
dur desir de durer.”
“Non omnis moriar;” but, regrettably, survival
exists only as random tags and scraps
written once by…God alone knows who,
after a sufficient number of generations.
I shall not wholly die? I shall not wholly live, either.
The Buddhas of Bamiyan, like the Central Asian frescoes
destroyed in the bombing of Berlin’s museums, exemplify
their master’s teaching: even monuments of stone
are subject to transience, suffering, and brutal death.
The iron laws of history are as hard on poems
as they are on statues and paintings. Nothing endures.
How often love, as Schopenhauer pessimistically noted
decades before Charles Darwin, has rested on such accidents
as the fortunate arrangement of subcutaneous fat.
Women have been drawn more to well-defined muscles.
The shape of Cleopatra’s nose, Blaise Pascal observed,
was probably responsible for the deaths of entire armies.
The later Romans, curiously,
didn't think this sort of lunacy could happen.
When Saint Augustine, creator
of the new, grim cultural paradigm,
cited an old-fart elderly landowner
who ran away with a slave girl,
they scoffed and called him
“novus medicus,”
an upstart theologian contradicting
the considered opinions of the era's
most distinguished physicians.
The fallen petals of the Japanese magnolia
are squashed to slippery mush on the concrete sidewalk.
It is the old battle between Winter and Spring,
and this year, winter is winning most of the rounds.
The spring wind screams like the shouts of deluded souls
who think that anything can be gained or lost for good
in the endless ocean or garden of becoming,
whichever metaphor suits your illusion.
Midnight in the garden of good and evil,
or, more likely, twilight in the ill-kept yard of neither.
February 26-March 12, 2001
“How it is” is the title of a Samuel Beckett novel, and “I can’t go on, I’ll go on” is a line from another Beckett text. The story of the destruction of the world’s largest statues, the Buddhas of Bamiyan, is available from many sources, as is the plea for their preservation by the director of the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The Venus of Dolni Vestonice was briefly on display in Atlanta, where a Czech curator hauled the two pieces of the statuette out of a padded box to show me how it was apparently designed to explode in the kiln (how they know this, given the ways of ceramics and ceramists to this day, is beyond me). The line about servants of the True Way is a universalization of the Muslim belief that all babies are born Muslim and only later educated into religious errors. Where John Calvin said that the human heart is a factory of idols, I cannot say, though the theologian Gabriel Vahanian may have provided a footnote in the book in which I read it, either The Death of God or Wait Without Idols. The Coen Brothers re-invigorated “old-timey music” in the film O Brother, Where Art Thou? “The Anti-Aesthetic” was the title of a mid-80s Hal Foster anthology published in Britain as Postmodern Culture. “The Downfall of the Adelphi Grist Rolling Mill” and “The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death” are, of course, titles of John Fahey compositions. The Townes Van Zandt story may be recorded on the two-LP set of live performances, but I heard it first from the man himself. The moon gate and bamboo gate sound tremendously symbolic, but in fact are only the two alternate gates of the Japanese garden in the Atlanta Botanical Garden, with, as far as I have been able to learn, no symbolic meaning. “All is tangled in desire”: the Bhagavad Gita. The passage is cited in longer form in “the ego and the body in northern Georgia.” “le dur desir de durer,” “the hard desire to last,” is the title of a book of poems by Paul Eluard. Horace’s “non omnis moriar,” “I shall not wholly die,” was once learned by every schoolboy (not necessarily every schoolchild) in the English-speaking world. The Buddhist frescoes from western China were destroyed by aerial bombardment in Berlin’s New Museum because they had been cemented into the wall, considered immovable in spite of having once been sawed out of the solid rock on which they were painted; cf. Hopkirk, Foreign Devils on the Silk Road. I don’t know where Schopenhauer made his remark because I encountered reliable versions of it in a New York Times Magazine story designed to depress romantics on Valentine’s Day. Blaise Pascal made his wisecrack in the Pensées. The original, which I have expanded poetically, reads, “Le nez de Cléopâtre, s'il eût été plus court, toute la face de la terre aurait changé.” The Saint Augustine story is presumably told by Peter Brown in The Body and Society, since the book covers the same territory as the lecture in which I heard it. The Battle Between Winter and Spring can be found in any number of books on ritual performances and folklore. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is, of course, the title of John Berendt’s bestselling book on Savannah, which should not be taken to have anything to do with this poem. As with many another reference, it is the resonance of the words, not the contents of the book, that brought the phrase to mind.
Sleepwalking to Kandahar: An Elegy in Time of War for the Remembering of Howard Finster
Humphrey Bogart: Sam, it’s December 1941 in Casablanca. What time is it
in New York?
Dooley Wilson: Uhh…My watch done stopped.
Bogart: I bet they’re asleep in New York.I bet
they're asleep all over America.
—dialogue from Casablanca (1943)
We are all asleep in the outward man.
—Jakob Boehme, German mystical writer
during the Thirty Years’ War
Man is asleep. Must he die before he wakes up?
—the Prophet Muhammad (oral tradition)
i. 2001
First sharp rain of the cold fall; more than enough to flatten
the tiny, defiant Stars and Stripes on Johnson Road
that droop and more or less forlornly wrap
tight round their cheap sticks. This is all going to last a lot longer
than most folks ever would have figured.
Americans don’t like interminable epics. We like quick sequels
or else fresh edits: Apocalypse Now Returns
or Gulf War 2, featuring previously unreleased
scenes greatly improved in the director’s cut.
Colin Powell flies off to Central Asian conferences
in a reprise of his most popular starring role.
The flags flutter gallantly as the rain subsides
and wind gusts suggest brutal shifts in the seasonal
average daytime temperature.
Autumn asters surround the box where the morning paper
announces the death of Howard Finster. Nation shall rise against nation,
Howard wrote on his wooden angels last winter. These are the final days.
“The Last Days of Mankind” was Karl Kraus’ sarcastic title
for his bitter satire of patriotism, profiteering, and self-delusion
in Vienna in the First World War. Twenty years or so later
he wrote, wearily, “I can’t think of anything at all to say
about Adolf Hitler.” The second act
is not, as Marx implied, always farce. Sometimes
the first act was just the set-up for the tragic finale.
Bombs fall on Afghanistan. The supermarket
bags groceries in plastic bearing the United States flag
and the noisy slogan “Proud to be American!”
We are all asleep in the outward man. Cold air
comes as a surprise each winter in these warm latitudes.
Howard made cutouts of the ant and the grasshopper
which were happily collected by fledgling entrepreneurs
secure in a slew of dot-com stock options.
Special op boys from Kansas or Fort Benning, Georgia
comb the caves of the north in quest of Al-Qaida.
Central Asia was once the place where yesterday’s occultists
parked their favorite fantasy Masters of Wisdom.
Monasteries somewhere in the middle of Nuristan province
were almost as good as Shangri-La or forbidden Lhasa.
Now exile Tibet has a text and textile outlet
on a small cul-de-sac on Atlanta’s northside,
and Afghanistan, also sold locally, is an easy first runner-up
for the title of Most Thoroughly Demolished Asian Culture,
after Cambodia managed at last to give up the top spot.
Afghanistan and Appalachia:
Mountain cultures enjoy hard simplicities
like hunting rifles and folk religion.
They also, in the right extraordinary circumstances
spawn not prophets, but meetings with remarkable men
who dream dreams, as in the Book of Joel, and see visions.
I, who grew up in a place about ten feet above sea level,
took a much longer route to the foothills of Mount Analogue.
The post office box reveals that our national colors
are very popular for autumn fashion. Sale catalogues
scramble to update their holiday covers. Cocooning
and cozy Americana are in vogue. When we hunker down
we tend to do it in unison, celebrating the home front virtues
while the air war creeps through Herat and Kandahar,
hitting the same Red Cross storehouse twice despite best intentions
because someone simply forgot to take it off the target list.
We mean well. Afghan opposition soldiers
note that this measured response looks really wimpy.
The Russians, they say, plastered everything in sight.
These are, as Howard wrote, the beginning of sorrows.
Someday all this will end, just because it always does.
Changes, as Heraclitus noted some little while ago,
happen whether or not you want or expect them.
Nothing will ever be the same again,
but only—and not simply—because it never was.
The history of terror or the terror of history; in Santa Barbara,
while bomb-laden bicyclists destroyed Saigon cafes, we read Eliade
on the fate of small, poor nations, and how it was that history
was a thing that was feared by peasant populations
located on major rivers or mountain passes.
We didn’t understand a word of it;
some wanted power to the people, and
all we are saying is
give peace a chance.
When 13 year old Jawad awoke as the only
surviving member of his Afghan peasant family,
Muhammad Razi lied compassionately, “All is well.
You were walking in your sleep,
and you fell down the well next to your house,
and I rescued you.” The last few words were true.
Regrettably, real life all too frequently imitates
the stereotyped tragedies of the supermarket tabloids.
On the side of farce, a reported prototype of urban legend
woke up at ten on a September eleventh workday,
long blocks away from his job at the World Trade Center,
and thought, for a while, that he was in serious trouble.
The terror of history or the history of terror.
As Howard most likely quoted on some vision of other worlds,
Beloved, it is high time to awaken out of sleep.
For now is our salvation nearer than we believed?
Howard believed it. We who, as they say, are left behind
stretch to read the signs of things to come
less confident in our gifts of interpretation.
To be continued.
The epigraphs are all quoted from memory, and I have no guaranteed source for the sentence from Boehme, which was used as an epigraph by Robert Bly in Silence in the Snowy Fields, his first book and certainly one of his best. The identification of Boehme with the Thirty Years War, though factual, derives from a short poem by Kenneth Rexroth. The hadith is often cited by Sufis and occultists but I have never troubled to find out if it actually exists. “always farce”: The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte again; “Hegel says somewhere that all great events and personalities in world history reappear in one fashion or another. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” Since this poem is being written year by year (to be continued, as the published version of this was, for a while), I had no idea that there really would be a Gulf War 2, though there was reason to believe it would happen. Nuristan: See Peter Brook’s version of Meetings with Remarkable Men and O. M. Burke’s Among the Dervishes, re a region that obviously can hold more than secret monasteries. The Tibetan text and textile outlet subsequently moved elsewhere. “The terror of history” is Eliade’s best-known phrase from Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return. The stories reported as fact in the New York Times may, of course, have been fabricated. The lines from St. Paul about waking out of sleep are quoted from memory and are not quite accurate.
These poems are excerpted from the copyrighted volume Unfinished Ventures: Selected Poems 1977-2005 and the standard courtesies of copyright are requested, even though in the age of digital reproduction such niceties have become increasingly fluid and open to fruitless query.
For J, again
Rain smashes the petals of a reluctant Spring:
the weather, as usual, provides endless parallels
to psychological processes. You pays
your money, and you picks your metaphor.
Random walks in between mundane errands
do more to clarify one’s personal absurdity
than hours of deliberate introspection.
This has given rise to my idiosyncratic habit
of visits to organized Nature in those rare places
where clouds and rain give rise to reflection
instead of, say, to hours of brooding or
pointless addiction to crossword puzzles
or games of Scrabble. All of which are,
in many houses I have known, venerable
family traditions. I prefer to walk.
“And now, we’ve seen it all.” So one vivacious retiree,
and later, to a less ambulatory companion,
“Well, you simply have to keep going, just because
there is no other way to get you out.”
What are supposed to be the lessons of age
are so often instead only literalizations
of Samuel Beckett’s wry, bleak visions
of ultimate immobility. This is how it is.
We remain utterly laughable.
We age. We decay. We can’t
go on. We fall, or fall in love.
They are blowing up the great stone Buddhas
of Bamiyan province, a few miles west
of Kabul. Revolutionary Afghanistan
is drowning in self-devouring rancor.
Iconoclasm thrives because stone statuary
is decidedly the oldest surviving manifestation
of the birth of human imagination, twenty or so
thousand years ago. The Ice Age sculptors
already scratched marks on stone, but not just
any rock. What they hacked and scratched fit the hand
as snugly as any useful object ever did,
and the so-called Venus of Dolni Vestonice
was formed in fired clay as a finely proportioned
object that also begged to be cradled or clutched
as though our earliest ancestors already lived
in symbols cast far beyond the merely functional.
All men and women are born servants of the True Way,
and only later turn to their own perverse opinions.
The human heart, John Calvin said, is a factory of idols,
a psychological observation perhaps more piercing
than the anti-aesthetic of other cultures of the Word.
In general, the pain and pathetic repetition
of desire and destruction continue.
Babies die of starvation, small children die of cold
on the endless road of flight to Herat. Philippe
de Montebello of the Metropolitan Museum
begs for the preservation of the Bamiyan Buddhas.
It is spring, sort of, and all types and conditions
are entrapped in their usual, predictable fashion.
The petals fly in the wind like ridiculous symbols
left over from a previous century of emotional excess.
John Fahey is newly dead, who recorded American roots
decades before the Coen Brothers reinvented
the music of the nineteen-thirties. Years ago in California,
in love with young women three thousand miles away,
I listened to Fahey’s re-creations of old blues classics
and longed for a South that I knew was already lost;
not the Lost Cause, but the fragile chords of family memory
kept by some widowed aunt in Tennessee or Miami.
The downfall of the Adelphi rolling grist mill, or
the transfiguration of Blind Joe Death; Fahey’s
personal mythological transmutations
made sense of a South that had long since lost itself
in downscale auto racing and crappy imitations
of Nashville’s overpriced Grand Old Opry.
A tale from Townes Van Zandt, also gone early:
“The other day I heard my aunt singing ‘The Rivers
of Texas.’ Figuring
that here was a chance to learn the truth at last
about the methods of Folk Transmission,
I asked her, did she remember where she learned that.
She said, ‘Well, Townes, I heard Uncle George sing it.’
So I asked Uncle George, and he learned it from Cousin
Scott, and Cousin Scott learned it from his brother Jim,
and his brother Jim learned it from me.”
This is how, after enough passage of time,
shrines are born, and legends of sainthood.
The Japanese garden at Golden Gate and the
one at Atlanta’s botanical garden
are both echoes of an absent original,
like faint, flickering, barely cast shadows
that may for that reason be better teachers of
an elusive, yet ineluctable realization :
life is literally fleeting, and in some vague way
stone and water and twisted evergreens
reflect its essence. Whether we go out
through the bamboo gate or the moon gate’s exit
all is tangled in desire, even if only “le
dur desir de durer.”
“Non omnis moriar;” but, regrettably, survival
exists only as random tags and scraps
written once by…God alone knows who,
after a sufficient number of generations.
I shall not wholly die? I shall not wholly live, either.
The Buddhas of Bamiyan, like the Central Asian frescoes
destroyed in the bombing of Berlin’s museums, exemplify
their master’s teaching: even monuments of stone
are subject to transience, suffering, and brutal death.
The iron laws of history are as hard on poems
as they are on statues and paintings. Nothing endures.
How often love, as Schopenhauer pessimistically noted
decades before Charles Darwin, has rested on such accidents
as the fortunate arrangement of subcutaneous fat.
Women have been drawn more to well-defined muscles.
The shape of Cleopatra’s nose, Blaise Pascal observed,
was probably responsible for the deaths of entire armies.
The later Romans, curiously,
didn't think this sort of lunacy could happen.
When Saint Augustine, creator
of the new, grim cultural paradigm,
cited an old-fart elderly landowner
who ran away with a slave girl,
they scoffed and called him
“novus medicus,”
an upstart theologian contradicting
the considered opinions of the era's
most distinguished physicians.
The fallen petals of the Japanese magnolia
are squashed to slippery mush on the concrete sidewalk.
It is the old battle between Winter and Spring,
and this year, winter is winning most of the rounds.
The spring wind screams like the shouts of deluded souls
who think that anything can be gained or lost for good
in the endless ocean or garden of becoming,
whichever metaphor suits your illusion.
Midnight in the garden of good and evil,
or, more likely, twilight in the ill-kept yard of neither.
February 26-March 12, 2001
“How it is” is the title of a Samuel Beckett novel, and “I can’t go on, I’ll go on” is a line from another Beckett text. The story of the destruction of the world’s largest statues, the Buddhas of Bamiyan, is available from many sources, as is the plea for their preservation by the director of the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The Venus of Dolni Vestonice was briefly on display in Atlanta, where a Czech curator hauled the two pieces of the statuette out of a padded box to show me how it was apparently designed to explode in the kiln (how they know this, given the ways of ceramics and ceramists to this day, is beyond me). The line about servants of the True Way is a universalization of the Muslim belief that all babies are born Muslim and only later educated into religious errors. Where John Calvin said that the human heart is a factory of idols, I cannot say, though the theologian Gabriel Vahanian may have provided a footnote in the book in which I read it, either The Death of God or Wait Without Idols. The Coen Brothers re-invigorated “old-timey music” in the film O Brother, Where Art Thou? “The Anti-Aesthetic” was the title of a mid-80s Hal Foster anthology published in Britain as Postmodern Culture. “The Downfall of the Adelphi Grist Rolling Mill” and “The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death” are, of course, titles of John Fahey compositions. The Townes Van Zandt story may be recorded on the two-LP set of live performances, but I heard it first from the man himself. The moon gate and bamboo gate sound tremendously symbolic, but in fact are only the two alternate gates of the Japanese garden in the Atlanta Botanical Garden, with, as far as I have been able to learn, no symbolic meaning. “All is tangled in desire”: the Bhagavad Gita. The passage is cited in longer form in “the ego and the body in northern Georgia.” “le dur desir de durer,” “the hard desire to last,” is the title of a book of poems by Paul Eluard. Horace’s “non omnis moriar,” “I shall not wholly die,” was once learned by every schoolboy (not necessarily every schoolchild) in the English-speaking world. The Buddhist frescoes from western China were destroyed by aerial bombardment in Berlin’s New Museum because they had been cemented into the wall, considered immovable in spite of having once been sawed out of the solid rock on which they were painted; cf. Hopkirk, Foreign Devils on the Silk Road. I don’t know where Schopenhauer made his remark because I encountered reliable versions of it in a New York Times Magazine story designed to depress romantics on Valentine’s Day. Blaise Pascal made his wisecrack in the Pensées. The original, which I have expanded poetically, reads, “Le nez de Cléopâtre, s'il eût été plus court, toute la face de la terre aurait changé.” The Saint Augustine story is presumably told by Peter Brown in The Body and Society, since the book covers the same territory as the lecture in which I heard it. The Battle Between Winter and Spring can be found in any number of books on ritual performances and folklore. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is, of course, the title of John Berendt’s bestselling book on Savannah, which should not be taken to have anything to do with this poem. As with many another reference, it is the resonance of the words, not the contents of the book, that brought the phrase to mind.
Sleepwalking to Kandahar: An Elegy in Time of War for the Remembering of Howard Finster
Humphrey Bogart: Sam, it’s December 1941 in Casablanca. What time is it
in New York?
Dooley Wilson: Uhh…My watch done stopped.
Bogart: I bet they’re asleep in New York.I bet
they're asleep all over America.
—dialogue from Casablanca (1943)
We are all asleep in the outward man.
—Jakob Boehme, German mystical writer
during the Thirty Years’ War
Man is asleep. Must he die before he wakes up?
—the Prophet Muhammad (oral tradition)
i. 2001
First sharp rain of the cold fall; more than enough to flatten
the tiny, defiant Stars and Stripes on Johnson Road
that droop and more or less forlornly wrap
tight round their cheap sticks. This is all going to last a lot longer
than most folks ever would have figured.
Americans don’t like interminable epics. We like quick sequels
or else fresh edits: Apocalypse Now Returns
or Gulf War 2, featuring previously unreleased
scenes greatly improved in the director’s cut.
Colin Powell flies off to Central Asian conferences
in a reprise of his most popular starring role.
The flags flutter gallantly as the rain subsides
and wind gusts suggest brutal shifts in the seasonal
average daytime temperature.
Autumn asters surround the box where the morning paper
announces the death of Howard Finster. Nation shall rise against nation,
Howard wrote on his wooden angels last winter. These are the final days.
“The Last Days of Mankind” was Karl Kraus’ sarcastic title
for his bitter satire of patriotism, profiteering, and self-delusion
in Vienna in the First World War. Twenty years or so later
he wrote, wearily, “I can’t think of anything at all to say
about Adolf Hitler.” The second act
is not, as Marx implied, always farce. Sometimes
the first act was just the set-up for the tragic finale.
Bombs fall on Afghanistan. The supermarket
bags groceries in plastic bearing the United States flag
and the noisy slogan “Proud to be American!”
We are all asleep in the outward man. Cold air
comes as a surprise each winter in these warm latitudes.
Howard made cutouts of the ant and the grasshopper
which were happily collected by fledgling entrepreneurs
secure in a slew of dot-com stock options.
Special op boys from Kansas or Fort Benning, Georgia
comb the caves of the north in quest of Al-Qaida.
Central Asia was once the place where yesterday’s occultists
parked their favorite fantasy Masters of Wisdom.
Monasteries somewhere in the middle of Nuristan province
were almost as good as Shangri-La or forbidden Lhasa.
Now exile Tibet has a text and textile outlet
on a small cul-de-sac on Atlanta’s northside,
and Afghanistan, also sold locally, is an easy first runner-up
for the title of Most Thoroughly Demolished Asian Culture,
after Cambodia managed at last to give up the top spot.
Afghanistan and Appalachia:
Mountain cultures enjoy hard simplicities
like hunting rifles and folk religion.
They also, in the right extraordinary circumstances
spawn not prophets, but meetings with remarkable men
who dream dreams, as in the Book of Joel, and see visions.
I, who grew up in a place about ten feet above sea level,
took a much longer route to the foothills of Mount Analogue.
The post office box reveals that our national colors
are very popular for autumn fashion. Sale catalogues
scramble to update their holiday covers. Cocooning
and cozy Americana are in vogue. When we hunker down
we tend to do it in unison, celebrating the home front virtues
while the air war creeps through Herat and Kandahar,
hitting the same Red Cross storehouse twice despite best intentions
because someone simply forgot to take it off the target list.
We mean well. Afghan opposition soldiers
note that this measured response looks really wimpy.
The Russians, they say, plastered everything in sight.
These are, as Howard wrote, the beginning of sorrows.
Someday all this will end, just because it always does.
Changes, as Heraclitus noted some little while ago,
happen whether or not you want or expect them.
Nothing will ever be the same again,
but only—and not simply—because it never was.
The history of terror or the terror of history; in Santa Barbara,
while bomb-laden bicyclists destroyed Saigon cafes, we read Eliade
on the fate of small, poor nations, and how it was that history
was a thing that was feared by peasant populations
located on major rivers or mountain passes.
We didn’t understand a word of it;
some wanted power to the people, and
all we are saying is
give peace a chance.
When 13 year old Jawad awoke as the only
surviving member of his Afghan peasant family,
Muhammad Razi lied compassionately, “All is well.
You were walking in your sleep,
and you fell down the well next to your house,
and I rescued you.” The last few words were true.
Regrettably, real life all too frequently imitates
the stereotyped tragedies of the supermarket tabloids.
On the side of farce, a reported prototype of urban legend
woke up at ten on a September eleventh workday,
long blocks away from his job at the World Trade Center,
and thought, for a while, that he was in serious trouble.
The terror of history or the history of terror.
As Howard most likely quoted on some vision of other worlds,
Beloved, it is high time to awaken out of sleep.
For now is our salvation nearer than we believed?
Howard believed it. We who, as they say, are left behind
stretch to read the signs of things to come
less confident in our gifts of interpretation.
To be continued.
The epigraphs are all quoted from memory, and I have no guaranteed source for the sentence from Boehme, which was used as an epigraph by Robert Bly in Silence in the Snowy Fields, his first book and certainly one of his best. The identification of Boehme with the Thirty Years War, though factual, derives from a short poem by Kenneth Rexroth. The hadith is often cited by Sufis and occultists but I have never troubled to find out if it actually exists. “always farce”: The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte again; “Hegel says somewhere that all great events and personalities in world history reappear in one fashion or another. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” Since this poem is being written year by year (to be continued, as the published version of this was, for a while), I had no idea that there really would be a Gulf War 2, though there was reason to believe it would happen. Nuristan: See Peter Brook’s version of Meetings with Remarkable Men and O. M. Burke’s Among the Dervishes, re a region that obviously can hold more than secret monasteries. The Tibetan text and textile outlet subsequently moved elsewhere. “The terror of history” is Eliade’s best-known phrase from Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return. The stories reported as fact in the New York Times may, of course, have been fabricated. The lines from St. Paul about waking out of sleep are quoted from memory and are not quite accurate.
These poems are excerpted from the copyrighted volume Unfinished Ventures: Selected Poems 1977-2005 and the standard courtesies of copyright are requested, even though in the age of digital reproduction such niceties have become increasingly fluid and open to fruitless query.
