FIRSTNOTES

1

Utterly ...

It's been mutual. This book has possessed me and I've possessed it. A wrestling match. An idee fixe: l'idee maitresse. This experience is not all that uncommon. All writers it seems are possessed by something inside that keeps gnawing for a way to get outside. Particularly those who are wrestling with the thigh of the really "real" — hoping to get a "leg-up," as they say, on some abiding truth that it might walk beside us: a true, and a therefore likely ultimate, companion on our life's journey. I'm acutely aware that my subject is fundamental to the nature of life itself and our "species." Experiences of the everyday drive home this reality every day. How deal with it? What gets outside, for writers usually, is a book. Definition of "a book": document of an inner gnawing on the loose that was finally corralled. Not necessarily tamed, I must add. Same goes for a poem, a painting, a performance, a sculpture, a song, symphony, invention, movie, play, a theory, a techie idea — or whatever has creatively gnawed its way out to take its place in the world. It seems Goethe never stopped working on Faust, nor Michelangelo on his Pietas(non finito). As humans we are possessed by such things and have to make them perform somehow. (See Origins of an Opus in Altarpieces for more insight to the formation of this Trilogy.)

From the Shakespeares to us normals — it happens: a "poiesis" event to "make" something "imagined" or "felt" or howsoever ephipantic — be told as it truly is. Call this an "organic sensibility" at work: l'coeur d'affaire. Wordsworth describes the poetic process/possession as follows: "For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings but though this be true, poems to which any value can be attached, were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man (today he'd say "person"), who, being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also thought long and deeply." From his "being possessed," he penned the phrase "primal sympathy": because overcoming death, the past, and creating sympathetically from them are "primal" to life. While I can't assess my own "more," I can attest to a long and deep possession by this "sympathy," which I pluralize to "sympathies."

Yes, possessed!(Yes, it's probably some form of madness to knowingly write a book — A Trilogy! — that might never "really" be read. Done it again.) However possessed, I have not had any of these pages revealed in a Coleridge-style dream, or nuanced by visitations from Rilkean angels or revelations Biblical; nor have I experienced being a "secretary" as Blake, or Milton, or had a Jungian Philemon dictate my writings, or had full symphonies given to the mind as Mozart; nor has Virgil's Cumaean Sibyl paid a visit, or Ouiji board channeling spirits, nor have I had the assit of a channeling spouse of Yeatsian lore to bring me worlds beyond a normal day; and no mescalin or LSD adventures have gripped me, nor has Hugo's "turning-tapping tables" with three-taps a second performed in the living room of my most "at home" mind. I've yet to experience any form of automatic writing. Must be thrilling. I've no Ariel. No magic wand. Just the feeling to say what I feel the need to say as best I can say it.

Ah! — but I digress. Still, something (that gnawing need to get a two-hand grip on life's essential handle) has been pushing me to these, as you will soon see, extremes. I have wrestled with them to "really-feel" if they were "really real." (The Aoide Protocol — which I hope to clarify — has been, how shall I say it? — a revelatory guide.) Regardless of my shakiness drawing these "sympathies" out into the fresh air, they have proved to possess authentic character. They breathe real life. Along the way, somewhat like a Shelley or a Wordsworth, I've been overcome with the need to preface this book(fore and aft) with some of its infrastructure; to expose some of the bridgework and guy-wires of connectivity. Ah! Perhaps a slight touch of furor poeticus is required to process what Wordsworth referred to as "the primary laws of our nature," or to presume to be (somewhat) what Shelley called, with "social sympathies" in mind, a "Messenger of Sympathy."

With all this in my rear-view mirror, I feel more like a "driven" reporter on assignment. Some of the hairs in my "whitehead" are there because of past wrestles with poetic-philosophic Whiteheads. So, I mention at the outset that the following word-concepts of Whitehead are incorporated into my themes of "sympathies," "en-choiring," "protocol," and "belonging": prehension, concrescence, organism, becoming, presentational immediacy, aesthetic harmony, subjective harmony, nexus, creativity, process, conformity-sympathy, etc. And, while all this "process" is at work, (and I advance no pretence of Whitehead scholarship), I emphasize that the "core" dynamic is "performance": of which "creativity" is a component. Where philosophers, as scientists, must be cogent, poets(artists) must, sweating with authenticity, be boldly intuitive and sympathetic. While this does not guarantee these three (philosophers-scientists-poets) will balance, it is perhaps possible that enough sparks from their nub-rubbing sympathies will hold in the dark as we find our way. Fortunately, the accompaniment of music and the incantations of rhyme lend their harmonies to "en-choir" what's so difficult to say. And so, sometimes, here and there, an elegance forms like stones pathing the night streams as notes of a melody: giving to our passage the play of life's primal chords in all our singing. So it is, I will do my "twang" on all the pluckables(those sympathies) strung on my lute, lyre, and lyric propensities.

I recall Longfellow's caution: "The ass that thinks himself a stag discovers — His error when he comes to the ditch." Ah, there will be leapings. Stags must be careful, too, not forgeting the ever-growing " rack" they carry. What's ahead, reader, is a great rack of "sympathies." Since we all have a degree of assdom — an authentic-alert humility must prevail. In all this, Longfellow gives more guidance: " 'Tis an old ox that draws the straightest furrow." Believe me, I'm pulling this plow(in the mind's of some) as an old ox. At the same time, I'm leaping ditches with an ever-growing rack. Fortunately, I'm deeply acquainted with the give and take of the Earth; as one having crossed many streams and ditches. The poet! That great leaper of furrows bearing and barren, reaping abundances grounded in the abyss: leapings with lofty racks like deep rootings pulled from earth searching for new air and new leapings across ditch & furrow. Below is as portrait of such a Poet. Behold The Rack!

This Poet's picture, with the help of this beautifully racked Caribou(both sexes have antlers), needs explanation. The "rack" grows heavier and heavier from expanded consciousness and memory. Therefore, the poet's ditch leaping requires ever-greater feats of balance and feel for the earth in one's own ditch of time. The circle above is an inverted AWEN symbol discussed at the end of the book. Suffice to indicate here, that I prefer the rays of — BARD-DRUID-VATES — coming up and out from the creature, rather than from some realm above, so the dots line-up with the sensing-vocal features. (The middle dot's the ever-present Druid.) All poets must leap with a rack. This picture is the best, because the "rack" has two hand-finger "graspings" of the very air for essences unseen, but showing an uncanny capability to the task. They have an obvious connect with the hands and fingers on the cover and the potter's hands at the end of this book: Botticelli to the Beatles I Wanna Hold Your Hand. The touch of the human hand, the grasp of fingers, and the hug of arms, like a "rack," are perhaps the most poignant expressions of sympathy towards any person, dog, flower, rock, tree, or the air. This portrait leaps from the wild magic of life. Yeats had much to say about magic since, like poetry, it was much involved with the evocation of spirits and creating visions of the unknown: dancing a song in the air while leaping ditches. He spoke of three doctrines behind magical thinking since the dawn of time: " (1) That the borders of our mind are ever shifting, and that many minds can flow into one another, as it were, and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy. (2) That the borders of our memories are as shifting, and that our memories are a part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself. (3) That this great mind and great memory can be evoked by symbols." (From his essay Magic.) The Aoide Protocol sings from such chords: this poet symbol evokes eventums of such en-choiring of sympathies. I recall Robert Bly's book Leaping Poetry (Beacon Press, 1975). It leaps from deep-down to way-out forming fast associations. But the "rack" is hard to see. Wallace Stevens in Necessary Angel went all-over poetry as "resemblance" as a true "rack" poet. But his leap still hangs in the air. The Tempest's Prospero wailed all will fade and "leave not a rack behind." Such a rack's a "wisp of smoke," a play on "shipwreck." Some leapings end so. But "poetries" keep happening as ditches widen and racks increase. Heads must be held high to leap ditches singing; such racks deep-shaking with the Earth on impact. Oh, how revelation does not fall from above, but brursts forth like evolution and song from life itself. Oh, how sympathies "rack" our leaping brains to not just "bray" at the ditches.

A POET PERHAPS

"Madness in great ones must not unwatched go." Shakespeare. — "The faith of the Ideal, the inspiration, That made the canons of the church of Seville Say, 'Let us build, so that all men hereafter Will say that we were madmen.'" Michael-Angelo, by Longfellow — "He who without the Muses' madness in his soul comes knocking at the door of poesy and thinks that art will make him anything fit to be called a poet, finds that the poetry which he indites in his sober senses is beaten hollow by the poetry of madmen ." Plato. — O Furor Poeticus!

O Would that I were mad
Possessed and obsessed
With voices yelling
To make them sing.
Would that I were mad,
So angels lift me
Off the hide of night,
Rein me towards the sun.
Would that I were mad,
Wrote as poet tranced:
Genius strummed on lines
That lyre the silence.
Would that I were mad:
Possessed & Obsessed.

Perhaps I'm too sane:
Laundry done, dog walked,
Bills paid, and grass cut.
How rouse the poet,
Coughing near eighty
Midst much doctoring?
Can Resolve ... sudden
Gather its forces
While insanity
Still wars to break-down
Poetry's crutches;
Songs shattered like glass?
Would that I were mad:
Possessed & Obsessed.

Such shuffle barefoot
Through the shattter-cut:
Healing from the wounds
New songs needing sung,
Break-downs to break-throughs:
Making mosaics,
Veining the stained glass
To pulse new temples.
Yes, I would do that:
Sad-Glad-Mad ... and Blessed
To shake foundations.
A poet perhaps.
O Would That I Were Mad:
Possessed & Obsessed.

In Phaedrus, Plato juxtaposed the kinship of mantike(prophet-genius) with manike(madman). Seems the poet is always an "in the middle" variable; attempting an even-keel with both wings flapping their flutterance. Aristotle in his Poetics mused: "Hence the art of poetry requires rather a certain natural plasticity in the poet, that a touch of madness".... just needs to "have a command of metaphor." That "perhaps" is encouraging. Alas, life is crazy, so I guess the "poets," who think they manifest some grasp of the madness(and therefore compose it for consumption), must be mad, too: even madder should they think themselves "prophetic," but not so mad, perhaps, should history judge them "genius" for being profoundly correct. "Madness" itself is, perhaps, some kind of metaphor. Well, I'm an exemplum one needn't be a "genius" to form authentic utterance from such plasticity. Sympathetic felt-listening to what's been said, being said, and needs to be said (sung), could actvate procilities to prophesy, and even poesy, in anyone, as, indeed, some moreso than others. My sayings seem to come from such felt-listenings. (I could perhaps enter some realm of being "mad" should I be ignored. My play's curtain rises higher; still seeking an audience. Hello!! Ah! That such madness performs well from the proscenium of perhaps.) — So, it's easy to call oneself a "poet" today, with or without a degree or recognition as such. But here's the hard part. Poets, as architects of structures of language, engage in a craft of worded lines that need to fit so they lean-most-to-true, whereby, whatever the true is, is itself revealed (aligned) in the lean of the lines as they, significantly, lean true to one another. Granted, this "Plumb-line" judgment is often difficult to assess; generally, when there is a noticeable lean-out-of-true the significance of the structure composes to a silence of no further assessment, except to, perhaps, heed the call to fix it. No writer, poet, artist, thinker wants to be out of such alignment and assessment. The rack must balance. The leans to center, however, are rarely the "status quo-already centered." Centers keep shifting somewhat like the sun's eleven year cycle of over-turning-reversing its structures of polarity. Tends to disturb things a bit. The adjusts required are sometimes maddening(as in maddenly innovative-imaginative). Lean-to-real poetry is a significant happening of re-alignment (of the "Muses' madness) in the maddening shakiness of the lines. As the Earth quakes, the exegesis of existence has its essential and existential tremors. Poetry heeds the calling to shake things-up to a steady-focus, by its centering performance, in the shaking. Such madness must not unwatched go, as lean-to-trues must be more than lean-tos. Sympathies will lean on a lot of lean-to-truers to sturdy its leaning.—That's enough of this footnote to Plato and Aristotle. Leaping ditches while leaning-to-true is a maddening craft indeed. Poetry must "rack" it up. O Furor Poeticus!

This is the middle volume of a trilogy: Altarpieces — Sympathies — Auguries. The first created the "auto-ontic" characterization 'Apo'kstrophes' — connecting the unique individual, me, to the ubiquitous("totally yours") creative "other" in any art form: this is the artist who addresses anything to sound-out, in a revelatory way, what profundities are hidden and silent — and work to give them a voice, a song, a sound, a chorus, a look. So, as an 'Apo'kstrophes', I launch Sympathies, where you will find some new characters — Elysius Wesensshau, a Triune Muse(Aoide-Melete-Mneme) and the Players (Aoidoi-Agonisti-Actori) — and a slightly different twist to some old problems — such as: why life is as it is, what could and should possibly re-do prayer as traditionally conceived; and what primal power (the en-choiring) choruses humanity to its best performance. And these characters of old — The Soul and the Prophet — will engage these issues, as if on a Yin/Yang soccer field, with the New Earth Choir at mid-field singing the thrills of contest and resolution. When I look at such issues, I try to let fly what is naturally there — like the wetness of water ... its sound, and look. So, expect, too, some testy dialogue as the sea crashes fresh against the shoreline's old rocky cliff. Ah, to feel the real spray, hear the real sound from such real encounters. We don't want our boldness to lose its splash by making what philosophers call a "category mistake": or what some critics might think of as slippery objects unsure of their correlatives. I'll try to keep these sympathies a-float as all these players keep the ball in play.