ABOVE:
This essay is a reflection, refracted. It notes the poetic/philosophical influences flowing around Bob Grumman’s life and emanating from karl's response to his death. Like many of the “experimental” poets celebrated in Synapse, Bob struggled for recognition in his lifetime — and in fact the very basis of his poetic work was often challenged. You might say that his poetic licence was revoked by the official language police. And yet he continued unabated, even revelling in his "Outsider-dom". A blessing, because his was an exemplary and generous practice, sharing his vision, encouraging many others.
The essay (among the longest we've published in Synapse) then travels on, far beyond Bob the individual who karl knew well, into a wider and deeper oceanic terrain of confluence and influence in visual poetry. It is also a history of many repressions, many outsider-ings, many licenses revoked; the human will to erase is perhaps as strong as the will to create.
The skimming stone of this piece is sent out across those wide waters with love, to honour his memory.
Art is not to throw light but to be light.
Kenneth Patchen
PART 1
Opening the Conversation
Early 2023, two friends exchanged views with me regarding poetics and visual poetics. Joel Lipman, like me, shared concerns with the definition of poem and the eclipse of poets by artists in the modernism era.(1) Kaz Maślanka lamented the lack of a meaningful body of critical literature on visual poetics.(2) These concerns were also those of Bob Grumman, and while Kaz and I disagreed with Bob’s neologisms, most of which he never nailed in place — even their spelling jumped around — we shared more than we disputed.
My own macro interests encompass the overt or suggested philosophic inclinations of visual and lexical poetry, the individuals and groups involved across millennia, and uncovering those more recently missing-in-action in the academic/official visual poetry history narrative. Within this frame is a moral project, a commitment to Beauty-reached-through-vision, in service of humankind, a project Bob shared, despite our divergences. Bob was like many of us try to be, an egalitarian writer, accepting individuals regardless of philosophical leanings, status, or rigid stance, as long as the poems that issued were of importance.
While I was writing my overview A History of Visual Text Art in 2015, Bob sadly passed.(3) Or perhaps better stated, Bob, a huge fan and promoter of e. e. cummings, left the Enormous Room. And yet there were still things to be said.
Visual poetry for him, as with most, begins circa 1914 with Apollinaire overlooking 1903 through 1913 as its momentum grew on page and word painting on canvas each month and year into 1914. Missing from most commentaries are early visual poetry (1903?) by Henri-Marin Barzun, word painting beginning in 1906 by Hilma Aft Klimt, and the vast body of visual poetry and word paintings by Russian avant-garde and the Ukrainian, Kazimir Malevich. Overlooked too are the first wordless word paintings, 1910-191, The Four Evangelists by Natalia Goncharova. Barzun exhibited parts of his opus in Paris in 1913. Apollinaire’s first published visual poem, an ideogramme was published in 1914. Bob accepted the orthodox narrative of modern visual poetry beginning with Stéphane Mallarmé that blithely leap-frogged over Henri-Marin Barzun's works, to arrive at Ground Zero with Guillaume Apollinaire’s calligrammes. After a series of (doubtless vigorous) arguments, maybe he would have accepted my re-visioning of this history. Or maybe not. He was not a fan of the academics controlling the narrative and more often than not argued with them; maybe I too would’ve been overly controlling in my researches and theorizing?
This essay is first of all an unfinished conversation with Bob, but it’s also a broader offer — of considerations for wider discussion among all visual poets centred on Orphism, which I first mentioned in “A Brief History of Visual Poetry,” 2005.(4) Orphism was a term coined by Henri-Martin Barzun, of whom I've written extensively in a previous issue of Synapse. I give credit to Barzun for suggesting Orphism as a grouping of visual and lexical poets and word and iconographic painters. Of import for this grouping is American poetry around the early 1900s, is the influence of Blake and the Romantics, Platonic philosophy opposed to Aristotelian, Transcendentalists, Asian poetries and arts, ideals of the Baha’i faith, Transcendentalism, Theosophy, Hinduism, Jainism, Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and other religions that were subgroups of one of the former. In these waters, later, the Beats, allies and kindred quench their thirst.
My very first move toward framing the visionary intent of visual/lexical poetry was aided by Bob Grumman. Decades ago Bob published on his blog my first such attempt, “blue-violet shift”, now lost in the tumble of time. To sum, using astro-physics’ identifying of star movement towards (light blue shifts) or away from us (light red shifts) led me to two basic types of creative expression, the giving and the taking. The former, rooted in the visionary and other sources to be discussed later, nourish and uplift and hence are blue-violet in shift, moving towards the reader / viewer. Those which take energy, generate internal, non healing negative upsets and are not uplifting, are red shift. But, this Nourishment can be seductive and turn one in a misguided direction. An upset can create a confrontation for self-examination changing one’s direction towards self knowing. You are not what you ingest, but rather what you do not eliminate.
PART 2
Backgrounding
ABOVE
Long Division of Magic, Bob Grumman mathemaku
(Note: running into the fixed righthand margin is intentional -- Bob's nod to Zeno that the problem and answer are infinite)
-- the ground I walk and have lived on since 1983 with my partner Ruth was once owned by Gavin Arthur, the benefactor and member of the Dunites, an important but -- in avant-garde literature, even general literary and art commentary -- an unmentioned, bohemian community. Its previous owner was the neighboring Theosophical Community, The Temple of the People of Halcyon. Before the Spanish conquest and genocide, the land was cared for, lived upon, and softly walked upon by the Chumash.
I had moved to this locale of coastal Central California in 1975 removing myself with Sylvia, my first wife, from urban literary centers via Sacramento (1974-1975) from the city of salt. I did not take a university course in poetry; I self-taught poetics and art following trails pioneered by Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, headed for mythologies and symbology, rather than the post modernism and semiotics of many peers. I dove into poetry by reading and reading and beyond that, seeing.
Where the Dunites lived in the Oceano Dunes is now an area ground to dust by dune buggy enthusiasts. The Dunites named their area Moy Mel, a Gaelic term for Heaven, Meadow of Honey. The Chumash hold the dunes sacred; walking them or sitting with them you can feel the energy, if you're quiet enough, nurtured by their beauty.
The Dunites were a collection of poets, artists, writers, mystics and unemployed dropouts dune based living until the end of WWII.(5) In my way I continue their legacy. The Temple of the People, also known as Halcyon, is adjacent, north of us extending east. Its eucalyptus grove is due east, where at this moment dwindling numbers of monarch butterflies mate for their next generation’s migration...
I was illuminated in a Baptism by Light half way around my first Saturn return. I told no one, being unconsciously intuitively aware I would be poured into a mold. All scripture, school and common sense I had been taught was undermined, shattered in a numinous, timeless, non-spacial/all-spacial moment, shocking me to silence. Jungians call it falling into the Grail Castle. I pulled a blanket of amnesia over it. Years later it forced its way to the surface to face it, find my way back consciously and then my surrender (hence my poem: drop/the/e/of/ego/&/go). After my second lunar return and two months after the surrendering moment to the Goddess, Ruth pointed to the man who quickly became my sadguru.
Krishnaprem is my name, initiate into a many tributary lineage. They include Sivananda, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Sia Baba, Jesus, and Dattatreya. From duality of Bhakti Yoga I earned leaning into Advaita Yoga, the Absolute. Being inside a lineage opens insights into others...
The Scenery
License & the definition of "Poem"
-- roots into its Greek term, “to make,” and thus poem is defined “thing made.” A verb, sucked lifeless by logic, set in a coffin buried in the cemetery of the noun.
Comparative definitions with other languages and spiritual disciplines underscore the point -- I am resoundingly not alone. Reading the Roberts — Graves and Bly — first opened my doors. Graves on Keltic traditions discusses muse, bards and rune, a mystery, a poem or part of a poem, a puzzle, not just a written or carved character. These are lineage bards; bards of the shaman bloodlines of word bringer, sign singer, healer, ear whisperer into ear of the ruler. Bly nods to the Spanish duende, a quality of inspiration and passion derived from the word spirit, an apparition.
Spanish is forty percent Arabic; the Arabic root ties together poem and hair. For Arab speakers, a true poem raises hair on the back of the neck. Being hair-like, poem is unable to draw substance from or, in reverse, lacks strength to arrow point to higher / inner realms of light, the light we truly are.
For the Aztecs the closest translation seems to be “flowers and songs.” As for the Chinese, Bill Porter, aka Red Pine, quotes Zheng: “In the heart, it’s what a person holds dear. Expressed in language, it’s poetry.”
In Chinese, mind and heart have the same ideogram, contrary to Eurocentric hard edge divisions of mind from heart, heart from mind. In the history of Eurocentric thought, Athenian Centric philosophy seems to have given birth to the cult of reason dominated by a heartless, feelingless form of reason, logic, not an awakened awareness with all senses and mind integrated. There the mind became the center of thinking, the heart the center of feeling. Feeling is exiled from this cult as we know it today despite philosophy’s definition, “lover of wisdom” (the Goddess Sophia). Hence, lack of the awareness with which to wrestle with and experientially unravel the aphorism on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, Know Thy Self.
The descriptives, Occidental and Oriental, are out-moded today: these words carry the danger of colonizers' terms, and add to that the dangers of other complex misrepresentation. Occidental is a reference to the setting of the sun, movement into darkness. It also represents the material plane associated with the term geography and its 8 horizontal directions and the 2 verticals, up and down. Oriental has two meanings. Sun dawning light, the first. The second, being oriented in stillness found in many spiritual lineages; also oriented to the light of Knowing Thy Self taught by the bringer of light from the land of the midnight sun, their Pole. The light in darkness also linked to the pole star. Another seeing is the former as the horizontal realm of basic sensory intake; the latter the vertical ascent to the higher that is ultimately within. At this moment of global warming it seems more likely than not the inevitable sunset is close at hand unless we reorient. Poetry not thus "oriented" adds momentum, over the cliff into darkness.
Global spiritual traditions offer richly vibrant transcendent poetry overlooked in the West. These poets offer examples of a poet’s way, a life sought and lived in discipline, devotion, transcendence, and community service. Islam’s Sufis, South Asian dualist Bhakti and non dualist Advaita yogis, Chinese Taoists poets and poets of Ch’an, Korean Son, and Japanese Zen. Additional direction might be sought among global First Peoples’ Traditional Ways in which their poetics offer rooted, direct local environmental knowings and ladders to higher consciousness. Comparative study of terms and iconographics, though on the surface differ, generally share experiences of tripartite cosmological division and singular unity in a folding and unfolding narrative of the one and the many. The iconographics root deep into the most ancient rock arts.
For whatever reason(s) these poetics are missing from the Eurocentric definition. Noteworthy among indigenous ways is a knowing of relationship, that all forms and their parts are related. Surviving and recovered iconographics and other symbols through archaeology, such as the Keltic triple swirls, illuminate the tips of a lost knowledge that all is alive and all fluid.
Directly only sometimes and often indirectly these ways influence sectors of American poetry.
With this in mind and heart, I turn to Sri Aurobindo’s The Future Poetry in which widths, depths and heights of Vedanta Rishi poetry he suggest a model form of poem, seer poet mantra. In Sanskrit mandala is a book chapter, not the well known essentially circular symmetrical art and iconographic expressions Carl Jung and followers promote as forms for centering psychological and spiritual energies. The South Asian term for an ideal inner seer visual poem I suggest would be yantra. (10)
Sri Aurobindo, educated in England from the age of 7 through graduation from King’s College, Cambridge, wrote most of his articles and books in English.(11) But his visionary masterpiece and epic, Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol, remains outside the peripheral visional of Eurocentric literary criticism and acceptance. In India Sri Aurobindo’s freedom fight for India is more widely known than his poetics. I submit, Savitri is the English language epic of the twentieth century that is still most alive in this century.
Sri Aurobindo says elsewhere human knowledge results from a groping mind; true knowledge, wisdom and gnosis, arrives seen and heard by the seer poet, the Sanskrit kavi. Described in South Asian traditions, Sanskrit is a language consciously developed so that a word mimics the vibration of its object. Mantras of the Rig Veda are named after the Rishi who first saw-heard the phrase behind which stood its divine representative. Summing up a series of his descriptive views, “let us say, it is a supreme rhythmic language which seizes hold upon all that is finite and brings into each the light and voice of its own infinite.”(12)
Trends
"Arthur Wesley Dow ... taught that art had a potential to capture the spiritual harmony coursing through everything, that art also had a social responsibility for uplifting society ... He was a participating member of gatherings at the influential Baha’i Green Acre, as was Fenollosa, whose Japanese translations through Ezra Pound informed founders of Concrete Poetry. Through this center flowed the ideals of the Baha’i faith, Transcendentalism, Theosophy, Hinduism, Jainism, Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and other religions that were subgroups of one of the former."(13)
(From my article, “cleveland concrete,” in a previous Synapse, on philosophical trends among the avant garde of the early 1900s in the United States.)
Poets, artists, seers and mystics experience the above as the inner highest level of consciousness, ideally bringing forth literature and art. Their philosophy and psychology essentially agree in concept with the global traditionalist three level cosmological division, upper, middle and lower worlds. Kandinsky was a Theosophist. His book, Concerning The Spiritual In Art, was widely read by the avant-garde upon publication 1911, and translated into several languages. Stieglitz published translated excerpts in the Number 39, July 1912 issue of Camera Work.(14) Its basic concept was allowing expression to flow from the intuitive reaching to the higher realms.
On the outskirts of Paris for 18 months, 1906 into 1908, flourished the L'Abbaye de Créteil, an artist and writer community founded in part on the ideals of the American utopian Brook Farm, a Transcendentalist venture.(15) One of L’Abbaye’s co-founders, Henri-Martin Barzun, like many pre WWI poets, writers and artists, was a Platonist influenced by commentaries on the intuitive by Hugh Benson. Barzun evolved into a master visual and sound poet only to be buried in a shroud of forgetfulness in the avant-garde’s unconscious graveyard heavily added to from Dada to the present. I have celebrated and lifted him from this graveyard of the missing in action.(16) Platonic philosophy is openly Orphic and Pythagorean. Many pre WWI European avant garde precipitants were Theosophists or influenced by Theosophy. He turned to Walt Whitman to rid himself of Symbolism and thus was influenced by revelatory American poetics.
One of Barzun’s life-long projects was Orphism, a weaving of all the arts into one grand multifaceted expression. Being a complex project, Barzun enlisted others. His epic visual poem, L’Orhéide, is a visual kinetic work full of, “choruses, dialog, songs and unisons; also soliloquies, fragments of prose, pure sounds and even noises" (from his son, who retyped it).(17) Orphism: a poet weds visual text with other arts.
WWI caused a cultural post traumatic stress syndrome that arguably remains with us today amplified with echoes of further war and terrorism. Symptoms include art movements rejecting anything in the past, generally ignoring the intent of a literary or art work, and accepting materialistic philosophies, some of which embrace nihilism. In the worst cases, a philosophy reduces a literary or art work to a product-object made by an individual subservient to their culture as a laborer. Nowhere in these and related philosophies have I found a call for visionary work to uplift people from the social disorder.
Materialistic proponents are uninterested in a three-layered cosmology of the universe, focusing solely on sensory intake of the middle world, the physical universe , the horizontal. These can be said to be among the logical positivists, cynics, Marxists and Neo-Liberals, with numerous etceteras. Many dismiss, in an absolutist sulk, the Absolute. In the swing and sway of Western trends since WW1, the material plane sometimes seems to be the only focus of critical literature and publishing. The current Trumpian Neo-Liberal dive into eco-cide and fascism is the highpoint and apotheosis of materialism, loathsome and scary -- the devil on the other side of the mirror.
In this country, ambivalent but nonetheless wide acceptance of Marxist critical art and literary writings (especially impacting poetry/visuality) begins with Clement Greenberg’s erasure of the Stieglitz Circle. The erasure was successful to the point that it appears most visual poets here and abroad generally do not know its works, associated poets and artists, and flows of direct and indirect influence. Fortunately, others have resuscitated Stieglitz and his Circle, whose contribution to American modern art and photography as art has a significant place in art and literary history.(18)
Concerning Marxism in the USA: as a former student of economic history (i.e., America’s actual religion, wealth), I acknowledge Marx-Engels exposing dynamics of social and economic injustice. In the mid 1980s however, I dropped Marxist cosmology no longer able to accept its assurances that history’s “evolutionary” trajectory leads to a Workers’ Paradise, or even Playtime. This wider Marxist narrative begins with Hegel’s idealism which in part came from use of a yet to be completed translation of a Persian philosopher. Marxian cosmology is but a rewrite, cribbing off of the Book of Revelations within the context of Darwinism, then misapplied to cultural and material “progress.”
The unquestioned acceptance of the means of production as the solitary or primary evolutionary outline for humankind’s trajectory from hunting and gathering “savages” through early “barbaric” agriculturalists into agricultural “urban civilization” perhaps explains (aside from base-level xenophobia and racism) some of the contempt I later found among local archaeologists for the Chumash First People. This hyper-materialist bent might also explain the papers on the archaeology of the area that rarely mentioned the Chumash. Instead, they named a site or locale not after the Chumash or further north the Salinan, but after a perceived economic tool.
While Bob was not a materialist, he was ready to argue about spiritual matters. He always said we were "closer in thought than I thought". Grumman’s use of numbers was unconcerned with political economy, business, social or spiritual-psychic numerological inclinations, but rather in the service of his metaphor-in-a-poetic, mathemaku. This being a blend of mathematics and haiku, a many-yeared project, new-blended beauties of mathematics/poetic gesture and conceptualism. When he shifted from black-and-white to color his intent and reach became clearer, more compelling, the work of one who sees.(19)
Lost are the poems of Orpheus
In the West, Orpheus is our Greek-Eurocentric archetype of a seer poet. Given the widely accepted surviving stories, how is it Greek definitions of poetry disregard seer poetry and muse-inspiration with its uncontrolled/controlled ecstasies? Platonism is a hybrid dominated by Orphism, Pythagoreanism and the Socratic dialectic. Aristotle claimed Orpheus never existed; his writings on poetry seem to ignore both muse-inspired and seer poetry. He left the Academy disgruntled over its Pythagorean ways to eventually teach Prince Alexander. It seems he encouraged the push into Persia -- his famous student created an empire by way of violence, not a way of life leading to the light we are. Neither did Aristotle follow light, upon returning to Athens he set up his Lyceum dedicated to the Wolf Apollo. Lyceums have been and are preparatory schools for entering where the academy reigns. The avant-garde always forms as opposition to the academy and in time becomes the academy. Aristotle rewrote pre-Socratic philosophers’ histories and meanings to enhance his philosophy: horizontal-planed, filtered through logic of “reality”, excluding the higher and lower realms. Yet, he is considered the authority. Part of the so-called Neoplatonic philosophers’ mission was to correct his insurrection. They failed; the Sufis saw, learned and did not fail. Now the teachings via the Sufis slip back Westward, and in the West philosophy continues along the horizontal, reduced to linguistic gymnastics, not a way of living wisely. Aristotle unleashed the noun vampires on verbs, recreating his heartless categories, the noun-ed graveyard of verbs. While Alexander’s empire broke apart upon his death, Aristotle’s empire of heartless logic eventually prevailed over the global mind, threatening a complete unraveling of what we call the web of life, the great dance of ebb and flow bounded and permeated by the ineffable.
We have Plato’s words coming from Socrates: “I am a lover of learning and the trees and open fields won’t teach me anything only the men of town. But I will follow you throughout the countryside like a cow following waved fruit if you hold a book before me.” Socrates, acknowledged servant of Hyperborean Apollo, distrusted the written word. Known for not moving for 24 hours, he also exemplified a teaching of stillness and teachings sourced from stillness. As a dedicated servant, he could not disown his own oral dialectical work, teaching one how to think reasonably to reaching the point of not knowing to begin anew. His last teaching is the famous bitter drink, a toast to service as a lover of wisdom. While at this moment Platonic philosophy was in an embryonic stage as a way of life working to move in the upper realms with golden forms, “matter” here did not matter much, contrary to the Orphic-Pythagoreans centered in Southern Italy and Sicily. Plato in his last letter does state he has teachings which the written word cannot express. Perhaps a hint of this can be seen earlier in Ion:
"For the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him: when he has not attained to this state, he is powerless and is unable to utter his oracles . . . God takes away the minds of poets, and uses them as his ministers, as he also uses diviners and holy prophets, in order that we who hear them may know them to be speaking not of themselves who utter these priceless words in a state of unconsciousness, but that God himself is the speaker, and that through them he is conversing with us."
Note: he mentions neither muse nor goddess.
A minority autopsy report might conclude that a Zeus-flung lightning bolt killed Orpheus. Blaming the Maenads was easy. The priests’ clever and malicious coverup remains accepted. Long maligned as hysterics, eaters of raw animal meat killed by their hand in frenzies, ecstatics drunk on wine, and the real crime, disrespect of male rule, easy was the frame. The accusation also helped undermine a lingering problem for the patriarchy, woman unbound. Ecstatics in our cultural history remain looked upon with askance, many tied to the stake and burned, including gnostics, seers, writers and poets over the last millennia and a half under Christianity's un-Christ-like dominion.
Zeus has motive. While Orpheus crews with the Argonauts following Chiron’s request to Jason, Prometheus remains chained to a mountain. Daily at Zeus’ bidding an eagle eats his liver; it grows back overnight. Mankind already cooks and works with fire. The actual “crime” of Prometheus is giving humankind the fire of gnosis, enlightenment, providing a human control over the gods, especially if one is a masked titan playing at godhood or a demigod. The same weapon and murderer kills Asclepius; his healing powers deal with more than the physical body being able to bring selected back from the dead. Also, his serpent symboled robe seems iconographically linked to kundalini serpent powers. Contrasting the petulant, ego-inflated Zeus handed down in various myths with the lesser in number Orphic lineage hymns on hand full of highly devotional tributes that offer positive attributes and the golden forms of the gods in devotional homages, suggests levels of higher consciousness. Perhaps there is a Zeus as a controlling power for priests as clergy are generally if not mostly inclined, and another Zeus available in the circles of the Mysteries.
The Greek mysteries are secretive, for initiates only. Little of their texts remain and thus reduce comments on their mysticism to speculation. We know from Plato’s dialogues and others’ evidence the stories were allegories hiding higher teachings. Were these more than psychological tunings? Orphic poems found in graves scribed on golden foil further indicate initiatory poems secretive in use. Suggestive that the Eurocentric mystic split between the literal and the experiential is pre-Christian, Greek in origin. Orpheus obviously controlled forces beyond those of priests. This gift is found in common with Krishna and His flute, and in the narratives of the flute players of the First Peoples of the Americas such as Kokopelli.
Peeling back the backstory of Orpheus one sees beyond an archetypal poet of ritual, magic and spell binding, a transcendent poetics. He reforms rituals long gone wrong in temples, promotes vegetarianism, introduces reincarnation, and more including perhaps a new ritual technology, the Eleusinian Mysteries. One mother, two fathers. Mother, one of the muses. Of one genetic father he is perhaps born in the palace. Of the other father, likely an Apollo lineage spiritual guide, he is reborn after initiation in a cave. Cave dwelling Chiron presents us with sages living in caves, kindred with other traditions around blue jewel Earth. Many are the stories of the hero’s descent into the underworld to meet the goddess who provides a healing, law, revaluation, or teaching. Such passes from the Orphic lineages to the Pythagoreans, with some of these teachings and revaluations shared as poems.
Orpheus, like Prometheus, gives humankind a pathway to transcendence, gnosis, though it is through the descent. If applied with diligence and devotion, one rises above the demigods, the lowest forms of gods in various pantheons, to converse with the actual golden forms of Love and Beauty as hinted in the later surviving poems from the lineage of Orphic poets. If unattached one can then rise higher towards the One. To cover up the murder, these priests, blind to golden forms taught by Orpheus, jealous, and proved impotent, spell the story currently accepted as the majority report. The tail of the tale of Orpheus was stripped of its hair that a bold naked lie be set in motion, handing us a lesser tale of Orpheus told by the priests of Zeus, perhaps a pseudo-Zeus, their masked titan, that women killed him. Most Orpheus hymns praise the various gods and goddesses; one indicates a wariness of the thunder and lightening bolts of an unpredictable Zeus.
Is it an accident of chance that the lyre of Orpheus hangs on the fifth brightest northern hemisphere star, Vega? Traditional ways view the North star as the entry point into the above realms of their three level cosmology. There are suggestions of north alignments hidden in Apollo temples. When Vega appears on the winter solstice at Delphi Hyperborean Apollo leaves for the North. Goddess Rhea turns with her Big and Little Dipper hands the creation; her scepter is the pole, and Pythagoreans call the pole the seal of Rhea. Pythagoreans are informed by Orphism. Pythagoreans know all is alive and pulsing.
Here on the California Central Coast, I have recovered north star alignments of the Chumash; others have also recovered north star alignments. Full knowledge of the high technology of stone astronomy remains hidden but hinted in the alignments dating thousands of years of use and observation. This lore remains active in India in two forms. The short road to enlightenment is the North road; the road to “death” and rebirth is the long road to the South. To this day following the ancient Vedic texts, the south gate of a temple is placed such that a person facing north sees the North star atop the highest spire. Here, Chumash sites date back 10,000 years, older sites are ocean drowned. I was told of a sacred site now underwater, meaning the teller and her family held and passed it generation to generation for perhaps 10,000 years.
The polar star is neither stationary nor singular. There are four major pole stars on the polar ecliptic that appear to be markers, each announcing a new yuga. When Vega was the North star, Rama was the avatar ushering in the coming yuga through his teachings by example. Vega was named after Hanuman, Abhijit, the one who cannot be defeated. Alpha Draco, Dhruva, went exact due north 0 as a spike or pole in 3117 BCE, when Krishna left his body in the yoga corpse position, head, like Buddha about 1600 years later, pointing north. Dhruva’s story is one of great devotion leading to enlightenment. The Mayan Calendar begins three years later, 3114 BCE.
Perhaps the most famous yantra, the swastika, the symbol of good fortune, is the big dipper in the four cardinal positions pointing inward to the pole star once every 25,920 years. This span is know as the Grand Year usually measured not along the polar ecliptic but the equatorial ecliptic divided by 12 constellations or zodiac houses. When Polaris is exactly positioned at 0, the northern hemisphere stars rotate this perfect stellar yantra. Each star of the Big Dipper, Saptarshi, is named after one of the seven major veda rishis. The big dipper points to the current North star, Polaris, due to spike 0 degrees in a few decades ushering in the golden age. Momentum of the dark age continues darkness for a couple more thousand years.
Reading between and behind narrative lines provides hints of the Eurocentric tilt against the mystical / spiritual / transcendent that thus favors the cooked flavors of the literal in religious text in this yuga of the iron age, the darkest, least conscious of the yugas. Time is not a straight line as taken from Zoroaster, but circular and spiraling. Thousands of years ago e is replaced by i transforming herstory to history. Archaeological and symbolic artifacts uncovered by Marija Gimbutus illuminate physical proof of the long successful erasure of herstory with new evidence continuously supporting her work.(20) Others remove coats of ink on mythological and religious stories or dive into detective projects; the sum adds up to the undeniable premeditated erasure of herstory especially when it does not fit a contemporary materialistic rationalist evolutionary project. Christian conquest of Europe continues this subduction by subjugation. Then outward goes the erasure with Eurocentric global conquest. The e of earth-centered community relationship with all forms and beings replaced by an ego inflated i, the dot of which, mind separated from heart, our planet now falls through a vanishing point caused by rationalism without wisdom. First Peoples called the European crazy for shutting emotionality out of their thinking. Europeans of course believe this is nonsense; we are clever mental acrobats with no heart, teetering on the edge of the abyss.
Who killed Cock Robin? Who neuters the Greek definition of poetry? Given the influence of Orpheus, Aristotle is first on my suspect list. The lack of a full-bodied biography of Orpheus, a story that ends with a head without a body, is not simply to be blamed on Old Man Time devouring the texts -- teeth of elements, jaws of weather. One can only speculate. I add to my suspect list the pre-Christian patriarchal Greek followers of Aristotle who were opposed to notions other than the five sense intake filtered through the narrow funnel of rational logic. Plato without doubt, if read closely in dialogues logicians want to ignore or explain away as magical thinking, is a traveler in the higher realms. These are his experiential accounts of Orphism and Pythagorean-ism, and, one must assume, earlier experiences with his master, Socrates, servant of Hyperborean Apollo.
A paper or book trail probably existed to follow the dismantling of Orpheus’ story. Then one uncovers historical facts of this loss undeniably and directly attributed to the first Christian Inquisition, destruction of the Hellenic culture of the Roman Empire. Black robed Christian priests excite and head mobs burning uncountable private libraries and hammering pagan(21) temples to rubble. The so-called Neoplatonists focused on Plato’s ‘mystical’ writings while adding and embracing kindred teachings from Egypt and Asia. Also in Egypt were Pythagorean teachings, some from Sicily and southern Italy, embedding into alchemy. These with teachings of Manichaeism in turn bled into the Gnostics soon bloodied by the Church into submission or death. Nevertheless, they survived resurrecting in Sunni and Shī’ite Sufism alive to this moment influencing, among other arts, Sufi poetry and Islamic word painting informed by their Science of Letters.
Lost indeed are the poems of Orpheus, dropped deep under the surface of time. What exists attributed to his name is only available filtered through word-of-mouth heritage and translation, such as Taylor's The Hymns of Orpheus, which are assumed to be the work of a member of the Orpheus lineage.(22) In them, we read hymns to Greek gods and goddesses whose attributes contradict the stories and titanic brutish implications found in collections of surviving myths. These are homages and hymns to golden forms, kin to my mind of South Asian divine forms expressed in bhakti poetry rooted in age old rishi / Vedic poetry. This contrast parallels Old vs. New Testament and in my seeing presents an insight to the Orphean Way of devotion, contrasted with the literalism of the Greek priesthood.
In the accepted story, the body of Orpheus is discarded; only the head remains as an oracle that floats over to Lesbos. Eventually, it is written, Apollo shut him up. This symbolism may be seen as a forecasting of the rise of thought and speech without the heart. When the gods shut up or are shut up and when the logic only mindset rules, the game still is not in our hands but driven by an uninformed unconsciousness in need of reforming. Zeno also warned us.
After smashing the Hellenic culture, the next crime is the Pope sending Roman soldiers to close the hermitages of the Desert Fathers and Mothers. Thus ends what could have become a Christianity informed by enlightened teachers, who were later found among Sufis and whose experiences and teachings informed Islam. Before the Christian Crusades into Western Mediterranean Asia, and the later invasions of the New World, South and East Asia, forgotten among the surviving kin of victims, is that it first spread as violently by sword throughout Europe. What was called pagan was open for the taking when not willingly submitted in surrender to conversion. These peoples were traditional; their ways rooted into a deep past of the high technology of stone. In Norway today the traditional peoples of the Arctic, the Sápmi, continue to be discriminated against, not unlike First Peoples of the States and Canada.
Fertile Fields & the Quest
Christian clergy still insist on the literal meaning of their holy texts, despite their master Jesus clearly teaching with allegory; this leaves Eurocentric culture in want of a mystical revelatory poetry as important, widespread, and diverse as say Sufi Poetry. Reading Quest for the Red Sulphur,(23) the biography of Ibn ‘Arabī’, one discovers the living Sufi master of all Sufis is known as the Pole, but was also known as the Son of Plato. He is considered second only to Ibn al-Fāriḍ among the Arab Sufi poets, a direction changing devotional poet with his collection upsetting Islamic jurists.(24)
Sufi poetics can be seen as a branch of Orphic and Pythagorean influenced Platonic philosophy; some lineages reach back to pre-Socratic Southern philosophy in Italy and Sicily. It also contains streams from the Gnostics and early alchemy going back to Orpheus’ influence. Sufi geography and regional symbols expressing upper realm elements influence schools that range from Central, South Eastern and South Asia, through Western Asia, across North Africa and in Southeastern Europe. Its contemporary painted word artists express a Beauty rarely found among Eurocentric visual poets and word painters. Exceptions are to be counted among the disappeared and overlooked, such as the Transcendalist Art Group(25) in New Mexico and the iconographic First People artists of the Santa Fe Studio Style(26), Abstract Symbolism(27), and other traditions.(28) Contemporary First Peoples’ iconographic painting is generally ignored by mainstream contemporary visual poets. This turn-the-back stance is not new. Overlooking what's in front of them isn't unusual among avant-garde cliques and begins here with the Stiegliz Circle and others who visited the Southwest, with the honorable exception of Marsden Hartley, a defender of the First People of New Mexico.
Materialistic philosophies pressure and expel transcendental and visionary poetics and art. The collective demands of exclusiveness by fundamentalist religious and materialistic persuasions leave little ground for fertile mystical fields. Perhaps younger generations exploring alternative spiritual traditions will open the horizon line to encompass seer vision.
American poets and seekers influenced from William Blake and others of shared spiritual outlook or inclinations look for doorways to higher conscious psychological and spiritual energies, opening Blake’s doors of perception. Essentially, these energies and essences are identical around the world varying only by name depending on tradition. A serious study of these provides an approach, in my opinion, that allows poetry, narratives, and symbols / icons of various Traditional Ways to represent universal humankind high consciousness states of awareness and achievement. Among poets, hundreds can be counted transcendent.(29)
Blake was a friend of, and influenced by, the Platonist Thomas Taylor. Besides Taylor’s writings, the Romantics were influenced by ideas arriving in England through conquests of India and else where including America’s First Peoples. The spirit of the Romantics, Platonic philosophy, Theosophy, an idealism of hope (seen through a soon to be broken rosy glass prism that embraced new scientific breakthroughs and industrial expansion) set in motion the great expectations of the new millennium beginning New Year, 1900.
The well-known body of multi-cultural ideas influencing modern era poets and visual poets nourished those I suggest be considered among Orphism. These include concepts and philosophies flowing from Brook Farm, those taught by Arthur Wesley Dow, translations of South Asian, Chinese and Japanese literature. Though here a contrariness should be noted that Ezra Pound was inclined towards an authoritarian Confucianism while most other translators of Chinese and Japanese literature were drawn to Taoist, Ch’an and Zen poetry. These ideas influenced some of the American avant-garde between the wars, such as Patchen and Reps.
After WWII come the Beat literati to which Patchen was unwillingly attached as its visual poet and leading jazz poet. What seems forgotten is that the widely acknowledged American and international influencer of concrete poetry, e. e. cummings, was once associated with the Stiegliz Circle and later a close friend of Patchen. For whatever reason, Grumman and many visual poets of the States looked to cummings without paying attention to Patchen. Poet William Carlos Williams was also associated with the Circle. Young Allen Ginsberg of soon to be Beat fame visited him for validation. Williams’ In The American Grain is a commentary on and call for the American vision sparked by Stieglitz’s call for an American Vision to unhitch from Europe. Unfortunately, it ignored an actual American expanding vision, the iconographic paintings of the First Peoples and their poetry as I've laid out above. He was not singular in this blind spot. Avant-garde members visiting and living in Taos and Santa Fe for the most part did not see what was being created in front of their eyes; in any case, if they did, they failed to use their influence for this vision to root and spread.
A story of this blind spot is the association of translator, linguist, poet, and writer Jamie de Angulo with the Taos Pueblo people. Angelo was the only individual whom poet Robertson Jeffers, a forewarner to humankind of the coming, self induced environmental catastrophe, allowed uninhibited drop-in rights. Jeffers looked to the Mother, Nature, as guide and muse. Angulo figured majorly in the San Francisco Renaissance.(30)
Angulo was a friend of Taos Pueblo First People, including some of their priests. Prior to this he had lived with the Pit River First Peoples of California for a number of years. His work with them can be seen as insights into first mind. He was also a friend of Carl Jung at whose request Angelo set up a meeting with members of the priesthood. The friendship came about through his ex-wife, Laura De Angelo, with her close working relationship with Jung. Angelo was not permitted to attend. After the meeting the priesthood shunned Angelo; he never returned to Taos and ended his friendship with Jung. Angelo was contemptuous of the writers and artists living in Taos because of their blindness to the peoples of the pueblos. Jung never told him what happened. When visiting India Jung refused to meet enlightened individuals not wanting his scientific method “corrupted.” At this time Jung contended divine forms were archetypes of the unitary divine and thus were more than just psychological energies. These are actual higher, deeper forms dwelling in the higher realms and deep down in the unconscious of every individual. Sri Aurobindo experienced and received direction from divine forms as India’s living rishi. His Savitri sums Vedic teachings and experiences and unites them in a new yoga form.
To super-simplify the post WII American avant-garde for the purposes of this discussion, there's a division in the States between the Beats and the Fluxists beginning in the 1960s and documented in the critical writing appertaining to this moment. The Language poets ally with the Fluxists. The Beats, close neighbors to Beatitude, realign with Blakean ideals; Patchen and Ginsberg pointed also to Blake. While in San Francisco some of the Beats attended a salon headed by another Kenneth, the Catholic-Buddhist Kenneth Rexroth, main force of the San Francisco Renaissance. Visual poets inclined to Beat poetry neither appear nor are mentioned in the State’s international concrete anthologies (except for d.a. levy, who appeared in one smaller anthology by New Directions). Many so inclined viewed concrete poetry as a new typographic and iconographic “vocabulary” with which to express that which was previously inexpressible, particularly the transcendent. Both Patchen and Reps did so during pre-concrete; levy seems the first to do so in this country in concrete poetry.
While using broad strokes, one can simplify Fluxism as Eurocentric, heavily influenced by modern and post modern materialistic philosophies and semiotics -- none of which are centered on or concerned with seerdom, wisdom and such knowledge. While John Cage, influenced by Japanese Zen, influences Fluxism, he was not considered by them a Fluxist. This movement also is known as a revisit of Dada; some issue it a Neo Dada tag. From my gatherings of Fluxism, what Japanese Zen influence there was had more to do with compression for conceptual works rather than spiritual injection. Out of this Zen fogginess has come Zen mindfulness, a continuation of the 1960s Counter-culture, being culture-across-the-counter, and its New Age-ism paraphernalia. The latest edition, Zen-based mindfulness, is appropriated now for white collar technocratic corporate efficiency. Nor was Fluxism outrightly a pro environmentalist art and poetic movement as the Beats. Writing on visual poetics among academics tend towards the philosophies, expressions, and individuals rooted in or influencing Fluxism, not the Beats.
I remember Bob's disinclination towards the Language poets and their concrete and visual poetics; sometimes he lashed out at certain individuals. In his blog, found through the Way Back Machine, he posted two main collections of his visual math poems, long divisions and mathemaku. His intent was neither neo-dadaism, nor nihilism. He held to an absolute but, as previously said, offered no concise cosmology. Below is a mathemaku he dedicated to Blake, suggestive as to his poetic leanings. This little-known poem does not appear in his April to the Power of the Quantity Pythagoras Times Now, published by Mark Young via Otoliths.(31)
As with Lipman and I, in his way too Bob was uncomfortable with the definition of the term poetry. This can be seen in his long division series working with and against the term "poetry". Throughout his math poems one sees references or gestures to Basho's frog pond - splash haiku, interests in Odysseus, Greek goddesses, and dedications and homages to other poets. Bob is criticized by purists for calling many of these mathematical poems when strictly speaking mathematics is not taking place. In addition, he is admonished for misuse of metaphor.
I always read/saw his work as a clear contribution within the arenas of minimal and conceptual visual poetics. Bob is a poet of talent, insight, and in command of an extensive body of poetics, especially those of American and Canadian avant-gardes. The fact that some commentaries try to deny him use of his poetic license is a hint that he might need to be taken very seriously. These naysayers miss the point of Bob, and arguably of poetry, and so the eye fails to apprehend beauty.
Beatific visions
The cliché of many uses and justifications, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, is not Beauty discussed or experienced by Platonists. The Beauty of which they speak and experience is reachable through various practices requiring teachers who are knowers of Eros.(32) In the realms of golden forms and beyond, into energetics and essences there remains duality, a duality in which a seer or seeker easily becomes addicted to and thereby caught in a subtle trap halting further progression to That Which Is, the One, or any of other name for the named ineffable out of which comes form and words naming forms. Out of such inner work, if blessed, come Beatific visions. A finely-tuned intuition, especially open and egoless, is its avenue of descent to this higher realm. In this Way, comes writing and image to uplift humankind, not the lower mind driven by ego. As higher the achievement in higher consciousness so the actions and inactions of the individual harmonizes with the dynamic cosmic universal flow. Workings and implications of “so the micro the macro” dynamism can be found in Sri Aurobindo’s writings and the philosophical works of Whitehead. Paradise on the earthly plain arrives not through conquest by sword nor economic materialism’s dialectic, but by overcoming the inner conflicts between one’s angels and demons. Seer poets of various traditions are proof of the possibility for all.
A reading of the Navaho Beauty Way Prayer is a reminder of how a creative individual can walk the world.
Navajo Prayer — Beauty Way
In beauty may I walk
All day long may I walk
Through the returning seasons may I walk
Beautifully I will possess again
Beautifully birds
Beautifully joyful birds
On the trail marked with pollen may I walk
With grasshoppers about my feet may I walk
With dew about my feet may I walk
With beauty may I walk
With beauty before me may I walk
With beauty behind me may I walk
With beauty above me may I walk
With beauty all around me may I walk
In old age, wandering on a trail of beauty,
lively, may I walk
In old age, wandering on a trail of beauty,
living again, may I walk
It is finished in beauty
It is finished in beauty.
And here, Bob says something similar, differently:
Inward is the 11th direction in ascent or descent leading, should one be of good fortune, to what the Oracle of Apollo in Anatolia offers: “Once you have touched it there is no division, no tearing the heart away for it knows no separation.” Regardless, ascent or descent, a laboring in the dark is unavoidable unless karmically-blessed. The sons of Apollo – Orpheus and those “sons” of his linage, and Pythagorus, who said he was Hyperborean Apollo reincarnated, and those “sons” and “daughters” of his lineage – all visited the underworld, returning with a variety of what the most cultivated many and scholars now consider mythological curiosities and trinkets. These are goddess- and god-given gifts to a collection of seers, healers, prophets, and law givers for either individuals or an entire city (such as curing a city of a plague). They arose out of the Greek form of meditation, incubation. The Pythagorean masters were considered heroes, their experiences experienced all 11 directions ranging from hearing and learning from the goddesses and gods to the “singularity.”
Within the “singularity” or samadhi moment distinctions do not exist. There are no directions. The 10 outer directions of the 8 horizontal directions, up and down gone. The 11th inward gone. Some traditions use only the 4 cardinal horizontal directions reducing the total to seven. Time is reduced to no time of the now.
Plato reads for me in his travels along the 11th as ascent, an ascent actually opposing the descent into the underworld. Thus his rewrites of his predecessors who descended to the underworld. Perhaps this is another layer hidden in his Allegory of the Cave. Even today among Jungians, not Jung, horror has been expressed surrendering to the Goddess. Had I not, I would have written and experienced not what I have since.
ABOVE:
Persephone into Hades, Bob Grumman mathemaku
Aristotle’s way erased the 11th altogether. First People of this continent render it iconographically as the heart line. Heartless logical philosophy is unable to love wisdom; wisdom is informed by love, the love for the goddess Sophia who in turn returns the love many fold. This is a devotional love found among Sufi and Bhakti poets. Orphic and Pythagorean masters can be seen as parallels indirectly or perhaps directly influenced by lineages such as Rishis not as distant as thought among most scholars. (34)
Given Bob’s obvious interest, intent, and joy expressing Greek history, culture, and poetry through his visual poetry and mathemaku seen and read in numerous surviving published works, I wonder how he would respond to my use of the above mathemaku, Persephone into Hades. Mine is that his mirroring and textual puzzle seen and reads as a touchstone to riff off of. It is dedicated to Karl Young. He points to Young’s visual poetics, riccocheting off of Aramaic – Hebrew texts Young translated and then column-rendered with his idiosyncratic visual-typographic style. This adds another layer to Bob’s piece.(35) This rendered text by Young points to the mixing of the various 11th direction traditions in Egypt mentioned above: Orthodox gatekeepers of various orthodoxies squelch the transcendent "heretics" gently or bloodily.
Another aside to polish this, Young’s touchstone, Bob’s touchstone: Sufi poetics and disciplines contain within their arrays of practices and ways Greek Orphic, Pythagorean and Platonic influence, as stated before. Hermetics, with its additions of non Greek additions can be added. Around 300 BCE, Pythagoreans left Sicily and Southern Italy and settled in Alexandria and further south along the Nile because of Italian pressure reclaiming their land. What called Neoplatonism later rose as a reaction against Aristotelian philosophy. Teachings mixed with others throughout Hellena and later the Roman Empire and into Persia. Mentioned above, the actual first Christian Inquisition is destruction of Hellenic culture of the Roman Empire. Black robed Christian priests excite and head mobs burning uncountable private libraries and hammering pagan temples to rubble. The so-called Neoplatonists focused on Plato’s ‘mystical’ writings while adding and embracing kindred teachings from Egypt and Asia. Also in Egypt were these teachings, some from Sicily and southern Italy, embedding into alchemy. These in turn bled into the Gnostics soon to be really beaten bloody by the Church into submission or death.
When the Academy was closed by Justinian in 529 CE, philosophers went into exile in the Persian Sassanian Empire where they welcomed into Jundīshāpūr, a Persian center of learning. The cities, Harrān, Edessanda, and Nisibis, were also centers of Greek, Babylonian, Indian, and Persian learning. Years ago I was surprised to learn when Islam’s first jihad took Damascus in 634, fifty percent of the world’s Christians lived to its East. Most were of the Greek Nestorian Church, others of the Greek Monophysite Church. This is the actual Church of the East. It is not widely written about. During the Abbasid caliphate ancestors of these Greeks and Christians translated the Greek texts into Arabic initiating the golden age of Islamic culture. From these translations Sufis mined the esoteric.
Looked upon as pagan, Greek exoteric and esoteric texts in the West were destroyed. The possibility of a parallel ecstatic-esoteric poetry in the West was squashed flat to conformity by the Western Church wherever a lived revelation attempted to break surface.
Unfortunately, members of the Church of the East worked with the Mongols during their conquest and rule hoping to create a Christian realm. Islam regained control. The consequence was a slow eradication and loss of what could have been another devotional and esoteric poetic. The Church of the East essentially disappears over centuries of reaction for breaking the unspoken agreement between faiths. The Church of the East was always in a minority position. It strength was its ability to openly work with other religions including those along the Silk Road into China and over to Japan. (36)
Bob Grumman’s mirroring and column text/poem without word breaks is indicative of my purpose here. His entire poetic mathemaku field -- except Persephone, Hades, and the long division sign that are not mirror images -- spells out loud and (visually) clear that these misconceptions of the root of logic are distortions. Parmenides was carried into the underworld as a result of his devotion and longing, his desire. Persephone greets him as an initiate, tells him to listen and then share what She is about to say. He is to give a teaching for humankind, the road to experiencing the reality of reality. The Greek root of logic is not from Parmenides but from listening to Persephone’s teaching. Blowing smoke on mirrors to write with a sooty index finger what one hopes to see. The thoughts given were not to know reality but to be -- and to do that one has to be still. That means no thinking. The logic used, She says, is not the lesson, it is not that important; the lesson is that all is one in the now.
PART 3
Erasure, Eros & 11 Directions
I have been digging for too long to find where what went wrong went wrong. Robert Graves gave me a hint over fifty years ago. He failed to follow up, to drop down deep enough into Greek culture. The erasure of the Keltic bard / shaman was so thorough we forgot it was erased first by the Rome of Empire then Rome of Popes. Athenian Greeks did it to themselves by making distorting lens of philosophy, dislocated from a way of life to a heartless thinking project that continues into this moment. After the initial Christian destruction of Hellena, the Popes eradicated new forms – Manichaen, Gnostics and the Desert Father and Mother hermitages and followers – arising from the 11th direction to live and add to the revelation. Plato begins by putting words into mouths he wants to win arguments against. At least he experiences the 11th direction, but points upward only, thus becoming part of the crew disenfranchising living matter from this sacred state as taught and experienced the Orphics and Pythagoreans.
More is known about Pythagorus than Orpheus, yet even his story remains sketchy. His contribution to Greek mathematics, returning to his toga-wearing home island with formulas in his pants pockets pick-pocketed elsewhere. Where? Egypt, Persia, and/or India? Pants apparently designed somewhere on the Asian Steppes. He wears pants for the rest of his life, and claims to be a reincarnation of Hyperborean Apollo. These pants conceal, it is said, a golden thigh. He, as Orpheus, is shamanistic.(37) He moves to Croton, Sicily establishing his way of life, philosophy, lover of wisdom. Pythagoras continued the Orphic Way with additions and perhaps subtractions. Symbols shift as do word meanings spiralling elsewhere twisted in the airs of mouths. Ancient Greek vases over time illustrate the movement from three to four to seven strings on Orpheus’ lyre. The hands of Orpheus are the third set to play the lyre invented by Hermes. Perhaps the turtle shell represents the moon, its three strings the phases, and the Triple Goddess. And is a symbol for water, the water of knowing. Hermes trades his invention for the staff of Apollo. Also, Greece and the homeland of many Greek divine forms, Crete of the Minoans, has three seasons. Further north are four seasons where Orpheus resided and even further away the homeland of Hyperborean Apollo. Pythagoreans shifted to the seven string lyre. (38) Minoans were the last outpost of matri-centered Old Europe that stretched north to what is now mid Poland. Oracle centers and divine forms moved to Greece from Crete. See the works by Marija Gimbutas for some of what was lost and why.
Parmenides, father of reasoning and logic, reasons by not what we call reason, embraces stillness to travel the 11th direction to experience the ineffable. In fact, his words are not his; they belong first to Goddess Persephone. Use of logic is thus first taught by a Goddess to a Pythagorean initiate who fathers a lineage. The Greek form of meditation is incubation, a horizontal rather than sitting posture mainly worked at underground in sacred, dedicated precincts. Perhaps it is linked to the yoga corpse position for meditation, maybe linking back into the matri-centered ways of the Eurasian high technology of stone era where hunter-gatherers meshed with the newly arrived farmers from Anatolia circa 7 to 6500 BCE. “Inside” the now experience, Parmenides is given the teaching he renders into his poem. It should be discussed as it was exactly written and intended alongside Dattatreya’s Avadhuta Gita, The Upanishads, Tao Te Ching, or the Bhagavad Gita that informed Emerson and Thoreau and the Transcendalists. But it isn’t because its actual teachings of being were scrambled almost as soon as it was shared. Disciple and heir as adopted son, Zeno, and Parmenides are played in a play in which Plato inserts his own words. He also slips his words into Socrates’ mouth to argue against his other masked pseudo selves to become top dog. These two significant Pythagorean masters then have been given the scholarly shaft.(39) Both lived in Southern Italy. One hundred years later Plato and his nephew visited Syracuse, Sicily for a while and learned first-hand from Pythagoreans. Plato got into political trouble, imprisoned, and then bailed out by a Pythagorean ally. Upon returning to Athens he edited and (re-)modelled Pythagorean heroes as his philosopher kings writing with a hard reed, sly of hand.(40)
Peter Kingsley has spent a considerable amount of time considering Parmenides and the Italian Pythagoreans documenting scholars’ misunderstandings and actual misrepresentations, that began in the distant past. Read Kingsley's Reality for a step by step descent into the underworld to and then with Persephone in Hades, and a step by step stroll through the poem as it should have been told in Greek later and later in translation.(41) Countless thoroughfares, avenues, and walkabouts take this Greek history to as faraway as India and the Mongolian Steppes. The short of the long: Parmenides is given teachings by Persephone in Hades. Thinking is not being, though beings think. He shares the teachings in a poem that has yet to be accurately translated. Later, Sufis of Persia correctly decode Parmenides and others and then fold their teachings into one of their ways. (42) Scholars conclude thinking is being and thus to know reality, think, reason. The way of silence, no thought, is the teaching that leads to really knowing; gnosis is the teaching.
Zeno’s paradoxes have a reality most logicians seemed neither to have not seen nor felt. Kingsley points out Zeno teaches the moment of now. For me, they also are allegories showing the folly of pure heartless logic. But, southern Italy and Sicily are not agents of imperialistic Athens who torture and kill Zeno for obstructing their expansion. A failure of our Western philosophy in part seems to be that it is rooted in Athenian Centrism. Another failure is incubated in psychology’s behavioral control drug industry, discombobulating brains of “hyperactive” active youth, who are the wellspring of future seers, prophets and cultural healers. Most philosophers and psychologists don’t follow the aphorism Know Thyself to its emphatic conclusion, even Jungians who have no excuse.
Parmenides is not the only Sicilian / Italian Pythagorean’s teaching reversed. In his poem,“On Nature,” Empedocles’ cosmology has the four elements in their original state as divine forms. This, like traditional ways around the blue gem, means all is sacred. Love brings them together in a mixing becoming the many. Strife brings separation eventually returning the four to their original purity. Love again mixes and binds, and then Strife frees in unending pulsation, similar, but not, to the Vedic pulsation of the cosmos. Love traps. Strife frees. Aristotle and others reverse the teaching. Note Plato long idealized Love at its highest form of energy and essence. Plato degrades the material world to a reflection of idealized forms which he seems to have transposed from Orphic elements and the negation of the material world from Persian teachings.
So, we have Plato exiling poets for lying about the upper realms even as he creates fictions about other philosophers to prop up his own entryway into the upper realms while with the same flourish of his sharpened writing tool closes and buries the door to the underground. We have other philosophers of his era and later scholars mistranslating Parmenides and others because of the preconceived notions the Goddess clearly warns about. Being a dyslexic, I could say their philosophical interpretations are dyslexic. Being a visual poet, I could say Aristotle rubs out Orpheus and the upper realms.
Trust the Spirit. Trust nothing else.
Let Aristotle watch his bears and foxes
‘lick their whelps and cubs into shape.’
That’s all he’s good for.
I shall never deny my deepest instinct: which is to face all events with open eyes. In the beginning there was only being and spirit; whatever we know of reality arises from our disbelief in it. The mind forever returns to itself. To speak of logic in creation is to imagine that the mind has concerns outside itself. This is not true. The mind is not a logical instrument. Vulgarians speak of ‘using the mind.’ How? How is this done? If the mind does not function in a logical way, by what right do we demand ordered thinking? What put this thought in our heads? If there can be no logic outside the mind, and if the mind rejects logic, is not the desire for logic a form of madness?
EPILOG
“River Wind”
is another name passed to me by bees, via a keeper who lived and worked to our west, down the lane. He tended 100 or so hives to our east when it was a five acre organic avocado orchard. An energy line runs from the east across the eucalyptus grove, over and through the land once orchard, down lane and then street to the ocean. It is also an equinox line associated with the overlaying Chumash solstice equinox pole star grid. It flows so to speak out of a creek canyon mouth; further east is where the 20,000 year date was found. Eurasian traditions call them dragon lines. It is also known as a ley line. I am not the only one to have seen or experienced it. A close friend in the late 1960s was more than just unexpectedly touched by it. He fell, so to say, into the 11th direction to reach a moment of golden singularity, twice within one day on and in it. He moved here because of it; now lives on it to our south, downslope. Founders of Halcyon experienced it first on the East Coast searching by map for a place to settle in before any member walked here; to feel and crier the call. Thus, Halcyon was founded in 1908. Current generations recently were reminded by me of what and where the draw. But that is another story for the unfolding, or not.
Karl Kempton
Oceano, Ca
April 2024
BELOW:
NOTES/FOOTNOTES/LINKS
(1) https://the-otolith.blogspot.com/2023/07/karl-kempton.html
(2) https://mathematicalpoetry.blogspot.com/
(3) A History of Visual Text Art, https://www.karlkempton.net/p/blog-page_97.html
(4) https://www.karlkempton.net/p/home.html
(5) https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1IwaXV3qj9YQ7fNkAap_rmQHTE7CVm425
(6) Paul Eli Ivey. Radiance from Halcyon: A Utopian Experiment in Religion and Science. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013 https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/radiance-from-halcyon
(7) http://www.henrycowell.org/bio.html
(8) https://www.futurefarmers.com/
(9) https://www.karlkempton.net/p/yoga.html
(10) https://www.sriaurobindoashram.org/sriaurobindo/writings.php
(11) https://www.sriaurobindoashram.org/sriaurobindo/writings.php
(12) The Future Poetry . 1997 edition, p 218 pdf available in aurobindo writings
(13) http://synaptry.blogspot.com/search?q=cleveland+concrete
(14) https://archive.artic.edu/stieglitz/camera-work/, https://modjourn.org/journal/camera-work/
(15) For the unfamiliar, its influences to name a few: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle, Platonism, the South Asian and Chinese scriptures, mystics as Emanuel Swedenborg and Jakob Böhme. Out of its constellation flowed the first American literary Renaissance.
(16) http://synaptry.blogspot.com/2020/03/synapse-essay-ninth-enigma-of-henri.html
(17) https://synaptry.blogspot.com/2020/03/synapse-essay-ninth-enigma-of-henri.html
(18) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Stieglitz, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/291_(art_gallery),
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DMMWaGm4jU&ab_channel=RovedaAudiovisual
(19) MatheMathemukumaku Finished Since 2 February 2004https://web.archive.org/web/20090731115707/http://www.geocities.com/Comprepoetica/Blog/Gallery-A.html s
Doing Long Division On Poetry https://web.archive.org/web/20090731115707/http://www.geocities.com/Comprepoetica/Blog/Gallery.html
(20) https://www.opusarchives.org/marija-gimbutas-collection-bibliography/ Further, a 2018 publication indirectly supports her pointing to a vast cultural shared knowing: Decoding European Paleolithic art: Extremely ancient knowledge of precession of the equinoxes https://www.athensjournals.gr/history/2019-5-1-1-Sweatman.pdf
(21) This highly-charged pejorative term continues in use.
(22) The Hymns of Orpheus. Thomas Taylor, trans. Forgotten Books, 2007
(23) https://www.google.com/books/edition/Quest_for_the_Red_Sulphur/n6lpMQEACAAJ?hl=en
(24) Addas, Claude. Quest for the Red Sulphur: The Life of Ibn ‘Arabī’. Peter Kingsley, Translator. Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 1993.
The Discloser of Desires: turjuman al ashwaq. Yousef, Mohamed Haj, Translator. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2014
The Translator of Desires: Poems. Michael Sells, translator. Princeton University Press, 2021
(25) https://artmuseum.unm.edu/raymond-jonson-web-portal/tpg/
(26) https://www.adobegallery.com/art/category-Fine_Art_Native_American_Paintings
https://jennifermclerran.wordpress.com/
(27) A History of Visual Text Art, https://www.karlkempton.net/p/blog-page_97.html
(28) see A History of Visual Text Art for more details
(29) time line for seer, realized & mystic poets https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1xNfdMXhCvsWt3TybGkykaXegxAk10L04?usp=sharing
(30) https://allenginsberg.org/2014/10/expansive-poetics-125-jaime-de-angulo/
(31) https://www.lulu.com/shop/bob-grumman/april-to-the-power-of-the-quantity-pythagoras-times-now/paperback/product-1jm84kv.html?page=1&pageSize=4
(32) Devotional love of the golden forms seems to be the root of Platonic love.
(33) https://xexoxial.org/is/xerolage30/by/bob_grumman
(34) We need here to step to A: India: S. Radhakrishna. Eastern Religions & Western Thought.New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1940, 11th impression, 2004. pp 142-152. And B: Henri Corbin on higher realms and orientation to the north: 1) Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabī. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. pp20-22. 2) The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism. New Lebanon,NY: Omega Publications, 1994. pp 4-7. and 3) Spiritual Body and Celertial Earth: From Mazdean Iran to Shī’ie Iran. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989. pp 118-163.
(35) https://www.thing.net/~grist/ld/koppany/kgram/ky-cnm-n.htm
(36) A mention of Platonic philosophy informing Christian exoticism. In the 500 or 600s an unknown converted Platonist individual named himself Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite passing as a convert of St Paul. His forgery was successful in the Latin branch of the Western Church but not the Greek. He created a vast upper Christian realm based on the Platonic ideals. His writing suggests this more a religious than experiencial based work. Nevertheless, his ideas spread and despite the later exiling of angels by the Scholastics. Margaret Porette experienced these realms and wrote of them in The Mirror of Simple Souls. She was warned to stop; she didn’t and was burned at the stake on June 1, 1310. She is considered a Beguine. Her writing and experiences reach heights found in the heights of Sufi and Bhakti poetry and prose.
Margaret Porette. The Mirror of Simple Souls. Translators: J.C. Marler and Judith Grant. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1999
(37) http://opsopaus.com/OM/BA/ADD.html
Kingsley, Peter. A Story Waiting to Pierce You: Mongolia, Tibet, and the Destiny of the Western World
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pythagoras/#:~:text=Aristotle%20reports%20that%20the%20people,(Burkert%201972a%2C%20143)
(38) M. L. West, The Orphic Poems. London: The Prometheus Trust, 2016. pp30-31 & fn 89
(39) Peter Kingsley, Reality. London: Catafalque Press, 2020
(40) Of this and more see books by Peter Kingsly https://peterkingsley.org/books/
(41) https://peterkingsley.org/product/reality/ an overview: Fragments of Eternity - Carl Jung's Psychology Meets Parmenides' Philosophy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BPlEfuoPAA&ab_channel=Humble-UMedia
(42) In Catafalque, Kingsley provides at length the story of Henry Corbin’s bringing this history back to the West that began with his studies of Suhrawardi who complied all Sufi teaching of the East to Greece. He also studies Ibn ‘Arabī who compiled all Sufi teachings of the West to Mecca. He shares his understands and experiences with Carl Jung in discussions comparing Jung’s work with these Sufi insights. They become fast friends. Kingsley receives the hidden and personal from Corbin’s widow and research in Jung’s library. Some of this Sufi history is found in my A History of Visual Text Art.
Also in my A History of Visual Text Art I discuss the Theosophical painted word and iconographic paintings of Hilma af Klimt. She required that her work be hidden away for twenty years after her death because the materialistic world would not understand them. Another iconographic painted word work hidden away until posthumous publication was Carl Jung’s Red Book. Made public in 2012, he kept it hidden for identical reasons and fears. Kingsley’s Catafalque proves his fears were justified.
(43) Finally, two poets for touchstones: Patchen as a bookend for this essay and most of all, for most of us, William Blake.
Bob Grumman first came to my attention with an unsolicited submission late 1984 or early 1985. Hunting through the haystacks of Len Fulton’s The International Directory of Little Magazines & Small Presses for magazines publishing visual poetry, he found Kaldron. The approximate date is gathered from memory and page 135 in his autobiographical rumination on his multifaceted poetry interests, OF MANYWHERE-AT-ONCE. Over the span of Kaldron as an international visual poetry and language art journal I accepted 1 or 2 percent of unsolicited submissions. I sought works and selected from international exhibitions I curated. His submission was returned with a polite rejection letter that started a long, fruitful and at times contentious friendship. Bob loved to argue. Suggesting he send the works to Score in the rejection letter began his long working relationship with its editors who published his poems and critical articles. At the same time he had reached out to other publishers which set in motion other long time friendships and publishing relations. Through the years he attended events using mass transit, visiting poet friends and meeting others thereby continuously adding to his impressive network of friends in alternative poetics and publishers over the years.
I never met Bob face to face, but we had long phone conversations. Our correspondence expanded when the internet opened its digital vacuum pipes for email. It would be five years after his first submission before I published two of his visual poems, both in the last issue, 21/22, page 23, 1990. These were also exhibited in Visualog 3, (of my international exhibition series) and its sister exhibition, Visualog 4, in Brooklyn, co-curated and added to by Bill Keith. Both visual poems at that moment in my opinion were his strongest and remain among my favorites alongside some of his widely-praised mathemuku poems.
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