Where the Sea Comes in

I listen to my own stillness
In the early afternoon
Meet the stillness of my world
As it surrounds me with tall white buildings
Holding onto the city sky

Hoping for a voice within my own voice
To sing me back to an awake mind,
To a vision full of what it sees
Not so drowned in my mere vision.

I listen while the buzzing buzzes
And the walls of my room hold me in
As my past holds me in,
As my identity remains the break, the limit,
To who may be here now
In the pause, the weight, the inertia.

For background, here's the complete diary entry which goes from an email from a friend to the the poem as posted here.

FURTHER NOTES ON HEIDEGGER AND POETRY

Heidegger is haunted by the poem. He come to it as Nietzsche did, through the visionary words
of the Pre-Socratic philosophers and the writiings of the Greek tragedians. What most intrigued Heidegger was the
sparring between mythos and logos, their embrace and later attempts to separate one from another.
How does the mytho-poeic mind react to the rational? At what point are they complementary, and where
do they clash? Poetry provides the necessary gravity foR the two to exist as one. There is no opposition
between mythos and logos,and in fact,t hey breath from the same source, from the need to reveal that which
is hidden or locked away, so that it might be examined in the light of our senses.
Two 19th Century "giants" of the mind, Nietzsche and Holderlin, both of whom fell into madness, most attracted
Heidegger's attention. These two figures, the philosopher and the poet, balanced the Dionysian dance alongside
Apollonian rigor, recognizing that the mind is a bonfire, not just of vanities, but of questions as well, and cannot be
contained. Neither Nietsche or Holderlin could be contained in his time. In order to invent they were learned in the
classical humanities, Heidegger learned from the two of them, and delved back in time in order to forge fearlessly
into the future.
Poetry hedges on madness simply because it makes great demands, almost impossible demands, so much so that ,
the finest poem may be the one we cannot write down ("let the wind speak, that is paradise," Pound, The Canto).
For Heidegger, poetry is original ground, the foundation, or bedrock of consciousness. Language resides most fervently
in The Poem. TTe Poem is in reference to only one poem an original source-poem. Consider that Nietzsche wrote the
haunting lines, "the wasteland grows" some fifty years or so before T.S. Eliot pens 'The Wasteland," not just a reflection of
the immediate past (WW1, etc), but of the waste and devastation that accompanies man down through time and across
frontiers. Consider that the poem begins with a reference to Chaucer. It is a new poem, but part of the Old Poem,. Eliot's
montage is the disordering of the senses reflected all the way back in time.
Those who charge Heidegger with mysticism, as if it were a badge of defeat: "He's not a true philosopher," miss the point.
Heidegger's metaphysical rigor understands the intertwining of the poetic and the prosaic. He learned from Heraclitus that
all opposition, or strife, and the tension between opposing forces, is still based in an overriding order (logos, cosmos). The One Poem is not a mystical or proto religious ideas, it simply makes sense as a useful tool in understanding the human condition.
Now, hat One Poem may be the greatest tool against the imposition of an order based on strict obedience to a super-technology
that moves faster than the spirit can keep up with it. Heidegge understood, however, that The Spirit (the Original or Origin Poem)
is the fastest thing around.
There is no mythic One Poem but there is a Mytho-Logos to the human mind, and, at some antiquarian point, we stood up and began to articulate, through The Poem, a series of questions that remain as important today as they were in the past.

NC


(more to come)

Neeli,

Yours are the only email words I feel compelled to respond to, yet they are the only ones I feel incapably of responding to. You know the mythopoetic mind so well, struggling with it through that sleeping wakefulness and you know the poetic tradition just as the critic knows the poet, and your intuition of Heidegger rings true, like the bell in the hall.

To touch Pound/Eliot and the air that resonates through The Wasteland back through The Wasteland through the Vedic Silence is the gestalt for H.’s meditations on poetics, I believe. It is to the work of art as origin of the historical moment that H’ shows us in his essays, the generative aspect of the mythopoetic creation, even when it may be in ‘error’ that H. tells us to listen.

I think you are so attuned to this.

Please keep posting you thoughts on H. and poetics as they come to you.

Blessings,

Peter


p.s. Remember that Wallace Stevens also spoke of only writing the 'one poem, throughout his corpus.

3:40 PM But you know, ethos and polis are both Greek ways of framing things, thinking about them, separating them, just as are Eros and mythos and logos...what is the way out and the way in to one’s own culture and its roots. I do suspect sometimes that these terms frame the questions in a way that makes it impossible to get beyond the quandaries the questions lead into. But I don’t know where else I can start except for the new territory that poetic thought opens up. Aye, yes, poiesis –
[Poiesis
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Poïesis is etymologically derived from the ancient Greek term ποιέω, which means "to make". This word, the root of our modern "poetry", was first a verb, an action that transforms and continues the world. Neither technical production nor creation in the romantic sense, poïetic work reconciles thought with matter and time, and man with the world. It is often used as a suffix as in the biology terms hematopoiesis and erythropoiesis, the former being the general formation of blood cells and the latter being the formation of red blood cells specifically.
In the Symposium (a Socratic dialogue written by Plato), Diotima describes how mortals strive for immortality in relation to poieses. In all begetting and bringing forth upon the beautiful there is a kind of making/creating or poiesis. In this genesis there is a movement beyond the temporal cycle of birth and decay. "Such a movement can occur in three kinds of poiesis: (1) Natural poiesis through sexual procreation, (2) poiesis in the city through the attainment of heroic fame and finally, and (3) poiesis in the soul through the cultivation of virtue and knowledge."
Martin Heidegger refers to it as a 'bringing-forth', using this term in its widest sense. He explained poiesis as the blooming of the blossom, the coming-out of a butterfly from a cocoon, the plummeting of a waterfall when the snow begins to melt. The last two analogies underline Heidegger's example of a threshold occasion: a moment of ecstasis when something moves away from its standing as one thing to become another.] –
is also one of those Greek snares, snags, entanglements, poses. But I know no other way to make it new, to find a way beyond method, methodos...the trackless track, where the sea comes in.

Where the Sea Comes in.

I listen to my own stillness
In the early afternoon
Meet the stillness of my world
As it surrounds me with tall white buildings
Holding onto the city sky

Hoping for a voice within my own voice
To sing me back to an awake mind,
To a vision full of what it sees
Not so drowned in my mere vision.

I listen while the buzzing buzzes
And the walls of my room hold me in
As my past holds me in,
As my identity remains the break, the limit,
To who may be here now
In the pause, the weight, the inertia.

The reference to Wikipedia came after the poem was composed, all the rest came before.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/17/2009 08:19PM by petersz.

What is your limit?

What is your identity?

The identity of the poet: a chameleon, according to Keats.

What's yours?

I am Baron of Greymatter

If not the Emperor of Ice Cream, wat!

this thread made my head explode.

you're welcome.

amo,

Peter

Ahhhh..opacity without the redemption of musical language.

Chesil! Great to see you. I guess the clarity is in the eye of the beholder and the music is likewise in his ear. But I never mind a contrary view or someone's wish for what might not be there. I am most pleased that you are here and that you stopped by my little meditation.

Hope you stay around,

Cheers,

Peter

Hi Peter. I find your investigative exploration of Heidegger
through poetic synthesis with existenialists and more pointedly
his personal relationship with Nietze stunningly inventive and
original. The fact that Heidegger remained both friend and disattaced
observer of his friend showed intellectual metal people like Wagner
lacked. I liked this poems controlled dialectic with itself very much.
It helps keep you as poet within parameters that allow a broader
and tighter experimentation into the genius of H and why that genius
is so worthy of your intellectual patronage. For some reason
I tripped on this one line and felt a change might be constructive.

"To ing me back to an awake mind" sounds rough and if "awake" is applied through
conceptually Mahayana Buddhist paradigm you might think about this:

"To sing me back to an awakening of mind" seems to reference the lines
behind this line better and enlightened Nirvanic experience is always in
traditional teachings a process of "becoming awake". But, that's just me
and the voice your hear and application you make might discount my trip completely. Well done poet. tom

Well, an essay in support of a poem seems a lot. I am nothing if not pedantic and I wish you and your correspondents would spell Nietzsche consistently!

Your work is often not to my personal taste as I guess you will remember, Peter. That doesn't mean that I don't believe it isn't carefully crafted, for I am sure that it is.

By the time of the Cantos, Pound may well have been deranged. Not normal, anyway. Not great poetry, though many will disagree. I have this view that poets are a microcosm of society. People, to me, only seem normal in the superficial. Dig down and there are depths to people and poets.

As for musicality as redemption, I claim little insight into much of Dylan Thomas's work, but the musicality redeems it, in my view. Should poetry make us think? Clearly yes, but should the poet direct our thinking or should we be permitted to reach our own conclusions? In that sense, I regret the diary entry, well at least as following so quickly upon the poem.

As an aside, presumably the email option no longer works?

Chesil,

I often find my comments on poetry, mine and others, pedantic and not particularly helpful toward reading the poem as a spontaneous expression...which it is. I agree the journal entry came a bit too early. and I can't control my readers' spellings of Nietzsche's name.

tom,

the meditation on N. and H. in my journal came from Neeli Cherkovski. Heidegger's relation to N. was extremely complicated and historically controversial. Something you'll have to make your own mind up about.

Chesil,

I know my poems do not have the musicality of Dylan Thomas' pieces not do I have his poetic talent. I do love the sound of language though and do what I can with what sounds musical in it to me.

Thanks both for commenting.

Peter

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/06/2022 04:36AM by petersz.

Your poemms are very uniquely musical Peter and
if I have any strength at all in writing poems it
is in the ability to write the music of language but
also to feel nuanced melodies and percussions
as I read and you have superior ability to play a
song for the reader. The only poet that frustrates
this with inability to immediately pick up the prosody
is Whitman and Ezra Pound had the same damn problem with Walt
that I do. EP apoliged in a poem but not me. LOL. tom

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/06/2022 07:02AM by easyeverett.

Glad to hear we've traveled some of the same pathways, Tom.

Peter