Blaser's Heaven

-and human survival, which, with its adjectival ironies,
proposes a social inheritance
Robin Blaser from As If By Chance

the survival of words
the next day of
rain through the night
nothing has been
diminished
lots of rubbish natural
or not is rotting,
truly morning certainly
and the gray sky drifts home
like a dock loader like
one job after another.
There is something
right about the result
it cannot be argued.
How big is the secret
between these rivers,
should not each word
in this be an entire thing,
a dreadfully long metaphor
in which every interlocuter
is pressed and finished
with a final answer?
I am not an ant nor am I
courageous enough to admit
to a certain revulsion
over such important claims
wisdom peace at last neverending, etc.
Hard nutrition this and to keep
everything round the point
the universe is blank
without us, hidden
in the dark-dust pocket
don't you know.
Everything and inside
of that is empty nothing
where words try to begin
and notice the backs
of their heads who listen
the way they scratch
and nod inside those skulls,
to sit still when in fact
it isn't even close
to what they are doing
which is die-ing.
All push pins and dreamers
of scatological redemption
plus phase after phase
of chew boast and record.
Damaged pop-up classics
like Poky Little Puppy
cannot find their
way into poor pox* or Greece.
They don't even know
about the watching
let alone the focus
of the watch in which
are presented
a multitude of chances
in Detroit, in Timbuktu,
outside of that tailor's
shop in weary Sidon.
Not again, not that
yet again, the hierarchies
of angels again?
Oh purple plusses
and gold stars,
old beards and glazed eyes,
sonorous damn voices,
please not that yet again.
Love, mention our archetype,
at least one little surprise
in that most indefinite word.
Friendship, nothing like old
men saying such things
in their own dugout,
a classroom full of turnips,
self witness and transfer
for an old wrinkler who hopes
for quiet dominions
in which the kings
have his face,
his hands and say
the same pungeant things
to the waiting podunks,
better them than no one
and repeat after me.
There'd be poplars and Spicer
and some of that glow,
a tireless legion of adulation,
almost his angels.
Whose fault could it be
and if so, might it be yours?
The hole got filled already
and you're in it despite
the curious loss of imagination
and yes, in that you uttered
a final truth, a blessed amen:

"What changes are not the things but their limits."

*first usage

http://jacketmagazine.com/22/blaser-quar.html


Blaser laments ‘the unrecognized disaster of a
world devoured into human form, rather than a world disclosed in which we are images of an action, visibilities of an action, an action which otherwise is invisible, larger, older, and other than ourselves.’



And to whom is he speaking and of what one wonders? The substitute called Mother Nature/Father Time, the indelible admixture of the Creation with the Creator via the Created, i.e. through language? Some of us recognize something but I highly doubt that without a certain amount of scholarship like ours that Mr. Blaser would be the one to judge the veracity of such and such a claim. As he insists on the existence of language in which wisdom, beauty, etc etc are manifested prior to even their own existence and then to provide a convoluted parameter for such convoluted exagerated "wisdom' (as such interlocuters usually do) thus, it is a miracle then that language exists at all and without it, I suppose, there is a vacuum of action, intention, result even. Really now. It is part of the interlocuter's job of course to make sad things seem peppy, to make dumb things speak but at the very least they should try to make them speak in logical terms that provide at least a little more than a bit of something from that which is being dismissed as horse pucky. And if so then how is it that the word sperm does not contain the majesty of creation? Would not just a bitter drop do? All these outpourings seem necessary in the work of poets who spew and outrage, criticize and 'humor' us all with a teardrop at the end of a perfunctory and quite complex obligatory lunch time foray into the blisteringly hot alcoves of this so called 'hell' that they prefer to life. How contradictory....even if in our culture it is inappropriate to attack dead men unless of course they are prophets.

You cannot get away with such references without at least a little bit of accountability in my perhaps not-so-humble opinion. As well, neither poetry or philosophy should or can be considered, a shortcut to religious knowledge. Yet in the modern context, both are considered and given greater attention and the answers arrived at ...well of course. They are not satisfactory. That they are not even satisfactory to those poets and philosophers ought to be enough, ought to be a sign but tragically, they are allowed to flourish and even encouraged. The only group that they find themselves outside of is another group of outsiders and so on, so forth in myriad formation. What on earth convinces the reader better than the widespread fame of such entities that indeed they are not truly inside by virtue of their outsidedness nor are they inside by virtue of ours, or by gum, our (actual knowledgables) bloody ignorance.

"For it is not God, but man, who is dead, Blaser argues (suggesting this was Nietzsche’s conclusion also)."

And what means this 'dead'? As in the vacuousness of a variety of mistaken identities within another variety of mistaken premises? Here's the hot tip newsflash...the mystery isn't so mysterious and the logic is not so logical if in fact the non mysterious mystery is fabricated in form and function with a blasphemous and even higher form of mythos that is placed intact, in situ in this "public space" and in that, the argument the public must pose is against it's own fable and ironically, armed with its own fable. No wonder there is chaos rather than redemption (and isn't that what is being redeemed in the poetry of the late Mr. Blaser...'the public' in which 'joe public' resides)?

in unmapped America, the Puritans had a ferocioustime with omniscience, which
proposed predestina-tion of human nature, one by one—now, when you get down to
brass facts, who in this community should be allowed to receive the body and
blood of Christ?—the answer: the successful—speaking inthe voice of—the
coherence of—capitalism—Robin Blaser, Great Companion: Dante Alighiere

I don't think the author of the jacket article understands enough about Nietzsche in order to know what Blaser understands about Nietzsche...not that Nietzsche understood much himself to begin with...other than he understood that the reflection of a reflection is bad enough let alone the stonification of such ideals and analogs into a curious pantheon of fatal humanistic trends that don't really trend up or down...they merely tread alot of historical water.

in 1963, an Italian reporter named Luigi Pasquini met
Pound in the Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini:
'When I reach him he is standing in the sacristy
of the church, a tiny room that formerly housed its
relics. Above the door is Piero della Francesca's fresco
depicting Sigismondo Malatesta as he kneels before
his patron saint. Pound is standing beneath it, sur-
rounded by people.
'I approach him slowly, nervously, until I am
directly before him, face to face. I look him in the
eye, and inquire: "Ezra Pound?"
'He does not respond. He stares at me, silent, and
his mouth hints at a smile.
'I insist, and repeat his name. He gazes at me, arch-
ing his eyebrows for a moment, but says nothing.
'I fear I must be mistaken and address my glance to
the woman beside him. She peers up at him, then
nods, reassuring me that it is him.
'I offer him my hand, and he takes it in his own, I
do not tell him my name, but I make clear that I know
his books. . . . He understands, it seems. He gives a
sign of assent, but continues to remain silent.
'Our hands are still clasping each other. "This is
the hand of the great American poet," I offer. ("La
mano del grande poeta americano!")
'And at last his voice emerges, his first words,
uttered in a tranquil Italian accent without a trace
of an Anglo-American inflection: "I am not great."
("Non grande.")
'Swiftly I reply: "—you are among the greatest."
("Grandissimo.")
'But the conversation falters, and I grow uncertain.
Through friends I had heard that he was living in
Rapallo, but a stray remark from Miss Rudge indicates
they have just come from Venice. I try to take up the
topic: "Where are you living now: in Rapallo? Or in
Merano with your daughter, or in Venice?"
'He will not reply. He looks at me again, with a
mocking gaze.
'I persist: "Rapallo, Merano? Venice, Rome?"
'Nothing. He is still silent, his gaze fixed on me,
like someone playing a guessing game.
'I press on: "So where are you living now?" I con-
tinue, "Where?"
'At last he lowers his head, slowly, and put his
mouth to my ear so that no one can hear us. His
voice is a whisper, rasping: "I live in hell." 'This leaves me
bewildered. Here we are in church,
in a sacristy in fact (even if it is the sacristy of a pa-
ganizing temple)—in a place, in short, as far as pos-
sible from Erebus or the underworld of Lucifer. And
yet he says we're in hell. I fail to understand and
want to pursue it: "Which hell do you mean? The
hellish tourism? The inferno of the war, here in
Rimini? the hell of Rome? Of Italy? Of the world?"
'He is silent again. At last he moves his hands: he
places them before his stomach, and slowly lifting
them to the level of his heart, as the traces of light in
his pupils become like glowing coals, he whispers a
suffocated scream. "Here is hell. Here."' -Blaser in Great Companion

And hey, Dante was the prototypical Anti Islamicist don't you know!

Ah well, he was on the right track (desirous of knowledge) but you know what they say, the highway to heaven is just paved wall to wall and side to side with the best intentions afterall. The role of the outsider in this, the role of the one who was thrown out of the ring so to speak, is in Nietzsche's own contruct, a necessary evil. Through such necessary evils it is that truth can be translated and deduced throughout time by examining the effect instead of the cause.

And perhaps there is redemption in at least some of that.