Even blogging at this moment - being engaged in blog formation as we speak, so to speak - I am not sure one needs a reason to blog or a purpose toward which to blog. I mean, here we are, five sentences into this blog and there's hardly anything like a topic per se. But I am in a mood to blog, that much is apparent. Maybe one needs to be in this mood, to frame the desire to see oneself writing a blog in order to blog. I think this is true, and I also think that, when you are working on other things, you may not be in the mood to blog.
So what kinds of things have I been working on? Well, I think about what I am working on all the time, as I'm sure you do, but it's hard putting it into words when it's several things, really, and they all sort of jumble together. So, when I look back from a certain perspective - and I think I have reached a point where I can look back at what I've been doing and say something about it - I often feel like I am embarking on a guess. I feel like I lack proper documentation to represent actions and thoughts as they occurred and influenced each other, and - here's a more critical dilemma - with having reached a point of perspective and looking back, it's as if context has been lost to me. The reference points have been largely erased. I must rely on recall - not my strong suit. Adding to the confusion, I am almost never motivated to explain in precise detail what I am about, being convinced it is of no real consequence as long as certain goals are met.
Now, we have actually, unexpectedly, struck upon a notion that draws very close to the theme, if there is such a thing, that dominated the last several months of my waking thoughts, but I am faced, in this blogging moment, with the choice of going on with the show in relating the jumble of things I've been focused on and getting the theme, or developing the theme in lieu of recollection. I choose the latter tack as it should illustrate for the reader and myself what I am getting at better than if I try and capture it otherways. So here goes.
I am almost never motivated to explain in precise detail what I am about, being convinced it is of no real consequence as long as certain goals are met.
There is a great deal of life and thought wrapped up in this sentence. It strikes me as a predominantly Christian sentiment and that does not surprise me as most of what I think about is Christianity, either as I live it or it is lived by others, though not directly (rule keeping, etc.) , or I mean to say insofar as I am a moral thinker, or I think about morals, not morality. I think about the will and I think about what is good. A lot. And when one thinks a lot about something pone tends to lead the life of a person who thinks about those things. I do not mean that thinking about the good makes me good - no, I mean that I am preoccupied in a certain way and my actions show it. My behavior and tendencies reflect my concerns - no surprise there. The surprise and difficulties of the past several months - and really the last couple years - has been a shift in perspective that can be located in the above sentence I italicized.
Simply put - and I know no better way to try and state a fact - as a writer my goal was to discover goodness in the act of writing. A well-written poem would be a good poem, and good art was the best thing I was capable of, and the only reasonable goal I could be sure of having the opportunity of meeting. I lived this way all my adult life, really, up until I was married - about 20 years I guess. At that point, the writerly goal remained intact but was complicated by the goal of a happy, successful marriage. That was a wonderful learning experience and it altered, over the course of several years, not the writing itself, but the purpose or expectations of the writing. The core or purpose of writing remained the same, but the purpose of the poem once written changed from being a means of personal validation to being an accomplishment in itself. I found the means, therefore, of self-publishing and participating in other ways as I saw fit, while supporting the writing of my wife, Endi. Being a good father to my son, Jackson, simply reinforced this movement toward a self-sustaining practice, where the poem was good in itself both as an independent object and for the good it did the writer (me) in having written the poem. A process that was bound to draw me closer to whatever ultimate good or truth this life might lead me to.
Therefore, the more I wrote, the better I became, was the theory. And I wrote a great deal. Writing however was not enough and living with the writing was not enough. Writing was good, yes, and there was truth in writing, but could I ever know that the good or the truth I had obtained was any better or worse than what I might achieve the next day or a year later? In fact, I had not only plateaued but I began to feel enervated and realized that I had reached a critical juncture. Having exhausted all previous, interior means, including such political and artistic practices as often are made to represent ourselves, I reached outside myself for God. I was catechized, baptized, and confirmed in the Catholic church.
I continued to write at a furious pace for three years or so, then slowed to something like a trickle. I spent the last 13 months on a manuscript of poems written in fits, here and there, entitled Parades for You. And all this time, running through my head, weren't poems as much as questions: Why write when the words of ultimate good and truth are here before me in the scripture? How do I write (and seek the good in the process of writing) when my goals are set before me as a Christian? I would read at Mass and I could not deny the effect. What joy it was to read the word of God, and what a small thing it was to write for oneself. And could I state otherwise? My writing was indeed largely for myself. I would share it with my wife, a couple people might see it online, and I continued to host my Concrete Formalism Facebook group dedicated to concrete/visual poetry, and I continued to write for my OpenCatholic blog and website, but clearly a reckoning was in order. And really this is what my mind has been working on for a good while now. And while it was working on this reckoning and reordering it was not particularly motivated to engage in creative or polemical writing.
Now, however, I have gotten somewhere. What to call it is a challenge though. I should make clear that the preoccupations of the past couple years were not administered solely in the dim light of my consciousness. Oh no. Everything was thrown into the mix so as to be sure that whatever came out of it would be a fair conclusion or at at least a working assemblage. The purpose in fact was to test myself, I suppose, or decide if writing could continue in light of the Christian certain goals alluded to above. So where did I get too, and what makes it somehow definitive, a point of perspective? I suppose that the best and most succinct answer to that questions lies in the manuscript of Parades for You, in the movement between the first poem, written in October 2016, to the last, written in November 2017.
Here is the October 2016 poem:
*****
deserts and streams
deserts and streams
deserts and mountains and streams
mountains and streams
mountains and streams
deserts and mountains and streams
streams and streams
streams and streams
deserts and mountains
deserts and mountains and
deserts and mountains and streams
mountains, streams
mountains
mountains, streams
mountains and streams
mountains and streams
mountains and streams
and streams and streams and
deserts and mountains and streams
mountains
mountains
deserts and streams
deserts and streams
mountains
mountains and deserts and streams and mountains and
mountains and deserts and streams
*****
And here is the poem from November 2017:
*****
Most of time and mountainsmost of time and true
true into mountains and time is mountains
true into time and true
This with time and mountains
this with rivers and true
this with mountains and rivers and time
is time into mountains and rivers and true
Send me into time and mountains
send me mountains and rivers so true
Let me fall into rivers and mountains
and mountains and rivers and mountains so true
All for time and all for mountains
all for rivers and mountains so true
all for mountains and rivers and mountains
and mountains and rivers and rivers so true
Watch for this, watch for mountains
Watch for time and watch for mountains
Watch for rivers, mountains for rivers
mountains for rivers and rivers so true
I am where eyes were, mountains for rivers
rivers for mountains and mountains so true
I am where rivers, rivers for mountains,
mountains for river and rivers so true
True is the mountain
the mountain the river
true is the mountain the river so true
true is the mountain the river so true
Now is the mountain, now is the river
now the the mountain the river so true
now is the river, the river so true
now is the mountain the river so true
Come with me the mountain the river
come with me the mountain so true
Fall with me for rivers and mountains
fall with me for mountains so true
*****
The second poem is clearly more engaged with its topic than is the first. The first poem recites; the second incites: it makes apparent the poet behind the poem and enlists and beseeches the reader. It is active and in the context of this blog it is clearly reflective of certain goals, whereas the first poem chooses instead to offer a kind of product, not goals. One can choose to take the first poem however one wishes to, for whatever purposes. You might worship the deserts, streams, and mountains or you might merely enjoy them. Or you might build vacations homes on them or store nuclear waste in them. Whatever. The poet offers only the rhythm of the deserts, streams, and mountains while hoping, perhaps, that the reader will empathize and appreciate both the poem and the things poeticized and, by extension, the poet.
The second poem presents a very different scenario or dialogical space. The poet addresses the reader directly with sum conclusions regarding the deserts, streams, and mountains which are assigned active and particular values. There is no getting away from the fact that the poet is calling to the reader from out of his understanding and experience of the deserts, streams, and mountains. Here, the deserts, streams, and mountains are strictly valued, esteemed, and fraught with both personal and essential values. Our options of what to do with the deserts, streams, and mountains are vastly reduced to the point where we are incited not merely to witness them with the poet but to fall for them.
Now, someone could read this blog and think, Oh he's assimilated his religion in his writing. And maybe they would have a point, but I can't say that's right, not exactly. I'm quite sure I've assimilated next to nothing. Instead, I've had to leave the comfy confines of myself and go out and meet something I was never expecting to meet, and which all my reading and education had not prepared me to meet. And I can not do this alone, and I can not pretend that it is enough that I do this alone even if I could. If I were in a desert I would feel compelled to preach to the rocks, to see what I see, to become as I have learned to be. Anything less would be hypocritical and impossible in light of certain goals.
So what's next, as I turn back to look toward the future? Good fellowship, hard work, and peace, I hope. Peace, first and foremost. And I hope for nothing less for those I love including anyone who has kindly read through to these final words of this blog.
