Porta in ‘terzo cielo’ [size=85]1[/size] excipit cum Σοπηεροτο-Διαλογις.-- [Sopheroto-Dialogia; Philosophical Love-Dialogues before the Gate of the third Heaven.] You are every bit my mind’s equal; then you must share my distaste for the Byronic conscience, that is, the old lamentation of the poets over knowledge being somehow equivalent to sorrow. What excess weeps the old Heraclitean genius, bears also the swollen poverties of Democritus? Knowledge is not sorrow, and sorrow does not teach us anything that we could not have learned without it; sorrow is not deeper than joy. What do we gain by this monstrous wit of ours? Knowledge is neither a curse or a boon. We can humble and destroy everything with it, with wit,- but in the end, nothing can help the one who possesses it from turning it against itself, and that last combatant in whose wake it is as much assured of its own defeat. What use is it, after all, to have all the answers, and to have no questions to give our answers context? It is certainly not wisdom that we gain by it, by our wit. If wisdom ever did exist at all, it doesn’t now; it was in our youth, it was a dream whose strange symbols we learn to prophesize with age, a mute hieroglyphics we learn to read back into the living shape of things, until, perhaps with a second youth, (for I am sure this is what the first youth was) assuming that we do not simply forget that dream as most do in the advancement of years, everything we set our eyes to,- all the objects of our perception,- might learn to speak for the heart they touched, to the heart that beat in accordance to them and knew the language of such images in all of Bryant’s ‘eloquence of nature’. Conversely, philosophy leads only to aporia and paradox. The sciences reconstruct the universe in a skeletal form, a web of causes and effects that cannot ever be traced back to any moment of true creation, only the repetition of the same dialectical contest; Reason alone only feeds the mind back to itself, deriving an empty simulacrum, a potential stripped of any vitalizing element, a clockwork gear left without any impulse to actually set it into motion, a frozen mechanism: pure descriptions, without any explanations. Poetry, the arts, music-- these only generate our eidolons, converting the fluxions of sensible matter into stable, Apollonian forms; the illusion of immortality, Plato’s children of the mind, a progeny without generation. The desire of the poets to join these Forms with the shadow of our senses, to join Apollo and flesh, creates only what the Stoics called phantasai,- the fog of delusion. All three of these fail to touch the Real, and what each of them lacks, we name God; the power each of them refuses, we name the Infinite; the truth of what each of them denies, we name Absolute. That is why the saints and old religious masters, turning away from all three of these pursuits, chose to focus their strength on the task of negating their selfdom- on eliminating that finite element within themselves, opposing the infinite, their God. But that is just as pitiful a thing to do. The infinite is a mirror turned toward itself. They take one of the mirrors away, the lesser one, and believe they will see their God more clearly by doing so. They see nothing at all. It is easy, armed with wit alone, to fall into the same forgetfulness of self, though as mere ‘saints of the abyss’ without a God to serve, it were only to enjoin the frightful proclamation of Nerval’s Artemis: “La sainte de l’abime est plus sainte a mes yeux!” But we have more than wit; as our minds save us from feeling too much, so do our feelings save us from thinking too much, Sarah. We are blessed to have both depths. They save us from- words.
Words, Sarah; they are like glass. They either magnify things far away from us, and aid us to see things more clearly than before; or they do precisely the opposite, and obscure the things closest to us, and that nearest our heart, and estrange us from the things we thought we knew best, which then ‘show through a glass darkly’, as the Bible’s phrase goes; inverted, abstracted, cast at a distance.
And yet my words are the double of themselves; they do both, clarify and obscure, pull closer and make distant. For all words are double; as Emerson said, each one was once, by itself, an entire poem, when it was first invented. All poetry is duplicitous, after all, and so each word serves its author only by what ends it shows the world through. Perhaps you are worried to look into them from that proper vantage, for fear that you should break the illusion of the stars, that seem as easy to reach up and catch as fireflies in our inspired states, in the wordless oracle of Desire, in speechless exultation. And would you catch me, and pull me from the firmament? And would I die, as fireflies die, even in a single day, if you did? But the stars are dead already, and I am not; my proximity is not illusory. Nor is my distance. I have more secrets to tell you than those as easily broken by words.
You said I had found nearly every secret of your love, but that you kept one; a deeper secret, buried like a gemstone lodged in your heart, a secret carried beneath your ‘mortal share of blood and tragedy’ that none have ever yet discovered, and which prophesized my arrival for you many, many years ago. You begged me, should I ever find it, not to take it from you. But all lovers are thieves; and love itself is thievery. It was said in the Homeric age, that the poet and the thief suckled at the same breast,- that of the Muse, but the thief’s brother stole the greater share of milk for himself, and became engorged on the heavenly inspirant; the thief was left half-starved and wasted, the runt of the two. The poets achieve a higher form of thievery; if I rob from you, I would only rob you of your secret to perfect it in myself, after the manner of the poets. Yet, like I told you before, you are beyond my ability to any further perfect within myself.
As inscrutable as you are, and as deeply as that secret is kept from me, you tell me all the ways I have unraveled your past. But that has brought me no closer to stealing that secret from you, which is still perfectly safe. Transformation is something within the reach of us mortals beneath the stars, far more so than is salvation. Redemption is not in your past, nor might I find any in mine. Absolution for our sins is a thing that cannot be unraveled from the threads of fate. And the river Acheron too often deceives the shades of the dead into drinking from it on their way to the next world, for it carries with it the bitter salt-pang of our own human seas, as Kafka wrote, a hypnotic semblance of life that washes them back upon the shore of our memory and leaves us with their ghosts, attracted as they are to the tears we’ve shed over them. I would not have you fall into that trap; I would not have you haunted.
You are a woman. Perhaps, in order to understand your love, I have only to read everything you say backwards, and look into the opposing end of the glass, given every word is the double of itself, as I said earlier. And, as a man, to understand my love, perhaps you only have to listen to precisely everything I have not said, in all these words I have levied against you in our happy contest of will. As I have said so much, I imagine it is very difficult for you to find what I didn’t say. And if there is nothing that I did not say? If I have said everything there is to say? But no. A poet might say all there is to say, and even more than there is to say, which is to be expected of such fools, but it is in the greatness of philosophers to leave always something unsaid, in however plodding a discourse.
I would prepare you in this way, and allay your ‘holy dread’, [size=85]2 [/size]lest we become lost in the Venusian sphere and held back with its many traps, beyond which, in the Dantean scheme, no poet successfully crosses.
[size=85]1. The perils of Dante’s ‘terzo cielo’, or the third heaven of human love. Pound believes no poet can cross that sphere into higher divinity, and imposes the challenge:
" I have brought the great ball of crystal;
Who can lift it?
Can you enter the great acorn of light?
But the beauty is not the madness
Tho’ my errors and wrecks lie about me.
And I am not a demigod,
I cannot make it cohere."
He is recalling his own translation of Herakles’ dying words: “in what splendor, it all coheres.” The third heaven poses the challenge: can the poet-artist leave his ‘written Paradise’ and painted Goddess behind in the third sphere, the domain of Venus,- the fallen Garden,- and so expiate his human failures by reconciling them to his artistic pride, and to the limitation of all flesh, that he might cast his forgery of a Self away, and so embrace a higher truth than all that had been yet written or sung by him.[/size]
[size=85]2. You spoke of Coleridge’s flower to me once. What if you dreamed of a beautiful flower and awoke one day holding it in your hand?- “What then?” I dreamed of such a flower until I thought I was mad, until I thought that I was alone with that great beauty, (For, following the logic of Kierkegaard’s diapsalmata, the depths of solitude are not tested by our sorrows; rather, it is to be alone with our joys and with our beauty that finds the real measure of our loneliness.) and that what I poured all of my heart into was only a dream, a dream that would pass, and I would pass with it, like a madness, into nothing. Yet I woke up one day from my madness, from my solitude, and your legs were coiled around me, like a devious serpent, with the promise of Knowledge; and I looked next to me and saw you sleeping, with a crooked half-smile,- the kind of smile only those are capable of who bear many beautiful secrets. And Coleridge asks what then. What then? Well, should I answer Coleridge with Coleridge? Waking up from that long dream with that flower in our hands, should we close our eyes again? Should you, Sarah, to recall that poets’ own words in another verse, “close your eyes with holy dread, for he on honey-dew hath fed, and drunk the milk of Paradise”?