Addendum

As an addendum to yesterday's post about Crowley's The Book of the Law, I want to make something clear about the text. Both Crowley's intro to the text and his postscript are written rather gauchely. Because, in the postscript, Crowley inappropriately suggests that the book should not be studied, for fear of the life of the individual who might study it, he comes across as rather a histrionic adolescent; or, as we see here, The Fool. The Fool on the Hill does, indeed, have a problem; through fooling around with states of non-being and nothingness, while trying to seem to himself like a substantial individual, a something, as it were, on the surface, the Fool has reduced himself to a Zero-state. As he plummets off the cliff, he is a reminder not to be half-assed, where Nothing/Something dichotomies are concerned. Crowley could have used this reminder. Those who will study The Book of the Law, for its literary excellence, will just have to deal with an author unwilling to handle what he has created, and who is more than willing to play the fool.

Do what thou wilt...

There is the big chunk of Crowley's Book of the Law which reads to me as superior poetry; then, there is the dictum which in many circles has become a commonplace: Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. Crowley remarks, in his introduction, that Do what thou wilt constitutes a simple code of conduct; which implies that what is being signified is a simple Do what you want. Thus, the bastardization of Crowley into Satanic, adolescent cults and orders, mostly undeserved, is due partly to Crowley's own negligence; because there is another, richer way of reading Do what thou wilt. The way I have always chosen to read the dictum, Will (Thelema, in the text) is something, an individual essence, which must be divined for through processes of arduous spiritual labor and eventual catharsis. To "do one's will," one first has to know one's will thoroughly. The process of learning one's own will involves not only introspection but awareness of all levels and gradations of positive and negative Otherness; how the individual must stand in relation to the rest of the (complex, contradictory) human race. Not simple stuff. Just as Love is the law, love under will can only be the manifestation of internalizing complex realities and assimilating them over long periods of time. For the love to be there, under one's will, it must be directed concretely; you must be loving something or someone; and it is impossible to love everyone and everything.

P.S. This piece, on Crowley's novels Moonchild and Diary of a Drug Fiend, appeared on UK blog Eyewear in 2013.

I posit no boundary between us...

The line in the title poem of Posit (I posit/no boundary/between us) is one I'd like to parse, in reference to what Neo-Romanticism is meant to be in the humanities world in 2017. If looked at objectively, an argument could be made that Modern art, post-modern art, and Deconstructionist literary theory are all largely constituted by a succession of boundaries, and a succession of boundaries effect. In other words, the works of art, and the texts, are a game and a gambit against both intimacy, and the possibility of intimacy, between reader/viewer and creator. Deconstructionism configures intimacy as naive, as both an intention and a possibility, largely through the perceived obtrusion of the arbitrary into language and linguistic significations. Modernity and post-modernity lean heavily on alienation tactics and irony motifs. To torque Wilde, the importance of being earnest is lost. Yet Deconstructionism must withstand its own contradictions; as Roland Barthes enumerates how we might be seduced by texts, it must be understood that what is seductive in textuality is, in itself, the possibility of writer/reader intimacy; and that intimacy can only be a viable possibility if what is arbitrary in language is balanced and offset by what in language and linguistic symbolization is purposeful (as Wordsworth would have it), and penetrant into the psyche of those who read and experience the text. 

Neo-Romanticism is, in fact, predicated on a belief in the efficacy of aesthetic symbolization, and (specifically), the positing of no boundary between creator and viewer/reader. Neo-Romanticism, on a primordial level (manifest, perhaps, from a ricochet to Philadelphia's buildings), believes in itself, and believes in its audience. Why the Dusie chap Posit, which ten years ago was ricocheting across the country for the first time, was more a statement of intention than I at first perhaps perceived, is because I failed to grasp the underpinnings of the work itself (and of The Posit Trilogy, and Volo, which came later) in regards to the primordial compact I unconsciously projected onto it, as I created it; a self-regulated, self-sustaining world of good faith, good intentions, and genial good will towards whoever might choose to read the text. The Neo-Romanticism which arose from Aughts Philadelphia does, in fact, attempt to take the first person singular and make it genial again. There cannot be a "you," a second person singular, without an "I"; and the significance of poetry's primordial perspective, an "I" addressing a "you," is that it becomes a Heideggerian sheltering device against what might corrupt it from without. The succession of boundaries effect embedded in Modern and post-modern art, the creation of more and more vast distances between reader/viewer and creator, is not an effect Neo-Romanticism finds interesting. Formality is another issue, and off the table here; but, suffice it to say, formality creates the inherent genial good will of a rich relationship to history and histories, continuity of consciousness over long stretches of time. 

When formality is shifted into place as a prominent element of a literary text, as in The Witches of South Philadelphia, the genial good will of the artist is to, among other things, fulfill an imperative function that both Deconstruction and post-modernity largely lost: to entertain, edify, and enlighten the reader on the highest possible cognitive level. Readers read the poem because they enjoy it. This seems simple; it is not, in practice. Literature in the American Academy is so painfully onerous, as a Babel-level enterprise or (often) anti-enterprise, that literary types stick to books as a mode of self-abnegation and self-abasement. As a graduate student, I worked under a professor once, and I endeavored to bring this complex to the surface. We stick to these texts, I said, because we enjoy them; we study literature because we like it; correct? You'd be amazed that he was nonplussed enough that producing an answer seemed, to him, inadvisable and impossible. I never forgot the sense I had that here, folks, was an impostor; someone doing something for the wrong reason, whatever that reason might have been. Posit, The Posit Trilogy, Volo, Witches, and the rest are all aiming to cut out the proverbial middle man, academic or not. 

Ode: On the Schuylkill

Borne by the river’s back, boat-legions rolled

    in search of commerce, bridges to build;

souls, cargo (heavy, light), bought & sold,

    coffers waiting in Philly to be filled.

Ladies leaped gingerly onto green banks,

    bound in satin or lace, versed in politesse or no,

        & walked rote patterns, inscribed insignias in the air;

crew-ship kids, underlings already in their ranks,

    sought to make the landing show-offy, slow,

       hulked a hundred yards from a drunken fair.

Add a century, an Expressway looms over

   the murk— wave-sounds, squeals, & metal—

which the Schuylkill cannot answer, hovering

    under— slow-moving, patient, & settled.

The river’s mind is limpid— the human race

   churns around it restlessly, adding bodies

      shorn of dignity, bloated, pulp-bloody, blue,

having carried burdens the river never dreams

    of, emptiness so incorrigible the Schuylkill’s face

         registers nothing but disinterested waves— tender, true.

The Over-brain, peering in, questioning, elevates

    the Schuylkill’s mystery into frozen heat—

truth & beauty buoyed up in the browning, decay, fate

    of all water-bodies prone to human meat—

I sit on the edge, watching overhanging leaves,

    frozen myself by the gross negligence

      of what lies beneath the river’s surface,

& my own, as the summer sun inverts, grieves

     for the masses, exploring no penitence

        as I am, grounded, here, & diving for purpose—

 

 

The Smitten European Syndrome

Anyone who's lived in Philadelphia for more than a few years knows the Smitten European Syndrome. On one's travels in Philly, periodically one will run into European folk, who passionately vow for Philadelphia against all the other American cities: for class, style, distinction, and dignity. It's just something that happens. Much of the European hoopla around Philadelphia has to do with architecture: after all, what a city essentially amounts to is a collection of buildings. As a collection of buildings in the continental United States, Philadelphia is peerless. What the Philly Free School amounts to, is an extended attempt to transmute the grandiosity, stateliness, and gravitas of Philadelphia's architecture into a body of higher artistic work; why I called one of our key pdfs Our Architecture Did This To Us. All these facets of Philly, as a construct, point to one essential reality: Philadelphia is an adult city; a city about solidity, on and beneath the surface. For the continental United States to grow into an appropriate awareness of PFS, all the sectors of America which remain Babyland sectors (the press corps are the worst, and NYC, with its bold-facade-with-nothing-behind-it emptiness, runs a close second) will have to grow up. What I'm doing here now amounts to planting seeds, because wheels this extensive and ponderous can only turn slowly.

& Now, Chicago...

As per other Happenings Ten Years Time Ago: on July 6, 2007, I read with a bunch of Chicago poets at Kate the Great's bookstore in Andersonville, Chi-Town. We wound up doing three Philly Free School readings at Kate the Great's; the final one, in the summer of '08, capped off a trip on which I lectured at Loyola behind Opera Bufa. Illustrated here is a Loyola (Prof. Laura Goldstein) syllabus featuring the book: 

this, also, is a term paper written on the book for the class by Stacy Blair:

But, back to the main: I forgot to mention: Philadelphia and Chicago do share many key issues. Chicago's image problem is a hinge to Philadelphia's: that to make Chi-Town simple is a fool's game. Down to rich Chicago suburbs appearing in 80s movies with which we learned our moves as kids (Bueller? Bueller?). And here's another big Aughts Chicago push for Opera Bufa. Here is Opera Bufa in its entirety on WAV file:

Double Imperatives

Ten years ago today, on June 9, 2007, I stepped into the post office, on Chestnut Street between 20th and 21st Streets in Center City Philadelphia, to mail out the first copies of my Dusie chap Posit. The Dusie Kollektiv extended its reach all over the world at that time. A decade and many books and e-books later, it is interesting to reflect, on June 9, 2017, what it means to spend ten years publishing on high levels. What it brings to the surface, for me, is an awareness and an acknowledgment that we are living through a transitional time, where publishing is concerned. The splintered or splintering effect in publishing, created by the competing, not always commensurate demands of online life against print life, has created a sense of the whole enterprise as a whirling dervish highwire act, in poetry if not prose. Posit, in 2007, was released as a print chapbook and an e-book simultaneously; Mark Young's journal Otoliths had that double-pronged effect going then, and still does. Beams came out as an e-book later in '07, and pirated print editions soon appeared on the market; while later books like Apparition Poems and Cheltenham were released in print without precise online counterparts. To make up that difference, I placed the pdfs on sites like Scribd and Internet Archive, where they have enjoyed some success. But the point, that the publishing imperative should, of necessity, become a double imperative by '17, is one which adds gravitas to a semi-Sisyphean conception or paradigm model of publishing, in which only the super-diligent and highly motivated might survive, and the idea of standing, confidently and suavely, behind print alone, is an antiquated one.

In fact, from '17 on out, it looks like in many ways online is winning, which I did not expect. The reason is simple: online offers a more pure, less riddled-with-corruption reading experience than print does. The paradigm which held sway in my mind for many years, of print and online holding commensurate weight and finding ways and means of balancing each other out, now in and of itself seems antiquated. Online, of course, cannot be completely utopic; the human race en masse are not capable of producing utopic contexts; but many of us at least do not feel, by '17, that we've stepped into a Rosemary's Baby-level Satanic orgy when we read online. Amazon is just that, an obvious, obviously corrupt jungle; as is the University library system in the United States. It is the province of rackets and racketeers. The problem, for myself as a literary individual, is that I love print books. I adore them. Yet, if the integrity and the purity is online, there I must remain. When I stepped into the post office on Chestnut Street ten years ago today, many poetry voices were still dismissive of online as a viable context for poetry. So much has changed that, unbelievably, if you want to ride the publishing cutting edge in '17, you may have to admit that print can be expendable now. Preservation techniques have made online a suitable venue for eternity, and the eternity sweepstakes; and print has become a fool's paradise's, at least part of the time, for clods and literary clod-ism.