Huge thanks to all of you for subscribing to Vita Contemplativa. And thank you again for the wonderful words and support for the last piece (with a few notable exceptions: I can proudly announce that I’ve accreted my first true Substack haters!). Anyways, after the sheer flaming Discourse of my last piece, I’ve decided to start somewhat fresh, to try to figure out just what this Substack might be. So you can expect, for at least a little while, more pieces or poems or errata on the slightly, shall we say, “experimental” side (not too much so, but still…).
I’m most interested in turning this site into a place that can host just about any kind of writing, not just personal essays. So I’ll be running some tests to that end, to see what sticks and what doesn’t. It’s my genuine hope that this will not only free myself from having to pander or court, but will hopefully free you, reader, from being courted or pandered to. It’s been a pretty consistent, linear rise in subscriptions here for the past three months. I can only hope that won’t change. But who knows! Thanks for hanging on until now, folks.
Now, by no means do I expect anyone to obsess over today’s post. It is merely a response which I had to make, to a series of discoveries. You see, I was born on the 26th of April. For me this has made my literary life a swirl of eerie confluences. So a few notes may be helpful before tackling the poem below:
1) Modern English Literature “begins” in April, with the first line of The Canterbury Tales.
2) April 26th is the date of Stephen Dedalus’s famous penultimate diary entry, in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the day before he embarks on his life journey.
3) The 26th was also at one time the traditional celebration of Shakespeare’s birthday, though now we celebrate it as the 23rd.
4) In 1932, on the 27th of April (April 27th also being the last of Stephen’s entries, and the completion of my first day on earth), Harold “Hart” Crane drowned in the midst of a voyage across the Gulf of Mexico.
5) Crane was the completion of the timeless figure of the drowned poet—the most famous example being Milton’s “Lycidas,” which Percy Shelley re-figured in “Adonais,” his eulogy for John Keats. Shelley himself drowned in 1822. It is only fitting that Crane, perhaps the last Romantic poet, ended the line the way he did.
6). Ralph Waldo Emerson also died on April 27th, in 1882. He is my American grandfather, just as Samuel Johnson is my British one.
7) Of all the figures who initiated me into literature, Harold Bloom remains the dearest, for all his flaws. To me he was the first teacher, whom I did not get to meet. His favorite poet was of course Crane—his namesake. That is one part of him—the other part he shares with his great literary analogue, Leopold Bloom. If you have read both The Odyssey and Ulysses, you will know that Joyce makes Leopold Bloom his Odysseus, to Stephen Dedalus’s Telemachus.
8) Somewhere in the midst of this is Shakespeare, of whom Stephen Dedalus says he “fathered himself” in the act of writing Hamlet. The true subject of Ulysses is probably Shakespeare.
9) The rest I leave to you, reader.
A Personal Mythology, to Confuse and Edify
Young Half Kinch hied up to Bloom Brontosaurus
Saying, “O gray and blooming bodhidharma,
Look—you’ve gone and made poor Half Kinch crazy,
Saying things even old Bill Shakspeyre,
Tom Bedlam, old nobody’s body, could say!
Step light and wake not old Nobodaddy,
Not in the quick of this denuded world.”
Stately, plump Bloom Brontosaurus
Sweeping wide with Gnostic pen,
Trawled down the shore, then, as rash young
Half Kinch came trawling after him.
And turning to the boy, Bloom boomed out:
“Remember your First and Second Samuel,
Your books of older testament,
Books of the prophet and sage of God’s city,
Remember the words the Fathers said!
“First Sam Johnson, port- and gate-man,
Dictionary trudger, weaver, wiseman—
Firmly planting the tilled green middle
Of the ruddy mother tongue.
“Next poor Coleridge, opiate dreamer,
Pantisocratic critic-bard;
Fleet idealist; ballad-makyr;
Brother to our second William—
Of Nature and of Milton, son.
“Then who’ll be third, the next-unwritten,
The as-yet-unaccomplished one?
They say he waits and bides his time
In suffering with his flagellated limbs,
They say he dreams dark dreams of flight
To other nations, under other suns...”
“Ah but what of Beckett, Clemens?”
Half Kinch piped up, looking sly.
“Good, all good,” said Bloom, “And yet—
The first has disavowed all ties—
The next has changed his name—
Will you dare the same?
“Look in the sand there,” Poldy told he:
“Fathers, sons, all spiraling—
Endless rings of spite begetting
Endless nights of fevered dreams…
What can one do, so lost in the midst
Of all these enviable Greeks, my boy?
Be not too Roman, nor too Hebrew,
Or just another Saxon man:
Wake the Tempest up now, seize it
With both hands—and cast it in.”
“Indeed I ought to,” Half Kinch muttered,
Gazing darkly into the sea,
“And yet I think that if I were to,
It would be the end of me….”
“And so we must beget ourselves,”
Old Valentinus Bloom was saying,
“See how the father fathers on—
Yahweh, Adam Kadmon, Christ;
Shakesspere fathered Joyce, and Joyce
Gave birth to Stephen, and on, and on—”
“But if I balk at all this nothing…”
Half Kinch whispering into the wind,
“If the world is gray, or slumbers
Waiting for the day to end…?”
But to the sun chanted Harry-Poldy:
“As his own new protomartyr burst
Out from the head like Zeus’s crown—
In intellect, how he blazed like Lucifer,
Waging war with Olympus Mons!
Since Joyce it was gave birth to you,
His Stephen is your Stephen, too:
To read him is to read a father,
To father yourself, and to discover
What you were before you knew!
“On the 26th of April
How you burst wide out the womb!
On the same day, young Joyce sailing
Out into the next great wave.
So he wrote—you will remember—
‘Welcome, O life!’ And how he went
To forge in the smithy of his soul
The uncreated conscience of his race—
“So he prayed to Father Dedalus,
Old artificer, pushing him out the tower,
As you did this very morning—
So Half Kinch, be not weary of the moon,
For sublunary lovers are not brave
Or bold—but crave necessity.”
Half Kinch stopping a while in the sand,
Bloom Bardolator recomposing
Thoughts to speak to him again,
“Recall the words again, my son:
Whan that Aprille with his schowres swoote…
So the 26th bore this boy to me,
The day that once was Shaxpeer’s day,
Though now they make it 23…”
“Old man,” said young Half Kinch, turning,
“I rebuke you—tell me no more things,
No dispiriting myths of empires
Or prophetic sounds of kings,
Or rash theistic speculation—
Or whatever craves that god’s demise.
“Old man, have you forgotten your namesake,
The herald who leaped, but did not swim?
Long live the Joycean day of him,
And yet the poet still drowned at sea:
Shelley, Adonais, Lycidas, Crane—
As each Childe next to the dark tower came,
To leap off the same very day Walden died—
Have you forgotten the leap, and the name?
Too much compacted in a world too wide,
In a sea of poets’ suicides.
“No more of trumpeting furious nations,
Or suns that blanche the bottled sky:
Mystic and ruinous, deft or sublime;
Mercurial wonder, leaving us bereft
And lost in the gatehouse—are you listening,
As all your order sifts into time?
Why build more libraries,
Why map more stars,
Why think to teach, or hope to learn—
When the world would go on forever, pretending
It only ever wished to burn?
“Keep your keepsakes, your memento mori,
Death is the only way for me—
To die into dying, to dream into dreaming:
To melt at last in the wine-dark sea—
This is an Age of Chaos, spurning
All the whims of ancient scenes,
And all the grafted, dark traditions
Of anxious poets, gods, or kings.
To believe in nothing—that is the dream.”
Now Half Kinch walking up the sandbar,
Leaving behind the old Blooming Sage,
Now Blooming Man—trudging slowly
Back to the tower, to sleep again.
But poor old Ulysses, lost on the shoreline,
Lest he lose his son again,
Shouts to Telemachus—crying,
As the purple sun descends:
“Who can say a word to wonder
At the things you’ve said, my son?
Grim and purposeless years beset us,
The world seems more and more undone.
The Black Death haunts the city summer
Where you try to write your way—
To play-at-acting, a droll, a mummer—
Why not, as Job did, curse your day?
Is this all we have learned from setting
Words in print and ink and type?
I think it must be, if disorder
Burst the boundaries of our life...”
“You words are nothings,” Half Kinch answered,
Turning for a moment back—
“Arguing over meanings, when
All the earth laughs at our lack.
Now we’ve built a crumbling planet,
A Nature worshiped just in spite,
What else is left us, but to kill?”
“To build!” Bloom shouted, “Even knowing
Jehovah waits to knock it down—
This tower of mud-brick in the clearing
Is only life’s playhouse, in-the-round.
And if at the end, the curtain opens,
And you and I step out to bow,
Remove our masks, and show these groundlings
That all the time they thought the world
Was spinning, it was just at play?
Life-against-life, a command performance,
As the evening and the morning were the first day…?”
“But to live,” a quiet Half Kinch whispered,
“Not wanting, or only knowing want—
Just as if life was there to seek it,
And not to live as if to know.”
The man, apart in the dusk made shadow,
May have nodded quietly;
Still for a moment father, son, and father
Stood there on the beach.
Then soon the two had wandered together
Over the dune, past the light in the tower.
And one reached out his ancient stick
To draw a boundary in the sand;
The other took his heavy hand
And signed his closest name in the dirt.
Then looking up to see the sunset,
Knowing both were bound to sail—
The one to distant father-islands,
The one to final evening lands—
Who saw the ship was in the harbor—
The trip begun,
The work began.
An excellent personal disclosure.
Drowning poets. My biggest fear is suffocation.
My first father is Yeats. Through all the changes in himself and the world, always lyric.
Let us all participate with Sam.