The Vestibule in Our Dreams
An Essay on Poetry, Ceremony and Digital Consciousness
He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven
W. B. Yeats
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.Introduction: The Abolition of Poetry
The following piece will be, in part, a continuation of the sustained argument I presented in The Ouroboros of Humanity. In brief, that essay put forth the following points: We can make a useful division of literature into local, regional and provincial; Post World War II, a great cultural and literary shift occurred which may be termed World Provincialism; This shift was animated at root, by an adherence to the Religion of Humanity; This change resulted in immense literary changes, and in my opinion, for the worse.
This present essay aims to examine, in regards to the poetic act, our local realities, our piety towards our realities, our ceremonial awareness towards existence, and the present state of our local realities as mediated by digital technology. I can only ask for the reader’s patience and forgiveness for presenting an essay as labored and diffuse as this one.
I intend to lay out some thoughts on the function of Poetry. Particularly the function of poetry to counteract prevailing cultural forces causing psychic deformations to the human person. These poetic functions are part and parcel of discussing our current spiritual maladies; And because of this, I will also lay out a few general observations about our current psycho-spiritual environment. Namely, that we suffer an affliction of rampant, untrammeled positivization, by which I mean (taken from Byung-Chul Han) our hyper-tolerant relation to information under the force of unlimited increase of intellectual and material goods.
Contemporary poetry is not ameliorating nor addressing our spiritual maladies. Contemporary poetry is, more often than not, poetry of the individual. I do not mean poetry of the person, but of the individual who is merely a substantiated symbol of generic humanity. There can be communication between individuals, but not communion. Communion requires persons. The problem of communication without communion is emblematic of the course of thought I will be pursuing. We deny the person yet demand communion; We chop down the vine yet demand the fruit.
The mechanics of poetry have been devalued by our culture. Not only do people not appreciate poems, they are unable to appreciate poems. In fact, appreciation of poems is a rarity even among the general reader, which in itself is already a rare thing. The poem appreciator is a double rarity. Making poetry is like speaking a near-extinct language, it’s no surprise when you are not understood.
That we might both better assess our poetic situation and suggest possible avenues of convalescence, we will be making intensive use of two books. The first is The Men I Have Chosen For Fathers by the Southern Agrarian poet-critic Marion Montgomery.1 He will provide us the major contours of our arguments, in both proposition and solution. All of the quotations from Mr. Montgomery in this essay will come from the book’s Introduction.
The second book is The Disappearance of Rituals by the philosopher Byung-Chul Han.2 He will provide us with a contemporary look at ceremony, and many descriptions of ceremony’s function. We will be making extensive connections between poetry and ceremony, the reason for which will become apparent as we continue our argument.
Even though this essay will be examining diverse and sundry functions of poetry, I would like to state here that the mere enjoyment of poetry is sufficient reason to read any one, single poem. The general reader does not need to present a utilitarian defense of himself that goes beyond simple enjoyment.
We can feel some good deal of security in that statement because the erotic experience with reality is necessary for recovering our natures and our creatureliness. Eros is the beginning of all our loving—our desire for the fullness of being. Poetry, we will argue, shares an intimate relation to ceremony; And we might suggest here that ceremonial awareness cures the spiritual impotence of materialist assumptions. This is in hopes that we eliminate what is blocking our ability to consummate our erotic relation to existence.
The purpose of this essay is recovery and reformation. The recovery of poetry, and re-formation of poetry within the boundaries of our own time and space. As always, men are called upon to recall the fullness of real reality in their own lives and times. I am committed to the recovery and re-formation of poetry because in the words of Josef Pieper:
“Now, as always, the workaday world can be transcended in poetry and the other arts. In the shattering emotion of love, beyond the delusions of sensuality, men continue to find entrance to the still point of the turning world. Now, as always, the experience of death as man’s destiny, if accepted with an open and unarmored heart, acquaints us with a dimension of existence which fosters a detachment from the immediate aims of practical life. Now, as always, the philosophical mind will react with awe to the mystery of being revealed in a grain of matter or a human face.”3
How great a gift is poetry then? And how great is the loss from its disappearance? Our culture of refined barbarity has been chopping away at poetry’s roots. It has labored, burrowing the axe deep into the heartwood of piety and ceremony. Is it any wonder that poetry has declined? We destroy ceremonial awareness towards existence and therefore asymptotically scuffle closer towards the Abolition of Poetry.
I. Poetry: Local & Political
I would like to begin with The Men I Have Chosen for Fathers by Marion Montgomery. In the Introduction he advances a line of thought about poetry written in the “Regional Spirit” and makes many important observations about poetry in general.
He begins, “I take poetry or any making by intellect as necessarily local. For intellect uses the world immediately adjacent to the poet’s mind and senses, whatever modifications his mind may give it in an attempt upon the universal. It uses the language the poet hears, or thinks he hears, however he may adapt that language to his sense of form”
With this quote, let us begin from the beginning: Art is made from what is local to us. The materials of our art come from what is around us. We use our language, our culture, our people, our home and our perceptions. Importantly, art is not contained within these things. Certainly not anymore than a painting is contained within a tube of paint. Despite this, they still constitute a necessary part of the artistic act.
Now, if art is necessarily local then the local is obviously important to the artist. What we see, hear or otherwise encounter in our daily lives has a direct effect on the artistic act. Therefore, stewardship of the flesh is a priority for making art. We aim to both preserve the local and preserve ourselves, which means practicing a perceptive discrimination of our directly experienced reality. We must protect ourselves from the local while also maintaining our connection with reality.
We will argue that a poetry which withdraws from real reality and thus abandons the local is lesser poetry, as it causes a deformation of reality and our persons. Momentarily, we shall examine the very legitimate reasons why a poet might retreat from the local, using the example of politics. However, though the poet may have valid reason, we will argue that a poet giving up on his language, his culture, his people and so forth, is an abdication of poetic responsibility.
Moving on, If we posit that poetry is necessarily local, we have at the very least provided a reason for why there is so frequently an overlap between the critique of art and the critique of culture. We can see that they have a direct relation to one another. They both feed and starve each other.
For example, the culture can feed the artist with a mature, expressive language, and the artist, having used that language, can feed the culture with the fruits of his contemplation. Or the opposite is possible, the artist can starve the culture of art and the culture can starve the artist of language. Naturally, there are hundreds of configurations for this relationship which we could come up with, but the example stated should suffice.
Resuming our argument, if the culture provides the local4 then the artist is not fully responsible for what is “immediately adjacent” to his senses. (Though let us assume he possesses some degree of bodily autonomy.) The artist, being not wholly responsible for what is local, is however responsible for the “modifications” he gives to what is immediate. And here, we are nearing what is more properly the poetic act.
However, before we move on to these “modifications” we must not avoid the question of what is responsible for providing the local and thereby gloss over a salient fact—the local threatens the poetic act. It is in this gray area of fuzzy borders that we as poets must wrestle. Where we are not quite responsible for our materials, but nonetheless remain responsible for how we use those materials. And all this, despite the fact that we operate under threat, which brings us to the consideration of politics in our argument.
One of the main threats from the local is politics, and unfortunately I do not believe this threat can be eliminated. From the necessity of the local we can derive reasons for why art is, to a significant degree, political. Is not politics concerned with what we see and hear? Is it not concerned with what we say? And more now than ever in an age of propaganda?5 I believe the answers to these questions are quite evident. At the very least, art is political because politics will make it political.
As we all know, It has become a frequent refrain today that art is “too political.” Though I will quickly concede that the complaint is justified, I’m afraid this betrays shallow thinking. This criticism does not understand the enormity of the artistic task. Whatever determines the local becomes an artistic concern because the local is an unavoidable part of making art.
Perhaps I might help clarify the issue by stating that Political Art is not the same as Partisan Art. Partisan Art is often what we mean when we complain about art being too political. Partisan art is incredibly susceptible to becoming propaganda and in critical language becoming provincial, or in plain terms bad. Also, may I remind the reader that there is both political art and partisan art which is good. This should not surprise us, the existence of good partisan art merely supports the conclusion that what makes art good is beyond both politics and partisanship.
That I might clarify further what I mean by politics, perhaps I might put it like this: If the philosophical question might be stated “How then should we live?” the political question might be stated “How then should we live together?” Politics is concerned with ordering the flesh; And in our time, politics is concerned with managing the flesh. It is essential for the artist to know that even if he is not interested in politics, which is perfectly natural, politics is interested in him—interested in managing him.
I do not know of an easy answer for the problem of politics and the poet. Perhaps there is an opportunity for the Critic here. He might take it upon himself to defend poetry from the onslaught of politics. It is quite unfortunate that the majority of our recent, popular critics have, in fact, been the ones responsible for the assault.
Those Critics, who are not paid hatchet men for the regime, have made a conceptual error. They have confused poetry with science, and more than that, they see poetry as a broken science. Critics are interested in poetry for its shared qualities with psychology and sociology in the mode of therapeutics. They see poetry as a therapeutic means to manage the individual.
Before we leave the topic of political art, it should be stated that art can be political in two ways, art can be made political by politics and art can be political in itself. Personally, I do not want to give up on either side of the issue. I want politics to be interested in art, and I want art to be interested in politics. I do not believe there is a system which can solve this dilemma. The only thing which can navigate such a dilemma is Virtue, which is an answer but not a solution.
In summation, we might say there is a need to develop political thinking that both preserves poetry with politics, and protects poetry from politics. A near impossible task that is laden with risk. And by politics I mean political action, by which I mean acting not upon policy but upon customs, norms and mores.
I would like to make clear that I do not say that art is political with gladness. It is a troubling and threatening fact. The purpose of considering politics in our argument is so that we might become acutely aware of the threat that a totally encompassing local poses for our poetry. We aim to free poetry from being trapped by politics.
Poets—in differing degrees proportionate to their talents, interests and circumstances—must contend with the encroachment of politics so that the integrity of the poetic sphere might be maintained. And in point of fact, the emergent dynamism caused by the friction between the poetic and political spheres allow the poet yet another depth of language through which can pursue his art.
If we reject that the local totally comprehends art, in the sense of wrapping around in complete capture, the local remains at the poet’s disposal as raw poetic material, with which he can reflect the clarity and brilliance of Being Itself in an infinite array of specific forms.
II. The Poet’s Piety
Moving beyond politics and on to those “modifications” which we give to the local in our art, let us now return to Mr. Montgomery: “Time and place nevertheless are always threats to language, as they are to man, who is by his soundest differentiation the user of signs, of ‘language.’ Time and space limit language’s spirit, even as they also threaten to overcome that spirit that announces itself through language. The world’s threat, the dangers of time and place, is inevitable, given the soul’s anxiety for autonomy”
He continues, “The local—the world adjacent, as revealed to the poet’s mind—is consequently the poet’s relevant concern insofar as he hopes to transcend time and place by his poetry…For the poet’s reader no less than for himself, the local—the coincidence of event with time and place—threatens the larger resonances of that event called poetry, whose proper arena is a timeless placelessness. The danger of time and place to poetry is the possible entrapment of poetry by history.”
We are not ahistorical, disembodied beings. Our consciousness lives at a certain place in a certain time, and to deny these realities is to deny the body. However, to push these realities further and state that man’s consciousness is, strictly speaking, a product of his time and place, is denial of the soul. Herein is the challenge of poetry. Poetry sits teetering atop a precipice, at every point in danger of careening off the edge when pushed by an ignorant hand that denies Being. And if we might give that ignorant hand (in but one of its sundry modes) a proper name, perhaps Historicism will suffice.
Since poetry’s proper arena is a timeless placelessness, poetry will naturally be resistant to the constraints of flesh—time and place. Hence why we can be easily aggravated with politics or other particularities in art. However, a full-minded view of Poetry and Being does not deny these constraints.
Montgomery continues, “Now the problem the poet has in achieving a transcendence of the local in his art—in moving his art beyond the jealous intrusions of the local—does not lie in his struggle with time and place so that he may escape them, as if escape were the primary end…As if one might by going to New York or London or Paris thereby throw off all the iron weights upon the wings of his song.”
He adds, “Such is an enduring temptation to the poet, one that Dante rejects dramatically at the outset of his great poem.” We shall return to Dante in a moment. First let us explore this temptation that Montgomery has brought to our attention.
If the temptation of the local (and politics) is to restrain poetry and fully entrap it within History, then the temptation of the poet is to cast off the local, flesh and all. Montgomery states that escaping time and place as the primary end “has been the poet’s general inclination in my lifetime.” Contrary to this, he says “The first necessity is to address time and place, engage the realities of finite existence as directly experienced.”
Poets have quite often attempted to loose themselves of the limits of their own humanness. Instead wanting to create a world unto themselves for their poetry to reside. We can see this in Wallace Stevens’ stunning achievement “Sunday Morning.” A fully admirable poem of majesty and serenity. But in what world does this serenity ring true?
The poem is a contemplative episode of a woman in her dressing gown as she gazes upon the objects in her room. Her thoughts wander amongst the brightness of her “late coffee and oranges” but find their way under the force of something ancient and dark:
“Over the seas, to silent Palestine, Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.”
Which is to say, the tomb of Christ. She continues:
“Why should she give her bounty to the dead? What is divinity if it can come Only in silent shadows and in dreams.”
She concludes:
“Divinity must live within herself:”
With this divine power she self-postulates:
“She says, ‘I am content when wakened birds, Before they fly, test the reality Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings, But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields Return no more, where then is paradise?’”
Now this is where many poets might leave us—in placid contentment where the poetic figure of the lively birds test reality with the poetic phrases of their sweet questions from which they gain their nourishment. A sweet question such as the poem itself, we might add.
However, Stevens with his perceptiveness takes us further:
“She says, ‘But in contentment I still feel The need of some imperishable bliss.’ Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams”
And finally nearing conclusion, our contemplatrix returns to Christ’s tomb:
“She hears, upon that water without sound, A voice that cries ‘The tomb in Palestine Is not the porch of spirits lingering. It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.’”
“Where he lay,” the crux of the issue indeed. And so, what is the response to the un-resurrected Christ—the one who lays in His grave?
“We live in an old chaos of the sun, Or old dependency of day and night, Or island solitude, unsponsored, free, Of that wide water, inescapable.”
And in this “island solitude” what are we left with?
“And, in the isolation of the sky, At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make Ambiguous undulations as they sink, Downward to darkness, on extended wings.”
The mere undulations of those birds as they sink into darkness. Our contemplatrix finds more beauty in the death of Christ than in His resurrection. On her isolated island as she gazes into the isolated sky, she finds her own self-made paradise, and so with the fulfillment of her desires in this snow-globe cosmos which she can agitate and watch as the little birds glide in their ambiguous undulation.
I ask any man to find fulfillment in such a scenario. The answer is that no man could find contentment in that “island solitude.” Unless of course, he pursues the destruction of his own natural desires. Which is the precise fact we are bringing under contention.
Now, let us turn to Dante’s treatment of the local:
Unlike “Sunday Morning” Dante rejects casting off the local in The Divine Comedy. Montgomery explains, “[Dante’s] pilgrim may not climb the Mountain of Hope before he goes into and through the dark world so palpably local. The first necessity is to address time and place, engage the realities of finite existence as directly experienced. And so Dante performs that symbolic drama by descending where hope is all but abandoned, into Hell, as prelude to an awakening on Purgatory. Throughout, his poem is freighted most marvelously with the local, but most especially in his Hell. And through the bearing of that weight of the local, he arrives at last at a moment of vision, a resolution of his journey. After which, however, he must return to the presence of time and place, back into this present moment in this discrete place to sing his journey.”
Dante’s prioritization of the local is evident even in the language of the poem, “Dante’s election of vulgar Italian is evidence of a stirring regional spirit put in operation against a provincial attitude toward Latin as the necessary instrument of any high poetry, an attitude incidentally that brought Latin’s death at last.”
As we can see in Dante, our struggles with the local do not have to be against the local, they can be through the local.
As poets, we will have to refuse the comforts of a closed poetic world—a hermetic world is a sterile world. Whether it be Stevens’ world of chosen poetic figures, an academic world frozen in the past buttressed by ossified formalism, or even a narcissistic world where the poet extols her litany of psychic wounds. Without fail, poets desire to collapse the entire world into the poetic world, or they seek to live exclusively in the poetic world. When in fact it is the “realities of finite existence as directly experienced” that are truly alive, innervated with “on-goingness.”
However, a moment of pause: Perhaps we ask ourselves, are not the images in Stevens poem realities directly experienced? Is not the academic study of historical poems, a reality? Certainly a person’s psychic pain is real? Yes, to varying degrees. The pertinent issue reveals itself to be the poet’s attitude towards the local, which is to say whether one affirms or denies the validity of the local; And whether or not one abuses the local for his own ends.
For the poet, not abusing the local—that is, licentiousness—is a difficult task. And not without reason. A poet’s willingness to engage his direct realities is a matter of faith, and specifically a faith in something beyond him. He has to believe that he can achieve real, lasting resonance despite the apparent opacity of his local materials. To be clear, we are speaking of a faith in the local and not in one’s own ability. (As an aside, I might remark that the contemporary poet apparently does have faith in his own ability, but does not have faith in the capacity for ability. A stunning conceptual difficulty.)
In regards to local poetry, Montgomery describes a consequence of this faithlessness, “If great poetry is of necessity local, we may I believe distinguish it from a lesser poetry that also uses the local. That is, some poetry may be said to be provincial rather than regional...It is a regional deportment toward the world of the local, I believe, that leads to a transcendence of the local, for the poet no less than for those of separate callings, since by nature all are intellectual creatures.”
He goes on, giving us an example of provincialism in action, “consider that the terms academic and beat, as applied to poets, have been about equally terms of derision. When either term is used in derogation, it is intended to carry some of the onus in our term provincial. Academic poetry means poetry that takes form to be a mechanical relating of metrics to metaphor by wit, sanctioned primarily by history, the whole activity of this poetry at last divorced of the poet’s commitment to what he is saying or to that of which he speaks. On the other hand, beat poetry means those ceremonies of naive innocence ‘full of passionate intensity,’ whose origins the beat poet takes to be at least no more remote than that last great ‘happening’ for his benefit, whether World War II, or the Korean War, or the Vietnam War, or, in dull times, Irangate.”
Both the Academic and the Beat are provincially bound by time, the academic in the past and the beat in the now; Both eschewing the full resonances of poetry.
And in the current day, our poetry has culminated in a synthesis of Academic and Beat, which shows itself as farce—a sophisticated idiocy, provincially bound by time, identity and invert-morality.
The modern critic is a sophisticate of slop, a cognoscente of stupidity, a connoisseur of shit. As the dung beetle rolls his fecal horde, so does the contemporary poet revel in the literary exhibition of his own coprophagy.
If we might take a moment to summarize our argument thus far, we have explored the temptations on either side of poetry, both its complete entrapment in History and its complete escape from History. To answer this dilemma, Montgomery posits a regional conception of poetry. Regional poetry, to put a fine point on it, is the poetic use of the local in which we transcend the local without rejecting the local. Or more concretely stated, we can take the image of a flower, indeed a particular flower, and perceive through that flower the resonance of its “flowerness” without destroying the discrete integrity of that particular flower.
We have then stated that a poet’s deportment towards the local is the determinative factor in achieving a regional poetry. And what we mean to achieve with regional poetry is to avoid the deformation of reality and thus hamper the full resonances of the event we call poetry.
If we now wish to explore a poet’s proper deportment further, we can turn again to Mr. Montgomery: “Whether a poet turn out to be provincial or regional in his bearing toward the local is determined, I would have it, by a piety that is almost presumptuous. Piety here is the discriminating reverence through which the poet takes and uses the local, and the threat of presumption lies in his taking.” (Italics mine)
The regional approach to the local is one of piety. What, then, is piety?
“Piety is the mode of his ceremonial awareness of time and place. (I define ceremonial awareness as an action, whether or not words are said aloud.) The poet must use the local, that which is mediate through his senses to mind of the transcendent.”
And again, “But as we have been saying, he may use the local in a provincial or regional way. The difference is revealed by his deportment in relation to his origins and in relation to the immediacy of the time and place that impinge upon his discrete being.”
Our argument has been guiding us towards a “ceremonial awareness” of and “discriminating reverence” towards reality. Montgomery underscores the breadth and importance of this, “But whether regionally or provincially academic or beat, all poetry has one aspect in common—some degree of the ceremonial.”
He claims, “From Homer’s invocation of the muse to Allen Ginsberg’s mad incantation of his own spirit through a catalog of epithets. Whatever the use or abuse, it is through the ceremonial that one may recover that regional state of awareness of existence that I hold desirable. Indeed, regional as I mean it is that state of mind in which one is most acutely aware of the necessity of those ceremonies of innocence that Yeats announces our age to have lost.”
If it is through ceremony that we can recover the full resonances of reality, what then can we make of the ceremonial? What does it mean? What is its use? How is it achieved?
III. The Functions of Ceremony
To help us understand and possibly answer these questions, we will now take leave of Mr. Montgomery and turn to the book The Disappearance of Rituals by Byung-Chul Han.
Han provides a great deal of insight into the mechanics of ritual and ceremony. It does not appear to me that Han distinguishes between ritual and ceremony, and for our purposes I am going to consider them as rough equivalents and use them interchangeably, mainly so that we might continue the flow of the argument from Montgomery.
We will now explore Han’s book so that we might develop a sense of what ceremony is and what it does. Through the various descriptions presented here, we hope to inductively gain a clearer sight of ceremony’s place in our lives. Additionally we will be making sundry connections between ceremony and poetry in an effort to grasp their shared mechanics and shared sense of purpose.
Han tells us “Rituals stabilize life…In life, things serve as stabilizing resting points. Rituals serve the same purpose. Through their self-sameness, their repetitiveness, they stabilize life.” With regards to poetry, we might remark that one of the characteristics of poetry is verse, and verse certainly has the quality of repetition, whether that repetition be in the rhymes, line length or simply the prevailing metrical foot. We might ask ourselves to what degree can poetry stabilize our disposition towards reality via its repetitive medium with respect to achieving a co-inherent unity of feeling and conception—a palliative to the famed dissociation of sensibility.
Rituals also have the ability to bind persons to one another, Han explains “Rituals bring forth a community in which resonances occur, one that is capable of accord, of a common rhythm…Without resonance we are thrown back on to ourselves, isolated. Increasing narcissism works against the experience of resonance. Resonance is not an echo of the self; the dimension of the other is inherent in it. It means accord. Where resonance disappears completely, depression arises. Today’s crisis of community is a crisis of resonance.”
If ritual ameliorates a relentlessly shifting relation to life by stabilizing our attentive bewilderment, there is a corollary to our shifting relations to each other. With the dearth of accord, we become isolated and can longer resonate with one another. Perhaps we might label this a dissociation of personhood. While we are clearly still communicating with each other (at least to some degree) we are doing so without communion, without accord. It is serendipitous that Han describes “accord“ as a “common rhythm.” I think the correlation with poetry is obvious. In verse we can literally speak in a language of shared rhythm—a reflection and substantiation of the fuller resonance between persons.
Ritual not only stabilizes and bonds, but enables these functions in a beautiful way, “Forms of ritual, such as manners, make possible both beautiful behaviour among humans and a beautiful, gentle treatment of things. In a ritual context, things are not consumed or used up but used. Thus, they can also become old…Ritual practices ensure that we treat not only other people but also things in beautiful ways, that there is an affinity between us and other people as well as things.”
Poetry is a good which can be taken from and not suffer diminishment. We can see how this would be a quality which helps approximate the transcendent, immutable nature of the Beautiful. Poetry, as a beautiful and beautifully organized language, provides a pedagogical medium through which we can treat each other beautifully through speech. And perhaps we would be able to use each other without consuming each other, in the sense Han expresses above.
The very necessary functions of ritual are acutely felt when they are lost. Therefore rituals will surface again when men begin to seek meaning in their lives. However, a false idea of ritual and ceremony exists, and though it appears to us as the authentic article, this false idea is a counterfeit—a mere semblance or decoy. Han fascinatingly explains this in a veiled swipe he takes against Jordan Peterson:
“The need for ritual and fixed rules is being felt again following years of excessive deregulation. It is no coincidence that the subtitle of Jordan B. Peterson’s well-known self-help book, 12 Rules for Life, is An Antidote to Chaos. The demand for individually designed rites to mark the phases of life and their transitional points is also on the increase, with the place of priests now taken by so-called ritual designers. These novel rituals have to obey the imperative of authenticity and creativity. But they are not rituals in the proper sense. They do not exert the symbolic force which directs life towards something higher and thus provides meaning and orientation. Where there is no longer a higher order, rituals disappear.”
Apart from the very interesting observation here, we can apply the same concept to poetry in this way: Formal poetry does not necessarily denote ritual. Genuine poetry and pseudo-poetry can share the same formal semblance, however the difference is deeper than form. Genuine poetry “exerts the symbolic force which directs life towards something higher and thus provides meaning and orientation.” Pseudo-poetry ultimately will “obey the imperative of authenticity and creativity [and] are not rituals in the proper sense.”
And perhaps most importantly, “Where there is no longer a higher order, rituals disappear.” Can we assume that in the absence of a higher order, poetry disappears as well? I think it is probable.
Han gives us another function of ritual, “We can define rituals as symbolic techniques of making oneself at home in the world. They transform being-in-the world into a being-at-home. They turn the world into a reliable place. They are to time what a home is to space: they render time habitable. They even make it accessible, like a house. They structure time, furnish it.”
He will take the analogy further with a quote from Roland Barthes “They protect us, [Barthes] says, against the abysses of being: ‘Ceremony . . . protects like a house: something that allows one to live in one’s feelings. Example: mourning. . . .’ The ceremony of mourning ‘acts like a varnish, protects, insulates the skin against the atrocious burns of mourning’. When there are no rituals to act as protective measures, life is wholly unprotected.”
Rituals symbolically structure time, and make time accessible, and even further, they provide shelter from the “abysses of being.” Barthes says that ceremony allows one to live with one’s feelings. This is an interesting observation in regards to the problems of the dissociation of sensibility. If we might be a bit speculative, we could consider what function poetry serves as a “protective measure.” Is a world without poetry “wholly unprotected?” Does the poetic act play a role in making the word habitable and accessible for our consciousness? I think this can be helpful language if we wish to talk about the importance of poetry.
Han actually remarks on poetry explicitly in chapter 7, “Because of the compulsion of work and production, we are losing the capacity to play. We only rarely make playful use of language; we only put it to work. It is obliged to communicate information or produce meaning. As a result, we have no access to forms of language that shine all by themselves...Poems are structures with strict forms that shine all by themselves…They are characterized by an excess of the signifier; they are luxurious. We enjoy in particular their perfection of form. In poetry, language plays. For this reason, we hardly read poems any more. Poems are magic ceremonies of language. The poetic principle returns pleasure to language through a radical break with the economy of the production of meaning.”
(As a note of clarity Han juxtaposes meaning against meaningfulness elsewhere in the book. I believe he means by “information and meaning” to denote language which is not meaningful.)6
Han explicitly calling poems “magic ceremonies of language” obviously gives credence to the connections we have been making between poetry and ceremony, and their correlative functions. As he says, the poetic principle returns pleasure to language, and I believe we have already sketched out or otherwise suggested many other functions of the poetic principle, whether that be the stabilization of consciousness or the building of mutual resonance in accord.
Importantly and I believe quite rightly, Han also connects poetry with play—poetry is language at play. And because we are losing the capacity to play, he says we hardly read poems anymore. It seems that losing the capacity to play is concomitant with losing the capacity for poetry
As can be deduced from its title, The Disappearance of Rituals, Han’s book is about the lack of ritual in our daily lives. He spends much of the book exploring various reasons why ceremony and ritual are being undercut in our society. And continuing our theme, I think we can make the case that what undercuts ceremony, undercuts poetry. The depreciation of ceremony, play and poetry all share the same underlying cause.
If we remember that Han says rituals are symbolic techniques that exert symbolic force which push us upwards towards a higher order of being, we can understand the importance of this statement:
“Symbolic perception is gradually being replaced by a serial perception that is incapable of producing the experience of duration. Serial perception, the constant registering of the new, does not linger. Rather, it rushes from one piece of information to the next, from one experience to the next, from one sensation to the next, without ever coming to closure. Watching film series is so popular today because they conform to the habit of serial perception. At the level of media consumption, this habit leads to binge watching, to comatose viewing.”
The observation that film series (and now the short form digital video format) causes serial perception, and therefore comatose viewing, is an example of the medium is the message par excellence. Might we also suggest that symbolic perception is a necessary ability for the reading of poetry? I think the proposition has serious validity.
Han contrasts symbolic and serial perception, “While symbolic perception is intensive, serial perception is extensive. Because of its extensiveness, serial perception is characterized by shallow attention. Intensity is giving way everywhere to extensity. Digital communication is extensive communication; it does not establish relationships, only connections.”
This is perhaps the single greatest mechanical problem we face as poets. The readers, and no less ourselves, are suffering the decline of intensive perception. Anyone who has spent a great deal of time with a poem or has attempted to explicate a poem, can tell you that engagement with a poem is an intensive exercise. It requires our attention in an intensive mode. Meanwhile our digital mediums, which we regularly interface with, refashion our attention in the opposite extensive mode.
Han continues describing the digital medium, “In the digital world, where attention has a flat structure, silence and muteness have no place. Silence and muteness require a vertical structure, but digital communication is horizontal. In digital communication, nothing protrudes. Nothing deepens. It is not intensive but extensive, and this leads to an increase in communicative noise. Because we cannot remain silent, we must communicate. Or: we cannot remain silent because we are subject to the compulsion of communication, the compulsion of production. The liberation and emancipation from the word brought about by silence turns back into the compulsion of communication. Freedom reverts back into compulsion.”
If I might make an aside, poetry takes places on the backdrop of silence. Poetry receives its intensity because it presupposes silence. Poetry posists “suppose nothing was said” and therefore increases the weight and import of what is then actually said, when it speaks. Just as the natural stress of verse dynamically works against a set meter, so does poetry itself work dynamically against silence.
Han gives us a concrete example of the digital medium and its effects, “A smartphone is not a ‘thing’...It lacks the very self-sameness that stabilizes life. It is also not a particularly enduring object. It differs from a thing like a table, which confronts me in its self-sameness. The content displayed on a smartphone, which demands our constant attention, is anything but self-same; the quick succession of bits of content displayed on a smartphone makes any lingering impossible. The restlessness inherent in the apparatus makes it a non-thing.”
We might take a moment to reflect on the degree to which the smart-phone is a non-ceremonial device. And therefore a non-poetic device? At very least, I believe we can safely assume that the smartphone changes our conception and perception of ceremony.
Han adds, “The way in which people reach for their smartphones is also compulsive. But things should not compel us in this way.” The digital seems to be replacing ritual with compulsion. Everywhere we can see the compulsive principle at war with the poetic principle—the desire for the consumption of things instead of the use of things.
Before we leave Han’s book, I would like to present one more quotation:
“In the face of the intensifying compulsion of production and performance, finding a way to make a different, playful use of life is a political task. Life regains its playful element when it relates to itself instead of subordinating itself to an external purpose. What must be won back is contemplative rest. If our life is deprived of all its contemplative elements, we become suffocated by our own activity. The fact that contemplative rest, silence, is essential to religion is suggested by the existence of the Sabbath.” (Italics added)
If we might return to one of our earlier themes, notice that Han says “playful use of life is a political task.” As poets we have a vested interest in promulgating the playful approach to life. Is it any wonder that in wake of political abdication, as it pertains to the transcendent aims of poetry, that poets in isolation increasingly play by and with themselves? It is no coincidence that the final chapter of The Disappearance of Rituals is entitled “From Seduction to Porn.”
One of the most characteristic qualities of contemporary verse is its exhibitionist nature, this is contrary to the poetic principle of metaphor or conceit. Han gives us one more remark on poems, repeating himself, “We rarely read poems any more…Poems play with fuzzy edges. They do not admit of pornographic reading; they do not possess pornographic sharpness.”
And on that note we shall leave Han’s book.
IV. Ceremony & Decay
I would like to make it clear to the reader that we have ventured this excursion with Han so that we might bring our argument up to date. This is in hopes that as we finish our exploration of the poet’s piety and ceremony, our conclusion will more fully resonate with the here and now. With that said, let us now return to Mr. Montgomery.
Now, when we left Montgomery in his Introduction to The Men I Have Chosen for Fathers, he was speaking of regional consciousness and the ceremonies of innocence which we have lost.
“Indeed, regional as I mean it is that state of mind in which one is most acutely aware of the necessity of those ceremonies of innocence that Yeats announces our age to have lost. His lines are desperate ones, perhaps the most often quoted from his vast work, though honored more for their apparent topical (provincial) cogency than for their timeless virtues. They do touch a sore spot in decaying community, but the symptom of soreness—even of acute pain—if taken to be merely topical loses recognition that community is always in decay. Yeats remarked, between wars, that”
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.”
Montgomery clearly demarcates the field of play in front of us: “Spiritual and intellectual maturity, which I assume as desirable, is a growth in which the blood-dimmed tide of the self is reduced from that anarchy bred always in any time or place by the phantom desire of individual autonomy.”
He then casts the poetic act in language which reveals the full resonance of the poetic principle, “A poet might put it that, through ceremony, the blood of the self and the bread of the local become transformed beyond the mere provincialities of self or of place. Maturity in the soul is a growth from that provincialism, into which the individual soul always finds itself born, toward a regionalism which requires of it, for instance, that ‘brotherly deference’ Confucius speaks of or that ‘charity’ Saint Paul extols as making us members one of another.”
He underscores his point, “I repeat, each is born into a provincialism of the self, whatever the actualities of his time and place.” And how do we transcend this provincialism of the self? As his analogy clearly suggests—Ceremony.
Montgomery gives us his own remarkably abundant description of ceremony. “Ceremony is the form of active participation in being, in celebration of the gifts of being. Thus ceremony may move us beyond a merely natural provincialism through an openness to existence itself. Ceremonies are the forms through which we discover ourselves at least higher than vegetable or animal without our depreciation of vegetable or animal; the forms whereby we acknowledge with generosity of spirit the existence of that which is separate from the self. Thus at last we may come to that most difficult generosity of all, that whereby we truly value our own self. Ceremony is necessary to that sanity and health whereby we can say that we are at home in the world, and know thereby that at a higher level we are only acceptable guests of being for a brief duration of time and place. That is the point at which we turn to the local and see it for the first time.”
Just think of all the poems which compare the beloved to a red rose, or a rolling meadow, or a refreshing spring, or a swift hart, or a resplendent dove. This is a celebratory harmonization of existence where both the beloved and the rose are ceremonially considered and envisioned anew.7 This is the reconciliation and elevation of existence, where we truly come to value both our own self and the other. A true poem, at its best, rightly situates us in time and place and thereby recovers and appreciates the local.
Montgomery describes ceremony further, now in direct reference to poetry, “At its most basic, ceremony is orderly awareness toward existence. Its most immediate instrument, given our created nature, is language. Which means that, in high poetry, form is neither mechanical nor arbitrary. It is the ceremonial use of language helping to direct desire so that desire may prove worthy of the desiring soul, a point perhaps neglected by too many poets, academic or beat. Language implies an imperative nature in ceremony, whether one look to the grammar of a sentence or to the meter, rhyme, logic of a sonnet. The major poets of our century—Yeats, Eliot, Pound, the Nashville Fugitives—have felt that at certain points of our history there was a more general respect for the ceremonial nature of language than in our own age. They recognized in history as well periods very like our own in which ceremony was in rapid decay.”
Poetry is the literary medium which is the most exhaustive of language itself.8 Poetry is luxuriously concerned with the use of language in all of its aspects. It attempts to organically unify denotation, connotation, feeling, stress, pitch, length, weight, image, proportion and so forth. Poetry is an attempt to charge language with the utmost force of Being.
As Montgomery says, poetry helps direct and elevate desire. It increases the soul’s sensitivity towards a full awareness of Being and thus increases the desire for the participation in Being. Poetry which livens us, is true; Poetry that enables comatose viewing of existence is counterfeit. True poetry enables the ceremonial viewing of existence. How then could we recognize true poetry without the concomitant knowledge of true ceremony? Therein is the crux of questions surrounding the decline of poetry. As Montgomery and the poets he mentioned all knew, ceremony is in rapid decay.
We remember that Han stated in his book that ceremony binds people together in accord. Without ceremony, those binds loosen. On this account, Montgomery quotes Thucydides on the decay in the Greek states:
“The meaning of words had no longer the same relation to things. . . . An attitude of perfidious antagonism everywhere prevailed; for there was no word binding enough nor oath terrible enough to reconcile enemies.”
Where there is no oath terrible enough for reconciliation, “the center cannot hold.”
Montgomery opines on the ceremonial decay in our own time, “Ceremony, let me insist, is an imperative wherever and whenever there is a legitimate necessity of addressing oneself to something or someone other than the self. Impious ceremony, dispirited technique, is the mechanical, though self-conscious, conduct of the self in nature and society…As poet, I am disturbed that impious ceremony dominates life as well as art…We have manner still; and so long as it yields efficiency we defer to manner. But we have lost manners, the rituals of community ceremony, the tradition of community beyond mere history or mechanics.”
As Montgomery said “It is the ceremonial use of language helping to direct desire” that can be used to properly order our souls and thus awaken our souls with desire which is the proper mode of its being. With impious ceremony comes improper desire and therefore insufficient desire which easily succumbs to a comatose mode of being. Ultimately, the dearth of desire falls to the mechanical contours of routine as driven by technique.9
Montgomery tells us that Pound foresaw this linguistic decay, “Ezra Pound, for fifty years warned us to look to our language, lest we find ourselves overcome by disorderly unawareness. Still, the vestigial manifestations of ceremony have become for us increasingly routine and mechanical, largely under the pressures of technology”
By “vestigial manifestations of ceremony” Montgomery has in mind traffic laws, paying bills and ordering fast food from a “Burger Temple.” That haven of efficiency that fulfills our daily bread, where “The immediate priest at the window performs the final act to absolve us of our hunger.” All these mundane activities bear the ghostly remembrance of ceremonies long past.
It should not be hard to spot our own daily ghost-ceremonies. In but one example: We “open” our phone, release it from its charging-cable umbilical, check our texts, then our emails, then our notifications, compulsively use it throughout the day, until we finally reconnect the umbilical to the womb of mother electricity before our phone “dies.”
With regard to Pound’s warning to not be “overcome by disorderly awareness” Montgomery continues, deeply penetrating into the truth of matter:
“Discrimination lost through language abandoned, it is little wonder that one take any piece of music or art or any poem to be as good10 as any other—so long as none of them breaks too disturbingly into our nervously autonomous awareness. We have become accustomed to, and prefer, only a foggy throbbing of the heart, one still allowed insofar as we are sufficiently isolated in our self from the techniques of technology. Meanwhile, technique, void of ceremony, becomes the Black Mass of the provincial mind.”
I believe it is pertinent here for the reader to remember that Ezra Pound was locked in his cage at Pisa, and later “rehabilitated” stateside in another cage. At certain times, in certain places, it can be a precarious enterprise if one wishes to flog the follies of the provincial mind or otherwise interrupt the provincial Black Mass.
Montgomery stating “Meanwhile, technique, void of ceremony, becomes the Black Mass of the provincial mind” reveals the deeper meaning behind our “impious ceremonies.”
Perhaps rituals have not disappeared to the extent to which Han’s book may suggest. Perhaps they have only transitioned into an occult mode. Anyone, poets especially, who prod along the surface of our conglomerate consciousness ought to be acutely aware of the leviathans that agitate the deep and send the storms which cloud our noosphere. There are dangers in moving from unconscious to conscious ceremony. Especially since, due to our materialist assumptions and habituation, and therefore our obsession with physical causation, we have become blind to this architectonic influence of spiritual origin.
In Frontiers of Poetry, Jacques Maritain tells us, “The unconcealed and palpable influence of the devil on an important part of contemporary literature is one of the significant phenomena of the history of our time” He also notes, “Demonologists know well that every passive state into which a man puts himself is a door open to the devil.” An important remark to be kept in mind with regard to Han’s “comatose viewing” caused by “serial perception.”
As Montgomery has said, “A poet might put it that, through ceremony, the blood of the self and the bread of the local become transformed beyond the mere provincialities of self or of place.” Might I remind the reader that a Black Mass involves the desecration of the Eucharist.
If we were to complete the metaphor, we could say, that just as a Black Mass absconds with the Host to commit blasphemy and sacrilege, so does Impious Ceremony take the “the blood of the self and the bread of the local,” which is to say the elevated and “redeemed” form of our reality as directly experienced, and tarnishes it with the destruction of celebration and the symbolic perception which perceives a higher order.
Conclusion: The Question of Digital Regionalism
In conclusion, I will now be very bold and make a number of speculations which I am not qualified to make. However I believe that these speculations are vital to our consideration of poetry. Whether or not I am correct enough or comprehensive enough, I do believe that I am at least in the ballpark.
The management of our Being is in the reconciliation of our Body and our Soul. A false theory of anthropology is that man is either wholly Body or wholly Soul. A false theory of Elitism is that one can be made to extinguish the other; And therefore Man can be remade in the image of himself. A false theory of poetic transcendence is that because the proper arena of poetry is timelessness and placelessness, therefore time and place do not matter—The local can be disposed of and eliminated. Related is a false theory of “representation,” namely, that it does not matter what race, sex and so forth, a person is. This is a false belief that we can eliminate the particularity of the person—his flesh. I do not believe that man can or ought to be obliterated.
In this essay we have been chasing after a regional and ceremonial conception of poetry. The importance of this conception of poetry is that we might fully affirm the Local and the Transcendent. If loss is incurred on either side, a deformation of reality has occurred. This proposition is against a false theory of poetry which does not recognize or care about said deformations. This essay has been against pseudo-poetry which substitutes actual reality for one of its own device. We have been in favor of and in search of a fundamental openness to the existence of reality. And if we ought to put this way: A recovery of the validity and legitimacy of Understanding as compared to Reason. Or put another way: The recovery of the Illative Sense.
Where then does this leave us as poets, in the present day?
I will now confess that much of the motivation for this essay has been a search for the possibilities of digital regionalism. The local is digital. Our reality as directly experienced is heavily mediated by digital technology. How then do we struggle up through the digital local to a digital regionalism? Is this even possible? To what degree can we penetrate through these digitized local materials in hopes of reaching the proper arena of poetry? Can we escape placeless digital provincialism wherein a simulated plane of Time constrains our expression and refashions our consciousness?
It is unfair to propose these questions without sufficient answers, and I admit that I have done so. However, since the Digital is in a overwhelmingly great deal of flux, I suspect that proposed answers would be ad hoc and their utility would quickly fade. This does not mean that we should discard ad hoc answers, only that we should recognize and accept their transient nature.
The Digital is hardware and software, a quasi-reflection of body and soul, which means that even if we come to terms with the exterior digital medium of hardware, we still have to reckon with the interior medium of software. (This is true just as much for users as it is for makers. It sometimes seems to me that software designers take an impious attitude towards hardware—an almost gnostic confidence.) All this is simply to say that changes in hardware and software alike cause shifts in how the digital medium operates.
Digital form is flat or fore-shortened, where all things appear to us in a single plane of existence, where there is no distance between objects. Every screen event takes place in the same window—the same framing. This is an obstacle for perceiving a higher order of existence.
For this, and other reasons I have stated, I do not believe that digital form is conducive to the poetic habitus, and likely it is harmful, even if there are gains to be made from digital content. By habitus, I mean the Spiritual and Physical state of being that a poet inhabits to make his art. However, it must be said that the role of the digital medium in disabusing us of Liberalism’s illusions cannot be overstated.
Despite the help or harm of the digital, it remains a fact that we have developed a relationship to it, in similar fashion to and in greater degree than any object that we use daily. However as Han observes, a smartphone is not quite a thing. How can one form a relationship with a thing which has such little self-sameness? In the face of this very important aspect, we have still all managed to form a relationship to the event that we call the Internet. What exactly the Internet is, I am not sure. It is some kind of corporate body, composed of projected souls which spiritually affect one another. Regardless of what the internet is or is not, it seems to me that we have an attitude of impious ceremony towards it.
The internet has become our primary producer of information, and likely our single most intense and developed spiritual relationship. Byung-Chul Han would tell us that we live under the pervasive influence of the “compulsion to produce.” The internet, then, is the greatest vector of this production, at least in immaterial terms. The internet is the progeny of the feminine, Mother Electricity and the masculine, Father Mind, which grants the Electricity its Form.
The compulsion to produce creates a general disposition of positivization, so says Han. Positivization is the overall mode and orientation of our attention. Our attention is cast out like a great net, continuously expanding outwards, developing within ourselves an extensive consciousness which captures reality with serial perception.
Han would say this is an autistic reception of information. The defining characteristic of autistic reception is that the receiver cannot filter or parse the information. This sends the receiver into a state of hyper-stimulation, resulting in both comatose dullness and episodes of manic frenzy.
I will remark here that our current literary environment is inundated with social therapeutics. In the days of yesteryear, our literature was inundated with social agitation. This was a broad effort towards ethical formation via the excision of prejudice. Or otherwise stated, the excision (or anesthetization) of our Intuition. Now, social agitation has transmogrified into its positive form—social therapeutics. It is no coincidence that confessional literature and other social therapeutics are so often in search of acceptance. This is no less than the exploitation of catharsis by the self-exploiting subject of positivization. Untrammeled acceptance is both cause and symptom of the incapacity to exercise our Intuitive sense.
I contend that these are the ley lines which underscore our current moment and its poetic challenge. This essay has been an attempt to more securely orient ourselves in face of that poetic challenge and more clearly envision our poetic purpose. We must use the tools which are available to us, despite their amount, quality or condition. A poet makes use of language in the state he finds it in, and does what he can to lift it out of disrepair.
One of the main reasons that I am interested in “regional” poetry is that this understanding of poetry allows us to do a lot with a little. It allows us to make the most out of the materials we have available to us. As we have been saying, regional poetry is concerned with taking what is nearest to us and letting the near local achieve full resonance. This in spite of the various ways we have succumbed to decay. Whether in language, historical knowledge, self-knowledge, or even if we have been subsumed by simulacrum. The ceremonial awareness towards life through poetry aids the proper use of our being.
At all times, my general instinct is to maintain the integrity of the poetic sphere. This includes carefully delineating its boundaries and defending its borders. My overarching concern is twofold, both to refrain from overtaxing poetry, and also to castigate its disuse. I believe that poetry is a truly valuable human activity, and I think that it should be advocated for. However I also believe in the limits of poetry. Despite the continuing decay of ceremony and language, and the ability of poetry to ameliorate this degradation, I will not accept that the ultimate answer to our problems is in Poetry.
Let us hear from Jacques Maritain once more, “By showing us where moral truth and the genuine supernatural are situate, religion saves poetry from the absurdity of believing itself destined to transform ethics and life, saves it from overweening arrogance.”
I will continue to assert that poetry is not a substitute for religion. However I will eagerly admit that poetry is a precursor to religion, and only under this conception does poetry achieve the absolute fullness of its resonating power. Poetry is not religion, however it may serve as religion’s precursor—its vestibule.
Maritain continues, “But in teaching man the discernment of immaterial realities and the savor of the spirit, in linking poetry and art itself to God, [religion] protects them against cowardice and self-abandonment, enables them to attain a higher and more rigorous idea of their essential spirituality, and to concentrate their inventive activity at the fine point thereof.”
And as Maritain will also say, “to civilize is to spiritualize.” For these reasons and more, I am committed to the civilizing power of Poetry and Literary Art.
On the topic of poetry and civilization, I wish to turn one last time to Mr. Montgomery; And once again I will ask the reader for his patience as I will quote him at length:
“I have a rather dark view of the possibilities of our survival as ‘Western’ civilization, of our survival as a particular nation. I have too regularly borne in upon me the evidence that ‘stupidity is national,’ evidence that intelligence lusting after provincial internationalism loses the art of the local, so that only by calamity or accident does it seem possible to return to the local and know it in a ‘regional’ way—that is, under the aspect of eternity. My view will seem a dark one to many. But I also see cause for hope, the same cause that has always been present for a recovery from any decline in any epoch. That is why I am most constantly concerned with a particular institution in which the ceremonies of innocence have been traditionally exalted.”
“I mean, of course, the institution we call the family, now so much a popular concern. What I urge as necessary to community recovery is the restoration of ceremony in the family…There is certainly little hope of recovery in those techniques for family recovery, considered and argued for and acted upon, that take origin in abstractionism by institute or agency...For it is only from ceremony recovered at the most local level that one may learn the piety necessary to the recovery of family, a piety such as that which bound Telemachus and Odysseus, Anchises and Aeneas to Ascanius. Otherwise, family must become itself a miniature agency for the operation of technique, a block in the pyramid raised to technology. Family is corporate, but not in a legal sense. More literally, family is a body in nature raised by ceremony in a sacramental way beyond the merely natural, though always permeated by the natural. Out of ceremony—the discipline of body and mind in respect to the self as the self must relate to all that is not itself—out of ceremony eventually is recovered a manner of being larger than the naturally provincial being of the child before he finds his place in the family and in a community of families. A reverence for family, as does the reverence for self, leads to reverence of selves and families of selves. Thus only may be restored the prospect of viable—life-giving—civilization.”
“It is to the family that we must look for such recovery. And we may with some expectation and hope look to the poet in this struggle for recovery. For his is the gift of words sacramentally transformed through piety, through his ‘regional’ address to being, that may recover to us lost and forgotten ways of our proper being in the world.”
Then let each poet reconsider his realities, and cast them under the aspect of eternity through which the truth of all things resonates; And let him do what he can to increase the sensitivity of our ceremonial awareness which binds us one to another in the fullness of intimate communion.
Marion Montgomery, The Men I Have Chosen for Fathers, (University of Missouri Press, 1990).
Byung-Chul Han, The Disappearance of Rituals, (Polity Press, 2020).
Josef Pieper, In Tune with the World, (St. Augustine’s Press, 1999), 85.
Culture is not the exclusive source of the local.
For the benefit of the reader I would like to state that we are actually post-propaganda in the 20th century sense. 20th century propaganda used the medium of broadcast technology, 21st C. propaganda uses the medium of network technology, i.e. Digital. This is a hugely significant difference, the examination of which is beyond the scope of this essay.
I will briefly say that I am suspicious of Han. I’m not about to draw out a literary theory from these few sentences, but I will say that I can agree with these first couple paragraphs of Ch. 7, as it is written. I suspect that Han desires to go farther than I would wish, perhaps much further, possibly to the destruction of the soul and rationality. I have not spent nearly enough time with his writings to have developed a firm grasp. I will say here, as I have elsewhere, that I do not believe that poetry can be a substitute for religion.
The exceptional poetry of my friend J.Z Schafer beautifully exemplifies what I am describing here.
This is a remark of Yvor Winters.
As both I and Mr. Montgomery are using it, Technique means here the sense that Jacques Ellul has given it: That of pervasive, continually increasing systemic efficiency as a first principle of society.
If the foundations of poetry are in ceremony, it should not surprise that Criticism shares that foundation, and that without ceremony Criticism too, shall fall. (This note is mine, not Mr. Montgomery’s.)