Afterward (Postlude as Prologue) from the forthcoming anthology, The Inexhaustible in the Exhausted Always Speaks
Catches, Between Fret and Gambol
Catches flicker by inner lids—
orange gleam,
shading Antic fret
to gamboling dream;
beneath them coil the heat-drawn worms,
citrus-toned,
stonefruit rot that squirms.
Here lie Pieties, tossed and torn,
their altars cracked,
their vestments worn—
and there,
the throttled Technocart,
strains evolution
through beast and scat,
to birth redesigns for ape-throned kings,
bull-shod, horse-breathed,
pulling strings—
pharaohs not by blood
but code,
in temples
by acceleration stowed.
Transhumans hug themselves in foxholes,
detached by loathing,
irony’s effete,
and crawled nostalgic yearning
as under a drone-bearing sun,
a sizzling cauldron of judgment
casting its forebode pall
to arrive fierce
upon ovoid smog,
horneting.
To emerge from these pocks, brambles, and boils, we come to participate in the proprioceptive, kinesthetic, and recollecting Logos unfolding from brokenness to
delight, from compost to cosmos, from wound to
wound-bearing witness. To mature beyond a nature ligatured by archive and
hierarchy, so as to realize the potential of a human essence, attuned to immanence as the Vatic Coriolis of repair. An
essence that scales enclosures by refusing to close, and instead compose and craft
assayed worlds of betweenness and middle-making where entanglement with the
old epoch brings undergrowths of insight into the redemptive, where grace is virtuously aligned rather than
dogmatically imposed. And Satan can never escape his abyss, no matter what monkey-coded artifice is brought
to bear.
Do we ask of poetic awareness as of cognition: is such
a funda- mental trait of
the universe? Or must
truth about reality be stated as a principle or ground cordoning off human possibles? Or is sensory poiesis only provisional? Is authentic understanding deterministic and causal, or probabilistic and
correlational? The
usual binaries mislead. Poiesis, rather, is marked by resonance and resistance in facing the immanence of
conative acts. Cognition severed from conation, through categorical logic, attempts to elide
accountable living—and in doing so, by its axiomatic
winnowing, kills.
What is needed is a retrained modernity—a renaissance modern. Modernity began well: shifting from the institutioned proclamation of truth to the individual’s responsibility to investi- gate and align with it. From static form and hierarchy to dynamic vector and equality of created potential, modernity turned toward history’s energy of peacemaking, not the exhausted boundaries drawn by epaulooned generals. Both institution and individual once understood that accountability flows from the act of seeking human potentiality not following forms of putative human nature.
But
Enlightenment individualism veered off course. Rather than pursuing
a keening metaphysics, it collapsed into a radically subjective freedom-claim, forged under Napoleonic
distress: I. Kant do anything without an umbrella service of subordinates—so only
my thoughts may fly free,
and even they must ground
themselves in
self-determined goals absent my
created potentials! In such formulations, freedom was
unmoored from metaphysics of relationship to announce a system of particular,
static interiority disguised as
universal absolutes.
Methodologically, poiesis centers on
the virtue of recollection—not as an intuitive measure of
memory, but
as an
ongo- ing investigation conducted through
auscultation and archival ligature with the world in which one is contextualized and set, not randomly thrown. It does not seek
forms to which an ontological and binding affinity is claimed—forms that always
drag the soul backward in time. Rather, recollective poiesis involves the
soul’s auscultation of ontological vectors in motion,
trajectories to which the
soul holds affinity—whether trending toward agon or shalom: toward an eschatology of catastrophe, as is
the case with all claimed, entropic formalisms, or rupture by which what is desired is re-aligned and extended
but not finally overthrown because
it is of the light.
Poetic perception involves punching apertures through surfaces of energy’s scour and thermodynamic degradations: the intuitive serves the pre-reflective ground where divine revelation emerges, not yet philosophical or doctrinal, but moral and felt as such. Thus the poet is prophetic, who senses before she speaks, and may only be—necessarily be--prophetic because they have an ethical confidence that what they sense and perceive is the essence or its anti-essence. The poet is not merely receptive, he is devel- oping faculties of aware attunement with the Unseen Metaphysic by means of reflective consideration of how the moral and the phenomenological align in his own purifying heartwork (“senses (aistheteria) trained” (Heb 5:14). What is observed changes the observer, and what light is cast onto an object changes the object. Contrary to Heidegger’s valorized verse (s)training by darkness, this can be the only valid method of poiesis.
In
abandoning metaphysics outside the self—precisely because of the
accountabilities it entails—modernity reduced itself to a null metaphysics of worldly ego measuring.
Like in the Biblical age of the Judges, each pursued
what was right in one’s own eyes, yet lacked the capacity to realize it. Complex chains of cause-and-effect quickly overwhelmed intention. What
followed was failure, disorientation, and the
ironical sense of
living within the
unintended consequences of one’s favored
stratagems and valorized
orders.
A modern
renaissance of accountable and virtuous poiesis
is pursued idiolectically, sui
generis—as that resists the permanence structures typical of aesthetic
metaphysics grounded in anything but the heart. Say, as for
Balthasar, Desmond, and Hart, in “infinite” beauty that dulls by sentiment and is given too easily to nihilism from fatalism. A theo-aesthetic iconoclasm abandons tradents
that chain history to natural hierarchies and stifle human potential, instead
prophetically to lance them. Poetic visceral testimony rejects harmonizing with
material analogies and their categorical, cognitive syntheses. Resisting the lure of modes and
models of ascendance
along fixed ladders and determined patterns as rites of “participation.”
Poetic iconoclasm is idiolectic witness refusing inherited coordinates while seeking new grammars of covenant, immanence, and conative effect. Poiesis reveals volatility of flame, its sourcing applied to environment: it fuses domains—in the wake of critiques of metaphysics but refusing its anthropocentric closures, established by ecological lament and Trinitarian yearning—into a mode unrecognizable to adumbrative techniques of conventional genealogical anachronisms imported to the heart absent context. Poiesis illuminates the heart in history, the heart of history, and the heart situated in environmental settings contemplating the heart (Logos) of other species and other eras. Its poetics rupture and lance false taxonomies in order to drain and repair—more Ezekiel and Basil the Great than Origen, more Pentecostal utterance than Thomist catechism.
So poiesie may also preach:
The “thou shalt nots” do not rest easily in such a the post- metaphysical claims of the absolutized self, but the “thou shalts”— the positive imperatives—have been too easily subsumed into a freedom from metaphysics that makes the Golden Rule a guideline, subject to rationing among subjective ends. Of geometries of dispense that weighed lesser evils to make room for personal and strategic ends. Ratio as cogito. Ratio as religio. Ir-ratio-guard-less.
So modern rationality has become its own source of crisis. It embodies resource and de-creational shortages by naturalizing human myopia and greed. This creates an a priori rationale for ratiocination. The metacrisis of weighing ends for lesser evils, in order to exert our will tethered only to effective, self-effected ends. Meta-crisis has staked humanity to “post-“s, where skeptics battle yearning and the coherence of ethics that sustain and so discard generative sight lines. Categorical logic begins with foun- dational claims about human nature, and every political statecraft begins from such a claim. Thus a poet is bound to investigate nature, and naturalizing claims about human nature. But while a state begins with “Because resources are limited for the public good,” only the poet, Yahwist, Malthus, and Marx begin with “Why are resources limited for the good?” One doesn’t need to be a poet to know that ratiocination proportions and appropriates public goods to the benefit of the system center, to the detriment of the marginal and periphery.
The poet, then, is ever the interrogator of statecraft,
especially by a strong
man ruler, of Platonic formalizing, and of categorical closure and categorizing
logic of ration. Of ratio. Of ratiocination. Of idiosyncrasies of rationalism as natural reason.
The poet offers another form of reason than ration-ism. The poet lives as
nature Attributes and lists the divine as his friend
and comfort, never
inside the sword-bearing angels of Appropriative reason-as-rationality.
Ratio is
the snake in the garden tempting in its promise to un-mete the heart from accountability
to the Creator of reason, to the freedom to determine ends, bringing nihilism
upon others by rationalism’s antitheses and Boolean logics—as
one freed from his
garden host and mates. The whole heart
for the total
creation was lost, and so
here we are, at the point of fractionate realities, being staked to post-s by the dragon.
To ends incapable of arriving because
divorced from metaphysics, only a Titan, a Prometheus, can like a birdbath tip heaven to re- lease us from this impasse: What can be known about the essence of the
creator regarding human deathlessness for us to pursue by other means than those endowing the present crises.
Yet this
heaven has already rained: the only Attribute of the divine knowable is through
the son: his Sermon-mounted clarion to
dispense with Appropriation, his sacrificial supplication making known the radical love that the creator has for
the creation. The only humanly-knowable divine attribute
is intent to sustain and flourish—the conation of heart—for endurance. For the human
to arrive at her potential is to align
with that heart,
without ratio-ing its
ends. To heart-commit wholly to
the creation
represented by the other, without mete or ration.
Accountability to the creator’s heart for the creation is
our obligation to the creation—to study and serve it as we are constituted by
embodied soul. Poiesis
is the method, for Adam dust-aware of the
renewing essence of earth reality. What we owe:
To our lords and superiors: un-ration-ed honesty;
To our subordinates and wage earners:
un-ratio-ed mercy; To our peers: un-ration-able virtue;
To our works and
callings: whole body-and-soul devotion to duty. To
those in
deprivation at
our footstep: unrationed care.
Religio and poiesia are never cisterned as limited
resources, so not by ratio come:
SO UP FROM STREETSETTING GLOSSOLALIA
its Azusa flut-t-terings—
charismaticians unrooting jazz
on its sun-knocking graft
that claw and cloy re-madding doggerel—
might instead come Pentecost again in these:
verse thudded and wonder jolting,
willed intelligible by the main
its legs and ankles,
into whence partners the room-
and tent-making heart
by clutching prophecy
through partnering rhythm
from awareness,
cohering Logos by choresis:
And bring Paul’s fourteenth chapter finish
to the Corinthian lip
by othering’s interpret
and backleading kiss?
So that kine-thetic verse
is every Pentecost’s arriving speech,
striating and stretching
the messianic freshets
in our throating
we hope and sense.
Must so then humanity
ever sealeg wing and open,
to muffling lament by a daimon,
gimlet-eyed crucible,
battened and beating
against wet-wrenching ropes
and rubbed camel knots
tuning the masted pass,
and calling sail and mane of Christ—
our poetic and kinesthetic bearing
under the gift-giving prism
lofting, downdraftward blue,
Its feather and halo
jigging, abounding
the set and bounty galley table,
as it prows and plows,
two-stepping with the foamy sea—
a heeling gut weather
humming from blows
the helming horn that gladdens.
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