Three Layers

Yesterday’s posting on the Papal initiative—to invite dissident Anglicans to join the Catholic Church—prompted me to ask myself why that event struck me as pleasing. The event may also be viewed in entirely in negative terms, of course. The Anglican congregation is dividing over a major conflict triggered by the ordination of women and gay clergy. Anglicanism, along with other mainline Protestant denominations, has been drifting into a social gospel for many decades already without that trend, which strikes me as much more serious, having caused any active rifts. The Papal initiative may also be viewed negatively as a power-grab. I’ve always viewed the exclusion of women from the priesthood as due to an arbitrary patriarchal bias rooted in the distant past. Similarly, I am persuaded that homosexuality is not a willed choice but a biological fact; fairly decent theories of how it arises are on offer; in other words, Dante to the contrary notwithstanding, it is natural. It occurs in nature, not by free will. The development of a celibate clergy also strikes me as a strange cultural aberration. You might say, in other words, that I don’t have a dog in this fight.

Pondering this, I realized that my pleasure came from another source. To put it briefly, the Papal initiative suggests a movement in the direction of genuine reform. If something like that inspires a realignment of the religious layer of our culture in the long term, it will be beneficial for this grouping of humanity, the West.

I came across this concept of layers in a quote from Ali Hujwiri (990-1077), a Persian Sufi, teacher, and writer. He said: “There are three forms of culture: worldly culture, the mere acquisition of information; religious culture, following rules; elite culture, self-development.” This was written in Hujwiri’s Revelation of the Veiled, and I saw it quoted in Idries Shah’s The Sufis more than thirty years ago. It struck me as true and appropriate—the more so because in the Sufi realm of thought, each individual is counseled to follow the appropriate requirements of each layer of culture, and these layers are conceived of as linked and ascending, like stairs to a summit.

The religious layer of culture, in other words, has a meaningful, elevated, role in the shaping of human values—and behaviors based on these values. It is a necessary element in human life. When this layer becomes deformed, trivialized, or sinks into the one beneath it, that spells trouble for the society—and individuals in it, of course. A single, coherent faith system is better than a carnival of competing beliefs. The reunification of Christianity is therefore desirable. That in turn implies an institutional organ at its peak which is sophisticated and appropriately tolerant of diversity beneath—and Benedict XVI’s initiative, if it succeeds, also suggests changes in that direction ultimately if unity is to be achieved. Hence my favorable reaction to the news.

Now, needless to say, the other two layers in our culture are not exactly exemplars of coherence and order either. And the relationships between them are correspondingly troubled. But the general trend of things, it seems to me, is better now, despite the seeming chaos, than it was in Dante’s day.

The trouble with this medium (blogging) is that it takes multiple passes to develop ideas. Or maybe that is the medium’s virtue. I’ve yet to make up my mind.

The Times, the Names…

In an e-mail comment on the last post, Michelle (la sage-femme and funny ghost-writer of Pontoon Pirates) had this to say among other things:

Just for fun : in Paris there are two streets like Die Grosse and Die Kleine Freiheit. They are rue de la Grande Truanderie and rue de la Petite Truanderie in the 1st arrondissement. They, like rue de la Brèche-aux-Loups in the 12th and rue de La Grange-aux-Belles in the 10th, have often made me wonder dreamily where those names came from... Much more inspirational than Main street, no? But Grand rue also exists in France, in Etueffont as a matter of fact.

Wonderful. A truanderie is a swindle. Next we have “the Breach of the Wolves,” thereafter the “Barn of the Beauties.” Now concerning the wolves, I wonder if the original name referred to a huge or an especially wide breach or opening, this because in French wolf is also used as a word of emphasis. In that language, like in English, you’re hungry as a wolf; but in France you can also be cold as a wolf.

Michelle also commented on the dissonance that sometimes appears between the cover and the content when the intention is to-draw-attention-for-profit. She comments on the three book covers I’ve trotted out in the last few days:

Those covers look great today, don’t they? Vintage 1970s sci-fi creativeness! I remember thinking, back then, that they were, how shall I put it, a bit loud for my taste and mostly not at ALL what I had imagined when hearing the books [read out loud]. Those brash, colorful covers were light-years away from Darnay genes. Strange, huh?

This reminds me of a true story told by Idries Shah regarding his forays into publishing Sufi materials to a western audience. Shah’s writings have been very successful, but not so in the beginning. His first books had very formal and scholarly covers; they were intended for a scholarly audience. Sales were nil. Shah then had the covers changed; now they were vivid, colorful, and showed intriguing, romantic images. Sales—still from the scholarly community, first targeted in mailings—suddenlyshot up. And then stayed up thereafter.

Does that suggest that I should to change the cover of Ghulf Genes (the novel)? A gyrating belly-dancer? A Conan-like muscle-bound half-naked hunk charging a monster?

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.

Smell? You’re right enough about the smell, Bill, but I was talking about sell. Get it? Sell!

Graves and the Goddess

One of the strangest books I’ve ever read—perhaps the strangest published in the twentieth century—is The White Goddess by Robert Graves. He himself describes it as “a historical grammar of the language of poetic myth.” Indeed those words appear on the cover of my latest copy of the book (1997). The first copy, which I got in the 1950s, eventually fell apart. I still have it, in four pieces. I keep returning to this book—and must have read it at least five times, all five hundred pages of it.

The use of the word “grammar” has a scholarly odor. Another strange book I once perused was Kenneth Burke’s A Grammar of Motives. Lots of people write “Grammars of ….” The meaning in these cases, to cite Webster’s, is “The elements or principles of any science or art.” So there you are: the elements and principles of the language of poetic myth. What makes The White Goddess memorable, fascinating, and indeed sometimes maddening is that Graves avoids intellectual reduction and uses the language of poetic myth itself to weave his subject. It becomes accessible, therefore, only, as it were through absorption. You have to be adequate to it. Not surprisingly, Graves felt ignored. In the Foreword to the revised edition he acknowledges all those who helped him assemble the vast material he used. Then he complains: “Yet since the first edition appeared in 1946, no expert in ancient Irish or Welsh has offered me the least help in refining my argument, or pointed out any of the errors which are bound to have crept into the text, or even acknowledge my letters. I am disappointed, though not really surprised.” Nor am I. If you step off the trodden path and go in search for strange flowers or beasties, you will be on your own. And those you meet are likely to be as wild and strange as you are.

The organizing principle behind the poetic myth, as Graves saw reality, was the Goddess herself—and poetry is ultimately the relationship of soul to the divine. But to say this much is to say nothing at all. The book must be experienced. To enter Graves’ forest of myths it is best to jettison orthodox structures of how, why, and where the divine will manifest. The heart will learn something even though the intellect will rage at times like a chained dog sensing shadows in the night.

Graves was a prolific writer. He wrote a two-volume work on The Greek Myths, he wrote a war-memoir (Good-bye to All That), novels, and his “grammar.” He once said of these activities: “I raise dogs to keep a cat.” The cat was his poetry. I always liked that as a good program for the writer: make your money the ordinary way and thus preserve your sovereignty. For Graves prose was the “ordinary way.”

I owe Graves for introducing me to Sufism. Once, anciently, I chanced across a book by Idries Shah entitled The Sufis. I picked it up to see what it might be about. I opened it, saw that Robert Graves had written the introduction. Not checking further I bought the book. Thus stood, stands, my relationship to this poet.

Graves like all poets was open at the top of his skull and had strange experiences and—because of them—strange beliefs. He thought he could journey into the past and experience it as if he were there. Time for him was reversible at least. Mad—like Swedenborg, like Boehme. One of the more memorable snippets of this book, to which I return at times, is a short poem of his, published in Collected Poems (London, 1975), entitled “On Portents.” Graves introduces the poem thus (p. 343 of Goddess):

Time, though a most useful convention of thought, has no greater intrinsic value than, say, money. To think in temporal terms is a very complicated and unnatural way of thinking too; many children master foreign languages and mathematic theory long before they have developed any sense of time or accepted the easily disproved thesis that cause precedes effect.

I wrote about the Muse some years ago in a poem:

If strange things happen where she is
So that men say that graves open
And the dead walk, or that futurity
Becomes a womb, and the unborn are shed—
Such portents are not to be wondered at
Being tourbillions in Time made
By the strong pulling of her bladed mind
Through that ever-reluctant element.

This gives a glimpse into this forest. For more, you need to wander in…