Old Friendships and New Projects

My new project is to illustrate and notate my old "Rehearsing Repetitions on the Rappahannock."  This is a book I adore, and which no one else really cares for too much--like "The Departed Friend," which was about my feelings of loss when Jeff Moller stopped being my buddy.  I did eventually send a copy to his last known address, but he returned it unopened, just like the Weird Al Yankovich tickets I had sent a few years earlier.  It is difficult not to reach the conclusion that it is oneself who is the toxin in such relationships. But I believe that I am not, even so.  

I think I am a giving, and even generous, friend.  And I see the beauty in beings who are in need, and extend myself, perhaps uninvited, into their world.  It is this quality of "uninvited," I believe, that eventually wears thin.  When the subject of my interest and affections grows strong with genuine self-worth (perhaps partly, I egotistically state, from contact with my unflagging approbation of their being), they look back with disapproval at who they so recently were, and exile or dismiss that past.  I, as an associate of that past (and an approving and loving associate at that), must be exiled as well.  To continue in friendship with me is to acknowledge a continuity between their own old bad self and their current stronger, healthier self.

"Whatever gets you through the night," is a song that comes to mind.  If what gets you there is base betrayal of loyal friendship, well, that is preferable to death--or the death of one's self-concept (self-conceit?) in any case.  Or so, at least, I believe, wanting to forgive rather than forget my old friends and those dear to me who have "moved on."

River Read Talking Intro for “Of flares, of flowers”

As talking apes, we handle the matter of urgent mating in a way quite different from our hairier cousins. For us musing humans, loving someone seems to be equal parts artifice and fascination.

We love someone, first, not for who they are, but for whom we make them out to be through the mists of dim recognition--across the roomful of phony fog and the pulsing rainbows of the disco ball. This fascination, combined with the artifice of who they present themselves to be, is just the initial sauce of the gourmand's smorgasbord of attraction and affection we term "love."

And where the imagination latches its mollusk, it secretes its magic--transforming the rottenest rowboat into Cleopatra's bejeweled barge.

The courtship between two adult humans contains, on average, one million words--roughly 100,000 more words than Shakespeare's complete plays. This is the titanic effort that the imagination brings to bed with us. And from this art, we weave the dreams of our sexual lives, our tenderest expressions of affection. And, indeed, we weave our own families.

How we imagine love is important. To be raw, to be vulnerable, to weave our dreams of love in utter nakedness, is important. It's what we talking apes do. We do it incessantly and, in all the animal kingdom, we do it with an artifice and fascination compounded mainly of words.

This human intrusion of the heart and cock into one's interpersonal affairs can be awkward, embarrassing, and nearly impossible to winningly negotiate.  Such a spectacularly humbling comeuppance is celebrated by the sonnet--a form of soul-singing at once earnest, witty, and winsome.

Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]

Catastrophes and Trophies

Preface to The Timid Leaper

Catastrophes and Trophies

Report from a Victor and Victim

This collection is actually the combination and slight rearrangement of four separate volumes of verse; almost all of these poems were written in the calendar year 200I. It's not much to show for a year of human life--that rich mystery we are twisted into by such a resolute hand. The main emphasis of this collection (as I hope will be quite clear) is Nature. Nature and Naturalism are not quite the same thing, however, and I have always had my own disagreements with those who took too dogmatically Thoreau's painful premise "Simplify, simplify, simplify." The Timid Leaper sets the keynote of this mixed approach. I hope this collection achieves some grace while trying to attain such goals. It is the beauty of man's reach exceeding his grasp. The Timid Leaper leaps, not from any discernible goal he might attain, but from some more subtle cause, some interpenetration of events that defies analysis and germinates poesy. The sub-title is "inner nature poems," and that is to help show that the weather for humans is never merely a matter of what's over our heads it's what's in our hearts as well.

A victim of depression during the composition of these verses, I noticed an inability or unwillingness to assign purpose within myself. I was lax and ready to suffer unmitigated disasters with little more than a shrug and a tear. This is really a rather hopeless state of affairs, as a number of the poems outline. I remained staunchly impressed, however, with Dame Nature's capacity to excite the recognition of meaning within myself. As meaningless and adrift as I may have been, I could not help but notice that Nature still evoked in me the wry acknowledgement of a more masterful hand in the pictures I kept seeing both before me and within me. "No Wood to Sing Through" shows the adaptability of natural instincts and impulses. It was inspired by my observation of a catbird still thriving without its native habitat, and by my own reflection that I was seeing something meaningful even when my depression had revoked my self as any inherent source of meaning. Something was helping meaning to survive even in the brain of someone who refused the acknowledgement of meaning. Something in me wanted, at least, for meaning to survive or, more exactly, for the expression and acknowledgement of meaning to continue happening, despite my conscious wishes. This is a form of nature's nurturing weather that is both harsh and humbling. Can't I be meaningless if I want to? Don't take that shred of self-definition away from me! But, opposite of Sartre perhaps, it seems that meaning remains contiguous with essence, even when that essence wishes to exile meaning. It is this co-created weather of inner and outer that is charted in this volume of verses.

Full of wily wit and a bastard's bravado, The Sword Inside was the first burn and purge preparing a place for a new self to take up residence. I had to be rid of old hopes that I had harbored too long. Hopes are the white lilies of the soul, and when their time is past, they fester as fast. There were reconciliations to be made here as well, and rueful acknowledgement followed hard upon the heels of aptly rapid self-wit. Well-rooted weeds and lingering things were burned out, or hacked at with a saber. Some villainy of habit and temperament had to be acknowledged and integrated, a black sheep returned to the fold. Such traceries of whim explored and displayed in The Sword Inside were the iron rungs I used to clamber back from the void.

The section entitled "The Soft Assault" stands apart for its being the documentation of a very severe personal storm and so shows the purely human side of the weather. Nature purists and vegans of nature poetry may safely skip this section if they do not want their nature poetry too irredeemably mixed up with the human roots of that poetry in the poet. This section is the fever chart of one of love's bitterest victims. The natural phenomenon of the "inner weather" gives these poems their place in this collection. My retreat into nature, and nature's "soft pursuant touch" of my capacity to keep seeing meaning no matter what, are a direct result of the catastrophes alluded to within these poems.

Indeed, it was nature's "soft, pursuant touch," that I could not shake off, and that led me back to myself as more than a recording barometer of outside events. Nature creates great art, but she uses dirty fingers. Soon enough, I was actively pursuing designs and meanings of my own in the material that Nature had fauceted upon me. I was ready to assign parts to clouds and prompt the trees with dialog. When this hubris expressed itself too heavy-handedly, the poems themselves rebelled and those poems have been expelled from this collection as a complete botch. But, as I now think significant, I was saved. And more than saved, I had become a victor from being a victim. Out of my personal catastrophe, I have extracted this volume of verses, which will serve as well as anything for a trophy.

Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]

You can read this post as part of the poetry collection "The Timid Leaper" here:

http://gregglory DOT com/wordpress/posts/catastrophes-and-trophies/

Victor Hugo: Humble Egoist of Infinity

From the "Posie Soiree" series. Short essays incited by the French Poise Soiree held monthly at the Cranford TeaSpot in Cranford, NJ with my careful co-host Carrie Pedersen Hudak.

The courage and freedom to imagine one’s society contains within it the capacity to re-imagine it. This is the deep seed of all revolutions. A renewal or re-imagining of conscience is what every change in the social order requires. The industrial revolution came upon Europe in Hugo’s era, calling forth the equally large energies of individual artistic innovation. Reality was changing–the imagination needed to change as well.

Hugo invented the “realistic” or “naturalistic” novel–a form of artistic expression as broad and multifarious as the new industrial reality confronting the France of his day. And this form, being reflective of reality (a mimesis, as the ancient Greeks would say) could keep pace with the breakneck changes of his Victorian era. Indeed, so effective was Hugo’s artistic solution to confronting his contemporary reality that a whole school of naturalistic novelists grew up in Hugo’s gargantuan shadow.

But it is Hugo’s poetry, acclaimed in his day by a poetry-hungry audience, that shows the fire of his spirit and the philosophical feeling that impelled his will to contribute to his society through literature. In his poetry, besides heroic and harrowing story-poems, we get some extended philosophical “meditations.” I wouldn’t put them anywhere other than in the category of “meditations” because it is the subjective feelings aroused by his philosophical conjectures that are the real focus of the poems.

Hugo imagines his individual mentality adrift in an infinite abyss of space–making his self infinitely tiny and insignificant in comparison. This is a philosophical correspondence with the religious notion of humility before the awful throne of God. And yet, at the same time, Hugo imagines–feels–that all the threads of thought and feeling that go zinging about in this infinite abyss actually meet at the crossroads of his heart and his head. Hugo is the humble egoist of infinite space!

In human terms, Hugo is a nothing–just like the rest of humanity before the infinite–and, therefore, he can use his private philosophical feelings as a basis to create universal art. His ambition springs from his humility before the vast, new, roiling experience of Life with a capital L. Hugo is nothing–but, we all are nothing–therefore Hugo can speak for all of us! This is a paradox made clearest in his philosophical poetry.

How much more marvelous a solution to the overwhelming dilemma of the Industrial Age. Instead of becoming an inward-looking miniaturist of his private feelings, Hugo leverages our shared insignificance before the infinite to create some of the largest, broadest, most weepingly human art since Shakespeare.

Gregg Glory

5/05/2012