This article goes up against 50 thousand or a hundred thousand years of human conditioning. That means people will say, “I have no idea what you mean.” “You’re not saying THAT, are you?” “Everything about civilization contradicts what you’re suggesting.”
So be it.
“There is a living empire of The Poem. The Poem is what most people automatically reject as completely worthless and useless, pragmatically speaking---pragmatism being the only language they are pledged to speak, on pain of death. And yet there they are, in church, at funerals, reciting poems, when it counts. When they have to be MOVED.” (my notes for The Magician Awakes)
“The force that through the green fuse drives the flower Drives my green age…”
“Time let me play and be Golden in the mercy of his means, And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold, And the sabbath rang slowly In the pebbles of the holy streams.”
“I have dreamed of the green night with dazzled snows A kiss slowly rising to the eyes of the sea, The circulation of unknown saps, And the yellow and blue awakening of singing phosphorous!”
I know logic. And evidence. And investigation. I’ve been doing it for close to 40 years. But underneath it all, I’m doing it to expose the castle they, the insane ones, are building for us. The castle of their dead language and their tattered false logic and their iron bands of materialistic control; their newspeak and lab speak and germ speak and protection-racket speak and payoff speak and robot speak and techno-speak and data speak and modeling speak and squeeze-play speak and propaganda speak and mapping speak.
All the languages that are separate from LIFE.
When the printing press was invented, did people set about worshipping the little metal letters that allowed books to be published? When computers took hold, people DID set about worshipping them and the software and the processing capacity; and the mind-as-computer metaphors blossomed everywhere like cheap plastic flowers.
As social commentators never tire of pointing out, every new era creates its own story about how the universe works. These days, the story centers on “programs.” The planets and stars and galaxies must be responding to some set of instructions. And so are humans.
Taking this myth out to its conclusion, there is no room for LIFE. Or CONSCIOUSNESS.
The poets have always led the way. They burst through the layers of conditioned imprisonment and plant new seeds of time.
They take functional language, transform it, and shoot it up through the clouds.
They express what was inexpressible.
They destroy old crusted empires with a glance.
That centuries of education have failed to ignite billions of the young with poetry is no sign that this highest expression of consciousness is incomprehensible or an aberration.
Poetry isn’t a solution to a problem. It’s what the soul is always searching for. Searching for in a liquor store at 3AM, in an endless desert, in a brothel, drugged in front of a television set, at the moment two lovers pledge loyalty forever, when a coffin is lowered into a grave, when clouds of the mind suddenly clear away on the top of a mountain, when soldiers’ bodies arrive back on home soil, when boredom seems as if it has no end, when a firing squad points its guns, when a child comes out of the womb, when terrible circumstances rip away the foul rotting cover of smug indifference of the know-nothing who thinks he knows everything, when a father realizes what his child is seeing on the morning of a spring day in endless time, when a woman turns over in bed and looks at the man she loves.
Clamp down on The Poem, bury it, deny it, and the invention that supplants it is living death.
In this era, we call that invention Technocracy.
Every religion is frozen poetry. Somewhere, a poet was writing a ten-thousand-page poem, and the priests stepped in and took it and edited it, cut it, framed a piece of it, tore away the wild and free nature of it, and put it in a book---their book.
And this became a model for every large organization in the world: REDUCTION. Simplification. False maps. Making what is vitally electric into something that is dead.
Doctor: You know, I’ve failed you with all these pills. I’m trying to look into your SOUL. It’s like a block of stone. Let’s try something completely different. I’m going to give you a poem that can raise the dead. I want you to read it OUT LOUD six times a day for the next hundred days. Give it your all. Don’t hold back. Force it if you have to. If you feel shame and embarrassment, shove them aside. Read it as if you were the poet himself. Bring your voice to life! Here it is.
Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.
And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.
All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark.
And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.
And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace,
Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea. (Dylan Thomas, Fern Hill)
THE PATIENT RESPONDS: Doctor, I can’t do that. I can’t read that out loud. I don’t even know what it means.
DOCTOR: I understand. You’re looking for a mechanical solution to your problem. But the problem is, YOU’VE become mechanical. That’s what’s driving you into oblivion. So every solution of the type you want makes things worse. You’re dead inside. No pill is going to fix that. You’re going to have to make a grand leap.
A poem, greater than any system or map or portrait of consciousness.
The lost language. The invisible empire. Over and above a hundred thousand years of human conditioning.
~~~
(The link to this article posted on my blog is here.)
(Follow me on Gab at @jonrappoport)
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