Poetry 1968

I delivered this talk to a general audience at a 1993 conference observing the passing of twenty-five years since that annus mirabilis (or was it an annus horribilis?) 1968. The occasion encouraged a sociological swerve in the discussion. Fifty years have now passed. I could not resist revisions.

     Just as language according to Saussure is a system of difference, literary history proceeds by contradiction and dialectic. Tradition and innovation are complements rather than opposites. A static code would be robotized and empty of information whereas one wholly free of convention would be unintelligible. As anyone who has witnessed an English department meeting is aware, literary people are fond of tossing words about endlessly, but this does not mean their disputes are meaningless. Just like the ancient Greek contention between the water-drinking poets and their wine-drinking colleagues or the eighteenth-century battle of the books, the 1968 “culture clash” in poetry represented real differences in values, literary practice, and culture generally.
     In fact ten years before 1968 the partisan lines were already well-defined. The fact is notorious that the two most prominent anthologies of new poetry in English – the 1957 New Poets of England and America edited by Donald Hall, Robert Pack, and Louis Simpson and Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry 1945-1960 – did not contain a single poet in common. So there was fierce controversy on strictly poetic turf, and the war of the anthologies defines the principal factions usefully and far more precisely than the labels formalist and anti-academic. Still, other oppositions occurred simultaneously. Within the boundaries of Allen’s collection, one might, for instance, imagine the scrimmage of the projectivists against practitioners of the deep image or the bicoastal competition between the boys from Artnews against the team from City Lights.
     On this occasion, though, I prefer to emphasize the intersections of the sociological with the literary and to highlight some works from that period that exemplify significant changes in the location of poetry in the fabric of American culture.
     Today as in the sixties most Americans consume poetry in the form of advertising copy. The clever writers who sell beer and detergents use every trick in the Renaissance manuals of rhetoric, and they doi gain their audience. The verbal magic of their technical skills, alas, is directed only at charming money from the consumer to the corporation, not a theme likely to generate soul-stirring and enduring texts. A few subgenres still persist with vigor: bumper stickers, internet memes, greeting cards, and the more extravagant varieties of slang. But poetry proper, the longtime honorific queen of the arts, is also the neglected step-daughter – without readership, without a context beyond the universities which continue to shelter a few queer cranks.
     In 1968 poetry was reaching new audiences and experiencing a miniature surge in popularity which, though never fully realized in new masterpieces, still carries momentum today in a thousand open readings in bars and coffee houses. This efflorescence did not emerge, though, from the heart of American poetic tradition alone, but was stimulated by social, political, and economic conditions and movements far outside the realm of the aesthetic.
     Several of the new popular artists and audiences were directly spawned by the political trends of the day. Protest rallies often included poets and musicians on the same stage with orators. In what was really a fainter echo of the proletarian art of the thirties, the sixties brought new art arose to make concrete the radical sentiments of the day: the new muralist movement ornamented some of the bleakest walls of American cities, Newsreel set out to chronicle the revolution on film, R. Diggs of Rip Off Press and Aaron Fagen of Rising Up Angry drew cartoons that were fierce as well as funny. There were even countries where the politicians were poets, a peculiar thought for Americans: Mao and Ho, Leopold Senghor of Senegal and Agostinho Neto in Angola. Protest poetry had been building, cultivated by Robert Bly who founded American Writers against the Vietnam War in 1966 and the following year held the first anti-war poetry reading and Old Leftist Walter Lowenfels whose anthology Where is Vietnam? appeared in 1967. Books like Ed Dorn and Gordon Brotherston’s Our Word: Guerilla Poems from Latin America not only were published, but enjoyed a certain popularity. Diane di Prima published the first of her self-dramatizing Revolutionary Letters. For a time, as a generation earlier, it seemed that writers and artists were united in opposition to an oppressive government.
     Black literary consciousness had already the tradition of the Harlem Renaissance and the thirties engagement with socialism. During the Depression Langston Hughes performed to the sound of jazz as well as composing in jazz-influenced verbal rhythms, and in the fifities black poets were welcomed in the counter-culture. Writers like Ted Joans, Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka), and Bob Kaufman read accompanied by small ensembles in bars, galleries, and coffee houses. On May 19 of 1968 (Malcolm X's birthday) Felipe Luciano, Gylan Kain and David Nelson formed The Last Poets in Marcus Garvey Park in East Harlem. That year Etheridge Knight went directly from prison to an appointment at the University of Pittsburgh on the strength of his Poems from Prison, and LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal came out with Black Fire, an anthology of African-American poetry which acknowledges, according to Neal’s “Afterword,” “History weighs down on all this literature,” and which thus seeks to represent , as Jones (Baraka) said in the “Foreward” “the striving of a nation coming back into focus.”
     The hip subculture, conceived at the time by some as the revolutionary youth movement, contributed to the radical critique of America. Though the Beat Generation was in fact a coterie of writers (Ginsberg liked to says it was simply himself and a few friends), by the late sixties it looked almost like a mass movement. The 1967 Human Be-in in San Francisco featured Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, and Snyder as well as Lenore Kandel who insisted on the vatic as well as the political role of poetry, saying “Poetry is never compromise. It is the manifestation of a vision, an illumination, an experience.” (Allen and Tallman 450) The Diggers publishing arm, the Communications Company, had already ceased printing by 1968, but their example spawned countless others. Paul Carroll, the Chicago poet who had come to some prominence when the University of Chicago refused to publish a number of the Chicago Review he had edited which featured William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac and he reacted by printing it himself as the first issue of Big Table, saw that his time had come and he published an anthology titled The Young American Poets which featured writers who had emerged after Allen’s anthology.
     Oral performance of poetry had, of course, been widespread throughout history, but with differing forms in different eras. Earlier generations of Americans had made celebrities of poets like James Whitcomb Riley, Amy Lowell, and Vachel Lindsay based on their live shows, but for the second half of the twentieth century the spoken word model (apart from university readings) was the Beat coffee house scene. By 1968 readings were proliferating across the country in a trend that continues to the extent that poetry may well be the most widely practiced art today.
     Considerably more influential than even the burgeoning hip movement was the evolution of popular music. In a general way the often sappy lyrics of fifties rock and roll, many of them written by Tin Pan Alley professionals, were replaced by more original, subtle, and inventive lyrics. Led in sales by Bob Dylan and the Beatles, much popular music came to be more artisanal than corporate, with every garage band playing originals, and millions of people who never would have read a poem consumed these oral texts with devotion and understanding. Instead of the Leiber and Stoller songs expressing teen-age frustrations with school (“Charley Brown”) and Parents (“Yackety-yak”), bands began to express youth culture with a more radical disaffection. The leading edge of this trend was perhaps embodied by John Sinclair and the MC5 and their White Panther Party (later the Rainbow people’s Party) who literally proposed a program of “rock and roll, dope, and fucking in the streets.” Even among the most popular artists, 1968 was the year of the release of the Rolling Stones’ “Street Fighting Man” with its declarations “The time is right for a palace revolution” and “I’ll kill the king.” By contrast in 1968 the Beatles recorded “Revolution” which satirically maintained “if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao/ You ain't going to make it with anyone anyhow.” (A few years later, in 1971 John Lennon was moved to announce a different reaction: “I really thought that love would save us all. But now I’m wearing a Chairman Mao badge, that’s where it’s at.” (Lennon Remembers) Meanwhile Mick Jagger was boasting that his father had been a working class Communist.
     The categories between the social, the political, and the artistic blur in Amiri Baraka’s comment on jazz: “The social consciousness displayed in that music . . . is more radical than sit-ins. We get to Feel-Ins, Know-Ins, Be-Ins.” (Black Music) In spite of the dated locutions, this might serve as a decent formulation of the Romantic definition of art.
     At the same time as poetry was influenced by the political and by popular art, experimental work continued in more purely artistic circles. The attacks on poetry written to order for New critical analysis continued on a variety of fronts: the confessional writers, the hip attempt to tap into pure consciousness, Bly’s “leaping poetry,” the search for the elusive breath unit, the exploration of oral literature by Snyder, Rothenburg, and others, to mention only a few.
     In terms of form itself the sixties represent a transition period during which the profoundly radical gestures which had originated earlier in the century when another war had estranged the artists and Dada had emerged were being integrated into established and academic journals, giving birth to a curiously sleek and prosperous avant-gardism. Before long, the very strategies which had been used to épater les bourgeoisie were receiving grants from major foundations founded by nineteenth century robber barons and even by the federal government without alarming an body except eventually in the nineties Jesse Helms and a few fundamentalists who had never before given a thought to art.
     Cage, MacLow, and Kaprow cultivated randomness and their attitudes were reflected in verse by writers like Ted Berrigan, Anselm Hollo, an d Lew Welch. The attempts to explode the text advanced, breaking first syntax (like Clark Coolidge) and proceeding to wholly non-verbal documents by people like Richard Kostelanetz very like to old-style Lautgedichte. Though such work was as much in a twentieth century tradition as it was experimental, it continued to attract practitioners in spite of its loss of the ability to surprise and shock.
     The concept of a “culture clash” moved from symbolic to physical described by Charles Simic in “On the Great Poets Brawl of 1968.” He recalls hostility to the old guard faction headed by longtime editor Henry Rago whom “lots of poets loathed” was sufficiently heated that fistfights erupted on the floor of the Stony Brook World Poetry Conference. Yet that same year Poetry published aging avant-gardists like Pablo Neruda, Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan, political radicals like Muriel Rukeyser, and hip authors like Gary Snyder, as well as experimentalists of various schools such as Gerard Malanga, Ted Berrigan, and Larry Eigner.
     The proliferation of community poetry readings and the relative rise in popularity of readings by well-known authors is a lasting if limited effect of the tendency that, while it was hardly new, grew considerably in the late sixties. As M.F.A. programs have sprouted on all sides, the general poetic literacy has fallen precipitately. The poetic energy that for a time in the sixties bled into popular culture in a range of fresh and exciting directions, has, it seems to me, produced little promise of new work in our own time. Revolutionary political lyrics in rare survivals seem as robotized as the forgotten proletarian poetry of the thirties, though ethnic identity, gay, and feminist themes are prominent in prize-winning manuscripts. A solid advance is evident in the emergence of ranks of significant black writers, but political protest seems most vigorous in rap. The counter-culture, arguably already spent by 1968 – the Haight had observed “the death of hippie” toward the end of 1967 – is to most a somewhat silly memory rather than a renaissance. Its innovative forms have been coopted and digested by the marketplace. The sometimes witty, elegant, and outrageous head comics, it seems, served only to pave the way for Beavis and Butthead, the montage methods of the wildest underground movies appear in advertisements for underwear, and popular music has long returned to being a commodity. For my money, the present question is not in what direction the avant-garde will turn, but whether an avant-garde is possible at all in the twenty-first century.

The Greeks Meet the Yogis

I collect here most of the significant references to ancient Indian philosophers in Greek authors. Rather than proposing new ideas about these encounters, my goal is simply to bring these records together for the convenience of the general reader and to provide suggestions for further reading. I realize my title sounds flippant with its overgeneralized “yogis,” but I am little worse in this way than my Greek authorities.



     Knowledge of India in the West was, until the last few hundred years, fragmentary and often fabulous.  Even when a European writer did speak of the East, Asia, or the Orient it was most often with the Near East in mind.  The 1785 publication of the Bhagavad Gita by Charles Wilkins marked the first translation directly from a Sanskrit text into a European language. [1]  Still, as some find they have a wandering and a curious disposition, there have been contacts, including trade, between Europe and South Asia since ancient times.
     It is likely that Herodotus had heard something of Indian sadhus when he wrote “there are other Indians, again, who kill no living creature, nor sow, nor are wont to have houses; they eat grass, and they have a grain growing naturally from the earth in its calyx, about the size of a millet-seed, which they gather with the calyx and roast and eat.  When any one of them falls sick he goes into the desert and lies there, none regarding whether he be sick or die.” [2]
     More or less reliable accounts of meetings between ancient Greeks and Indians are recorded in historical and geographical treatises in both Greek and Sanskrit.  Some Greeks were actively curious about the new philosophies they encountered and sought out and questioned those considered wise men among the Indians.  More speculatively, Indian thought appears to have influenced some Greek philosophers, particularly Pythagoreans, Cynics, Skeptics, and Neo-Platonists.
     The practices of Indian ascetics impressed many outsiders, most of all those of a similar sensibility.   Philostratus quotes the Neopythagorean Apollonius of Tyana as saying “I saw Indian Brahmans living upon the earth and yet not on it, and fortified without fortifications, and possessing nothing, yet having the riches of all men.”  Apollonius indeed thought their wisdom surpassed that of the Greeks, saying somewhat gnomically, “I consider that your lore is profounder and much more divine than our own; and if I add nothing to my present stock of knowledge while I am with you, I shall at least have learned that I have nothing more to learn.” [3]
     Doubtless the most substantial report of India was the Indika of Megasthenes who had been an ambassador sent by Seleucus, one of Alexander’s Diadochi, to Chandragupta Maurya’s court in Pataliputra.  The book is lost, but portions are preserved by Diodorus Siculus, Strabo, Pliny, and Arrian. Megasthenes accepts fantastic tales such as mouthless people, those with their feet backward, and others with great ears extending to the ground in which they wrap themselves to sleep.  He is, however, quite clear about the distinction between brahmins and sramaṇas, or ascetics. With the casual cosmopolitanism of the Greeks, who considered that divinity was universally the same, followers of Shiva are called Dionysians and those of Vishnu followers of Zeus. [4]  The Greeks themselves were probably ignorant of Indian sects, and the thinkers they encountered may have been Buddhists, Hindus, or Jains, and all three groups might have been called Brahmins or gymnosophists.
     In his life of Alexander Plutarch relates a story of the king’s own interaction with such sages. He had been wounded by an arrow while fighting the Malli in the Punjab. Blaming religious leaders for fomenting rebellion against him, he suppressed the resistance violently, including killing numerous holy men. Plutarch’s narration takes the form of a folktale.  Alexander summons ten gymnosophists and poses them difficult questions.  He threatens to kill them if they answer poorly but appoints one of their own number as judge. [5]
     They acquit themselves well, and the general import of the anecdote is simply to establish their credentials as wise men.  Some resemble riddles with a pleasantly unexpected answer, such as the question as to which animal is the most cunning, to which the response was “that which man has not discovered.”  The Greeks likely admired the forthrightness and attachment to virtue of the man who, when asked why he had supported Sabbas’ revolt, replied “Because I wished him either to live nobly or to die nobly.” Several of the answers seemed to be common sententiae such when declaring that the most loved man would be he that is most powerful, yet does not inspire fear.
     Perhaps the most subtle answers are those that to undermine dualities.  When asked whether the earth or the sea produced larger animals, the gymnosophist answered that earth did, since the sea was but a part of the earth.  Thus the apparent opposites are folded together harmonically. Similarly, the responses seem to harmonize life and death, day and night, god and man, while making no reference to the philosophic or theological underpinnings of their attitudes.
     The story ends with three turns of a fine dialectical wit.  “The judge declared that they had answered one worse than another."  Alexander says that, for delivering such an opinion, he must be the first to die, whereupon the sage responds, “That cannot be, O King,” said the judge, “unless thou falsely saidst that thou wouldst put to death first him who answered worst.”  Pleased, Alexander then pardons the lot and sends them off laden with gifts.  Thus the gymnosophist surprises the reader by, in effect, condemning his colleagues; Alexander turns the tables once more by saying that he must be executed; and finally, the gymnosophist uses the king’s own words to provide a happy ending.
     Arrian paraphrasing Megasthenes, tells that the Indians indicate no sign of respect but only stamped their feet when he appeared.  When asked the meaning of their action, they did not hesitate to chasten the conqueror’s ambition.  “King Alexander, every man can possess only so much of the earth’ surface as this we are standing on.  You are but human like the rest of us, save that you are always busy and up to no good, traveling so many miles from your home, a nuisance to yourself and to others.  Ah well! You will soon be dead, and then you will own just as much of this earth as will suffice to bury you.” [6]
     It was not the end, apparently, of Alexander’s inquiries.  Having heard that the very wisest remain in their hermitages, he sends Onesicritus, a Cynic and follower of Diogenes, [7] to interview these wisest if the wise. The one reputed wisest of all, Dandamis would have nothing to do with the Greeks, asking only “Why did Alexander make such a long journey hither?”  Onesicritus sought then to interview another of the gymnosophists, Calanus, only to find him unwilling to speak until the Greek removed his clothes to match the Indian’s state of undress.  Calanus did accompany the Greeks for some time, though he took ill and, realizing his death was approaching asked that a funeral pyre be built whereupon he calmly reclined to be burnt. [8]
     The Indian philosophers impressed not only pagans, but Jews and Christians as well.  Philo Judaeus, the Jewish neoplatonist, who sought to harmonize Jewish and Hellenistic thought by interpreting both symbolically, observes with admirable cosmopolitanism, “And among the Indians there is the class of the gymnosophists, who . . .make their whole existence a sort of lesson in virtue.” [9]
     According to Eusebius an Indian asked Socrates about his philosophy and when he answered that he studied human life, “the Indian laughed at him, and said that no one could comprehend things human, if he were ignorant of things divine.” He does not record Socrates’ response, but he does treat Socrates as a righteous if non-Christian theist, superior to the materialist Greek thinkers.  He approvingly notes that Plato sought to make “the divine” the basis for his thought.” [10]
     Clement of Alexandria, with more understanding than many an orthodox Christian divine since, said with regard to pagan philosophers “all [peoples], in my opinion, are illuminated by the dawn of Light.”  His ethnocentrism destabilized by attachment to Christianity, he argues that much of Greek philosophy was derived from “barbarians,” including Jews, Egyptians, and others. He mentions Buddhists as well. [11]
     Indians clearly had acquired a reputation for asceticism, non-materialism, and utter devotion to philosophy.  It is less evident that the specific tenets of Indian religio-philosophic thought influenced Greek writers, though Indian influence has been traced by some scholars as early as pre-Socratics. [12]   With evidence varying from the highly speculative to the highly likely, scholars have discerned South Asian concepts in a number of schools of later Greek thought.
     Pythagoreanism with its teaching of reincarnation and vegetarianism seems obviously reminiscent of similar Hindu and Buddhist doctrines.  Apollonius thought that the philosophers of the East has a Pythagorean air about them. [13]  According to Philostratus’ account the Indians specifically claimed to have influenced Pythagoreanism.
     Plotinus, according to Porphyry’s biography, wished to study with the Persian magi and the Indian gymnosophists.  The neoplatonic monad Nous has seemed to many to resemble the Atman of Advaita thought. [14] Plotinus had set out to study he teaching of the Persian and Indian sages, but the military expedition of Gordian III with whom he traveled, proved a failure and he did not reach India proper, though he may have met with Indian philosophers.
     Some see Indian influence in Diogenes whose ascetic practices were rare in pre-Christian Greece [15], though Pythagoreans and others had advocated simple, if not ascetic, life. Diogenes famously met Alexander – the encounter is one of the most well-known anecdotes of antiquity – and Diogenes’ disciple Onesicritus was selected to by the king to investigate the gymnosophists, perhaps due to a similarity of thought.
     Probably the best case for Indian influence is that of Pyrrho of Elis’s Skepticism.  Not only is Pyrrho known to have traveled to the East and conferred with philosophers there; he is also reported to have had a sort of conversion experience. “This led him to adopt a most noble philosophy, to quote Ascanius of Abdera, taking the form of agnosticism and suspension of judgement. He denied that anything was honourable or dishonourable, just or unjust. And so, universally, he held that there is nothing really existent, but custom and convention govern human action; for no single thing is in itself any more this than that.” Upon his return to Greece his radically skeptical teachings included a virtual duplication of the quadrilemma that had been used for centuries by Sanskrit thinkers. [16] The Buddhist concept of avyakrta or insoluble problems according to Buddha is comparable as well, though Pyrrho’s skepticism is more thorough.
     By the third century of the Christian era Hippolytus of Rome included the Brahmins in his Refutation of All Heresies. [17]  He says, oddly, perhaps referring to mantras, that “to them the Deity is Discourse.”  Yet he also more or less accurately describes the austerities of the “Brachmans.”  Though Westerners only gained access to reliable texts of the Sanskrit masterpieces in the nineteenth century, many hundreds of years earlier Europeans had caught sight of glints and shadows of philosophical and spiritual systems from the other side of the world. In spite of imperfect transmission such news from other cultures exercised an outsize influence even in ancient times, suggesting a broader sense of what it is to be human, opening the possibility of new directions and fertilizing European thought.




1. Translations into French and German followed, and the book proved an influence on Romanticism. Blake celebrated its publication with a picture The Bramins, unfortunately now lost, which showed Wilkins and his Indian collaborators.

2. III, 100.

3. Philostratus 3.13 and 3.16. An early example, perhaps, of a late antique trend that persists today, the Westerner infatuated with “the wisdom of the East.”

4. See the account in Strabo XV, I, 39 ff.. Chandragupta himself married a Greek, daughter of Suluva. Bhavisya Purana edited by P. 18 According to the Pratisarga Parva , he “mixed the Buddhists and Yavanas [Greeks].” Other Greek embassies to India were led by Deimachus, ambassador to Bindusara, and Dionysius, ambassador to Ashoka. Ctesias was also the author of an Indika, but he relied on second-hand information, having himself gone no further than Persia.

5. Plutarch 65 ff. Curiously, the story finds its way into the Mishnah transformed into Alexander questioning the elders of the Negev. See Luitpold Wallach, “Alexander the Great and the Indian Gymnosophists in Hebrew Tradition,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research Vol. 11 (1941), pp. 47-83. He notes as well that a number of ancient Greek sources claim that Jews were descended from Indian philosophers. Plutarch had earlier noted (59) that Alexander did have many gymnosophists killed for their part in fomenting rebellion.

6. Arrian, Anabasis, VII.1.5 ff.

7. Though Onesicritus’ volume How Alexander was Educated (Πῶς Ἀλέξανδρος Ἤχθη) is lost, it was known to many ancient authors and seems to have combined much factual information with a measure of myth, legend, and good story.

8. Plutarch reports (69) that the same self-sacrifice was performed by “another Indian who was in the following of Caesar at Athens; and the ‘Indian's Tomb’ is shown there to this day.”

9. Quod omnis probus liber sit (Every Good Man is Free), 74. Philo specifically praises the judgement of Calanus in sections 92-93.

10. Praeparatio evangelico 11.8. The story in Aristocles is thought an attack on a materialist or at any rate humanistic Socrates perhaps from Pythagorean critics. Many early Christian regarded Socrates as something of a proto-Christian, for instance, Justin Martyr’s First Apology 46. Augustine says he was taught by the Platonists to seek spiritual truth. Confessions 7. 20.

11. Stromata 1.15 and 1.13. Eusebius likewise Preparatio evangelico 10.5 says that the Greeks owed their philosophy to barbarians.

12. See George P. Conger’s “Did India Influence Early Greek Philosophies?” in Philosophy East and West Vol. 2, No. 2 (Jul., 1952), pp. 102-12 and Thomas C. McEvilley’s The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies. General treatments include K. Karttunen, India in Early Greek Literature.

13. Philostratus 3.13 and 3.19.

14. See Ananda Coomaraswamy Vedanta and Western Tradition, Bréhier’ La Philosophie de Plotin (1928), P.M. Gregorios (ed.), Neoplatonism and Indian Philosophy, R.B. Harris (ed.), Neoplatonism and Indian Philosophy. For an up-to-date survey, see Joachim Lacrosse’s “Plotinus, Porphyry, and India: A Re-Examination,” Le philosophoire 2014/1, No 41, and J.F. Staal, Advaita and Neoplatonism: a Critical Study in Comparative Philosophy. Coomaraswamy (see, for instance,) and others have noted the similarities between Plotinus' teachings to the Hindu school of Advaita Vedanta,. Though some have denied or downplayed Indian influence. See A. H. Armstrong’s The Architecture of the Intelligible Universe in the Philosophy of Plotinus: An Analytical and Historical Study.

15. See J. Romm, Dog Heads and Noble Savages: Cynicism before the Cynics.

16. Diogenes Laertius IX.61. See Christopher I. Beckwith Greek Buddha: Pyrrho's Encounter with Early Buddhism in Central Asia and E. Flintoff, “Pyrrho and India,” Phronesis 25 (1980), 88-108. The story of the gymnosophists’ answers to riddle-like questions was thought to be Skeptic by Philip R. Bosman in “The Gymnosophist Riddle Context (Berol. P. 13044): A Cynic Text?” in Richard Kalmin Migrating Tales: The Talmud's Narratives and Their Historical Context which also discusses various retellings of the story.

17. Ch. 21. Jean Filliozat with Jean Renou in L’Inde Classique argues that Hippolytus was familiar with the teachings of the Maitreya Upanishad. See "La doctrine brahmanique à Rome au IIIè siècle" in Les relations extérieures de l’Inde, vol. 2.

Archives of the First Majority Gallery

America’s susceptibility to celebrity extends even to the arts. We laud the famous to the skies while neglecting those who have never gained the spotlight. We gladly pay premium prices for concert seats to hear a performer we know by reputation and ignore first-rate regional talents. We turn in a literary journal to the names we recognize and never get around to the rest. In order to succeed in the arts one must be as clever about publicity as about one’s art. In this way most artists work in darkness and leave no trace. The merit of an aesthetic work does not entail its longevity.

All the more do those who embrace counter-cultural ideals and eschew conventional markers of achievement prepare their own obscurity. Ted Joans was always just too hip for the mantle of fame while Allen Ginsberg found it fit him well. Patti Smith doggedly pursued every opportunity for advancement, so we can say her name today, while dozens of other punk poets are forgotten.

During the 1970s my wife Patricia Seaton, sometimes called “Ia,” was an exhibiting member of the First Majority Gallery in Berkeley, a pioneering all-female gallery in Berkeley. In a few decades the First Majority, has all but vanished from memory. Virtually nothing of its history is recorded online beyond its place in a few artists’ résumés and scans of old journals listing shows. Surely such grass-roots artistic formations have their own story to tell of the cultural history of our time. I record below some haphazardly surviving records concerning the group which were kept in increasingly battered cardboard boxes through all the artist’s travels and subsequent ventures. Having witnessed so very much of lesser importance preserved apparently forever in digital form, I list these documents here to record available details of one small and twisting tendril winding through the history of the age.

Reading the guest book comments for Patricia’s show, I am struck by the number of visitors who thought the work pointed important new directions. They felt the presence of something meaningful, beautiful, and novel in the arts. Decades later their enthusiasm cannot be recaptured, but it is possible to preserve a few fragmented traces of what once excited it.



Multiple copies exist of some documents.

call for submissions for two group shows during the summer of 1975 signed Ginger, Janet, Judith, Rosalie, and Sheila.

call for submissions for a group show inviting work “whether or not you consider yourself to be an artist,” on the theme of the Great Mother scheduled for April 24, signed “Rosalie, Sheila, Ia, Ginger, and Evelyn.”

call for submissions for a show on the theme “Illumination: words, pictures, & light” opening June 24, 1975.

letter dated June 18, 1975 signed Patricia Seaton indicating a wish to join the collective.

note accepting Seaton’s work for group show July 12, 1975.

“An Interior Landscape” Nov. 3-Dec. 7 (1975) poster with drawing by Ia and, following the title, the words “women’s environment . . .mental contours . . .collective art work.

“Spirits Clothed in Flesh” Jan. 27-Feb. 8 (1976) with drawing by Ia from a painted plate and, following the title, the words “paintings, drawings, ceramics, phantoms demonic & delicious."

“A Women’s Art Show” Oct. 1-Oct.31 (1975) with drawing perhaps by Janet Cannon-Unione including Virginia Atkin-Murray, Janet Cannon-Unione, Evelyn Hinde, Patricia Seaton, Sheila Seguin, Judith Sutliff, and Judy Todd.

Catalogue for “Spirits Clothed in Flesh” including three drawings by Ia.

press release for a slide lecture on “Patriarchal Mutilation of the Great Mother” by Lili Artel on September 18 and 25, 1975.

press release for “Spirits Clothed in Flesh” Jan. 27-Feb. 28 with remarks attributed to Euterpe of Chicago.

Women’s Art Center Newsletter, Winter 1976, with notice of Ia Seaton show, labeled gallery copy.

“The First Majority: Conversation with Sheila Seguin and Ginger Atkin,” four-page document citing a founding statement from February 1974 and list of the current collective members: Ginger Atkin, Rosalie Cassell, Evelyn Hinde, Patricia Seaton, Sheila Seguin, and Judy Todd. The document discusses the gallery and its vision, past shows, the current “Internal Landscape.”

announcement of an April 1 showing of tapes from “Just Us” and from International Women’s Video letters and of a program “Meet the First Majority” on April 25. Both are noted as “women only” events.

poster for the April 25 “Meet the First Majority” program, including “women only.”

poster for first show opening Feb. 15 with a group show including Virginia Atkin-Murray, Janet Cannon-Unione, Rosalie Cassell, Ellyn Rabinowitz, Diane Rusnak, Sheila Seguin, and Judith Sutliff.

poster for “Hindsight,” sculpture and environment by Evelyn Hinde with a drawing (by Hinde?) September 14-October 18 (1975?).

poster for “Bay Area Women: part 2” August 10-September 4, 1975 with unsigned drawing.

poster for “Ghost Images,” paintings, prints, and photos by Judith Sutliff with photo by Sutliff June 15-July 10.

poster for show featuring “The Drawings, Paintings, and Poems of Janet Cannon-Unione and Virginia Atkin-Murray with unsigned drawing.

poster for “Camilla Hall: her paintings, drawings, poetry” March 16-April 15 with drawing by Hall.
poster for Paintings and Sculpture by Sheila Seguin May 17-June 12.

poster for “Witch’s Retort” art by Rosalie Cassell and Judy Todd March 6-April 3, 1976 with unsigned drawing.

poster for the “Great Mother” show including Lina Allertons, Diane Rusnak, Pat Henshaw, Karen Berkan, Lougran O’Connor, Benita Mirabelli, Elizabeth Ennis, Maxene Galkin, January Nice, Leslie Markham, Nan Parry, Sara Sunstein, and Rossi Stewart, April 24-March 29, 1976.

poster for “Bay Area Women” July 12-August 7 with unsigned drawing.

poster for “Womanrise” Amazon art by Virginia Atkin, Dec. 23-Jan. 27 with drawing by Atkin.

poster for video evenings Feb. 9, March 11, and March 25 featuring the Just US Video Collective, the Iris Video Collective and CCAC Women’s Video, the latter two to admit women only.

poster for open poetry readings (women only) in the gallery starting April 9.

poster for lectures Sep. 2 by Evelyn Hinde on Käthe Kollowitz [sic], Sep. 18 Lili Artel in the Great Mother, and Sep. 25 Lili Artel on “Fragmentation of the Great Mother in Patriarchy.”

text of proposal to Berkeley City Government for grant, dated December 1975.

report to Berkeley Civic Arts Commission detailing programs in the First majority Gallery space, undated.

photocopy of new story “First Majority: more than just a gallery” September 1975.

press release following the gallery’s first show opening February 15, 1975, discussing the history of the project, two pages.

“The First Majority: Evolution of a Women’s Gallery in the East Bay” discussing the first show, February 15, 1975, copied from an unknown journal.

copy of article by Brenda Kahn from The Daily Californian February 25, 1975 “New Gall;eryto Shpwcase Women Artists Only.”

Calendar of First majority events for January through March showing numerous programs undocumented elsewhere.

unspecified: letter from Chico State professor asking for slides of “Octopus Woman” for a course on Women and the Arts, newspaper announcements of shows, visitor book with comments for “Spirits Clothed in Flesh,” six pages from what seems to be a gallery sitter’s book, list of Bay Area media outlets, poster for “Persona, a women’s art show" in the Berkeley Library.

“Preachin’ the Blues” (Son House)

I discuss here House’s 1930 recording, the text of which is appended. I have added also for comparison his 1965 version.


     Literature, indeed, art in general, is particularly effective in dealing with thematic material which is conflicted, ambivalent, paradoxical, and mysterious. This characteristic of poetic truth arises not from a valuation of obscurity for its own sake, but rather from the complexity of people’s own attitudes, particularly toward the subjects that matter most: love, death, and the divine. Self-contradictory codes flourish in poetry because binary oppositions are often reductive or false. An accurate answer is often "neither and both."
     Son House exemplifies in his life as well as his work the tension between the sacred and the secular in early Delta blues singers and in African-American culture more generally. Though in his youth he was a regular church-goer and generally an enthusiastic Christian, his ambivalence toward religion and its associated codes of morality emerged in periodic heavy drinking which resulted in his leaving the church for a time, though he later returned to become a deacon and then a preacher for several years. At the age of twenty-five, he was captivated upon hearing a friend play slide guitar, and, in what has been called a reverse conversion, he returned to the blues. [1] The lifestyle that resulted from his commitment to secular music led to his involvement in periodic fights and twice to his arrest for murder. [2]
     One of his most well-known tunes, “Preachin’ the Blues,” recorded for Paramount in two parts in 1930, expresses the bipolar opposition of sacred and secular in its paradoxical title as well as in House’s intense, strained vocal quality and the driving, if simple, accompaniment. The pressured vocalizations of the performance push against the limits of the artist’s virtuosity, piercing the border of intelligibility to heighten the tone and leaping thereby into the sublime beginning with the very first syllable, an extended “ohhh” that seems to rise from the depths.
     The pattern of these apparently “spontaneous overflows of powerful emotion” is highly symmetrical. The afflatus above the register of words is maintained through the second verse’s “mmm” sound, the heart-felt “yeah” of verses six and seven which links the last verse on side one and the first of side two, the first of which is supported by an “oh” and the second by a “whoa.” The final verse brings a unifying return to the “oh” from the abyss which opened the song.
     Similarly, House’s exclamations, replicating those that would arise from a Pentecostal congregation, “Lord God almighty” and “praise God almighty,” indicate a level of emotional excitement, though their piety is radically ambivalent, caught on the ridgepole of doubt that supports the entire song.
     The song opens with what might sound like a declaration of faith in church, the commitment of a sinner coming forward to be saved: “Oh, I'm gon' get me religion I'm gon' join the baptist church.” Yet ambiguity emerges immediately as the rhyme line turns to satire emphasized by the vocal waver about the word “have to” in the line “so I won’t have to work.” House thus ridicules the most respected member of the community at the same time as he implicitly rejects the work ethic embraced by “respectable” blacks. His listeners were familiar with jokes and stories based on men of the cloth whose minds were less on things of the spirit than on chicken dinners from the parishioners, if not the church ladies’ beds. [3]
     He then tightly conflates the sacred and the secular by announcing “Oh, I’m gonna preach these blues now“ and asking “I want everybody to shout,” as though they were in a church rather than a juke joint, the likely venue for the song’s performance. Just after saying he would accept religion, he begins to preach, but not from a gospel perspective, rather “I'm gonna preach these blues now,” suggesting the music might prove for him a sort of religion. He continues “I want everybody to shout” as though leading a fundamentalist worship service where the congregation is anything but passive.
     While this may seem to continue the mocking of men of the cloth by conducting a sort of black Protestant equivalent of a Black Mass, celebrating the opposite of Christian values, the last line of the second verse disappoints that expectation with an apparently sincere search for spiritual release, just as the rhyme-line of the first stanza upset the rhetoric of the very first verse. The poignant longing of the line is unmistakable, “I'm gonna do like a prisoner, I'm gon' roll my time on out.”
     The word prisoner here is profoundly ambiguous. On the one hand, an irreligious person might regard the rules of the church as a “prison.” For the observant when House compares himself to a prisoner, the term may recall St. Paul’s references to himself as “a prisoner of Jesus Christ.” [4] Paul was speaking of his being made a literal prisoner because of his righteousness alone, but also of his submissive commitment to Christian morality and values. Finally, behind these associations is the old sense of the body itself as a prison and life as a long incarceration. [5]
     “I'm gon' roll my time on out” surely means that the speaker will live his life, with all its restrictions and suffering, in such a way as to make it as easy as possible, while maintaining a neutrality about Christianity or loose living will be the greater aid toward that end.
     In the third verse the ambiguities continue as the singer, having resolved to “do his time” on earth as easily as possible, commences to seek the consolation of religion in an altogether conventional way. “In my room I bowed down to pray,” but his intentions are short-lived since “the blues come along and they blowed my spirit away.” The speaker is apparently passive, he is trying to do right, but the blues rear up, actively curtailing his devotions. The personification anticipates the phrase that occurs later: “the blues came walking like a man.” [6] What could he do with his spirit involuntarily dissipated and his soul in the grip of the blues?
     Simply to reinforce his case, the speaker goes on to insist “I'd'a had religion, Lord, this very day/ But the womens and the whiskey, well, they would not let me pray.” Again he blames an outside agency for overwhelming his good faith attempts to lead a Christian life. He proceeds to yearn for heaven and, for good measure, praises “God almighty,” but then reveals that his own paradise would be “a long, long happy home” populated by “all my women,” implying that eternal love-making rather than choral song would occupy his black angels. [7] He is holding tightly to both sides of the bipolar opposition, seeking salvation (which one might also call liberation or enlightenment) while at the same time affirming his incorrigible pursuit of pleasure.
     The singer readily confesses the egocentric basis of his earthly love, noting in the sixth verse, after a passionate “yeah,” an enthusiastic affirmation: “I love my baby just like I love myself.” Christ after all, asked neither more nor less. [8] House, however, is swift to add the aggressively possessive and quite unchristian sentiment: “if she don't have me she won't have nobody else.”
     On the second side of the record, “Preachin’ the Blues, Part 2” House elaborates the synthesis of the sacred and the secular, implying a new sort of blues which provides a vision entire and specific of blues as an experience potentially as profound and soul-satisfying as the church. As before, he begins by sounding as though he is conventionally pious: “I'm gon' fold my arms , I'm gonna kneel down in prayer.” The rhyme-line, though recoils on this meaning: “when I get up I'm gonna leave my preachin blues laying there.” Though the precise implication of this statement is mysterious, House again beings into creation through naming that odd hybrid, the preaching blues.
     A sort of theophany follows with the devotee’s communion with the supernatural. “I met the blues this morning, walking just like a man,” human because, of course, only sentient beings can get the blues. Rather than fleeing, the persona reaches out in fellowship to embrace his own suffering, saying “give me you right hand.”
     The knotty problem that motivates both the devout and those dedicated to the blues, the dilemma of suffering, is then resolved. The singer confidently states “there aint nothing now baby, Lord that's gon' worry my mind,” placing his lover and his god paratactically next to each other, as though he is addressing both at the same time. In a new state of blessedness, he says all is well, “I'm satisfied I got the longest line.”
     The last two stanzas, punctuated by the call to “praise God,” are filled with the resolution to continue in his practice of refusing to select either the sacred or the secular, but rather combining them into a synthesis better suited to his sensibility. Vowing “to stay on the job” and “preach these gospel blues,” he can not only lift up his own soul but can inspire a similar excited joy in his listeners.


Whoa, I'm gonna preach these blues now and choose my seat and sit down
When the spirit comes, I want you to jump straight up and down


     A primary weakness of the church is its hypocrisy. Believers and men of the cloth alike are expected to deny their own essential nature in order to be holy. The singer seeks to integrate spiritual growth with a more realistic assessment of what it is to be human in which both religion and sensuality have a part. Son House in this song testifies to the spiritual power of the blues, a power felt by many practitioners and listeners through the life of the genre. [9] The gravitas and passion he brings to the song lifts it far above satire of the failings of the church and its adherents into a search after a new synthesis of the sacred and the secular which might provide the individual with purpose and peace of mind more attuned to human nature than fundamentalist Christianity. If the tension is never resolved between sacred and secular that, too, reflects the singer’s (and perhaps the listener’s) lived experience.



1. Further biographical details may be found in Daniel Beaumont’s Preachin' the Blues; The Life and Times of Son House (Oxford, Oxford University Press: 2011).

2. He served several years at Parchman Farm the first time, but the second time, twenty-five years later, the charges were dropped.

3. In The ground-breaking Deep Down in the Jungle (p. 199) Roger D. Abrahams notes a precedent in Boccaccio when introducing jokes, which he describes as “legion,” on “the sexual promiscuity of the clergy”.

4. See Philemon I,9, Ephesians 4:1, etc. See also “slaves of God” (Romans 6:22). In the Eastern Orthodox Church, this term is used to refer to any Eastern Orthodox Christian. The Arabic name Abdullah (from عبد الله, ʿAbd Allāh) means "slave of God," as do the Hebrew name Obadiah (עובדיה), the German name Gottschalk, and the Sanskrit name Devadasa.

5. The trope appears around the world. See, for instance, Plato, Cratylus, 400c, Phaedo, 61e-62c, Gorgias, 493a, Phaedrus 250c, and Republic IX 586a. Leo III’s De Miseria Condicionis Humane (XIX) says straightforwardly “the body is the prison of the soul.”

6. These same words also appear in Robert Johnson’s song titled “Preachin’ Blues.”

7. Cf. Robert Nighthawk’s “Sweet Black Angel.” Or Lucille Bogan’s version “Black Angel Blues” Louis Lasky (“Teasin’ Brown Blues”), Charlie McCoy (“Last Time Blues”), and Blind Willie McTell (“Talking to Myself” and “Ticket Agent Blues”) are among those whose songs ask God to “send me an angel down.”

8. See Matthew 22:39, Mark 12:31, and Luke 12:27.

9. There are at least two albums titled Blues are my Religion (by Eric Culberson and Sonny Rhodes). For a scholarly iteration, see Jon Michael Spencer’s Blues and Evil. Cf. Ted Joans’ poem “Jazz is my Religion.”


This site includes a good many other essays treating blues songs as poetry. To see the others open the Index under the current month in the archive and consult section 5D “songs.”


Preachin’ the Blues
part 1 1930 version

Oh, I'm gon' get me religion I'm gon' join the baptist church
Oh, I'm gon' get me religion I'm gon' join the baptist church
I'm gon' be a baptist preacher and I sure won't have to work

Oh, I'm gonna preach these blues now, and I want everybody to shout
Mmm-mmm, I want everybody to shout
I'm gonna do like a prisoner, I'm gon' roll my time on out

Oh, in my room I bowed down to pray
Oh, up in my room I bowed down to pray
Then the blues come along and they blowed my spirit away

Oh, I'd'a had religion, Lord, this very day
Oh, I'd'a had religion, Lord, this very day
But the womens and whiskey, well, they would not let me pray

Oh, I wish I had me a heaven of my own,
(praise God almighty)
Yeah, heaven of my own,
Then I'd give all my women a long, long happy home

Yeah, I love my baby just like I love myself
Oh, just like I love myself
But if she don't have me she won't have nobody else.


part 2

Yeah, I'm gon' fold my arms , I'm gonna kneel down in prayer
Whoa, I fold my arms, gonna kneel down in prayer
When I get up I'm gonna leave my preachin blues laying there

Now I met the blues this morning, walking just like a man
Oh, walking just like a man
I said good morning blues, now give me you right hand

Now there aint nothing now baby, Lord that's gon' worry my mind
Oh, Lord that's gon' worry my mind
I'm satisfied I got the longest line

I got to stay on the job,I aint got no time to lose
Yeah, I aint got no time to lose
I swear to God, I got to preach these gospel blues

(Praise God almighty)

Oh, I'm gonna preach these blues and choose my seat and sit down
Whoa, I'm gonna preach these blues now and choose my seat and sit down
When the spirit comes, I want you to jump straight up and down



Preachin’ Blues (1965)

Yes, I'm gonna get me religion, I'm gonna join the Baptist Church.
Yes, I'm gonna get me religion, I'm gonna join the Baptist Church.
You know I wanna be a Baptist preacher, just so I won't have to work.

One deacon jumped up, and he began to grin.
One deacon jumped up, and he began to grin.
You know he said, "One thing, elder. I believe I'll go back to barrelhousin again."

One sister jumped up, and she began to shout.
One sister jumped up, and she began to shout.
"You know I'm glad this corn liquor's goin out."

Another deacon jumped up and said, "Why don't ya hush?"
Another deacon jumped up and said, "Why don't ya hush?"
"You know you drink corn liquor and your lie's a horrible stink."

One sister jumped up and she began to shout.
One sister jumped up and she began to shout.
"I believe I can tell ya'll what it's all about."

Another sister jumped up, she said, "Why don't ya hush?"
Another sister jumped up, she said, "Why don't ya hush?"
"You know he's abandoned, and you outta hush your fuss."

I was in the pulpit, I's jumpin up and down.
I was in the pulpit, I's jumpin up and down.
My sisters in the corner, they're hollerin Alabama bound.

Grabbed up my suitcase and I took off down the road.
Grabbed up my suitcase and I took off down the road.
I said, "Farewell church, may the good Lord bless your soul."
You know I wish I had a heaven of my own.
You know I wish I had a heaven of my own.
I'd give all my women a good ole happy home.

I'm gonna preach these blues and I'm gonna choose my seat and sit down.
I'm gonna preach these blues and I'm gonna choose my seat and sit down.
But, when the Spirit comes, I want you to

The Bloody Venus of Marlowe’s “Hero and Leander”

     Christopher Marlowe’s “Hero and Leander” is described in the 1593 entry in the Stationer’s Register as “an amourous poem.” While the adjective is apt, Marlowe’s depiction of erotic delights and dangers is strikingly ambivalent. The susceptible reader may find some passages such a richly brocaded fabric that the poet’s aim can only be beauty and pleasure alone, yet other passages betray a disturbing ambiguity. Marlowe suggests that the experience of love is ecstatic and portrays a sensual paradise in the intoxicating possibilities each lover’s body holds for then other, hardly less enthralling in contemplation than in possession, yet the mythological parallels he cites regularly entail deep suffering. The love of the poem is far from the ingenuous romance of Valentines or the hyperbolic praise of courtly love.

     Unsurprisingly, recent commentary has emphasized dark, ironic, and humorous elements of “Hero and Leander,” but two generations ago a leading scholar could describe the poem as “an unclouded celebration of youthful passion and fullness of physical life,” and “a pretty piece of paganism,” amounting in the end to a “rapturous exaltation of the senses.” [1]

     To another critic of that period the poem “puts aside for the moment the great issues of life and chooses an idyllic theme,” creating a “holiday mood,” “a new and lovely region” with “clear bright air,” “one of the purest things in Elizabethan literature.” This particular reading betrays its blind spots by making the claim that the poem contains “not an obscene word or degenerate description,” [2] though no reader in any era could miss the many double entendres or the repeated introduction of homoerotic content with no direct relation to the central story.

     The very first line calls the Hellespont “guilty of true love’s blood,” foreshadowing a tragic outcome, yet this is easily assimilated under the rubric of “star-crossed love,” the more poignantly affecting for its unhappy conclusion. The reader is likely to be given pause, however, a few lines later, upon discovering that upon Hero’s “kirtle blue” may be found “many a stain/ Made with the blood of wretched lovers slain.” (16-17) The syntax makes it obscure at first reading whether the blood is on Venus’ or on Hero’s garment, but of course the latter is an instance here of the former, so like that the mortal attracts divine love and outshine Nature herself.

     Indeed, the reader very shortly learns details of Venus’ own blood guilt. Her temple, called “Venus’ glass,” (I, 142) is ornamented with depictions of love among the immortals, but these are not tender scenes of affection, but rather “riots, incest, rapes.” (I, 144) The mythological models for erotic behavior include Danae (imprisoned, then victim of rape and attempted murder), Ganymede (abducted), Danae (abducted), Mars (the adulterer), and Sylvanus (whose lover Cyparissus died of grief). [3] Here turtle-doves are quite properly not admired but rather sacrificed, (I, 158) and their blood must come to mind when Hero calls herself a sacrifice to Leander. (II, 48)

     With considerable wit, Marlowe takes pains to ensure that a sinister subtext underlies even what might seem at first glance a conventional compliment.[4] In the description of Leander, for instance, the poet praises the youth: “His body was as straight as Circe’s wand.” (I, 61) Yet the reader thinks more of the fate of Odysseus’ men, transformed to beasts, than of good posture. [5] Immediately following a reference to Leander’s being like “delicious meat” (I, 63) to Jove, his neck is said to surpass “the white of Pelops’ shoulder” (I, 65) whose body was in fact served up in sacrifice. The mention of Pelops suggests the whole multi-generational tragedy of Tantalus and the Atreidai. [6]

     Even a god like Neptune is not merely embarrassed but feels “malice” due to his infatuation with Leander. (II, 208) His own ambivalence causes him to call back his mace thus wounding himself. (II, 213) The digression on Mercury is filled with examples of mortals who came to grief through love entanglements: Ixion, Tantalus, Sisyphus, and Peleus. Leander’s love “is not full of pity (as men say)/ But deaf and cruel where he means to prey.” (II, 287-288) Hero, for her part, is figured as a siren (I, 105) or a terrible harpy (II, 270), a threat to potential lovers.

     This ambivalent or conflicted view of human eroticism, combining the most sublime delights and the most agonized suffering, new life and its complement death, introduced enough cognitive dissonance to render it nearly invisible to early critics. This complex, puzzle-like picture of love is aesthetically pleasing after the manner of a riddle with a similar reader satisfaction once the sense in its nonsense emerges. The fact is that love is compounded of ego and unselfishness, aggression and vulnerability, with immense potential for both violence and tenderness. Evidence is available in the ordinary transactions of life as well as in extreme dramatic phenomena such as sado-masochist fetishes and domestic assaults. With scintillating courtly wit, including a barrage of learned references, Marlowe constructs a picture of two lovers, neither more naïve at the outset nor more doomed in the sequel than his readers. Love may rule the world, but Marlowe leaves no doubt that this means pain and suffering as well as bliss.



1. Douglas Bush, in Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English, p. 33, 125, and 133. Wordsworth had called Keats’ Endymion “a pretty piece of paganism.” The view persisted. Paul Cubeta’s “Marlowe’s Poet in hero and Leander” in College English Vol. 26, No. 7 (Apr., 1965), pp. 500-505 declares “the central purpose of Marlowe’s poem to be “the celebration of erotic rapture.”

2. Paul H. Kocher, Christopher Marlowe : a study of his thought, learning, and character, p. 313, 294, and 514.

3. The only image which does not necessarily reflect coercion or deception is that of Iris. Since Marlowe has her tumbling with Jove in a cloud, he likely imagined her as ravished. (I, 150)

4. The similar partially submerged use of the reference to Philomel in Raleigh’s “The Nymphs Reply to the Shepherd” indicates that such sly use of allusion was well-established.

5. Circe had become by the Middle Ages a type of a deceptive seducer who leads men astray. See, for instance, Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris, 1361-1362.

6. Other relevant aspects of Pelops’ myth include his love relationship with Neptune (or Poseidon, see Pindar, Ist Olympian, 71) and his perilous courtship of Hippodamia, who had killed eighteen earlier suitors.

Notes on Recent Reading 36 (Norris, Rexroth and Laughlin, Sand)

The Pit (Norris)

     Might one write a good novel about the financial markets? Bonfire of the Vanities doesn’t make it, but Norris made a decent attempt with The Pit in 1903. Envisioned as the middle work of a trilogy following a crop of wheat from production through sale to consumption (hardly a promising theme), the story concerns Curtis Jadwin who initially eschews speculation but who is eventually seduced and finally ruined by it. His devotion to his wife, the much-admired Laura Dearborn, is gradually eroded by his addiction to the pursuit of the biggest of deals, cornering the market. (One recalls, of course, that the book was written in the time of anti-trust agitation.) Laura, on the other hand, is self-absorbed, far less mutual in the relationship of her marriage than her sister Page in hers to Landry Court. In fact, the married love themes coexist with the business and economic one without any real attempt toward synthesis or harmony. The conclusion is unconvincing, facile, and abrupt, as Jadwin, while ruined, sets off cheerfully to begin anew, sadder but wiser.
     Norris’ naturalist themes are apparent in his description of the commodities market as a great independent being in the coils of which humans are helpless. In the narrative, both Jadwin’s attempts to corner the market and his attempts at self-restraint are equivalent to challenging nature itself. As elsewhere in Norris, the world of business is contrasted to that of art, and his artist here Sheldon Corthell, charms the ladies and makes insightful observations from the sidelines. Though the book, which appeared after the author’s death, was widely reviewed and generally applauded, I would concur with those critics who find it weaker than the gritty lower depths of McTeague or the Cinemascope Western grandeur of The Octopus.


Kenneth Rexroth and James Laughlin: Selected Letters (Rexroth, Laughlin)

     Having valued Rexroth’s poetry, translations, and criticism for my entire life, indeed, having modeled some of my own studies after his own, I was perhaps over-sensitive to the more personal of these communications. While I was rewarded by finding Rexroth’s customarily knowledgeable and acute critical judgments on nearly every page (the Norton edition edited by Lee Bartlett is, if anything, excessively annotated), I was also put off by my man’s constant badgering, pushing repeatedly for more publications, scolding Laughlin for his refusal to completely discount the writers whom Rexroth calls academic, attacking him for his wealth while always trying to get a bit more of it out of him. In spite of the perils of irascibility and self-pity for those of us who deliberately chose poverty and the counter-culture, I salute Rexroth in the end for his simultaneous principled dedication to the classics and the avant-garde. And his translations from the Chinese can be quite wonderful even if, as the reader of these letters learns, he was capable of translating really from Judith Gautier’s fin-de-siècle French while pretending to work from Chinese. (Characteristically, Laughlin generously notes that he eventually learned quite a few characters and could work to some extent from the original.) He probably knew as much as Pound did, and Pound’s Cathay contains some of the greatest poetry of the twentieth century. The prose in this volume is rarely distinguished, but the literary history and the off-hand critical comments make it essential even for those to whom the hip ideal is less appealing.


Lettres d’un Voyageur (Sand)

     George Sand’s book is at once a memoir, a travel book, and a novel. She passes from one genre to the next as she relates her experiences in Italy and France. Some passages are in fact from actual letters she wrote at the time, while others were composed later. Though there is not enough plot to make a steady story line, she describes her emotional and geographic peregrinations at the center of a love triangle with a poet – the original was Musset – and her physician. The capping detail to this generic conundrum is that parts of the book were first published in the Revue des Deux Mondes and the Revue de Paris. So these letters had a rather wide audience at the time of their publication. Perhaps the celebrity/romance/mystery aspect was significant in the book’s first readership who may have received it as a classier People magazine.
     Yet I am afraid that I feel as a French cookbook once said about a Provencal olive oil pastry touted as equally useful for pie crust, tarts, strudel, and pasta, “good for everything means good for nothing.” The incidents lack the principal desideratum of each sort of book: the structure of a novel, the detailed outward focus of a travel book, and the consistent fidelity to subjective experience of a memoir. The reader who may be satisfied with partial quotients of each will nonetheless find the book worth reading. Now no less than in her lifetime the author has a palpable charisma about her.

Knowing and Not Knowing

     We value knowledge and regard its lack as a simple deficiency, but that view is neither inevitable nor is it always serviceable. In fact knowing and not knowing, like all bipolar oppositions, have a dialectical complementarity. [1] Their relation is so intimate that ignorance is entailed by every specific claim to knowledge, and skepticism in general need not be a logical cul de sac. The apophatic tradition’s route even as far as the divine is only the most spectacular use of not-knowing. Neither the lack of direct demonstrable evidence (of God, for example) nor an insufficiency of evidence (for any other proposition) need bring an end to inquiry.
     There is an inescapable figure/ground relationship involved in sense perception and no less in cognitive processes. Gestalt psychologists have demonstrated that, when one focuses on an object, one necessarily, at the same time, becomes unaware of its context. For every apparent gain in understanding, there is a corresponding loss. It is no more possible to maintain an equal awareness of all parts of a field than to fix both the position and momentum of a quantum object. To understand an utterance means to ignore other associated data. To recognize one reality means to be unconscious of many others. For functional problem-solving and most science, this presents no difficulty; indeed, the limited focus is essential and fruitful. In this way, not knowing is harmoniously intertwined with knowing throughout daily experience.
     Rightly understood the apparently limiting condition of our inescapably partial vision is more often the enabler of conviction than an obstacle. Growing up one is educated by acquiring the beliefs cultivated in one’s own culture. While the process enables an individual to function effectively in a social situation, it requires becoming blind to other possibilities. Yet societies do change, and, for the individual as well, this patterning of blindness and insight [2] may develop, evolve, and alter. The comfortable certainties of received ideas may be threatened or overturned by exposure to other societies with other visions, which may leave the thinker hopelessly at sea, but which often results in an eclectic or a skeptical point of view, or simply a more informed conclusion. A similar step toward enlightenment may occur due to ratiocination, meditation, drugs, or any of the range of techniques people have developed for altering consciousness and thus broadening the mind’s horizon.. Only then does the individual realize the significant role ignorance played in what had felt very much like secure conviction.
     But there can be no eliminating a residue of uncertainty about even the most superficially self-evident facts. One of the most systematic and influential philosophic formulations of this is the Indian catuṣkoṭi, a series of propositions that has been used in a wide variety of ways by Asian philosophers; my own use is doubtless different from theirs. [3]
     The catuṣkoṭi is generated by considering the array of possibilities when considering the truth of a proposition P. It may be so (P) or it may not (not-P). It also may be that both P and not-P are true, or that neither P nor not-P is, resulting in the following. Clever logicians including the great Nagarjuna then doubled this to eight propositions and added a capping ninth term sunyata, or emptiness.


Positive configuration
1. P
2. Not-P
3. Both P and Not-P
4. Neither P nor Not-P


1.
Negative configuration
1. Not (P)
2. Not (Not-P)
3. Not (Both P and Not-P)
4. Not (Neither P nor Not-P)

Sunyata


     This catuṣkoṭi has been used in a wide variety of ways by Asian philosophers; my own use is doubtless different from theirs. [4] To me it is a dialectical series of oppositions that, rather than resolving, leads to a further bipolar pair. It expands indefinitely like a human embryo starting with a single cell, then doubling and redoubling into nearly unfathomable complexity. In the broadest application the formula applies to any proposition, that is to say, to the world at large.
     One may walk through the progressively unfolding implications of the catuṣkoṭi until their complexity becomes unwieldy. One naturally takes the reality of the phenomena one can perceive for granted. This is the first term of the original tetralemma. The first duality then appears with the suggestion that the world is in fact illusory, a veil of maya, avidya, or not-knowing into which one must look more deeply to achieve enlightenment. At this point the critical doubt is productive, suggesting possibilities which would not otherwise arise. This skeptical questioning, flying in the face of common sense, produces the second term.
     Yet the world is not wholly and simply non-existent either. Even if it be a magic show, a puff of smoke, a flash of light, even these are something. The world must simultaneously exist in some sense while not existing in the last analysis. On the other hand the paradox forces the observer to conclude that it neither fully exists nor fully lacks existence in the ordinary understanding. These then are the third and fourth terms.
     This schema already gives the juggling thinker too many thoughts to keep airborne at once, but the savants’ increasingly exquisite metaphysical elaborations may serve the receptive mind as a basis for epistemology. Frustrating though it may be for those with little tolerance for paradox and mystery, this view, in which knowing and not-knowing are symmetrically intertwined, seems the closest approach we may attain to Truth.
     The view of those pursuing the apophatic conception of Ultimate Reality makes an even stronger claim: that the divine is “the affirmation of all things, the negation of all things, and beyond all affirmation and denial.” Nirvana etymologically refers to being extinguished, blown out like an oil lamp, yet it is the goal of Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism. Recent studies have pointed out significant parallels between these spiritual traditions and the discoveries of modern physics. [7]
     What can it mean that the positive and negative charges in the universe are equal? Surely the same should be true of matter and antimatter, though, for the present, these seem stubbornly unequal. [7] When one totals up the entire cosmos the answer must be zero, but a simple blank is not the result, or we would not be here wondering. On the contrary the observer, knowing and not knowing at the same time, gazing through the optical lens of ordinary vision corrected by the additional lens of philosophic speculation, sees most often instead the phantasmagoric phenomena of the world which are both there and not there. We know only by not knowing and see only by blindness.



1. Among the classic statements of this idea is the second poem in the Dao de Jing. As it is critical to the concepts to follow, I include a translation of a portion of that poem in James Legge’s clunky old translation for which, despite all its awkwardness (and its author’s Christian bias), I retain an affection: “All in the world know the beauty of the beautiful, and in doing this they have (the idea of) what ugliness is; they all know the skill of the skilful, and in doing this they have (the idea of) what the want of skill is. So it is that existence and non-existence give birth the one to (the idea of) the other; that difficulty and ease produce the one (the idea of) the other; that length and shortness fashion out the one the figure of the other; that (the ideas of) height and lowness arise from the contrast of the one with the other; that the musical notes and tones become harmonious through the relation of one with another; and that being before and behind give the idea of one following another. Therefore the sage manages affairs without doing anything, and conveys his instructions without the use of speech.”

2. This tidy phrase is, of course, the title of Paul de Man’s virtuoso critical performance. Deconstruction, with its insistence on the statement which is sou rature, “under erasure,” directly engages the dialectic of knowing and not knowing.

3. In fact this gap may well be considered an example of my own ignorance or blindness fostering a new conclusion. The catuṣkoṭi is closely paralleled by reports of the philosophy of Pyrrho of Elis in Sextus Empiricus. As Pyrrho is known to have traveled east with Alexander where he conferred with Persian magi and Indian yogis it is likely that he returned with some Eastern ideas. See Diogenes Laertius 9.61. For a useful sketch of parallels between Pyrrh and Madyamika, see Thomas McEvilley, “Pyrrhonism and Maadhyamika,” Philosophy East and West xxxii, 1 (January 1982), 3-35.

4. Note that, unlike some of the Asian thinkers I accept all these propositions as finally equal in truth value. For some they are alternatives among which one must choose.

5. Eriugena's translation of the pseudo-Dionysius “omnium positio, omnium ablatio, super omnem positionem et ablationem inter se invicem.” (Patrologia Latina CXXII 1121 c-d).

6. The seminal work was Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics. Capra was qualified both as a particle physicist and a psychedelic veteran. His books have, not surprisingly, had a mixed reception. I have not read them.

7. This is called baryon asymmetry.

The Uses of the Monstrous: Chaucer’s “Anelida and Arcite”

     Horace begins his “Ars Poetica” [1] by recommending propriety and adherence to convention, suggesting that works with ill-fitting parts lack unity and must be monstrous, similar to a human with a horse’s neck or a feathered mammal. He says a beautiful woman above the waist whose body is that of a fish below is unsightly and, at best, comic.
     Yet that last example might imply that even monsters have their uses. What struck Horace as a hideous freak was to Tennyson an ideal of beauty: “I would be a mermaid fair.” [2] Chaucer’s “Anelida and Arcite” is generally slighted by critics, largely because of its discordances. A recent critic characterizes the poem’s reputation in short by describing it as “one of Chaucer’s most abused poems.” [3]
     The poet himself may have shared this dismissive attitude. The work is unfinished, which certainly could suggest a failed experiment, though many of Chaucer’s other works, including, of course, the monumental Canterbury Tales, is similarly incomplete. Despite its well-accepted place in his canon from contemporary scholars, Chaucer himself did not mention it when cataloguing his works. To many it is an ungainly compound of the third person narration in uniform stanzas and the metrically elaborate first person complaint. The combination of sources -- from Boccaccio in the story and Machaut in the stanzas given to Anelida [4] -- has better pleased scholars tracing Chaucer’s career than those looking for coherence, unity, and organic form. Chaucer himself mentions neither influence directly, but claims Statius as his source, going to the length of including a few lines from the Thebaid as a sort of guarantee. Having dodged acknowledging his French and Italian sources, he compounds the question by mentioning a certain “Corynne,” generally identified with the female Greek poet contemporary with Pindar. He further confuses the issue of sources by using the name of a figure in Boccaccio to tell a story that seems to be original with him. His elusiveness about the issue of authority may be taken as an emblem that well represents the ambiguities the poem presents as a whole.
     The fact that the poem is unfinished marks it for some as inferior, an aborted experiment, perhaps, unworthy even in the eyes of its creator. However, one might as well view its truncated form as exemplary of lived experience, for is not every one cut off in life rudely before one is sufficiently prepared? One can lend cast one’s autobiography in a comely form, but the result is artful and not inevitable. The lack of an ending then might be regarded as rendering the poem more adequate to represent life as lived.
     The double invocation must strike the reader as odd. It seems epic in ambition, though the poem lacks such a grand scale. What follows is anything but an epic; the story is primarily a frame for the complaint. The second invocation, to the Muses, might pass as a throw-away convention, but the first to Mars is more surprising. War is only in the background of what plot there is, but the mention of the god of war, the lover of Venus, though here immediately doubled by a female counterpart Bellona, reminds the reader of the countless poems -- Romance of the Rose, which Chaucer translated, for one -- in which male/female relations are represented in terms of battles. Chaucer here lightly evokes that immense field of associations which reinforces the suggestion of peril and vulnerability that accompanies love. In an echo of this martial opening, “The Story” does open with the aftermath of military action and, in fact, the “ymage of Mars” carried in the field, (31) the public suffering of war preceding the private suffering of love-longing.
     It is as though Chaucer is playing a game with his reader’s expectations. Writing at a time when convention and its play were centrally important to poetry, he yet managed to twist the tropes round to make something new. One of the conventions he honors by refracting in unpredictable ways is the appeal to authority. Chaucer claims value for his work by attributing it to imitation of a Classical model. “First folowe I Stace” (l. 21) implies that he derives his poem from Statius’ Thebaid. The manuscripts even open “The Story” with a few lines of Statius’ Latin. Yet in fact Boccaccio’s Teseida is his most significant source for the narrative and Machaut for the complaint. Unsatisfied with this shell game, he realizes he can do as he pleases because his story is basically an original one, after all, and he tosses off another source: “Corynne” (21), generally identified with the Greek poet contemporary with Pindar. This suggestion, apart from the satisfaction of its providing another male/female doubling, is entirely a playful red herring. As Chaucer comments, time has a way of devouring all things. (12 ff.)
     The implications of this complex attribution of authority are clear: every work is original and no work is original. Where one thinks a notion arose may be altogether different from where it in fact did. The Classics provide a rich field for training readers in the fabulous potential of poetic language, but they are not the last word. Experimentation seems to assert itself in one aspect after another of “Anelida and Arcite”
     The combination of narrative and complaint might be considered as a representation of the duality of objective/subjective in everyday life. Instead of constituting an aesthetic failing it may be a bold move to record life as it is experienced. The continual check of one’s sense of what seems true to the observer on the individual subjectivity is one of the consistent rhythms of consciousness.
     While apparently Chaucer’s own invention, the story is in part quite traditional. Anelida suggests the archetype of the faithful woman like Constance in the “Man of Law’s Tale” or Griselda in “The Clerk’s Tale.” Her loyalty is contrasted with Arcite’s faithlessness which is not portrayed as the failing of an individual but rather as a typical male characteristic since the time of the first polygamist: “he were fals, for hit is kynde of man/ Sith Lamek was.” (149-150) [6] Men’s pursuit of novelty in love is said to be inherent: “The kynde of mannes herteis to delyte/ In thing that straunge is.” (201-202)
     Arcite is said to have used the conventions of love poetry with exactly the same rhetorical competence that Anelida displays, but toward his own false and treacherous ends. To him the “ful mykel besynesse” (99) of the seduction includes declaring that his is like to go mad or to “dyen for distresse.” (101) Thus the plot arises from the capacity of language to represent either truth or lies, positioning even the text itself balanced on a ridgepole of doubt. Whereas compliance with readers’ conventional expectations will in general reaffirm received ideas, Chaucer’s innovative manipulation of familiar literary usages must cultivate critical questioning.
     Almost in order to wink at the twenty-first century critic, the author specifically refers to his “slye wey” of writing. (48) [7] Whether that be a mirage or not, with its fragmentary character, its wild wrenching of convention, and its “sly” self-questioning, “Anelida and Arcite” may be read as an early predecessor of modernism. Horace’s rule covers in fact only half the house of literature: those texts which reinforce (or refine or further develop) preconception. It is through the violation of convention that authors question assumptions and introduce new ideas and forms.


1. More properly the Epistula ad Pisones.

2. From “The Mermaid.” Of course, in general the mermaid’s beauty is balanced against her destructive potential exemplified by the Sirens of the Odyssey or the Lorelei. Many other tropes exist such as the frightening and serious mermaids of Neruda “Fable of the Mermaid and the Drunks” and Yeats “The Man Young and Old: iii “The Mermaid.”

3. T. S. Miller, “Chaucer's Sources and Chaucer's Lies: Anelida and Arcite and the Poetics of Fabrication,” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. 114, No. 3 (July 2015), pp. 373-400. To Manly it was “purely an experiment in versification.” (Chaucer and the Rhetoricians, 98).

4. The debt to Boccaccio is evident throughout the narrative; that to Machaut is exhaustively demonstrated by Madeleine Fabin in “On Chaucer's Anelida and Arcite,” Modern Language Notes , Vol. 34, No. 5 (May, 1919), 266-272).

5. Compare the use in the “Friar’s Tale” to describe the summoner’s system of spies. “A slyer boye nas noon in Engelond.” (Canterbury Tales 1322)

6. “Kind,” of course, or “kynde” meant nature or natural in Middle English. In the University of Michigan MED: “inherent qualities or properties of persons, animals, plants, elements, medicines, etc.; essential character.”

7. Lines 162-164 question whether any poet might be able to do justice to the story, asking “what man hath the cunnyng or the wit?” Though “cunning” at the time meant only competence, it already by the late 16th century suggested trickery, implying the same duality of truth and lie. This association must surely have been taking shape for some time.

Song Lyrics as Poetry

This is a draft of my thoughts on the subject to be presented December 9, 2018 as part of a Megaphone Series program on the topic at the Seligmann Center.


     Over the chronological and geographic span of our species, poetry has far more often been consumed as sounds in the air than as signs on a two dimensional surface. In this sense the youth listening to pop songs on an iPod is more traditional than the Wordsworth scholar reading silently in the library. The fact is that until the Renaissance, most poetry was performed: lyric forms were sung and epics chanted often to musical accompaniment. Ancient Greek and medieval English poems alike were sung; not infrequently, the authors of Tang Dynasty Chinese poems and troubadours from the south of France titled poems with the name of the well-known song their rhythms recalled. Blues lyrics and some from the Great American Songbook may be among the most beautiful poems of the twentieth century. And, of course, Dylan, who decades ago was praised by Christopher Ricks, the Oxford Professor of Poetry, has now received the Nobel prize.
     The assumption that poems are more beautiful and meaningful than song lyrics is today clearly less widespread than it once was, though it has not disappeared entirely. There is, indeed, no formula nor can there be proof of literary excellence. Value can only appear in one’s consumption of art. Beauty is manifested in widely differing forms depending on the genre of the work in question.
     One sort of art might seem superior to another, more likely to elicit sensations of beauty and sublimity, and the most theoretically compelling is perhaps the Gesamtkunstwerk. If a reader is moved by a written text, how much stronger might the impact be when the text is sung? Add a striking set design, costumes that transform the actors, and dance to add yet another layer of signifiers, and one arrives at the concept, at least, of what might be defended as the very most effective work of art. Yet of course, its advantage is illusory. Quantity of signifiers is not equivalent to their quality. A simple piece may be more powerful than a complex one. Bollywood movies as well as Wagnerian operas employ multiple arts for effect.
     In practice the desirable integration of words and music is elusive. When poetic lyrics are sung, it is very difficult to maintain a balance between the musical and verbal elements. In general, when poetry is read with jazz, for instance, the musicians will follow the poet, accompanying the words with appropriate sounds. On Steve Allen’s television performance with Jack Kerouac , Allen provides no more than frames and decorations for Kerouac’s reading. Often music functions as a movie soundtrack often does, seeking to reinforce the primary element – image or word – while never taking the spotlight.
     On the other hand, Mingus’ “Fables of Faubus” is primarily musical with the simple, direct words making their impression through their apparent sincerity and transgressive hip radicalism. Many thirteenth century comments on troubadours critique their melodies as though the poems were incidental. Who remembers such librettists as Francesco Maria Piave or even Lorenzo Da Ponte as significant poets? How many opera-goers, while knowing the story, even follow the words of each passage? For unity the pitch and timbre of the abstract sounds must equally support and be supported by the language. Yet if this demanding goal is even partially met, the result can be enchanting.
     The general dialectic of performed and written texts is exemplified by the comparison of sung versus read poems. Out loud, the effect is different every time but fixed for the individual performance; on the page it is set as in stone yet subject to ever-new readings. Whereas the sung lyric is animated and immediate though evanescent and caught in the unrolling of time, on the page it stands still, palpably concrete. The exact symmetry of these relations indicates that neither is superior; the excitement of music in the air is balanced against the richness of possibility retained on the page.
     Song lyrics, as they are designed for musical accompaniment, do differ from lines meant to be read, either aloud or silently. The song must be understood in passing, processed by the consumer as it happens like a film or a symphony, while the reader may return at liberty to reread a written text. Therefore printed lyrics may be knotty and resistant to interpretation while sung ones tend toward transparent lucidity. The first is more likely to challenge assumptions and introduce new ideas whereas the latter will tend to confirm pre-existing attitudes.
     Further, the social situation in which singing occurs reinforces the unanimity of response. Often songs are addressed to a more specific audience. Warriors liked heroic epics, a cabaret audience is likely to value sophistication and polish, a heavy metal crowd will like dark and edgy imagery. Jazz clubs appeal to the hip, polka dances to those hip to a different beat altogether. While an individual poem in a book may likewise suggest a certain taste, the next poem may be quite different and the character of the readership is comparatively unpredictable.
     Ordinarily songs have a set stanza form with very little variation from one verse to the next. While a written poem may be structured in the same way, it has as well countless other possible forms. The song usually sticks to a single rhythmic pattern, though variation is always possible within limits, but a poet contemplating publication can use or ignore rhythm and rhyme much more freely. Many songs employ repeated content, whether a refrain or a key phrase, perhaps the song’s title, while poems in a book are less apt to do so.
     Singing, especially to accompaniment, adds elements of volume, stress, pitch and timbre which may either reinforce and enrich or distract from the piece as a whole. Just as the compelling vocalism of a great singer can make mediocre lyrics moving, shallow pop stylings can enervate even strong songs.
     Printed lyrics are generically different from sung ones, and a poem read out loud from a book or a song printed without music will be somewhere between. Each genre has unique challenges; neither is inherently more artful or beautiful. Indeed, each generic distinction opens certain possibilities while narrowing others.


• The addition of signifiers in music, phrasing, etc. increases expressive potential if all elements are mutually supportive. There is a risk of their not fitting and thus generating aesthetic dissonance that is absent in the silent reading of the printed page.

• Due to the social nature of performance thematic elements in songs more likely reinforce the already existing ideas of the audience. Thus they are less likely to challenge preconceptions or introduce new ideas.

• The formal reflection of the comparative thematic predictability of song is their adherence to a repeated metrical and rhyme pattern, adding melody and ingenuity while sacrificing the possibilities available to irregular and free verse.

• Songs have the immediacy of live performance yet lack the rich potential for leisurely contemplation offered by the page. Songs cannot in general afford tangled obscurity but aim rather at clarity and transparence. Sometimes the most direct, seemingly heartfelt lines are strongest, sometimes the ironic, oblique, and allusive.

The Heart of Hinduism

Having early cast off the Midwest Protestantism in which I was baptized and confirmed, I, like others of my generation, I found much to admire and accept in philosophical Daoism and Ch’an Buddhism. I marveled at the marvelous symbolic webs of Hindu mythology but could, at the time, accept them no more than the metaphoric figures of the ancient Greeks or the Bible. Through neo-Vedanta, Isherwood and Huxley, then Watts and Ginsberg, but even more through reading the Upanishads, I believe I have glimpsed some significant peaks of Hindu thought. I am aware of the criticism by some of the tradition descending from Ramakrishna as Westernized. Perhaps it is, and perhaps that need not be a criticism.

I quote from Robert Ernest Hume’s The Thirteen Principal Upanishads (Oxford: Oxford Press, 1921).



     For me the heart of Hinduism is expressed in the Upanishads. I recognize that very likely most Indians would prefer the passionate devotion, magnificent poetry, and ethical authority of the Bhagavad Gita, but for those seeking philosophy the Upanishads must be preeminent. I am innocent of Sanskrit and no expert on even European philosophy, but to me the essential insights of the forest sages are sublime.
     The definition of Hinduism can be elusive. Its own self-images tend to suggest a very accommodating tent. Buddha is commonly considered an incarnation of Vishnu . Much to their chagrin, Sikhs are treated as a subgroup of Hindus by the Indian constitution. Even tribal groups whose traditions have nothing in common with Hinduism are labeled “scheduled castes” and enrolled in the Hindu world order, albeit at the very bottom.
     Hinduism’s extraordinary breadth of inclusiveness is suggested by a survey of its accepted theological schools. Among the six orthodox traditions that generally accept the authority of the Vedas are reckoned [1] the Mimāṃsās who continue to focus on the ancient Vedic rituals dedicated to a range of deities and the generally monist Vedantists. There are also the dualist Samkhyas with little interest in gods, and the Nyayas whose central focus was the refinement of logic and who were originally atheist, though some of their later authors were theists. The Vaiśeṣikas engaged in atomist and scientific speculation with little reference to the supernatural. Finally, there are practitioners of the various forms of yoga. Thus among these lineages alone only the first could be considered really fundamentalist. Some may use religious rhetoric because that vocabulary was the only one available for intellectual speculation. One may be a Hindu while believing in no god, one god, many gods, or some more nuanced formulation between these options; one may accept or reject the divine revelation and hence the infallibility of certain ancient texts. One may practice puja daily in any of a bewildering variety of forms or use none at all.
     Hinduism, however, is willing to go further yet and to embrace even those who reject the ancient scriptures: the essentially godless Buddhists and Jains as well as the uncompromisingly atheist and materialist Cārvākas, the deterministic atheists associated with the Ājīvika school, and the utterly skeptical and hence agnostic Ajñana philosophers.
     The observer may also sort the countless “denominations” of Hinduism according the favored deity: most commonly Vishnu or Shiva, while the Bhakti practitioners generally honor some form of the goddess Devi such as Kali or Durga. Smartas avoid the choice by declaring that all the deities are in the end alike. Add to these factors the immense land area and varied historical experiences of different parts of India, and it will be no surprise that Hinduism is so resistant to definition.
     Surely one reason for the elasticity of the term Hindu is that the word was originally not an ideological but a geographical or ethnic term, indicating the people of the Indus area. Though it is possible for foreigners to convert to Hinduism, in the eyes of many Indians, a true Hindu must be an Indian. [2] Those from other countries are necessarily outcaste.
     It is no surprise that the Upanishads which provide the philosophic theory to accompany the ritual practice laid out in the earlier Vedas are the portion more accessible to Western readers. Though Indian philosophy is capable of exceeding subtlety and Sanskrit has an immense and erudite tradition of scholarship and hermeneutics, for me the heart of Hinduism is adequately suggested by what are perhaps the best known phrases from these two and a half millennia old texts.
     The author of the Brihad-Aranyaka Upanishad allows himself a lyric flight before declaring his apophatic intuition of the divine Brahma. “The form of this Person is like a saffron-colored robe, like white wool, like the [red] Indrapropa beetle, like a flame of fire, like the [white] lotus-flower, like a sudden flash of lightning . . . Hence, now, there is the teaching ‘Not thus! Not so!’ (neti, neti), for there is nothing higher than this, that he is thus.” [3] This is a cautionary corrective, warning against idolatrous error, reminding the listener in the oral tradition or the reader of the written word that perhaps the most adequate definition if deity is “that which one does not know.” The same insight is recorded in traditions around the world and through the centuries, particularly by mystical poets, but it is dramatic here paired as it is in Hindu tradition with the Vedic texts with their plethora of supernatural beings, their advocacy of the psychedelic soma, and their obsession with ritual. [4]
     Simply reading, or even being convinced by the principle of neti, neti is insufficient. For liberation the truth of the formula must be experienced. The system of guru/disciple relationships serves this necessarily experiential enlightenment. The use of entheogens, practice of sacrifice, and visualizations of a world of symbolic deities may, however, be considered as aids to the critical alteration of consciousness that alone can free the individual from suffering.
     There is a dialectic counterpart to this via negativa, though it, too, may be elusive, though omnipresent. Most people seek Ultimate Reality in cultivating a relationship with specific deities, but in the Brihad-Aranyaka Upanishad when questioned about the number of the gods, Yajnavalkya provides first a scriptural response “As many as are mentioned in the Nivid of the Hymn to All the Gods, namely, three hundred and three, and three thousand and three.” Upon repeated questioning, he eventually declares there to be a single god, Brahma. [5]
     The monad, variably named Atman, Brahma, or Ishvara, may be too immense to wrap the mind around. Beginning, as Descartes did (following Aristotle and others) with the self-evident certainty of their own consciousnesses, the ancient forest sages made the bold leap from subjectivity to a plenum. [6] To them one’s own perceived reality, partial and even distorted as it might be, is identified with Reality in the formula “tat tvam asi” (often translated “that art thou”). Recognized as one of the Mahavakyas or great sayings of the Upanishad in the Advaita tradition [7], this simple intuitive assertion, rests on neither ratiocination nor revelation. Further, the experience of the whole is identified with pleasure. [8] These claims arise not from authority but through experience, the practice, already ancient, of meditation and ascetic practices that produced a myriad ecstatic philosophers.
     In the Katha Upanishad which specifically addresses mortality in Naciketas’ questioning of Yama “tat tvam asi” occurs thirteen times, each a hammer blow to ignorance and fear. [9] When the ego dissolves, where is unease to be found?
     These visionary insights are repeated in many different ways in the Upanishads and are then affirmed by later authors -- Adi Shankara, Dattatreya, and others. For the apprentice sannyasi it may have been at the thousandth iteration that the realization arrived.
     Hinduism will remain multifarious with as many faces as a Khajuraho temple. One can only wish the best to people placing hibiscus petals before Kali or Mallomars for Ganesh. Those performing works of dana (caritas) are surely meritworthy as well. All humanity can sympathize with those who swoon with devotional love (bhakti). For those of an intellectual or mystical sensibility, though, the paradoxical insights of the Upanishads can provide a route to liberation from suffering and a whiff of the exhilaration of the sublime. Realizing in one’s back-brain that the divine cannot be described and yet that it is everything allows the very certainty of one’s own existence that might inspire anxiety or despair to be transformed into a consciousness of the holy.
     These concepts are simple and clear, yet it remains true that the path to their full realization is “a sharpened edge of a razor, hard to traverse,/ A difficult path is this – poets declare!”



1. These are called astika (“there is,” “there exists”) in distinction to the five nastika (“there is not”) schools.

2. I am reminded of how well-meaning people have long insisted “Judaism is a religion, not a race” yet many atheists identify themselves as Jews, and, of course, to the orthodox, the child of a Jewish mother is Jewish willy-nilly.

3. See Brihad-Arayaka Upanishad 2.3.6. The phrase is repeated at 3.9.26, 4.2.2, and 4.5.15.

4. In the Kena Upanishad even the great Vedic gods such as Agni, Vayu, and Indra are said to be ignorant of Brahma (14 ff.).

5. 3.9.1-3.9.9.

6. After his convincing demonstration of skepticism, Descartes made a far feebler attempt to rebuild the intellectual universe familiar to him including Catholic orthodoxy, though he was insufficiently orthodox still for the Roman Church which banned his books in 1663.

7. The other three Mahavakyas are similar in meaning. They are prajñānam brahma ("Prajñāna is Brahman" from the Aitareya Upanishad 3.3, ayam ātmā brahma ("This Self is Brahman" from the Mandukya Upanishad 1.2, and aham brahmāsmi ("I am Brahman", Brihad-Aranyaka Upanishad 1.4.10.

8. Chandogya Upanishad 7.23-4.

9. From 4.3 through 5.8. The author is not averse to figurative half-truths as well, though, describing the soul as a chariot with the intellect as driver (3.3 ff.) and the executive in the mind as a homunculus “the measure of a thumb” (4.13).

10. Katha Upanishad, 3.14.