Ezra Pound wrote poetry is news that stays news.
That’s a good thing … as these lines are written prior to rushing out of the driveway for an extended Montana fly fishing trip. This column and the following week’s installment are my final assignments before hitting the highway and relocating this foul rag and bone shop of the heart off the grid.
In any event, it’s a pleasure avoiding the embarrassments of the temporal in favor of the ageless. Too much joie de vivre is wasted tilting at windmills as recent dispatches in this fish wrap confirm. “Sad!” some might say; whereas, my response is cribbed from Les McCann and saxophone great Eddie Harris: “Compared to what?”
All I can say is not much compares to the upcoming fortnight of fishing in Big Sky Country as well as concomitant enlightening (and, ultimately, humbling) conversations with longtime friends well-versed in literature and other aspects of the humanities, economics and the essential stuff of life.
In the words of Pink Floyd guitarist and singer David Gilmour and in fond memory of the recently deceased Australian songbird Olivia Newton John: “Let’s get metaphysical” by returning to last week’s discussion of English poet Kathleen Raine and her fellow countrywoman, musician Kate Bush.
Speaking of Gilmour, he helped secure Bush’s first recording contract.
Although she never explicitly expressed it, one gets the sense from her lyrics delivered with a multi-octave fervor backed with world-music flavorings she buys into the famous Plotinus adage from “On Felicity”: “[E]very flower enjoys the air it breaths.” How else to describe the dreamy Celtic musical textures accompanying the adopted persona of James Joyce’s Molly Bloom in Bush’s “The Sensual World” – a song sonically framed by Catholic church bells?
Both Bush and Raine – by the poet’s own admission – could be categorized as neo-Platonists for whom the pursuit and recognition of beauty are their own reward. Yes, there’s far more to the descriptor than John Keats’ “truth/beauty” dynamic, but space restrictions only allow so many words of explication.
Indeed, the unnamed author of a 1956 Times Literary Supplement review described Raine’s poetry as “[T]he record of certain lucid perceptions of the timeless world by a mind religious in its first emotions and scientifically intellectual by training. It is Platonic poetry of a very high order.”
Also fitting within the neo-Platonist category is the employment of imaginative elements in both Raine’s poetry and Bush’s songs. Bush, for example, shifts genders, cultural backgrounds and time periods in many of her songs, not as a tourist but as someone imaginatively intent on embodying literary characters such as Catherine in “Wuthering Heights,” Molly Bloom from “Ulysses,” Steve Reich’s narrator from “Cloudbusting,” as well as numerous completely invented characters and historical figures such as Harry Houdini’s wife. The newly popular “Running up that Hill,” is an expressed desire of the narrative voice to know a lover so intimately the two should be allowed temporarily by God to swap physical and emotional identities.
Again, it’s important to note the absence of temporal – politics and otherwise – in the works of both women. To paraphrase Raine from the third volume of her autobiography, “The Lion’s Mouth,” those who focus exclusively on such matters do not possess active imaginations; and one might discern a degree of “hatred, or envy of the creative spirit in the monotonously negative judgments passed (for example) upon Jung and Teilhard de Chardin who, whatever their limitations, are seminal imaginative thinkers” ….
The neo-Platonic worldview, she wondered, may be “kept alive not by the imagination but by the informing gods: but in Plato’s Garden of the Muses (call it Jung’s world of the archetypes, or Yeats’s and Edwin Muir’s anima mundi), poets may still find the living immortal presences….”
Have a great and imaginative week, dear readers!
Bruce Edward Walker (walker.editorial@gmail.com) is a Morning Sun columnist.
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