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Poetry Book IVXAOC KAI NOMOC: CHAOS AND ORDER
POEMS, 1999-2020
Allahabad: Cyberwit. 2020. 391 pages
This book of poetry covers the full emotional spectrum between complete despair and ecstatic exhilaration, moderated by a somewhat rationalistic, optimistic and transcendentalist reflection on religion and cultural legacies.
I. POETRY AND RELIGION
Poetry is an unusual genre. It knows no limitations, no re-quirements, no boundaries, no restrictions, no fear. It needs little tools, and it can be practiced by anyone. It can be anything and everything. Anyone can write it, and everyone at some point in their lives makes contact with it. There is no genre like it. It represents absolute and complete freedom.
But this is a disconcerting freedom, which is why frequently poetry is contained, limited, and restricted to that which rhymes, that which sounds uplifting and beautiful, and is easily commodified. We have all encountered such poetry as it makes its way easily into greeting cards, books of inspirational witticism, school curricula, or easily forgettable jingles. Somehow similarly limiting, poetry can also be that which is pretentiously weird, different, and alien, and easily elitist. If the practice of poetry is limited to either of those two ex-tremes, it fails as a genre, and does not live up to its potential.
The poems in this selection aim to demonstrate as full a range as possible of what poetry can do. I can certainly not assume that I have reached that aim; that is left to you, the reader.
Thematically, this, my fourth book of poetry, covers the vast emotional spectrum between complete despair and ecstatic exhilaration, moderated by somewhat rationalistic, optimistic and transcendentalist reflections on religion and cultural legacies. These varying perspectives sometimes align with historical events or changes in my personal life.
The poems found herein have been written in different phases of life and productivity. They are not presented in chronological order as on the web site, but have been thematically rearranged to create a narrative leading from darkness into light - per aspera ad astra - and constitute, as my second volume Daimonia already did, a selection of shorter and longer poems. I am calling the longer ones Syllogies (logoi: words), as a poetic analogy to musical Symphonies.
Some texts may be a bit disturbing in their bleakness, but so can be life at times. What is important to note is that in the order presented, and sometimes the order written, bleakness does not triumph, and that the narrative of this book ends in a form of sublimation and maybe transcendence - and deliberately so. I aim to demon-strate that darkness in life is a normal phase to be ex-perienced, but to be eventually overcome. I do not aim to imply that this is a linear process; it probably is rather cyclical. Ideally though, your first walk through the valley of darkness hardens you for later travels of a similar kind, and teaches the lesson that difficulty can be overcome, that time indeed does heal wounds, and that life, overall, is worth living. Pain and suffering are an inseparable part of life; and without the experience of pain, there can be no true joy. This is what religion also teaches us.
My personal approach to religion is difficult, and I tend to shy away from too concrete an affiliation with any specific denomination. Yet I cannot deny certain influences in my thinking, and they become clear in these poems as well. For most of my life, I have navigated through what could be called skeptical Catholicism, but have also been heavily influenced by Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Native American concepts of spirituality, American Transcendentalism, and of course Graeco-Roman philosophy and religion. You will see traces of all of that in the subsequent poems. Overall though, I remain curious, searching, and deeply skeptical of any form of dogmatism. I see dogma as the opposite of true religiosity, although it can be useful to set up a system against which to rebel. Without this rebellion though, without constant dialog and struggle, there can be no true religion. The function of scripture is to allow for a sustained and life-long argument with and against it. An understanding of religion that does not understand this will always be limited and deficient. Following this approach, in effect, religion and science are more alike than typically assumed.
Back to the poems. They are set up to negotiate individual and temporary experience with an attempt at capturing, hubristically, some form of human universality. Most importantly, as any student of poetry should know, the "I" in any poetic text is always a lyrical I, not a true representation of the writer. Any attempt to read poetry as an authentic representation of a writer's feelings or beliefs must be ludicrous and needs to be rejected out of hand. These poems are not about me, they are about the respective subject matter. Not for nothing have the Greeks appealed to the Muses; for there are things going on between the writer and a poem that can be truly mysterious.
II. PLAN OF THE BOOK
The poems are set up in four parts:
- XAOC / CHAOS
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ZÔÊ / BARE LIFE
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AGAPÊ / LOVE
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KOINÔNIA / CIVILIZATION
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NOMOS / ORDER
This order sets up a certain dramaturgy, and requires sorting them by them, and not in the chronological order in which they were written. I began writing my poems usually in a stricter form, with rhyme and a clear meter, and moved to a freer form later on.
"BREAKDOWN" illustrates the breaking point of that, whereas "CENTUM" ? written a bit earlier ? still follows a stricter form. Yet even free form needs some structure, especially for longer poems, and I tend to follow the classical five-act-drama when setting up such longer Syllogies. My decision to largely abandon rhyme, and to adopt a less strict meter, or rather, let the meter (which almost always is still there; it has to be, as poetry is related to music) be determined by the natural flow of the text.
The order of the book is as follows. Part 1, XAOC / CHAOS, starts with a reflection on the limitations of human knowledge. What better way to start than to reflect on the first book of the Torah (Bereshit/Genesis) in "BERESHIT: IN THE BEGINNING." This provides a theological bracket for the entire book, as the bracket concludes with "ECCE HOMO", and thus leads from the Tanakh or Old Testament to the New, meditating on the relations between humans and the world, with the divine, and with each other.
The first section leads to the cumulative reflections on the abyss in the trilogy of "BREAKDOWN", "BROKE DOWN", and "BROKEN DOWN", as well as "THE END." What is discussed here is not just the breakdown of forms, but also of meaning, and thus we see a regression in language as well. Frequent quotes from the Latin Requiem mass, specifically the medieval Sequentia ("Dies irae, dies illa" ? "This day of wrath, this day" ? &c) form a frame of reference and point to the existentialist nature of the trilogy. The regression in language is represented in the accumulation of an almost aphasic language soup in "BREAKDOWN."
The attempt to bring order into the chaos and to structure it is represented by portions written in Latin and Ancient Greek in the next two parts of the trilogy, with translations provided in footnotes. While I am not entirely sure whether my capacity to write in the ancient languages is sufficient - and any mistakes would surely fit within the representation of a breakdown of order - the shift to Latin and Greek nevertheless represents an attempt to linguistically and culturally find a grounding that thematically (and emotionally) is lacking in the themes discussed by the poems: rejection, depression, lamentations, suicidal thoughts, regret, and ? eventually ? sublimation. Love and friendship are never to be regretted, and their loss is painful, but love is a feeling you carry inside of you, and you need to let people go, and find meaning for yourself, in order to remain truly in a state of love, tenderness, humanity, and transcendence.
After this katabasis, or downfall or descent, the world has to be rebuilt again in Part 2, called ZÔÊ / BARE LIFE. Following the meditations on the fragility of the self, we need to turn to the fragility of the other. "TERROR IN-COGNITVS" is such an attempt, but we remain speechless, as "APHASIA" illustrates. Part 3 eventually finds a way to relate to the other by reflecting on AGAPÊ / LOVE. It ends in a continuation or rather refutation of the original Breakdown Trilogy, in "UNBROKEN," which is basically a sign of life, and a stubborn insistence to not give in to fear and depression. Part 4 addresses KOINÔNIA / CIVILIZATION, and concludes with one of my earlier poems, "CENTVM."
The final section, Part 5, aims to move to an even higher plane discussing NOMOC / ORDER. The first of the two Syllogies contained herein, "SLEEPWALKER," pulls together the threads of aphasic discourse (playing even with some Devanagari syllables, in an attempt at Dadaism), civilizational critique, with some Hinduist and Buddhist influences. The religious territory shifts back to Catholicism with "PIETÀ," which is a reflection on the purpose of religion, with a heavily skeptical bent. Clearly then, transcendence is not quite achieved, and the book cannot end here. The concluding poems thus each attempt to restore a sense of order, belonging, and eventually a way to sublimate the conflict and ground the discourse in the ultimate representation of human suffering, sacrifice and salvation by meditating on the theme of "ECCE HOMO."
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Some passages in this volume may appear a bit bleak, dark, hopeless, or utterly devoid of optimism or a will to live. And indeed, at the time of writing them, I may have poured some of my feelings into these texts. You will also find descriptions of clearly suicidal desires. They are part of life. Life needs to be lived, but its continued existence needs to also sometimes be questioned, but this questioning should result, ideally, and hopefully, in a vindication of life, and the appreciation that even if times are dark and without hope today, they may be less so tomorrow, and that as human beings, we will need to put in the work to overcome the darkness ourselves. This is tough. I survived because of friends, family, and a sound grounding in religion and life-affirming philosophies; but mostly due to a heavy diet of American sitcoms like Frasier, Friends, and Will & Grace :-) . Should you, dear reader, experience such feelings, allow yourself to ask for help. Suicide comes with a finality that should be avoided. You are not alone, and it will get better. I am living proof myself.
III. OTHER POEMS & OUTLOOK
All poems are also available on my web site, philjohn.com. To make the to date more than 730 poems navigable, they are sorted into seven "Phases," 25 larger groups, and a variety of subgroups. What makes the books special is the extensive annotation, more easily understandable access, a selection by quality and relevance, as well as the different thematic order and focus. I have also reworked most poems for the books, and not all changes are reflected online necessarily, which makes the books the authoritative versions.
This is my fourth poetry volume published with Cyberwit. The first volume, Life As We Know It: Poems, 2001-2019, is a brief compilation of individual poems and excerpts from larger ones. It follows five different themes: I. Observations, II. (Human) Nature, III. Life and Death, IV. Love and
V. Civilization.
The second volume, Daimonia, Poems, 1997-2011, describes the shattering of a solid belief system, and attempts to rebuild and reshape it. In its five sections, it moves through the stages of I. Certainty, II. Introspection, III. Trauma,
IV. Questioning, and V. Redefinition.
The third volume, Tetralogy I: An Evolutionary Journey in Four Parts, Poems, 2004-2008, is a meditation about evolution, natural history, the nature of civilization, and the deeper layers of the human mind.
A fifth volume is already in preparation. Tetralogy II will again comprise four larger poems dealing with essential philosophical questions of human life. Its individual parts will probably be "The Road", "The Garden", "The City" and "The Ruins." I am aiming for a 2021 or 2022 publication date.
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