I have not formally introduced myself, though Nathan has done that good service on my behalf. That said, a few words more would not be, perhaps, remiss. My name is J.Z Schafer; writing became my serious occupation four years ago, give or take; before then it was a deep inchoate interest, which had not fully flowered, until it was (four years ago) made not merely to bloom, but to be enkindled full by a small chanced-upon volume of the selected poetry and prose of William Blake (an old Modern Library volume, of an ugly worm-grey and crayon yellow). This began a journey, not dissimilar from Nathan’s own, that led to my being baptized in the Orthodox Church, last year. For now, that is enough of a biography. I would like also to express my gratitude to Nathan for inviting me to participate in his ongoing project at the Silver Door, and for being the first author on Substack to extend a welcoming hand to me. Since then, it has been my utmost pleasure to have made the acquaintance of a number of capable essayists and poets, whose familiarity is a pleasure and a reassurance. On my own publication, Golgonooza, I have published, with a fair degree of regularity, short poems and the occasional essay, over the last three years. In what follows, one will be able to discern clearly why prose is a feather in relation to a leaden block upon the scales of my output. I offer merely some thoughts; they may in some instances be in error, in which case I supplicate the patience of the reader.
Poetry has been for me, since I have become a serious apprentice to its craft, a medium by and through which to make accessible the intelligibility of being itself, and perhaps more deeply even than that, a sustained clarion-note which is able to gather and organize the apparently disparate particulars of this world into a recognizable harmony. Early, I was taken by the semantic effect that placing two apparently disconnected words in proximity to one another can create. Semiologists are often dismissive, but the imaginal weight of Tolkien’s ‘green sun’ is doughty; or famously, William Blake’s Tyger, which incorporates a staggering semantic range. Now, as I have come to understand it, the placement of two distantly connected words (from the perspective of a semantic map) in proximity, not only reveals their propinquity (that is, that they do in fact bear an internal relation to one another) but can also create a semantic clearing, wherein novel meanings can be brought to birth. And these meanings which were formerly only potentialities, being brought thus to birth, are now realized irrevocably as particulars, and irrevocably part of the mystery of Creation, and God’s economy therein and through (I will add, this is only a very specific instance among a plentitude wherein this may occur). As Eliot points out, a lexical entry into the aggregate Book (which consists in this case of all the lexical artifacts) forever changes the positions of every one of those artifacts by its introduction. Think of a connect-the-dot problem: if one has 14 dots, there are a given number of possibilities whereby they could be connected; the addition of a 15th dot reconfigures these possibilities. This should be encouraging to us who rear our thin necks above the trenches of our ineptitude, to attempt the utterance of a verse. However poor our contribution, it will contribute to the beauty of the choral whole.
These are merely a couple of notes on a large subject, meant to introduce the following reflections on how we (as a population of writers and readers (which population by virtue of reading as you are now, membership is imparted) who compose probably the upper one percent of literate persons) can conceptualize for ourselves the worth of pursuing and revitalizing the life of poetry, which is verily an unegligible thread of that thick golden braid which is the tradition of our Culture, which braid is itself a thread in the much simpler and more complex rope that is the Providence and Wisdom of God.
Poetry as making is supremely reliant upon a prototype. All making is, in a sense, derivative; we work all of us from a model. Thus, even if one were so mercenary as to pursue only the goal of creating the most beautiful possible artifact of music or tongue, they would be required to adopt for themselves an understanding of the cosmos and the person as beautiful and intelligible. Works of art which seemingly traduce such a view of the world do not in fact controvert my claim: if they are beautiful, then they are beautiful because they lament the dissimilarity of their phenomenal world and the apartment ‘brutal facticity’ of things with the world that calls to them from deep within the heart, a promised world of honey and of milk, where man himself is called to the creation of new worlds alongside a wild and beneficent God. There is not a beautiful work of art which neither believes the world to be good, nor believes that the world should be good.
For the throat which so believed could only rattle like dry bones, having nothing, whether lust or rage, virtue or hope, to spur it into song.
Definitions of poetry have a pedigree of fruitlessness, and the exercise of putting one forth must always be partly ironical. However, the attempt to articulate the inexpressible is precisely the mandate of poetry, and as such I have put together a couple of rash and ignorant attempts.
Poetry is the mouth of the phoenix, the chewing of the cud, the door and the door-knocker, the subtle filigree of silences embroidered on the hem of Sophia’s garment, which she hikes up above her ankles, to sweep across the moonblued snow.
Poetry dismantles itself and waits for God to put it back together. It is the falcon plummeting out a cloud; it is Babel made a lightning rod. It is an early grave, and the tomb of Alexander.
Poetry is the lion’s mane, and Daniel inviolate; the purple jaw wherewith great Samson slew a thousand men, and the white hand breaking the surface of the lake; it is one hundred and fourty four eyes fixed upon the same altar, remembering Eden.
Poetry is the shedding of tears and the erosion of delusive suppositions, the soddening of the watchless couch and the irrigation of the arid fields of the mind; it is, in fouler ages, a lily growing in the cracks of a cementitious rage.
Poetry is all the lineaments of pananthropic memory, a hundred-coloured robe and the sandal which Moses flung aside.
Poetry is the shadow cast by that primordial speech spoken by the Hidden Man of the Heart, a braid tied out of all those things which cannot be communicated, expressed from a wanderer’s brown eyes in bloody drops, and worn like a necklace of pearls around the perfumed neck of the beloved. It is lightning visiting every corner of the sea, and all the silver bellied fish designing argent rainbows in its depths.
Poetry is an eagle snatching an elephant from the earth, and bearing the seed of citrus trees across the lunar bound. And it is oranges thrown down to us by the Man on the Moon, becoming yellow summer meteors, and throwing off an elfin mist of golden sparks.
Poetry is a speech spoken from the future while yet within the present. It is a golden brick and the vascular infrastructure of intelligibility whereon the silken banners of the world are hung, to flutter in that great immortal wind which is colourless yet vibrant, and soundless yet full of music. It is a green tree, a white snake, and a magic anvil.
Poetry is the eternal method of inhalation and exhalation, after the pattern of Adam. Where things are dipped in the mercurial quenches of the lungs, and tempered in the holiness which clings to honey-coloured bones.
We must begin to conceive our lives of creating and fashioning to be an unselfish thing (though it can become selfish, and should not be understood as an end in itself), like the tilling of the ground, and if God grants, the sharing out of crops. We must see it as a cosmic work, or it shall be devoid of life, and do nothing but masturbate our intellects so that the spermatikos logoi are spent into a ferric soil. We must learn well the wisdom of our ancestors, and connect ourselves to that natal braid which they in sufferings and misfortunes made their handicraft upon this earth. History is arborescent, and Eternity has filled History. Our work is final, and the angels watch.
I will recommend the reader a succinct and profound exposition of the interrelationship between creativity, cosmos, language, and eschatology, written by Seraphim Hamilton. Volumes have been written on the topic, the most notable of which are probably those by Fr. Dumitru Staniloae, but Hamilton succeeds in compressing a good portion of those texts into a few paragraphs. Find it here.
