Poetry in motion

Poetry is where art, language and the unconscious mind come together and have dirty, dirty sex. (No, that's not an Aphorism). So the question of "true poetry" - defined by Robert Graves as the kind of words that make your hair stand on end, words that have inherent meaning in their sound and rhythm as well as their denotative meaning, where the signifier is itself a signified - is very close to the questions we pose on this blog of depth psychology, practical memetic warfare and "changing one's mind" in the literal sense of the term.

Robert Graves claimed in his seminal (or should that be menstrual?) work The White Goddess that "true poetry" was indistinguishable from the True Religion, which was (in his estimation, based on well-meaning pseudoanthropology which was in fashion of the time) the cult of the Mother Goddess and her twin son/lovers expressed in the seasonal cycle. The initiatory tradition of this sacred poetry, he argued, was alive and well in the Welsh and Irish bardic colleges, among others, but had been lost and driven underground by Christianity. He set himself the goal, in his book, of recreating the basis of that tradition, although he expressly said he didn't consider himself qualified to draw any practical conclusions from it or to start initiating people himself. (Nonetheless, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes apparently had a little domestic cult of the White Goddess going, in which case, Sylvia should have killed Ted instead of the other way around.)

You see, that's the big problem with neo-Paganism. The initiatory tradition of the Western Indo-European Mysteries was broken and a soufflé doesn't rise twice no matter how much wishful thinking you put into it. I spent ten years in that tradition so I know what I'm talking about. Oh, Gerard Gardner got some fragmented folk-magic rituals, jazzed it up with some Crowley and some S&M and started his own ritual lineage, with blackjack, and hookers. But does it have the "true poetry"? Not being a Gardnerian intiate, I can't speak for them, but for me, all the reconstructed paganisms - or like most traditions of Wicca, the ones who claim to be reconstructed - lack it. I can explain this no better than in the words of Leonard Cohen: "A scheme is not a vision / and you never have been tempted / by a demon or a god".

In the absence of a formal intiatory Tradition which still maintains "true poetry" - or what Robert Fripp calls "the juice" - all you have left is what Sufis call an `Uwaysî initiation, i.e. Goddess Herself comes down and taps you on the shoulder and you say me? the chosen one? and I didn't even graduate fuckin' high school. And there's no way you can make that happen, although you can prepare for it just in case. I would say that the paths of modern cults like Discordianism and SubGenius suggests that "the juice" was at least there for a while, and maybe still is, who can tell.

However, in my own personal life, I got tired of waiting for the tap on the shoulder and ventured outside my own cultural background into an intact (although suitably modernised) initiatory tradition. Which brings up the question of how Marxists etc. should react to Burkean arguments that boil down to the idea that "Tradition is like natural selection, it's there for a bloody good reason". Lenin and Trotsky were adamant that there would be no Year Zero, you couldn't start human culture from scratch, that we should take the good bits out of Bourgeois Tradition. So how would Tradition balance with the free creativity of the masses under Full Communism?

I should close with the observation by Hooman Majd: "Not every Sufi is a poet, but all the great Iranian poets were Sufis". And Robert Graves certainly covers Persian poetic lore in his magnum opus. I stopped writing poetry about ten years ago because I got the idea that more people would listen to it if I set it to an electronic beat, but perhaps I need to go back to the purity of the words.

Tradition vs. Modernity

The thing about tradition, and this might shock and appall some of you neophiles out there, is that a tradition (as opposed to a new revelation) has passed the test of memetic natural selection. The longer a tradition has survived, the more evidence that it has been fit for purpose for actual human beings living in the real world of horrible jobs. Capitalist society has speeded up the process of evolution, but it's still a process of evolution. "Revolution" is simply the punctuation in punctuated equilibrium.

Hence, Chaos Marxism opposes any "Year Zero" nonsense or claims that things can appear out of nowhere with no connection to their predecessors and thus replace them. Which is why - for example - it's important to remember that Marx wasn't the first Marxist, he was the last of the great classical economists, working in the tradition forged by Adam Smith and David Ricardo. And conversely, we 100% oppose "fundamentalism" in the sense of the belief that "the original, pure message of [FILL IN BELIEF SYSTEM HERE] has been lost under useless tradition and we must restore it!" Thence comes nonsense like Wahhabism and all that "Forward to the Rebirth of the Fourth International" stuff.

... which is why Chaos Marxism opposes the efforts to "revive" traditions, or "return to the good stuff", but instead prefers to adapt existing traditions of the here-and-now to new phenomena and occurrences. You've got to build the new world with the building blocks of the old, because, as the history of colonialism tells us, simply attempting to shove a new civilisation down people's throats leads to Bad Mental Health on a mass scale.

Links in the tradition

[I]n the early fourth century, the christian Church began to change the way it did business. More and more, the encounter with Jesus came not through that deep, timeless opening of the heart but mediated by what might be called "doctrinal mantras" - saying the right things and knowing the right things about Jesus. The fourth century became the era of the great creeds (and the great credal controversies), as Christians attempted to hammer out and precisely nail down (pun intended? -DlaP) their understanding of the Jesus event... Underlying [the Nicene Creed] is [a] troubling message that the correct way to relate to Jesus is to believe and know the right things about him. But this is not how relating to Jesus was done in those earliest days, nor is it ever how it is done when a person actually comes face to face with Wisdom.

Cynthia Bourgeault lays it on the line. Shift "the early fourth century" to "the 1930s", "the Christian Church" to "the Marxist movement", and "Jesus" to "the Russian Revolution", and the story becomes familiar. Practice gives way to theory which gives way to scholasticism which gives way to rank superstition and the sectarian and downright meanness that goes along with it. This is how any tradition with real life and "juice" in it turns into a shambling, withered zombie.

Rev. Cynthia goes on to suggest that Muhammad (peace be upon him) was tapped on the shoulder by Universe Central at the point where mainstream Christianity had definitively turned a corner (marked St Augustine) where it could no longer carry the "juice". Is it too crazy to suggest that Karl Marx was tapped on the shoulder when religion in its totality, as it was known in the 19th century, had reached the same impasse? Is it too crazy to suggest that, in revolutionary situations around the world, real ones where ordinary people break free of the Matrix and begin to reshape their own world, we are seeing the same kind of phenomenon as we did in Galilee under Pontius Pilate, or Arabia in the early seventh century of the common era - the "underground stream" surfacing?

Wisdom is liberation is power for the people and music for the masses. It is the goal of Chaos Marxists to discipline ourselves to the point where we might be fit to be tapped on the shoulder ourselves - and, in the meantime, to at least learn to act as if we actually did hear the Voice of God or the Call of History. But if Marxism means anything at all, it means that the new era is virtually nothing like the old era, and old forms will not suffice.