I have been finishing a book-length poem called The Twelve-Gated City, after the heavenly Jerusalem that John saw in a vision, in Revelation. Our excerpt today comes the first of 33 dramatic monologues or dialogues. This speaker is Moses, a very old man, near death, on the top of Mount Pisgah, looking across the Jordan to the Promised Land.
Dare I wonder at and explore and peek around corners and poke about in the crevices of the Esolen mind with its devices and designs to ask if the excerpt here, being part of the first monologue/dialogue, might be associated with (given the book's title and the rooted factors of that ominous number 144) one of the twelve stones of the twelve foundations of the heavenly Jerusalem? And, if so, even hazard a guess at which stone it might be? The stone of the first foundation (and apparently of which the entire wall is based) is Jasper (also he of fond memory). Or am I, like the dwarves in the mines of Moria delving too deep into the mountain's roots with my machinations and risk uncovering a balrog of misconception? :-)
But on to the poem itself (or excerpt from) above: Having read it over several times now, a single word "distance" rings through my head at the imagery and thoughts of Moses described (and suggested and amplified by the beautiful accompanying painting, certainly), even though that word does not actually occur in the excerpt. And it seems to me that that is pretty much what Scripture conveys to us about God over and over throughout Old and New Testaments. But not distance as merely a separation of the "end goal" from the observer (though certainly that too), but also inclusive of all that lies between, ie, almost the "distance" itself -- IF, and only if, that between-ness does not become "all there is" to the distance (nor any sort of pantheistic implication either, of course), as the lines of your excerpt warn,
"...Never to own a neighborhood of gods,
Never to hold Him captive in a face,
Never to smudge and smear the holy Name
As if it were a shekel in your bag..."
Rather, I guess, that "distance" itself, and the awe it produces in us, I sense is more of a "pointer" to that goal, just as a road to a city is not the city itself, but a way of arriving at the city. I'm reminded much of perhaps my favorite passage from C. S. Lewis' book "That Hideous Strength," where Jane Studdock is taking a train from the fog-enveloped town of Edgestow up to St. Anne’s and she is enchanted by the change of scenery as the train rises out of the fog to reveal the landscape above in the hills:
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"She took a deep breath. It was the size of this world above the fog which impressed her. Down in Edgestow all these days one had lived, even when out-of-doors, as if in a room, for only objects close at hand were visible. She felt she had come near to forgetting how big the sky is, how remote the horizon."
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Ah well, will be awaiting its publication with anticipation and I look forward to seeing other excerpts in the remaining Fridays of Lent!
Stanley, Tony has kept this draft close to the vest. I'm seeing the poems for the first time now, too, with everyone else. I should have Tony mail you the many pages I forced him to produce outlining the mathematics of The Hundredfold (and of individual poems within The Hundredfold, and their placement in the whole). I did this because if either I or Jessica eventually become the curator of Tony's work, we need to KNOW "what he did and how he did it." I'm very glad that you are along for the ride with this new poem, as it unfolds. This summer I plan to compel him to do the same sort of mathematical analysis with the new poem. Just a teaser: two of the poems in The Twelve-Gated City are written in the broken line alliterative style of the Anglo Saxon poets, one in particular from whom Tony learned that poetic style.
Dare I wonder at and explore and peek around corners and poke about in the crevices of the Esolen mind with its devices and designs to ask if the excerpt here, being part of the first monologue/dialogue, might be associated with (given the book's title and the rooted factors of that ominous number 144) one of the twelve stones of the twelve foundations of the heavenly Jerusalem? And, if so, even hazard a guess at which stone it might be? The stone of the first foundation (and apparently of which the entire wall is based) is Jasper (also he of fond memory). Or am I, like the dwarves in the mines of Moria delving too deep into the mountain's roots with my machinations and risk uncovering a balrog of misconception? :-)
But on to the poem itself (or excerpt from) above: Having read it over several times now, a single word "distance" rings through my head at the imagery and thoughts of Moses described (and suggested and amplified by the beautiful accompanying painting, certainly), even though that word does not actually occur in the excerpt. And it seems to me that that is pretty much what Scripture conveys to us about God over and over throughout Old and New Testaments. But not distance as merely a separation of the "end goal" from the observer (though certainly that too), but also inclusive of all that lies between, ie, almost the "distance" itself -- IF, and only if, that between-ness does not become "all there is" to the distance (nor any sort of pantheistic implication either, of course), as the lines of your excerpt warn,
"...Never to own a neighborhood of gods,
Never to hold Him captive in a face,
Never to smudge and smear the holy Name
As if it were a shekel in your bag..."
Rather, I guess, that "distance" itself, and the awe it produces in us, I sense is more of a "pointer" to that goal, just as a road to a city is not the city itself, but a way of arriving at the city. I'm reminded much of perhaps my favorite passage from C. S. Lewis' book "That Hideous Strength," where Jane Studdock is taking a train from the fog-enveloped town of Edgestow up to St. Anne’s and she is enchanted by the change of scenery as the train rises out of the fog to reveal the landscape above in the hills:
-------
"She took a deep breath. It was the size of this world above the fog which impressed her. Down in Edgestow all these days one had lived, even when out-of-doors, as if in a room, for only objects close at hand were visible. She felt she had come near to forgetting how big the sky is, how remote the horizon."
-------
Ah well, will be awaiting its publication with anticipation and I look forward to seeing other excerpts in the remaining Fridays of Lent!
Stanley, Tony has kept this draft close to the vest. I'm seeing the poems for the first time now, too, with everyone else. I should have Tony mail you the many pages I forced him to produce outlining the mathematics of The Hundredfold (and of individual poems within The Hundredfold, and their placement in the whole). I did this because if either I or Jessica eventually become the curator of Tony's work, we need to KNOW "what he did and how he did it." I'm very glad that you are along for the ride with this new poem, as it unfolds. This summer I plan to compel him to do the same sort of mathematical analysis with the new poem. Just a teaser: two of the poems in The Twelve-Gated City are written in the broken line alliterative style of the Anglo Saxon poets, one in particular from whom Tony learned that poetic style.