Apoethesis 1

Do not fret, dear Will, for you are made of such stuff as befits few men among giants. I see your work as being in a tome with Burroughs on the shelf, besde you.

Thank you dear.

APOTHEOSIS1 Starts out after the WORST POSSIBLE THING has happened: A tragedy that has made the speaker "incapable of dreams", of speech with angels, the Elohim. What is this terrible thing? The death of a brother. The speaker asks with agonized cry about this death, because he does not want to feel cut off from "a God who speaks not to me." A slice from the Kaddish places us in a synagogue (perhaps only one conjured up out of a memory archive that insistently replays the scene, so that the the object that the consciousness emerges in is nothing but this terrible looped pain) and asks what power induced his hands so that could be cut off, or form the gesture of prayer. A terrifying and almost Solomonic comparison between the two actions, where piety is not the same as faith, and in the end neither may bring relief, since a fully intended and felt prayer ("pray as if everything depends on prayer--G.I.Gurdjieff) is not the same as a hollow one, and the end result may be an emotional reaction of gratitude just for the opportunity to fully grieve, since sitting shiva was not , nor in this case, could ever be enough.

The final lines of this powerful, elegiac panegyric of loss and the thoughts that will not release one from its grip speak to the paradox of how we take in the world--"how terrible/the mind is open to the world/and yet it will not be shuttered....."even from judging the insincerity of another penitent in another room "perhaps a shadow double?)

Here we have themes of the self mutating its own religious creed's meme in an effort to find understanding unavailable through conventional means; the consciousness extending in its highest form beyond language and creativity, CONSCIENCE, trying to free itself from the memory burned into it of a love so personal and true it's demise has questioned the homeostasis and integrity of the organism within its own boundary; a pathological situation in which repeated feedback loops back to the terrible death and the emptiness that followed, have in an oddly human way usurped the perogative of the core consciousness to explore the world, since this world has been overlaid by these orthodox mappings of the eternal that have not brought succor. In relating this poem to Burroughs' work, I think about the dark shadow the accidental killing of his wife Joan which caused him to flee New York for Morocco cast over his entire literary corpus, informing his notion of how guilt as a function of the need to displace (remain addicted) was not capable of being lifted.

This is a wrenching poem of the sparest sort of lyrical voice, entirely "right" for the harshness of this situation and the compulsive re-enactment of these dreaded feelings of despair that seem to self-replicate. It explores our pre-Sim ideas by directly confronting the self's notion of identity as a self-construction, since no rational person would ever deliberately want to remain haunted by "bad conscience" all of their days. "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark"--the speaker's somatic marking of the limbic system with extreme feelings, so that all memories of the future (plans) are limited by these inner mappings that are a limiting factor for the self's dreams? Or is the monotheistic faith that provides a way to mourn, but nowhere beyond a dull grey colorless Sheol for the bereaved beloved departed to be lodged in the mind's belief, that is to say, a failure of the memes of religion that conditioned the mind to accept death in a certain way in the first place?

Will's incisive, brutally honest examination forces us to question whether we believe to protect our own selves ("If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him"--Voltaire), or we believe because the memes have inculcated us in childhood, until a catastrophic event causes us to question all the memes themselves and either change them or try to remove them from the cognitive container. It is searching and dramatic and full of the right questions for us to ask ourselves the obvious: Would this deep mapping of sorrow exist without in consciousness without language, silencing the philosophers and rhetoricians who claim that awareness only arises with verbal signifying?

I'm glad I awoke to such a poem.

This is a very powerful poem, made more haunting by an epithet epilogue reminding the poet himself, that he is "cut off," and not understood. This speaks importantly into the poem of travail which has as its foundation the desire to know and be known in a hostile universe where an injury so great has separated mind/emotion from body so that IF Elohim SPEAKS, He speaks NOT to him... a worse notion, perhaps, that no Elohim at all. In this void, the poet asks where lies the purpose in the pain, and, importantly what is the office of the mind in relation to the pain and grief. "A man cries mercy, and does not mean it," is a piercing declaration, again, of the mind sifting through the ambiguities of thought, feeling, emotion, pain, suffering: existence. Here in this nexus of travail and groveling for understanding, the poet may have hit upon his own value and raison d'etre in the declaration of his own condition, irrespective of what he fears may be ultimately not be well understood by those who read. The poem does not offer a way out of here. It is in the midst of the suffering that the poem is conceived and uttered.

Merry something!