|
|
|
|
|
POETRY
millennium maggot
BETWEEN POETRY AND PROSE
PROSE
houses for the dead
|
THIS SORRY SCHEME OF THINGS
THE POETRY OF ANTHONY WEIR
I. THE POETRY OF ANTHONY WEIR Anthony Weirs poems are different from any others written in English. There may be echoes of Yeats, Blake, Wallace Stevens, perhaps even Swinburne, but he - a dedicated and lifelong Outsider - seems to be writing outside the tradition. Perhaps the language and tradition - that he should be writing in is Arabic or Persian . For his trenchancy recalls not only the great Omar Khayyam, who (along with Rilke and Yeats and the great Haiku-writers) is one of the greatest thinking poets of all time, but a great and noble Arabic tradition of dissent that few Westerners know about. Weir is strikingly similar to the 10th century blind Syrian poet Abu al-Ala al-Maarri an intellectual, pessimist ascetic in the tradition of Diogenes of Sinope, who despised most other poets because he considered them frivolous or fawning. This is the kind of correspondance which Vedic texts call Bandhu : a conjugation, a binding of concurring thought across the ages. At the same time, Anthony Weir links up with the East European poets of the Cold War period. He refers, in Millennium Maggot * , to his favourite modern poet, Vasko Popa, a Serb whose poetry is adult where modern English poetry is juvenile, self-regarding, frivolous, fawning, anecdotal and trivial. He is also impressed by post-war Finnish and Macedonian poetry, and quotes from the great exiled Romanian poet, Ion Caraion. Although he has translated poetry from the Old Irish, his work has nothing to do with the self-indulgence of modern Irish writing, which he despises as "all crafty form and little content like the civilisation we are trapped in". He does not feel Irish, or even European, but Outsiderish, "ashamed to be human" thus a voice for (and against!) all cultures.
[*published in THE HELLS GOING ON, Dissident Editions 1999.]
II. REFLECTIONS ON OMAR KHAYYAM after reading David Landes' On the Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1998) - a superb but curiously one-dimensional study of material culture and its empires which shows how exploitation of material and human resources widens and deepens with the mean intelligence of greed applied to opportunity. This book stands at the opposite side of literature to (for example) the Japanese haiku. In The West we live in a powerful miasma of Freedom, Will, Desire and, "too conscious of too many things", to borrow Wallace Stevens' concise remark, now Complexity and Information Overload. One of the deeply-underlying problems of Western Civilisation is that it has moved, through notions of Freedom and Will, from a mediæval culture of obedience and rôle in which obedience could be a very wide or catholic concept (whose strictures were easily escapable by flight or pilgrimage), to a culture of success in which success is only fame and money acquired through processes set up or sanctioned by a quasi-democratic state. In the Leninist-Stalinist countries there was a mediæval culture of rather narrow obedience to inescapable absolutism, which, soon after its collapse, erupted into a culture of smash-and-grab success, wherein the former apparatchiks continued to do very well. Fame and money are connected in various important ways to power, because political success depends on them; and because money, by creating absolute and relative poverty, is the most accessible tool for power. In a culture of obedience to rôle everyone can be included, but a culture of success (which will not tolerate either a court jester or a Feast of Fools) requires a large majority of losers, usually the materially poor in an environment of accelerating philosophical impoverishment. This is why capitaIism will ultimately fail: the losers will cease to have faith in a "system without a philosophy", and the erstwhile winners will lose faith in the bubble of mere marketing success. The moral restraints on capitalism are not inherent, but forced on it by governments which subscribe to some kind of ethical mish-mash foisted upon them. Once the bubble of mass-illusion bursts, capitalism will be seen not to have a centre that can hold. Socialism (not Marxism-Leninism) was at least a sort of philosophy which attempted to create a social structure around, and a control of, money. The transnational capitalism which temporarily rules (and destroys) the world is a mere cult - of money. Cults hate philosophy or any kind of intelligent awareness, and so the food and arms and pharmaceutical industries of the West - make war on the planet, in an attempt to exterminate any recrudescence of philosophy, especially the most basic philosophical questions raised by the Greeks: "how best to live" - and for Camus the only true philosophical question - whether to live at all. This problem arose before, in a smaller way of course, in late-mediæval Europe, when the obedience culture of Christendom and the papacy were breaking down. And before that, in Syria when a great and noble Arabic tradition of dissent that few Westerners know about blossomed into the 10th century blind Syrian poet Abu al-Ala al-Maarri an intellectual, pessimist ascetic in the tradition of Diogenes of Sinope , who despised most other poets because he considered them empty and frivolous or fawning. A century later, in Iran, the great Sufi mathematician Omar Khayyam (1048-1131) said that the seeker-after-truth would find more substance in the grape than in the teachings of the mullahs or even of the Prophets. Since we are clay and return to clay, he pointed out, we are ideally suited to contain liquids (and each other) rather than gas. Contrary to what his scholastic detractors still claim, he was not, of course, a libertine suggesting a return to the rites of Dionysos, but a latter-day Diogenes pointing out that while wine might make you incapable, teachers will render you senseless. You will wake up from a drunken stupor, but not from an educational (or a religious) one. He also, heretically, suggested that God, if He existed, had a lot to answer for, and that suicide is less of a crime than procreation: "Best not have come or be, but to go." In FitzGerald's expansive translation:
Better, oh better cancel from the scroll
Omar Khayyam here echoes the early Greek philosopher Theognis, who was echoed by Sophocles, Calderón and Schopenhauer, amongst others:.. El mayor delito del hombre, Es haber nacido" .[cf.. Lao-tzu, Tao Te-Ching II, 181a: Wisdom consists in knowing that you have no use for life. ] Such a sentiment is anathema to all revealed religions, but not to Hinduism or (in theory at least) to atheistic Buddhism. Living in Eastern Iran, Khayyam must have been exposed to various Indian, as well as Chinese, philosophies. Christian and Jewish ideas also came, not so much from Europe, as from within Iran, and from Armenia, Georgia and Syria. Iran's own native religion, Zoroastrianism, would not actually have endorsed Khayyam's ruba'i, but the Parsi funerary "Towers of Silence" on which fresh corpses were laid out for the vultures to pick, would seem to followers of burial-religions to be as outrageous as (and hardly distinguishable from) a Diogenean endorsement of suicide. It is with Diogenes of Sinope (on the Black Sea coast, died 320 BCE), founder and most famous of the Cynics, that Khayyam seems closest. Diogenes reportedly believed that virtue (the goal of most Greek philosophers but an irrelevance to consumer-societies) could be attained only by fighting hypocrisy, greed and corruption - i.e. conventional morality. He is famously said to have gone around Athens with a lantern by day, vainly looking for an honest man. He would have agreed with Khayyam that society is merely knots of people on puppet-strings of systems of belief. It is likely that he disdained to write any of his ideas down. In any event, all our information comes (like our information on Jesus of Galilee) second-hand at best. The Cynics were a very strong influence in the Hellenistic culture of the Eastern Mediterranean just before the arrival of Jesus, and the original teachings that survive in the "Q-Gospel" suggest that Jesus - who regarded the staff and knapsack as too much property - was one of many successors of Diogenes who were teaching and practising in Hellenised Syria, and in Galilee which had only recently come under Jewish control. (Ironically, the staff and knapsack later became emblems of the pilgrimage to Compostela.) There is an anti-hypocritical, that is more or less to say anti-religious, line connecting Diogenes of Sinope with Jesus of Nazareth, Abu al-Ala al-Maarri of Syria, and Khayyam of Balkh (who went to live in Nishapur) - a line which, very significantly, does not connect with Muhammad or with the moulders of Christianity, Peter and Paul, who were marketing a revealed Messiah. Khayyam (a tent-maker very different from St Paul) was roughly contemporary with heretical movements in the West which sprung up (like the Crusades) following the first Millennium, and which died out, were suppressed, or - as in the last of them, led by St Francis and St Clare - were quickly institutionalised and absorbed into hypocritical orthodoxy. Others included the Waldensians, and the Beghards who gave us the word beggar. Khayyam, however, is different from the others in his virtual obsession with wine. Although many Sunni Turks, chief amongst them Sultan Selim the Sot, have over the centuries endorsed his winepropaganda, his allusions to it are so many and so fulsome that they cannot be taken literally - quite apart from the questions of how many vineyards there were around Nishapur, and the extent of the wine trade in twelfth century Iran. Nor can it be a metaphor for salvation or redemption, because he - a decided anti-mystic - does not endow it with mysticality as Christians do with the Wine and the Host. The message must lie in between, as a simple, cheerful contrast to the scholastic hypocrisy of conventional religion. With wine, Khayyam seems to be saying, "what you taste is what you get": there is no bullshit. With wine, as with life, there is no jam tomorrow, only a hangover, and death is the welcome release back into the nothingness from which we came. Wine might be a metaphor for grace with a small g, for the Sufis place great emphasis on the graceful (which is the opposite of the worldly) life. The business of capitalism, on the other hand, is to ensure that modern life is all worldliness, all paid-for entertainment, all product, producer and consumer. And it is bound to fail, like all tyrannies - including the tyranny of evolution itself. Khayyam was perhaps the last of the true philosophers in the Greek tradition. After Socrates, philosophy gradually declined to academicism on the one hand, and, on the other, moral apology for the status quo: Diogenes was expected to endorse Alexander, the pupil of Aristotle, rather as Christian saints were expected to endorse the hierarchical structures of mediæval society, in flagrant opposition to Jesus of Nazareth. The words of Khayyam, on the other hand, are echoed by monastery-renouncing Buddhist mendicants right up to the present day, especially in Japan. These haiku by the now-celebrated beggar-monk Santoka (1883-1940) - whose chief solace was rice-wine - could almost have been written by the Persian or by the adopted Athenian:
If I could sell my rags
Khayyam would not have had a lot of time for Nietzsche, but he certainly would have concurred with the proclamation of the death of God - though the Twilight of Idols is, alas, turning to a bloody new dawn. He saw the totalitarian nature of monotheisms, and how they appeal both to absolute rulers and to to priestly demagogues. He could not, of course, attack the Seljuq monarch, and, being a philosopher rather than a reformer, he attacked the totalitarianism rather than the mullahs. This is more remarkable than it seems at first sight, for (apart from the gentle observations of Montaigne) in the West no such attack occurred until Nietzsche, nearly 800 years after Khayyam. In the West, the foundations of modern totalitarianism were laid by Constantine I, who successfully (as it transpired) killed the Gods and severed man's connection with not just the vine, but the whole of Nature. With the survival of Christianity through the "Dark Ages", the bogus "Donation of Constantine", the rise of the great monastic orders, and, consequently, the papacy, the foundations of capitalism (rather than mere mercantilism) were laid, so that Nature could be ruled by Man as Man was alleged to be - despite the evidence - ruled by God. The difference between capitalism and mercantilism (apart from the raising of capital from often-unknown shareholders) is that the former strives continually towards vicious monopolies. This is what links it so directly to monotheism. More than that, capitalism with its economic apologists and populist pseudo-democracies, has itself become a monopoly, the sole model of world society, so that no-one dare call it evil or even wrong. Dissidents don't need to be suppressed, they are simply marginalised to the lunatic fringe. The principles of capitalism and Christianity are the same: to create an overwhelming feeling of need which only the product or the religion can supply. Spirituality is, of course, the Sufic opposite, being the physical and psychic self-sufficiency and adaptability which have no need to resort to myths, magic, faith, miracles - or products. Islam (the State of Peace) and Christianity (the Creed of Love) trod different totalitarian paths: one accommodated to Oriental despotism (modified almost to Philosopher-Kingdoms in Spain), the other led to despotism of the Will, which brought Protestantism and its quasi-democracies whose lofty claims remain largely unchallenged by philosophers. The truer democracy in Athens (albeit only of free males, as in mediæval Iceland) was denounced as a sham by Diogenes. The real challengers of the Western quasi-democracies are not philosophers, but corruption, demagogues and dictators. In the sixteen hundred years since the sack of Rome, the West has not produced one writer to match Khayyam, whose writings (in Persian under the despotism of The Shepherd Kings) are considered more dangerous in modern Iran (where he flourished) and Afghanistan (where he was born) than television, the most pernicious narcotic ever offered by rulers to the ruled - or the plethoric World Wide Web, on which, of course, his writings must appear! Television and the computer monitor are like sugar, one of the few addictive products which people immediately like. Money is another. Like any drug, money does not really liberate those who have it. On the contrary, it tends to narrow their consciousness to thoughts of saving or making more money. The rich are not conspicuously happy, and usually spend their money on self-indulgences as banal as their greed. Like Diogenes, Khayyam was a moral nihilist, and it was this which appealed to Edward FitzGerald and his fin-de-siècle readers so much that he compiled no fewer than five versions of his translation and arrangement of selected ruba'iyat - just over 100 out of the 235 at that time ascribed to Khayyam, of which perhaps almost a third were composed by imitators. Both Diogenes and Khayyam would have welcomed the leaving of this vicious world of men, their gratuitous cruelty - and Malthusian overabundance - for utter nothingness. Like all spiritual people they felt that there is too much thingness' around. Here is something of the flavour of Khayyam's message - more sardonic than what emerges from the superb translations of FitzGerald - in a quatrain not translated by the Victorian:
Those who live in lonely love of Self
The twentieth fin-de-siècle was quite different from the nineteenth - and from the tenth (when Western Europe was not yet free from external threat) . Because capitalism has made all of us strangers to ourselves, conviviality, our natures and to Nature, the last century's end is shot through with Utopian irrationalism and anti-rationalism - whether of the inane New Age variety, or, more dangerously, of the anti-philosophical weirdness of human cloning and other "mad scientist" projects which appeal hugely to the large trans-national corporations who will benefit from them. Everything has now been commoditised - including marketable (that is to say false) spirituality - in the interests of a Thousand-Year Reign of capitalism whose basic currency of thought is the belief that everything is purchasable. Its few opponents declare, on the other hand, that the only thing worth having - worth dying with - is integrity. True spirituality is not marketable, for it cannot be a commodity but a state diametrically different from the nation state. Thus it has almost died out, like poetry, which has become an anorak-offshoot of the entertainment industry (perhaps a replacement for stand-up jokespinning). Contemporary poets worthy of the name - at least in English - are well-hidden or well-suppressed by the entertainment industry. (Poetry often flourishes under despotism and/or socio-intellectual flux, as both Khayyam and the Elizabethan poets illustrate.) Nearly two thousand years after the announcement of his death, Pan, though not yet dead, is whimpering in a cage, while philosophy has withered away as the Marxist state was supposed to. Americans, their Presidents and their European flunkeys never tire of talking about Freedom, but the freedom they really mean is not the freedom to stand up and be counted as Khayyam was able to do as a radical rationalist philosopher in an Islamic society which might have regarded him as a learned but dangerous heretic. What Americans mean is the freedom for American corporations as proxies for them to overrun the planet, and for the American government to be an instrument of terror abroad - just as the English did more blatantly with their "Pax Britannica". The Americans and the British were early national subscribers to the idea of continuous war (religious-cultural, socio-mercantile or explosive), just as Marxist-Leninists-Trotskyists talked of continuous revolution. Europe-as-Christendom has waged a Jihad against the rest of the world since the end of the first millennium - when, to its surprise and relief, the world did not end. This Jihad reached its apogee with the Anglo-saxon empires. Britains was far more evil in its perniciousness than any that went before. It and its values spanned the globe and turned a great deal of it into a distorted mirror of its cold psychopathology of hypocritical greed that is spiritual as well as venal. A rich, natural variety of cultures were hacked and dismembered by an idea-system based on property, the nation-state, work, mines, resources, money and money-economics, mean-mindednes, shopping, sham democracy on top of the crude hypocrisies of the Imperial Christian value-system initiated by Constantine. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were slave-owners who talked of Liberty, a word which might never have passed the lips of the khans and pashas of the Seljuq Sultan who ruled Qurasan in Khayyam's day. The Bill of Rights declares the right to pursue happiness as if it were a hapless hare - or Amerindian. In the West we confuse Freedom of Will and Freedom of Speech with the very different Freedom of Thought - thus demonstrating our lack of freedom of thought as well as our ignorance of the satisfaction of Thoreauian subsistence living. Freedom of choice tends to exclude the freedom to refuse. Khayyam in 12th century Persia had greater freedom, not just of expression, but of philosophical discussion than (for example) people in the monoglot, monocultural, monolithic empire of the U.S.A. where close on 90% of the population in a secular society believe in the Judæo-Christian god, and close on 100% subscribe to the new sub-cult of success and fame (within the larger cult of sheer greed), in which quality is as nothing compared with quantity, and simplicity is run over at high speed by (to use Yeats' phrase) "mere complexity". And mere complexity (symbolised by the golden, mechanical Byzantine bird) ends, Yeats implied, in "complexity of mire and blood". Other depressing statistics indicate that in a country where almost everyone watches television news broadcasts, over half the population believes in personal angels, and that less than a quarter know which country is the United States' southern neighbour.
FitzGerald's translation of THE RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM in the various versions is widely available in all kinds of edition from basic paperback to luxury leatherbound. for a Bibliography of works on the Mathematics, see
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/history/
|
