Lightning'd Press Issue #1 out now!
For anyone who is reading this that did not arrive here from the Lightning'd Press website...
Lightning'd Press--the poetry project of my partner Jamie and I--has published its first issue online; run over there and check it out!
One Day the Water's Gonna Wash it Away.
Apocalypse and Poetry, Introduction
"The Divine is not only the shapeless abyss into which everything sinks, although it is that abyss too." -- Gershom Scholem
Apocalypse is a trial. Apocalypticians attempt to nail it down in set definitions, relying on either its etymology as revelation or its common use as a referent to something called The End Times. Others swim in the gentle seas of genre studies, merely pondering the various iterations manifest in Judeo-Christian(-Islamic) theology / history. Then there are those who only manage to get lost in the materialist / fundamentalist interpretation of Apocalypse (whether they be Fundamentalist folks of whichever religious persuasion, or atheist Black Metal and Goth folks... its often difficult to tell the difference between them, on paper anyway). Few engage the poems themselves in practice, as a practicum, a set of maps--means revealing ends in themselves; meditations on dying before you die individually, collectively; revelations of the personal End Times second to second calling us home. The Old World ending, New World beginning with each breath colliding forever one into the other forming ever newer worlds; so many Golden Cities before our eyes, every one of us. The Christ, the Mahdi, Maitreya Buddha, the King of Shambhala cutting us down and rendering us in their embracing wuweiwu building walls with no stones or wood out of the gold of our hearts binding the nafs in the Second Opening of the Rock Door.
"Because you have kept the word of my patience, I also shall keep you from the trial that is going to come over the entire inhabited world, to test the inhabitants of The Earth." -- the Apocalypse of John, 3:10
All of these images, the holograms of our attempts to understand the inexplicable truth of our existence: Indra's Web, the Cosmic Christ, Nur Muhammad, Dharamkaya. Scrape off the accretions, the cultural overlays, the languages used, the descriptions... at its bottom the Apocalypse of John (or the legends of Shambhala or the Mahdi, the stories of Ragnarok, the Vedas, etc.) vividly describes the painful joy of the end of separation--in all of its orgasmic violence--and the continual restoration of Balance and its synonyms: peace, harmony, justice, love. Your ego is the Beast, the Antichrist, and--in its intellect form--the False Pope, fighting every fight to maintain its superiority at the cost of everyone and everything else; but if it doesn't lose in life, it will lose in death. This the ego knows, hence its desperation.
"Apocalypse is both genre and mode, and each is filled with power. Apocalyptic poetry, then, is language charged with the kerygmatic power to reveal sacred reality, in history and beyond it." -- Peter O'Leary
When it comes to a poem, genre is the language we can use in trying to begin to get a handle on how to talk about Apocalypse. Thousands of years of discussion, though, is a heavy weight for any poem to bear. Perhaps as a buoy? So like a buoy then, the genre of Apocalypse marks a place where looking can begin. But the work, the real work, is the process itself: writing-reading. Whether constructed from Spicer's furniture or Howe's library cormorants, the question is: how much Reality is breaking through the absence of the ego? How is the ego being absented? Is the Beast being cast into the Abyss, or is it Rising? Is the Antichrist defeated, or rallying its troops? Is the False Pope sundered, or dictating the poem?
So methodology is the foregrounding taste. The clearest books on mysticism primarily explain the spiritual ethics and methods, only referencing metaphysics, ontology, cosmology, theology, philosophy, etc. as part of praxis. The few useful books on metaphysics and the rest have traditionally been written for those already engaged in the ethics and practices of mysticism. It is no accident that the great Revealed (Apocalyptic) texts of spiritual history were poems (in verse or prose) written down by practical adepts: the books of the Bible, the Qur'an, the Bhagavad Gita, the Chinese Classics (Yijing, Daodejing, Zhaungzi, the Confucian books, etc.), all of the Sutras, et al. It is also no accident that many great mystics are poets (as the Sufi tradition and the Zen / Taoist confluence, among others, attest).
In the flowering of the Apocalypse understood not in a metaphoric nor fundamentalist sense, but instead in a true sense underscoring the breakthrough of Reality in every smallest increment of moment as the ego is absented, can we understand what poetry has always been: mysticism in practice.
The title is taken from the song "Wolf Am I! (and Shadow)" by mewithoutYou.