Joshua Corey's Blog

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What is the emotion behind Gnosticism if not the resentment of the unrequited lover?

The winter of our discontent named “God.”

The nothing that is there, that we pretend to be the nothing that is not.

God the Father. God the tantrum-thrower, God the grudge-holder, God the spoiled child.

God does not play dice with the universe. But when the Demiurge does, we call it God.

In blood and thunder, hyacinth locks drenched, the youth flies in with his No.

The blind stripling lisps his way through the streets of Dublin, searching for a surrogate father to help him cross to the other side. Heaven is a piano he must tune.

I gather bits, globs, fragments.

Not to shore against ruin but the shores of ruin. To walk along them, caught between the wreckage of the past and the blue indefinite. Picking up scraps. Sucking stones.

Nostalgia the intolerable temptation, the Whore of Babylon. Vitrine life.

Where is life? Inland. With the people who read clothes and faces instead of books.

Standing suspended six feet apart in crabbed constellations—the exploded families, corporations, lovers. 

The red-winged blackbird feathers its nest and sounds its savage trills; it flies free of the human web. It refuses to become my symbol. Its refusal is my symbol. 

Illiteracy is a prison but so is literacy. The headless cries follow me downstream. Red at the neck, face burnt orange, crying What have you got to lose?

The gray beard of Marx runs off his face like dripping water, making him young again. Can you meet his eyes in the mirror? 

How long can you meet your own eyes? Time yourself. I’ll wait.

Light is the best disinfectant, and so is death. The composting action of the earth astonished Whitman. It astonishes him still. 

When I was a kid I wanted to know everything because then, I figured, nothing could hurt me. These were my years of magical thinking. The encyclopedia was my spellbook. Life lived in advance can’t hurt you, because it isn’t life.

I got as far as D, I think. (Delta, Dirigible, Dweomer.) Maybe more than halfway into E. (Earthworms. Entelechy. Europe.)

Letters follow my name, calling it to come out and play. My name hides in the margins of the Book of Life, like Adam and Eve in the garden, guilty, waiting for the inevitable reader to come along.

In the cool of the evening, the destroyer.

The tree of life was cut down and pulped and pressed into pages, and black ink was printed on those pages, and a finger follows the figures described by the ink, picking out the letters unseen, unprinted, hidden and negative like the face of YHWH. LIFE printed in white fire.

Pyromancy lingered at leaves me searching in bones and ashes, lightlessly. The shores of ruin.

So decorate with the dreaming monks the margins with monsters, lovers, and wonders. The snake curls at the base of a capital, at the base of the T in The. Eve leans on the h, considering the apple, while the e is Adam hunched with his back to the scene, sitting on the ground, waiting for the last of the animals to come to him to be named. (Zebras. Zoophytes. Zooplankton.)

The tableau of the tree of knowledge in the moment before knowledge arrives. Another tree in the orchard goes curiously unforbidden and ignored. A tree separated from its brother by what? Human ignorance? The shore of grasses? 

As yet uncut, the grasses waving, somewhere over my grave.

A few words, stones, rolled in the mouth. Walk away from this shore. (My own hands carried me there.)

Here endeth the lesson, suspended like a struck chord. Dying fall between music and silence.

Pile these stones as you will. Summer stones.

It was her own heart the snake offered to her, and she ate of it and gave it to the man, and he too ate. Greedily, sucking out the juice, chewing the pulp and rind, swallowing even the seeds of new life and death. They are their The.

Long life to them, our parents, until we become them and find ourselves bewildered and indefinite, perplexed at the base of a tree whose branches shade us, whose flowers scent the air, a tree of which we’re scarcely aware. But it holds up everything, it props up the sky and prevents it from colliding calamitously with the earth. If we glanced into its branches we would die, or go mad, or go blind. Or walk free from that blindness, blessed.

Walk onto summer’s shore, bathed in light, diving in water, spouting, surfacing. Clothes. Cleansed?

The indefinite waits for us, a paradoxical A.

Start out for it swimming strongly, tonight, and every night.

A shore, a scroll, a woman, a man, a stone, a red-winged blackbird, a book, a tree, a sun and moon, a city, a plague, a night, an hour, a dawn. A shore.

The news is full of disaster, nearly all of it self-inflicted. Beirut has been leveled by criminal negligence and the United States lies prostrate under Covid for pretty much the exact same reason. Our atmosphere has been supercharged with carbon that will deal greater and yet greater calamities to us until the very structure of our civilization begins to fray. Yet where I sit in our sunroom the morning is cool and beautiful and quiet. It’s too much for one body to hold.

It’s the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing. In a New York Times article, Anne I. Harrington writes about Claude Eatherly, the only member of the Air Force team that executed the attack to have publicly expressed remorse. Harrington invokes the anti-nuclear activist (and Hannah Arendt’s first husband) Günther Anders’ concept of “the Promethean gap” between what our civilization is capable of and the inability of any one person to bear responsibility for it. The concept rhymes with Arendt’s “banality of evil,” which she claimed arose from the refusal of Eichmann and other Holocaust perpetrators to stop and think about what they were doing. I return, as I have so often, to Shelley:

“We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life; our calculations have outrun conception; we have eaten more than we can digest. The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world, has, for want of the poetical faculty, proportionally circumscribed those of the internal world; and man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave. ”

Here we have another husband-and-wife team: as Arendt proved to be a more popular and controversial figure than her ex-husband, Percy Shelley has been overmatched in the popular imagination by his wife Mary, whose novel Frankenstein;, or, The Modern Prometheus remains the most vivid structure of feeling for capitalist modernity’s subjugation of the individual to a vast and unaccountable “empire of man,” paradoxically in the name of individual assertion and the right to property. The Creature of Victor Frankenstein—far more eloquent in the novel than the grunting behemoth of the Universal monster movies—achieves “the poetry of life” by recognizing his enslavement and the refusal of others, even and especially his own creator, to recognize his humanity.

We seem to be incapable of rising above ourselves, of grasping the poetry of life, except in the face of a terrifying Other, who appears to us as Frankenstein’s Creature, a figure of esoteric or jigsawed features of humanity that, like the thoughts of the “genius” that in Emerson’s “Self-Reliance”, “come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.” This echoes the Creature’s description of his infant powers of expression before he learns to speak: “Sometimes I wished to express my sensations in my own mode, but the uncouth and inarticulate sounds which broke from me frightened me into silence again.” It seems in this historical moment that we too lack the language to express our sensations, and that far too many of us, in the face of horrors, have allowed ourselves to be frightened into silence.

On this blue sunshine morning with its soft airs, I struggle to retain the ability to feel in the face of all that numbs us—our collective creation that functions through a sinisterly disavowed collectivity. The cult of American individualism, with which I am infected, just as I am infected by racism and by all the other evils that come of thinking oneself exceptional, does not oppose or resist collective action—it is collective action of a malignant kind that yields up the most significant decisions to a faceless or imaginary authority. That authority oppresses the individual (who may resent that oppression or fall into conspiracy theories) because he refuses to see himself represented by it. Frankenstein and his Monster are mirror images of each other, one flesh, like father and son or Cain and Abel. But the father in this case refuses to take even Abrahamic responsibility for sacrificing his Isaac; the left hand does not know what the knife hand is doing. The blood of our brother cries out to us from the ground. It is our own blood.

Robert Duncan said that “Responsibility is to retain the ability to respond.” He said this in part to justify his refusal to respond as an activist to the horrors of the Vietnam War, accusing his interlocutor Denise Levertov of following into the same war-logic as the war’s proponents in her opposition to it. Duncan was short-sighted and cruel, though sincere enough in his attempt to live out Blake’s dictum, “Opposition is true friendship.” But in essence he was rehashing the claim of another visionary poet living a political struggle, W.B. Yeats, who said, in a sentence from his essay “Anima Hominis” that I sooner or later share with all my students, “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” For Yeats, the poet is in pursuit of something he calls “The other self, the anti-self or the antithetical self, as one may choose to name it, [that] comes but to those who are no longer deceived, whose passion is reality.” That passion follows not the path of certainty assumed by rhetoricians but that of negative capability as described by John Keats in a famous letter: ““capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” The refusal to calculate, of irritable reaching, enables the poet to make sympathetic contact with the anti-self, in a parenthesis from conventional morality. The “poetical character,” as Keats put it in another of his letters, has no character in the conventional sense: “It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen…. A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity - he is continually in for - and filling some other Body.”

The libertarian American refuses the task of “filling some other Body,” won’t act to protect others or even himself by wearing a mask to deflect contagion, won’t imagine that he has any responsibilities to those others who lack “identity” with him. In our history, most of the positive, organized, collective actions to fight monsters have required a monster upon which we’ve projected our imperial impulses: the South in the Civil War, the Axis Powers in World War II. It takes a powerful “they” to coalesce Americans into an “us,” which is why “the invisible enemy” has failed to overcome the partisanship that is the immediate cause of our plight. The “near enemy”—feminists, BIPOC, Democrats, etc.—has taken precedence over the “far enemy,” even though it’s the far enemy that infects our lungs, that has shattered our economy and shuttered our schools. How much more incapable are we of mobilizing against climate change, a monster of our own creation that we compulsively disavow?

In 1849 an American poet spent a night in jail for refusing to pay a tax that he could have easily afforded, because he refused to pay or be part of a “government which is the slave’s government also.” Thoreau is misremembered as a privileged Harvard boy whose writings have proved enabling to a million libertarian narcissists (I’m not going to link to it, but a libertarian think tank recently published an article comparing Elon Musk’s refusal to shut down the Tesla production line in the face of Covid restrictions to Thoreau’s “Civii Disobedience”—the real title of which, btw, is “Resistance to Civil Government”). But I think of his willingness to go to jail as a poetic act in Keats’ sense, a willingness, if only for one night, to “fill in for some other Body”—the body of the slave, or the body of a soldier poised to lose his life in an imperialist war. He did not propose to speak for these others, but he placed himself affectively in their position. It is as if Victor Frankenstein had chosen to experience the exile to which he had condemned his Creature, if only for a time. It was an exercise of the poetic faculty—of the quarrel with oneself—that not incidentally resulted, after the fact, in one of the finest pieces of political rhetoric that this country has ever produced, and the model for something finer and more consequential, Dr. Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”

Walt Kelly, Pogo, Earth Day 1971

“What are poets for in a destitute time?”—so asked the problematic yet inescapable Martin Heidegger, one of the subjects of my forthcoming (I swear!) book Hannah and the Master. The other subject, and the book’s heroine, is Hannah Arendt and her struggle to think and feel a place for the displaced person she was as a German Jew fundamentally from birth. Arendt’s work is flawed—she bore an acute blindness to American racism—but she too did the poetico-political work of imagining American individuality not as some kind of invulnerable and exceptional fortress but as a human condition that had to be struggled for. “Apparently,” she wrote tartly in the 1943 essay “We Refugees,” “nobody wants to know that contemporary history has created a new kind of human beings—the kind that are put in concentration camps by their foes and in internment camps by their friends.” We are all this new kind of human beings—there is nothing really new here. What is potentially new, in Arendt’s sense of natality, is our response.

For now, while I write this, I stand in, uncomfortably and fully in, this body that is in a comfortable apartment in a seemingly untraumatized part of the world—and I apprehend in the body of constricted breath, the panicked body, the fight-or-flight body of the people of Beirut, of people hooked up to ventilators, of parents who have been separated from children who have been interned in undisclosed locations. Not for a moment do I confuse my privileged condition with theirs. But I have a duty to imagine the lives of others as that which supports and cohabitates with my own.

Out of cognitive dissonance, dissidence—my hope for change, for this time.

In this photo the diagonal of the playing field cuts away from the diagonal of the light poles, leaving an uninterpretable gap at ground level between the field and a solitary tree, caged by inclined lampposts--so the eye drags along the ground, catching on the white foreshortened numbers, while above the mass of the image swirls up its complex of clouds, tissues of vapor pulled into and against each other, the foreground dropping down into a kind of middling swerve like a fat finger veering toward Wisconsin. We accept, routinely, seeing as adequate to knowing, seeing nothing that we know.

In this photo the surface of the water communicates inexactly the water’s depths, giving little indication of its temperature, the presence or absence of fish and other wildlife, the astringent or unctuous qualities of the substance itself in contact with human skin, the pressure imposed upon the eyelids or corneas of a person submerged, the float of clothes or trunks or breasts or genitals, the ragged irritating edge of jet ski engines, the creep of waves to the beaches on either side and the voices and footsteps of walkers and idlers. Each snapshot I take measures more of the unshown.

In this photo the text glances at itself as if uneasily, as if it were a middle-aged man confronting himself in the mirror, rubbing at stubble, pulling skin taut and letting it spring back into wrinkles and ruin, the eyes dark tarns into which long-cherished but increasingly inaccurate images of himself might tumble. In this photo there is no clear frame of reference, nothing clear except for the frame that references what it disincludes like an N95 mask dangling from its strap off of a harassed assistant manager’s ear. In this photo the bucolics of my confinement wax and wane.

In this photo the infrastructure of everything you cannot see presses squarely at the margins of everything you can: capital exempted from taxes, Asian carp, humidity arising from the rain-soaked earth, a young couple, confused seabirds, lengthy puddles, the late sonata of Beethoven’s to which the photographer was listening, the ache in the small of his back, the umbrella dangling from his fingers, the t-shirt perceptibly heavier with moisture than it had been before he left the house. Description of a description the moment before he lifted up his phone to capture the beginning of a new run of days.

Limited, endless, the drawn boundary, the tropic, the dotted line, the vertical attacks the horizontal, the horizontal swallows up the vertical, the virus homes in on healthy cells, spines its proteins through walls in the lungs, the cops phalanx through occupied territory, your neighborhood or mine, the air is charged with human voices, breath, whispers, cries, the walls are covered in graffiti, the walls are messages, the walls fall inward to disclose bare terror, the sun kisses us with its knives, the water rises to meet our windows, no one is at home, the world is what we make it.

The ninety-ninth day unfolds like every other in thrall to water, thunderous squalls threading sunny skies all afternoon, where I sit in the grass looking out over the lake going through its changes from turquoise froth to something heavier, like gleams of gray static rimmed by the horizon’s iron line. A mother and son try laughingly to rescue a toy from a tree; an old man with stringy white hair and yellow sunglasses shuffles past, dragging a DKNY bag. These the abstracts and brief chronicles of the time. Clouds mutter, flies buzz, the world holds its breath behind its mask.

Quasi una fantasia under skies heavy laden with clouds the color of both sides of birch bark, skies exceeding and defining our earthly existence, the very definition of transcendence yet part and parcel of every flare and burst (sudden attack of the piano, seamless movement) of gases, of oil, of the dying albedo of an iceless arctic, of the trucks rumbling from one half-closed town to another. Sun’s low in the west, concealed by Iowa’s edge, evidenced by fire fretting the fleet of clouds outward bound over Lake Michigan. The earth is still beautiful. The piano, racing with the rain.