Beware of Academic Conformity

“Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.” -- Martin Luther King, Jr.

As we continue our attempt to blaze a trail toward the Promised Land by way of the poetic genius, the project will necessarily have to attract participants of varying abilities, talents, and gifts who can act creatively in an attempt to change their world. But a problem arises in legitimate pressures towards conformity. On this subject, the poet John Keats states as follows, excerpted from an 1803 letter:

The Genius of Poetry must work its own salvation in a man: It cannot be matured by law & precept, but by sensation & watchfulness in itself -- That which is creative must create itself -- In Endymion I leaped head long into the Sea, and thereby have become better acquainted with the Soundings, the quicksands, & the rocks, than if I had stayed upon the green shore, and piped a silly pipe, and took tea & comfortable advice.

But as we attempt to blaze a trail, who wants to run into quicksand? To take such a chance, one needs a cause greater than their self, and this project strives to provide that -- and great art may come out of it.

Speaking of quicksand, beware the ossified academics who're guarded of their status and position at the university feeding trough -- as Rimbuad put it -- and intent to conform the budding poet or artist into a mediocre image of their own self in an attempt to shore up their own self-image. But this is not to say one can't learn from them (though some of the lessons may not be the ones they'd intended to teach). It's granted that those who've achieved status and recognition in their field have done so legitimately. No one should feel threatened by the Promised Land Project because, as it's closely tied to Whitman's vision, it validates. Its aligned with the integral philosophy mantra of "transcend and include", as articulated by the contemporary philosopher Steve McIntosh.

Calling for a New Brood of Bodies and Souls

In the previous blog I spoke the appearance of a crisis but I hope to avoid sounding alarmist. In a complex society such as our own, it can be difficult to ascertain the level of resilience in our society. The term crisis depends on one's sense of urgency.

In this blog I've tried to articulate a synthesis that demonstrates where we need to go as a society in the course of human evolution and how we can get there. But as I stated at the outset, I recognize the limitations of the written word and assert that some kind of spiritual movement must take place. Beyond paper and types, or paper and ink, or (computer)screen and types, we're trying to create a poetry of bodies and souls.

Short of a spiritual revolution, however, the project can be broken down into more tangible parts, such as "keeping up one's spirits" or simply promoting community spirit within the greater context of the human spirit.

While perhaps too presumptuous to claim patronage from the dead, I’ve correlated my approach to follow Whitman’s call as reflected in the poem below. Calling for a "new brood" of bodies and souls, the poem lends itself toward a festive approach, as reflective in the poem, "Poets to Come" (somewhat misconfigured):

Poets to come! Orators, singers, musicians to come!
Not to-day is to justify me and answer what I am for,
But you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental, greater
Than before known,
Arouse! For you must justify me.

I myself but write one or two indicative words for the
future,
I but advance a moment only to wheel and hurry back in the
darkness.

I am a man who, sauntering along without fully stopping, turns
a casual look upon you and then averts his face,
Leaving it to you to prove and define it,
Expecting the main things from you.

Going to the Mythos in Times of Crisis

As noted in a previous blog, I reiterate the value of cultural diversity. Cultures have evolved over time and have withstood the test of time. When a crisis appears on the horizon, it is to our benefit to be able to draw on the vast array of human experience to meet the challenge. That said, a crisis has appeared on the horizon in our democratic society. Entrenched narrow interests (to include self-interest and "special interests") and a divided political sphere threaten our society as a whole. This can be described as a crisis of the spirit. To meet this crisis we should not fear to go to our mythos, the dynamic of our moral culture. As demonstrated in previous blogs, under the auspices of poetry, we can make vital use of the symbols capable of inspiration.

"If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me." (Mark 8:34)

While such symbols can lend themselves to the ascetic and the didactic, the Promised Land Project, grounded in poetry, strives to make use of them inspirationally. To simply state, didactically, "What would Jesus do?" is of limited value and easily can create a negative affect. Self-interest is human nature and the use of moralizing and shaming in an attempt to transcend entrenched interests in a complex society is more apt to degenerate the public discourse.

Yet while recognizing self-interest is part of human nature, we must also recognize the dynamics of our collective nature, such as our capacity to love. By differentiating between the mythos and religion, we can draw on such symbols and frame them poetically, yet truthfully, then interject the arts as a means to inspire.

The essential function of art is moral. Not aesthetic, not decorative, not pastime and recreation. But Moral. The essential function of art is moral. But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. A morality which changes the blood, rather than the mind. Changes the blood first. The mind follows later, in the wake. -- D.H. Lawrence

Art can be many things -- it's not worth arguing about -- but I believe Lawrence was on to something. The promotion of a collective narrative aligned with the truth can erode the foundations of false ideologies that excuse self-interest and harbor a deep sense of shame, propping up falsely one's sense of self, and causing the occlusion of sympathetic love. Yet it ultimately validates because it restores one's sense of self through a truthful level of self-acceptance towards self-interest and enables one to see more clearly one's own contribution to the greater good. Well, that's how it's supposed to work, as I see it.

Something of My Odyssey

As we make our way toward a precipice I'm hoping will afford a better view, here I'll relate some personal history about your guide. How I came to promoting a poetic approach toward human progress is a long story but a short introduction is in order at this point. I began my adult life as an agnostic exalting science and reason. After a stint in the Army and four years of college, my dreams began to overtake me, eventually eclipsing what had been a careful, practical approach into adulthood. Like any American, or human for that matter, I'd intended to secure a measure of wealth and status; but driven by irrational forces, reminiscent of some of the themes of Dostoyevsky, I simply failed to live up to my existentialist reason.

After a crisis point in my life, as my existentialist reason came to an all too literal dead end, I came to the poetry of Whitman and became fascinated by the American poet that exclaims Of physiology from top to toe I sing,/ Not physiognomy alone nor brain alone is worthy for the/ Muse, I say the Form complete is worthier far

As I came to appreciate the soul, or primal soul, in time I would strive to create a progressive approach that taps into the totality of our human nature, beyond mere reason, and the Muse seems to have obliged. That's only part of a long odyssey evocative of Dante as well as Homer. And I might add that I, too, consider myself to be something of a poet:

I am the poet that rides the waves
cresting high
and crashing low.

A poet in the wake of your Walt Whitman,
a poet of the body,
a poet of the soul.

The pleasures of heaven ascend me
and the pains of hell descend me.

If you knew how much I missed the mark
of that ideal
you might shake your head and go.

But wait my countrymen and women
my weaknesses can be made perfect in you.

Where I'm Going With All of This/The Importance of Cultural Diversity

To give a preview of where I'm going with all of this, after I've established the project's roots in poetry, we'll then be moving into the realm of the prophets. There we'll try to bring Jesus down to earth, so to speak, in the more grounded sense as a poet. Those believers who're more comfortable with Jesus amongst the clouds as a prophet, the messiah, the Christ, are going to have to have faith. For nonbelievers, I expect they'll find there's plenty of room for them as well as I continue to talk poetry and the use of symbol and metaphor in relation to the dynamics of human nature.

Before that, however, I'll have to underscore my sincere belief in the importance of cultural diversity. Much like the benefits of biological diversity, whatever challenges that present themselves in the course of human history, it's to our benefit to draw on the vast pool of human experience to help meet these challenges. In this blog, I'll be citing some aspects of the Native American culture, for example, that I believe will help enable us to be more Christlike.

By establishing the project in poetry and making creative use of both deductive and inductive reasoning, I believe we can successfully engage these issues cross-culturally and among believers and nonbelievers alike. But where I think this is going is the creation of what nonbelievers might call a conceptual metaphor in which to engage the world. But the last word I'll leave is taken from the Roman Catholic theologian and Dominican priest Gustavo Gutierrez, who is considered the father of liberation theology. Speaking on the University of Oregon campus, in 2005 I believe, he remarked that to him, the language of God is poetry.

Analogy to the Manhattan Project

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” – Albert Einstein

I can be a real dreamer and even to myself, aspects of The Promised Land Project can seem rather, shall we say, far-fetched. There are significant obstacles to overcome and though I see no impasse, still, my vision is limited. Furthermore, I've had my share of failure in life. But if one can learn from failure, whether it's one's own or from others, it's not in vain.

As the American Scientists gathered for the Manhattan Project, some hoped that the atomic bomb wouldn't work. No one knew unless they tried. But the atomic bomb did work and with the genie out of the bottle, so to speak, nuclear weapons continue to proliferate around the world to threaten our destruction.

While the Manhattan Project strived to tap the power of the atom for military purposes, the Promised Land Project strives to tap the power of the soul for peaceful purposes.

In this blog I try to articulate as reasonably as possible why this can work. The project provides a collective narrative that will have to be picked up by others to be promoted in various forms. But to work it must capture the imagination, it must engender inspiration to be sustained and renewed on some level, and it must be the truth -- as much as we understand that to be. Ultimately, like the scientists of the Manhattan Project, we can only know if it will work by trying it.

As it was American scientists that unleashed the nuclear weapons into the world, let it be American poets to unleashed an imaginative disposition that renders the use of such weapons unimaginable.

The Problem of Nationalism and False Prophets

Coming through the collective movements of the twentieth-century, it's understandable we'd be suspicious of collective movements and collective mindsets. We are suspicisous of top down coercive policies that suppress individualism to promote the power of the state. Communism, Fascism, or National Socialism enacted such policies with horrific results. But there's no denying our collective identities because there's no denying our collective nature. The problem of nationalism in the modern era, as the the end all of collective identity, is that it separates ourselves into an "us" and "they" and leaves us susceptible to false prophets.

To me, Hitler is the classic false prophet: in the wake of defeat and humiliation in the Great War, promising to restore Germany to great heights, in fact, he led it to its destruction and other abysmal lows. The Nazi regime provided the German society with a false collective narrative, or ideology, to initiate an agenda of war and conquest. To a defeated country in dire economic straits, the collective narrative went something like this: their humiliating defeat at the end of the first world war was due to a “stab in the back” implicating the Jews, and that the Germans were a “master race” destined to assert their superiority and required “lebensraum”, or living space, and thus destined to rule Europe, if not the world.

While the Nazi ideologues provided this collective narrative that successfully restored a sense of national pride among a critical element of the German populace, it was necessarily backed by the use of coercive power and suppression toward those reluctant or unable to go along with this narrative.

A national spirit should fall under the greater context of the human spirit: the encompassing ‘we’. The Promised Land Project provides a collective narrative aligned with the truth -- as best we understand that to be -- to promote the human spirit and what I call the cross-cultural divine law to love each other as you love yourself.

The Flux of Human History: Between the Individual and the Collective

Human history appears to be in a flux between the individual and the collective. Humans evolved as social beings in a hunter and gathering society. The problem of our socialization into individual consciousness in the modern era, compounded by a consumer culture that incites the pride and passions of the self, may leave us in an unsustainable imbalance towards the individual self at the expense of the greater collective. Under this model, our society drifts toward spiritual crisis, if we're not there already. Here the working definition of a spiritual crisis is, simply, narrow interests that threaten the integrity of the greater collective.

The Promised Land Project, derived from the realm of poetry, provides a model of how this crisis can be met through a kind of bottom up spiritual movement towards the restoration of balance and harmony, that is, the individual acting freely in concert with the greater collective. The project seeks change through bottom up inspiration and revitalization of the moral cultural rather than through top down legislation, which is inherently coercive as laws have to be enforced. The poet Walt Whitman tried to achieve this through written poetry, such as is reflected in the poem "I Hear America Singing". The Promised Land Project, however, recognizes the limitations of poetry in written form, as Whitman did as well. Echoing Whitman, the project strives to create a poetry beyond paper and types towards poetry of bodies and souls.

Invidual freedom ultimately must be balance by love for the collective, or collective spirit; otherwise governments must lay down laws to achieve what's best of for the collective, which is inherently coercive. The reason we spend so much money on prisons, I argue, is because our moral culture has not kept up with the changes in society. But the problem is that love, or "spirit" is something one feels and there are legitimate obstacles toward that end. But I see no impasse.

D.H. Lawrence on Whitman and the Continuum of Consciousness

Back on the Whitman trail, I believe it's particularly notable how genius interacts with genius and the passionate ambivalence that D.H. Lawrence contends with Whitman's poetry can be revealing. As noted in the previous blog of June 7, Lawrence seems to fall in and out of love with Whitman. Yet Whitman's vision nevertheless seems to pass through the rapids of Lawrence's criticism despite ourselves. So that after Lawrence calls him "fat", I immediately hear a retort reverberating in my head in a line from Whitman's "Song of Myself":

And counseled with doctors and calculated close and found no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones.

Here in our time, I expect we're more likely to find it far sweeter when the fat sticks to the ribs of our rivals than ourselves. But it's the level of acceptance, in ourselves and in others, that we may long to feel. But Lawrence has a validate argument against Whitman's concept of sympathetic merging. As we look into “Song of Myself”, and come across certain lines, such as the following, I expect we’re likely to chaff, like Lawrence, at Whitman’s assertion of sympathy:

I do not ask the wounded person how he feels….I myself become the wounded person,

While we might come across a wounded person and feel sympathy and offer aid, like the Biblical Good Samaritan, do we actually become the wounded person? Like Lawrence, as I expect most of us in this age, we’d balk at the notion. But let’s return to Lawrence’s criticism of Whitman:

But in merging you must merge away from something, as well as towards something, and in sympathy you must depart from one point to arrive at another. Whitman lays down this law of sympathy as the one law, the direction of merging as the one direction. Which is obviously wrong. Why not a right-about-turn? Why not turn slap back to the point from which you started to merge? Why not that direction, the reverse of merging, back to the single and overweening self? Why not, instead of endless dilation of sympathy, the retraction into isolation and pride?

Note that Lawrence imaginatively creates a continuum to make his point. While there’s no denying our individual identities, neither can we deny our collective identities nor our collective nature in general. At times we might be completely selfish, in order to survive, for example; yet at other times we might be capable of complete sacrifice, such as throwing one’s self on a grenade to protect his or her comrades. Keeping in mind this continuum, the question is where does our day to day consciousness fall on the spectrum.

Death and Poetry

In previous blogs, I'd noted how Whitman's vision becomes eclipsed by the realities of the modern era. While Whitman's vision exalts the average working man and woman, subsequent poets such as Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot exalt art. When Pound decries what he decribes as emotional slither in poetry, such a position is rooted in the misanthropic and perhaps the modernist notion of detached reason. But people are emotional beings and yes, from time to time, we can get rather slithery about it. When it finds its way into our poetry, it's apt to look maudlin, such as what you might find in a sympathy card.

Another writer of about the same time with the strain of misanthropic, Evelyn Waugh, wrote a book called The Loved One about death in southern California. The book is hilarious, witty and wickedly funny, about a mortuary that molds a smile on the corpse of "the loved one" to help ease the sadness in the final viewing. Having grown up in southern California, Waugh satirizes the superficialities and the crass commercialism of the region that we can recognize to this day.

Yet the inherent sadness is that it's the traditional role of the poet to use their genius toward poetry that weaves the suffering caused by a death -- our shared individual destiny -- into love, not to mock it, and not to create art that comes across as sterile. The fear of death can become acute absent the gifts of the poet and lends itself to the courting of flimsy religious doctrine that talks about love but enables a society stuck in the self, instilling mere belief without a deeper sense of faith.

Displacing the Rotten Foundations of the Modern Era

To my view, it appears the modern era is propped up in part by four rotten pillars that, in time will have to be displaced: the notion of detached reason, the misanthropic impulse, nationalism, and individual consciousness. The earth and we as a species may depend on it.

Yet none of these are easily transgressed because we're socialized into these feelings. Nor will didacticism have but limited affect and can be counter productive. When people didactically tell us we shouldn't feel a certain way but we can't help feeling it anyhow, it puts us off. There are legitimate reasons behind these feelings and consequently they present legitimate obstacles.

In this blog I'll address these obstacles from various angles. The short answer, however, as I see it, they'll have to be transcended, or supplanted, by some kind of spiritual movement with particular emphasis on the human spirit.

The Most Notable Folly: The Problem of Reduction

“But reason has taught me that to condemn a thing thus, dogmatically, as false and impossible, is to assume the advantage of knowing the bounds and limits of God’s will and of the power of our mother Nature; and that there is no more notable folly in the world than to reduce these things to the measure of our capacity and competence.” – Montaigne

As I brought up the mystic in the previous blog, it calls for some clarification. In the above quote from the French writer Montaigne (translated) it's worth noting what he describes as the most "notable folly" of reduction in the process of our reason. Whether one believes in God or not, there's much mystery in the universe beyond our comprehension. We're all thrown into the world and have to make some sense of it and act accordingly. While I referred to myself as a prophetic progressive, I spent my time as an agnostic and can still appreciate the position.

I used the word "prophetic progressive" in the last blog entry to distinguish myself from the term secular progressive that's often heard in political commentary. The political commentator Bill O'Reilly, for example, who refers to himself as a culture warrior, makes sense of the political sphere as being a division between secular progressives and traditionalists. While I believe there's some truth in this model as to be useful, I don't expect it's the entire truth: I expect the reality of the situation to be more complex. But the term prophetic progressive can potentially lend itself towards a synthesis of this division in the political sphere.

But that can also be shaky ground. What I don't mean by a prophetic progressive is to imply something like, "God says we need to go here." Inherent in such a statement, as it seems to me, is the problem of reduction. Yet through humility and skepticism, I believe the issue can be successfully engaged towards inference. I beleive the reader would be right to be skeptical but wrong to be dismissive.

The Promised Land Project cites the poetic genius and other writers with the strain of the prophetic to to provide a rational argument of where we need to go as a society in the course of human evolution. My basic premise is that humans, by nature, are meant to love and be loved, not only on a personal and intimate level, but on a societal level. But love is something one feels and I recognize their are some legitimate obstacles toward this end as we continue down the road of the poetic genius. While I see obstacles, I see no impasse. And skepticism is encouraged.

On the Subject of Politics and Religion

“The business of a seer is to see; and if he involves himself in the kind of God-eclipsing activities which make seeing impossible, he betrays the trust which his fellows have tacitly placed in him.” -- Aldous Huxley, Grey Eminence

If in truth I do have a gift for vision, the above quote strikes me as good advice. What I mean by a gift of vision is one who's connected the dots in such a way -- mystically inspired, as I make sense of it -- as to provide a perspective that can shed light as to where we need to go as a society to truly progress in the course of human evolution. But like anyone, I have my opinions and how well informed they are or not, is a matter of degrees.

The Promised Land Project strives to transcend both politics and religion. Politics is the easier of the two to stay out of the conversation because it strives towards top down change. Whether through the executive, legislative, or judicial branch, it’s all about the laying down of the law through enforcing, legislating, or interpreting it. The project strives toward bottom up change to help engender the political will among our elected leaders to transcend narrow interests and act on behalf of the greater good.

On the subject of religion, however, I’m afraid I'm more likely to get dragged into the conversation because I’m no secular progressive but what you might call a prophetic progressive. But through exploring the notions of service, humility, and healthy skepticism, I could maybe negotiate the issue well enough.

We all have an idea of the world but it's always limited; no one sees the world in its entirety. People often argue opinions because there ideas of the world are inextricably tied to their sense of self and are searching for validity to their lives. And your guide is no exception. The genius of Whitman, and part of the reason we started out on the Whitman trail, is his disposition toward validation.

Restoring Passion in Art: A Project Rooted in Crisis

“The cult of art reaches its end when it exists only for a precious handful of men and women. Then it is no longer art but the cipher language of a secret society for the propagation of meaningless individuality. Art is something which stirs men’s passions, which gives vision, lucidity, courage and faith.” -- Henry Miller

The above quote comes from Miller's book on The Time of the Assassins: a study of Rimbaud. First published in 1946, there'a a sense of urgency to the writings in the wake of two world wars and the dropping of the atomic bomb. Lamenting the state of poetry and inspired by the writings and life of French prodigy poet Arthur Rimbaud, Miller calls for greater vitality in art.

Rimbaud's visionary poetry also comes at a time of crisis and urgency: following France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, the society is at the brink of civil war with the rise of the revolutionary Paris Commune, and its subsequent violent suppression by government forces.

Miller's book and the writings of Rimbaud would stoke my imagination towards greater possibilties of art at another time of urgency and crisis in the winter of 2003: in the wake of terrorists attacks of September llth, 2001, the administration would take advantage of the public mood to build up towards a unilateral, preemptive attack towards a country completely unrelated to the terrorist attacks. With the administrations emphasis toward tax-cuts and military spending, I saw it as a guise towards the usurping of private wealth amidst public plunder, leaving the country less secure and bitterly divided. At the time, a nationwide chorous of poets would raise their voices in objection under the banner of "Poets Against the War."

After my initial vision in early 2002, my creative inspiration would strike a feverish pitch during that winter of 2003 in what would be my first attempt to get a handle on this vision and turn it into some kind of action. It would also be the beginning of many failures but I believe I learned something about the possibilities of art forged by the fires of passion.

These days I strike a more disppasionate tone as I've come to realize the importance of a proper framework to harness passion. As when we officially set out on this trail, I'll remind readers it's not so important that one understands or agrees with what I write. Writing about The Promised Land Project is like talking about a piano when you're trying to create music. Staying with this analogy, the project strives to create a kind of instrument in which poets and other artists can make a more vital kind of music.

Poets and their Flowers: from the real to the ideal

Continuing down the trail of the poetic genius we come to the poets and their flowers. In previous blogs of June 9 & 10 I'd noted the burgeoning of the misanthropic in France. Baudelaire's great book of the period, first published in 1857, is entitled Fleurs du Mal, roughly translated as "Flowers of Evil". The book would become a cornerstone of the foundation of what would be modern poetry.

Across the Atlantic in America at roughly the same time, Whitman publishes his great book of the period, first published in 1855, entitled Leaves of Grass that celebrates the divine in the human. As this book would also become part of the foundation of what would be modern poetry, it's worth noting an excerpt from the opening poem later to be entitled "Song of Myself":

A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.

Note that while the poet is celebrating a real flower, one senses that -- true to the title -- it's more about himself. But while Whitman's celebrating the real in America, back in France, about a decade later, the evolution of poetry is moving from the real to the ideal. The poet Stephen Mallarme's philosphy of his poetry is crystalized in his remark, "l'absente de tous bouquets", roughly translated as "the ideal flower that is absent from all real bouquets."

So while Whitman's extolling flowers above the metphysics of books, the reader will require a book of metaphysics to appreciate this "ideal flower" as described by Mallarme; case in point, the blog of June 9 where I cite the French philospher Jean-Paul Sartre's book Mallarme, or the Poet of Nothingness.

Here I'll conclude with a poetic metaphor: if poetry is a flower, to what extent, for the sake of art, have we poisoned the surrounding bed so that no weeds may appear and then unnaturally altered the flower to such an extent that we need a professor to tell us that it’s a flower, though it neither looks like a flower nor smells like a flower. My prediction is that some of the weeds have become immune to the poison and are rising up in an attempt to save the flower, in whatever form it may take, from the real to the ideal.

The Problem of Art and Individual Consciousness

In a previous blog, of May 22, I addressed the subject of the rise of individual consciousness and the modern era as reflected in the poetic genius of Wordsworth. But for me, to go to Wordsworth is to also have another English Romantic ringing in my ear. This would be the poet John Keats to whom I feel I must give voice in the following excerpt:

Modern poets differ from the Elizabethans in this. Each of the moderns like an Elector of Hanover governs his own petty state, & knows how many straws are swept daily from the Causeways in all his dominions & has a continual itching that all the Housewives should have their coppers well scoured: the ancients were Emperors of vast povinces, they had only heard of the remote ones and scarcely cared to visit them—I will cut all this—I will have no more of Wordsworth or Hunt…

In my own experience, poetry continues to have this problem of pettiness to which I feel compelled to warn budding poets. To some, contemporary poetry is a writing cult guarded by peevish word commissars who can know everything about art and nothing about the spirit; and should they encounter it in another’s poem are apt to feel threatened and can become livid and pick apart such a poem intent to suppress the spirit of both poet and poem.

Part of the problem, as I see it, is because of this socialization into individual consciousness, our art becomes overly tied to our individual sense of self. Wordsworth snubbed Keats who in turn snubbed Wordsworth; yet both were poetic geniuses in their own right but overprotective of their sense of self as it became tied to their art. As the Elizabethans and the ancient Greeks composed their poetry at a surging tide of the human spirit, they were less likely to get bogged down in matters no one much cares about outside the realm of poetry.

Rising Above the Twentieth-Century Artistic Vision of Demoralization and Isolation

The poetic genius that took hold of the 19th-century Whitman, extolling and exalting the westward expansionist average working man and woman, winds up at the other coast by the end of the twentieth century in the grim realties of Charles Bukowski. While Whitman addresses the subject proactively in the celebration of the spirit, Bukowski addresses the subject reactively in a demoralized and estranged society. Bukowski’s writings indulge our cynicism, pride, and misanthropy and does it well with humor. Because we’re in the land of opportunity, conversely, we’re also in the land of a sense of failure. Turning pain into art, Bukowski’s poetry, provides some alleviation to our own pain and validation to our feelings, much like the subjects of Edward Hopper’s paintings and the music of Miles Davis.

Imbued in the course of my own writing – my novella and stories, my poetry, my novel – there is a degree of continuity in my art, whatever its artistic merit may be, a “searching” quality that might be described as the striving to rise above despair and the misanthropic impulse to attain hope and faith in our human nature.

Back in 2002, after prolonged rumination on the poetry of Walt Whitman, compounded by other influences and my own personal odyssey, specific events would instigate a foundational shift in my view of human nature and how we can progress as a society. This would lead to a vision, a dreamer’s disposition to create order out of disorder.

Turning this vision into action is what I'm calling "The Promised Land Project", which to date consists mostly of numerous essays and this blog. Hypothetically, this vision can lend itself towards a revitalization of the moral culture, a renaissance in the arts, and the restoration of a collective sense of progress through the promotion of the human spirit.

The Artistic Vision of Nineteenth- Century American Artists

Whitman's poetic vision came at a time, in 1855, of relative optimism and a collective sense of progress in the United States. This sense of optimism and divine purpose is reflected in much of the paintings of the time, in the so called Hudson River School, with its majestic lanscapes and pastoral scenes. In the early half of the nineteenth-century, the American artists looked west and sensed the country was moving towards a promised land.

From the 1850’s, the promise of America, in certain respects, would dim. Its contradictions – notably the ideal of freedom and the instituion of slavery – would tear the country apart in a prolonged, bloody Civil War. Industrialization and the masses of migrant labor would create the labor strife that had already formed in Europe. And the frontier, with its range wars and internment of the Indians, would begin to shut down. Whitman, living well into the excesses of the Gilded Age, would see this promise dim yet held fast to his vision, in some respects strengthened by his close proximity to the dying youth of the Civil War.

As related in the previous blog of May 24, the fact that these artists may reflect the prejudices of their times, is not reason to be dismissive of their artistic vision. From our vantage point in the twenty-first century, it may well seem clear that this sense of divine purpose came inextricably tied to the evils in the rationale of manifest destiny, for example. But that is not sufficient reason to render the vision irredeemable. History will run its course and address these contradictions. There is something in these artists that are both endemic and transcendent of their times. Whitman carries the disease that will afflict the subsequent American -- but through him I believe we can also discover its cure.

One such contradiction we must contend with today is the ideal of individual freedom and the reality of environmental degradation. To address this, I argue in part for greater merging of the mainstream American culture with its indigenous culture. Whitman's vision should be balanced against Black Elk's vision, as related in the blog of May 25. Time will pass and places change; but the biology that enabled the early nineteenth-century artist to sense and create in such a way, remains with us in our own time and place. But we'll have to achieve it honestly.

Two Views of Modern Humans as Animals

The two countries marked by eighteenth-century revolutions that, in part, initiated the modern era, in America and in France, would also be marked by two evolving perspectives towards modern humans by the 1850's. In the novel Madame Bovary, the French writer Gustave Flaubert artistically weaves the seduction of the married Emma Bovary by the libertine Rudolfe as an alleviation from the crushing banality of bourgeois provincial life. In contrast to the passionate Madame Bovary, in the following passage, Flaubert goes on to describe a peasant woman who’s just won the medal for fifty-four years of service on the same farm:

Her thin face, swathed in a simple hood, was more creased and wrinkled than a withered russet apple, and from the sleeves of her red camisole there dangled a pair of long hands, with bony knuckles. The dust from the barn, the soda for washing and the grease from the wool had made them so crusted, cracked, calloused, that they looked grimy even though they had been rinsed in fresh water; and, from long service, they stayed half unclasped, almost as though to set forth of themselves the simple testimony of so much affliction endured. A hint of monastic rigidity intensified the look on her face. No touch of sadness of affection softened that pale gaze. Living close to the animals, she had assumed their wordless placid state of being.

In contrast to what’s going on in France where Flaubert describes the peasant woman as an animal to exhibit the banal, Whitman embraces and celebrates people as animals to exhibit the divine, in "Song of Myself" and reflected here in the poem “Me Imperterbe”(somewhat misconfigured):

Me imperturbe, standing at ease in Nature
Master of all or mistress of all, aplomb in the midst of irra-
tional things,
Imbued as they, passive, receptive, silent as they,
Finding my occupation, poverty, notoriety, foibles,
crimes, less important than I thought,
Me toward the Mexican sea, or in the Mannahatta or the
Tennnessee, or far north or inland,
A river man, or a man of the woods or of any farm-life of
these States or of the coast, or the lakes of Kanada,
Me wherever my life is lived, O to be self-balanced for
contingencies,
To confront night, storms, hunger, ridicule, accidents,
rebuffs, as the trees and animals do.

While Flaubert's view is disparaging of humans as animals, Whitman is embracing humans as animals. Yet Whitman's vision would become eclipsed and it is a view we're still trying to recover.

The Modern Era and the Misanthropic

In the preceeding blogs, I wrote how the poetry of high modernism reflects the rise of a misanthropic age in the aftermath of the First World War. Yet its roots can be traced to the onset of the modern era in Europe. The exalting of art in poetry in part becomes spurred by the misanthropic impulse. The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, writing in his book, Mallarme, or the Poet of Nothingness, cites its incarnation in the ensuing repercussions of the fall of the monarchy -- as the king was believed to have led by divine right -- and the rise of bourgeois ideology of reason. Following the fall of the monarchy and the failed revolution of 1848 when the bourgeoisie asserts itself to dominate the social order, Sartre describes the situation as follows:

The wrath of the poets was awesome. The most violent immediately proclaimed their hatred of Man, that impostor whose grievous fault consisted in not being the son of God. Flaubert set things in motion: “Without ever having, thank God, suffered at their hand, I loathe my fellow beings.” But Leconte de Lisle went even further, and in a state of great agitation wrote:

Man, heir of man and of his accrued evils
With your dead planet and your vanished Gods,
Fly away, vile dust…

Yet at roughly the same time something quite different is taking place in the poetic genius in America. While in Europe, human beings have fallen from grace and are no longer cast in the image of God, across the Atlantic Whitman is asserting the divine in the average working man and woman in such poems as "Song of Myself".

Following the Whitman Trail through Eliot's Wasteland

As noted in the previous two blog entries, the poetic genius of high modernism, as reflected in Ezra Pound and D.H. Lawrence, had a strong, ambivalent reaction towards Whitman’s art and themes. Pound’s cohort, T.S. Eliot, would write The Wasteland during this time, a poem often heralded as the greatest poem of the twentieth-century.

My take on the The Wasteland is that of a reaction to the horrors of the First World War and reflects the ushering in of a new, misanthropic age. The narrator of the poem literally seems shell-shocked, a common ailment of the trench warfare of that time. Whereas the nineteenth-century sustained a certain degree of optimism in human progress, despite notable strains, following the outbreak of the First World War, faith in our human nature collapsed and to this day, we’re still trying to recover. To some degree, modern poetry, exalting art, became an esoteric refuge from the horrors of the twentieth-century.

The fall-out with Whitman reflects a fall-out with democracy and faith in the average working man and woman. Pound would look to Fascism, Lawrence to a nostalgic, aristocratic vision of the ancient Etruscans, and Eliot would continue to forge an aristocratic refuge in art. In the upheavals of the First and Second World War, arguably the beginning and end of one great upheaval, Whitman’s vision doesn’t fare so well. At the high-water mark of totalitarianism, George Orwell surmises in his 1940 classic essay, "Inside the Whale":

The ‘democratic vistas’ have ended in barbed wire.

While we know that democracy does survive this twentieth-century challenge, Whitman's vision gets roughed up as we attempt to take it into the twenty-first century.

The Whitman trail merging into the Realm of D.H. Lawrence

The high modernist reaction to Whitman would take other strange forms. D.H. Lawrence would write an admiring essay of Whitman published in 1821, excerpted as follows:

Whitman has gone further, in actual living expression, than any man, it seems to me. Dostoyevsky has burrowed underground into the decomposing psyche. But Whitman has gone forward in life-knowledge. It is he who surmounts the grand climacteric of our civilization.

After exalting Whitman to the “grand climacteric of our civilization”, a couple of years later he would revise this essay towards its final publication in Lawrence’s Studies of Classic American Literature (1923). In the essay’s final form, a more critical disposition is struck, for example, as his attack on Whitman’s concept of sympathetic merging, excerpted as follows:

As soon as Walt knew a thing, he assumed a One Identity with it. If he knew that an Eskimo sat in a kyak, immediately there was Walt being little and yellow and greasy, sitting in a kyak. Now will you tell me exactly what a kyak is? Who is he that demands petty definition? Let him behold me sitting in a kyak. I behold no such thing. I behold a rather fat old man full of a rather senile, self-conscious sinuosity.

I owe much of my appreciation of Whitman’s poetry through Lawrence’s criticisms and believe ‘ol David Herbert has a valid point here. But does he have to call him fat? Is it really necessary to bring in the issue of his size? Eskimos don’t seem to fair any better through Lawrence’s critical eyes. Lawrence eventually comes to see the image of Whitman, with its disenchantment, in his poor dog “Bibbles” – the subject of a great poem by Lawrence but one can’t help but wince at the vitriol of this spurned love. While Lawrence may have a valid point, there's something else going on with this high modernist reaction to Whitman's poetry.

The Problem of Poetry Setting Itself Apart from the Average Citizen

Getting back on the Whitman Trail, we move into the strange reactions from later poets of high modernism. The American poet Ezra Pound, who became enamored by the Symbolists and other influences beyond American poetry, seems to return to his homeland like a quarrelsome prodigal son to settle a kind of family argument, as reflected by his poem “A Pact”:

I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman –
I have detested you long enough.
I come to you as a grown child
Who has had a pig-headed father;
I am old enough now to make friends.
It was you that broke the new wood,
Now is a time for carving.
We have one sap and one root –
Let there be commerce between us.

While it's generally accepted Whitman was a groundbreaking poet, Pound can't say that. He has to say "broke the new wood" instead of the commonly used term "broke new ground". As noted in the earlier blog on May 19th, Pound gave us the dictum to “make it new”, and poets and students of poetry to this day are attempting to enliven the language of their poetry by steering clear of clichés, abstractions, and other writing heresies of the writing cult of poetry as Art with a capital ‘A’. Yet paradoxically, by attempting to enliven the language of poetry, poets must wonder why the art form has become dead to the average citizen. By steering clear of commonly used phrases, poetry can also set itself apart from the common man and woman. This runs counter to the Whitman concept of merging.

Addressing a Demoralized Society, Hypothetically

We can attain a sense of self, and a sense of group identity, through two means, though usually some variation of both: comparison to others, or to a cultural ideal; or, through contribution to a greater collective. The former is problematic while the latter often fails to receive recognition and monetary compensation; consequently, our society is afflicted by a certain degree of demoralization. The problem with comparison is that it lends itself to humiliation and the occlusion of sympathetic love and the ability to confront the truth.

Part of the reason Rick Warren’s book The Purpose Driven Life became and remains a best-seller, I believe, is that it addressed and provided some relief from this demoralization. At the time, Warren believed the country to be on the verge of a third great awakening and I would agree with him. But in a pluralistic country founded on the tenets of the enlightenment, a broader approach is needed because a country’s moral culture is more than religion, also encompassing, for example, its history, traditions, ideals, and its art.

Through a poetic approach and the use of symbol, metaphor, narrative, and vision (projection of the primal soul) we can create an imaginative framework which then can be interjected with the arts. This framework, that essentially promotes community spirit in concert with the human spirit, can help to affirms one’s sense of self, and one's sense of group identity, derived from contribution as the appropriate and surer foundation toward human flourishing for both the individual and society. This can act in conjunction with a faith-based approach or outside of it. What we hope to restore through all of this is a collective sense of progress by way of a synthesis movement.

Defining an Evolution of Consciousness

For our democratic society to meet its challenges, and avoid ever deeper levels of human conflict and environmental catastrophe, it may be that we’ll have to undergo an evolution of consciousness. I imagine this would be a kind of bottom up spiritual movement to overcome the entrenched narrow interests in the political sphere and engender the political will to enable action on behalf of the collective good.

In his 2008 book, The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability, James Gustave Speth, a dean of the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale, provides a synthesis of some of the leading voices in the field articulating why this may be a necessary course of action. Speth, who spent much of his career in government circles and courts of law, states that top down incremental change is failing to address the crisis at hand and calls for a new consciousness toward culturally transformative change.

Breaking down this lofty notion of “a new consciousness”, as I understand it, is essentially about imagining one’s self less as an individual entity and more as a member of a collective. But the question is to what extent does a culture enable or impair the individual to feel it, or inspire it, on a certain level. The Promised Land Project attempts to achieve this end through the restoration of a collective sense of progress.

A Vison of a Perfect Wave crashing through a Plato's Cave

No one sees the world in its entirety; we all have an idea of the world, or an imaginative construct of the world. What can be problematic is that our world view is inextricably tied to our sense of self and our sense of group identity. It can impair our ability to confront the truth. Plato's famous allegory of the cave -- a very poetic device, I might add -- in his Republic, I believe, speaks to this predicament. Employing the logos as we attempt to reason through our different world views can have limited affect and cause disengagement because it carries a threat of being invalidating and simply, destabilizing.

By drawing on the mythos and framing it poetically yet truthfully, we can provide an invitation difficult to refuse, or difficult from which to disengage. This poetic approach in the use of symbol, metaphor, narrative and interjected with the arts can promote a collective vision (hence, "the promise land") capable of crashing through, overriding, and incorporating the personal vision. I call this a vision of the perfect wave. Because, if it is the truth, people eventually will adjust their lives because inherently they will desire their lives to be a part of the solution rather than remain part of the problem. But the key words here are eventually and inherently. Such a vision would have to be promoted deeper than the level of reason to the level of the poetic, thus drawing on the arts. It must strive to inspire and provide validatation. Reading Whitman's "Song of Myself," as it attempts to do just that, it's understandable why we set out on the Whitman trail.

Thinking Outside of the Modern Mindset: Differentiating between Religion and the Mythos

The modern mindset often fails to differentiate between the mythos and religion. Religion is an institution whereas the mythos is about the collective imagination. In a previous blog, we established a working definition of myth as the stories a society tells about itself. All religions I respect because they've evolved over time and have withstood the test of time. All religions, as much as I can tell, promote individual spiritual development. Yet certain aspects of religion can be stuck in the past. For example, I take issue with the coercive, shaming elements in a religion because it suppresses the spirit, or inspiration, and ultimately becomes an obstacle towards true progress.

While the priest may instruct you, didactically, to love your neighbor as you love yourself, the poet can help enable you to feel it, or inspire it, poetically, through art and other means by invoking the collective identity of a culture, or transcending culture, invoking the human spirit. In regards to religion, the renowned mythologist Joseph Campbell describes the revitalization process as follows, excerpted from The Power of Myth:

The world changes, the religions have to be transformed….It’s in the religions; all the religions are true – for their time. If you can find what the truth is and separate it from the temporal inflection, just be your same old religion into a new set of metaphors, and you’ve got it.

Yet the objective of the Promised Land Project is not to revitalize a religion but the moral culture as a whole in the modern democratic society. Rather than opening a big can of worms that religion can be, we strive to establish ourselves in the realm of poetry.