What I've Learned About Socialism from Jack Spicer
Dear Danny,
Let me start by copying out a fragment from a fragmentary Jack Spicer Perry Mason script begun (and never completed) in 1956:
"R. Hamilton Burger: Look at man basically, your honor. He is a child. He wants to grow up. As soon as he realizes he is too old to grow up, he dies. Somebody shoots him or stabs him or he dies of pneumonia or a heart attack or commits suicide. This is what we in law call the basic law. Angelism [true human embodiment] is like leprosy. It tries to thwart the basic nature of man. It cannot succeed. That is its basic treason. If it could succeed, if the leprous person by having his face eaten away could make his bones seem so beautiful that all men would kiss them, if leprosy exposed the heart and the heart only, man (and nature) would not consider leprosy a crime. If there were any secrets the broken skin could lay bare, if the broken skin could display anything else but broken skin. But, your honor, you know, I know, all men know, there is nothing broken flesh can expose but more broken flesh.
Perry Mason: Your honor, I object. My client is not accused of leprosy.
R. Hamilton Burger: I accuse him of leprosy.
Mrs. Doom {the Judge}: The attorneys will refrain from personality. . . ."
Spicer never got to launch a defense of what he called "Angelism," active dis-invention ( he called it, similar to Lew Welch, "unventing") of the lie of hard-core Christian corruption or any definition of the human being as separable from God (and therefore open to trumped-up, trumpeted charges of failure). Imagine a Philip Marlowe who reads Rumi and you've pretty much got the "persona (very much gratis)" of the poet. "Angelism," he tried to tell his friends and students at this time, was the truest (appearing in its American incarnation as tough and rugged) propensity of human spirit. The truest nature of Human Nature. Spicer fought all his life against a Catholic and Calvinist sense of us as fall-guys for the Fall. Paradise, he taught me, is as much a down staircase to Earth as an up staircase to Heaven. It's got to be two ways, bi-ways, always. Angelism was to reveal another purer, incorruptible state beyond the Fall. Call it the Full. But too many boys and burgundies got in his way. So he made THE way his poetry and made it tougher than any desire--even the desire to write it and be good at it.
The first time I read Jack (some excerpts in a Gilbert Sorrentino review of "Billy the Kid") I knew Spicer was a true poet and that all true poetry prophecies liberation. How? By practicing it. "Real toads in fake gardens." Or was it "fake toads in real gardens." Both sound right. Both are right. The establishment calls such dis-invention (of the status quo) leprosy and makes it a crime like suicide. If there must be Satans (monotheisms thrive on them), then let them be the Satans of Job and the Gospels, God's handyman, absolutely dependable in his mayhem. [Note: I just finished listening to Arthur Honegger and Paul Claudel's "Joan of Arc at the Stake," which concludes with Joan giving the flames permission to consume her by sending flesh-combusting flames of love from her own heart. I don't know what actually happened up there on the stake except someone burned alive but I am convinced Paul Claudel thought he knew and Honegger believed him.]
The socialism I groped for last night was like Spicer's poetry: a socialism of instinctive rapture and regard (sometimes seeming like, or putting on airs of, rage) for the world as a protectorate of beauty. Poetry, had of necessity, a saint's kind heart but with the kicker's foot of a Christ-like Beckham giving the boot to money changers in the parking lot. It's a tough-minded, unsentimental socialism that forces the student to grab the cat whose head the Zen master is threatening to sever from the master's hands and put it back down on the floor, saying, "I rest my case." Saving the lives of threatened beings and things is the only satisfying reason for and successful argument in defense of socialism. The redemption of life is living proof.
What we are seeing in the Gulf, I fear, is a triumph of leprosy. It may be too late for the protection that is the only practical, practicable proof of God. Thankfully, we are bi-sexual--angel and man all at once. I never fail to learn the best about myself from Spicer. "Angelism" is a code word for the most irreducible form of Socialism. "Poet be like God," Spicer commanded. Angelism is the aegis and agency by which we do so. The stewardship begins, for me, with clear, articulate perception--a husbandry of speech. To see things as they are is my Socialism. Like-wise Bawa, who contrasted hard-hearted Communism with heart-to-heart Communasm, saved his best visions for song--often bursting from free speech into freed music. The first time I saw him do so I thought he was behaving like my mother, who chose to switch from English to Yiddish just when the story started to get good. One big difference: Bawa's Yiddish was perfectly intelligible. In fact, it was true speech.
I've been allowed to save some of my past with my teacher derived from snippets of song. I realize now he was confirming a lot of what Spicer and Olson were trying to teach us--but in an ashram rather than a barroom setting. This morning I felt like I was sitting in the mosque he built, sunlight pouring in, with bonus breeze. In my last days as a church-goer, I used to call the mosque Moscow and thought the imams were all KGB members. Then I remembered a Sid Caesar skit where he plays a gangster by the name of Harry Mozart ("At lest the name of Mozart will be famous!" he exclaims at one point) who exploits a law that allows men to flee burning banks with their money. I fled that burning building with plenty of wealth intact. But it can only be spent in prayers of clear perception and understanding. This wealth cannot burn a hole in any pocket because it can't be stored there. It exists only in use--its highest and best use as, in my case, song and its subsidiaries.
Here's another of Jack's incredible Boston poems, with that wonderful survivalist Philip Marlowe voice rising from the depths in the death-defying "calmness of poetry":
A POEM WITHOUT A SINGLE BIRD IN IT
What can I say to you, darling,
When you ask me for help?
I do not even know the future
Or even what poetry
We are going to write.
Commit suicide. Go mad. Better people
Than either of us have tried it.
I loved you once but
I do not know the future.
I only know that I love strength in my friends
And greatness
And hate the way their bodies crack when they die
And are eaten by images.
The fun's over. The picnic's over.
Go mad. Commit suicide. There will be nothing left
After you die or go mad,
But the calmness of poetry.
--Jack Spicer, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry, Wesleyan, 2008, p. 73.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Daniel Kasowitz"
To: "David Federman"
Sent: Saturday, May 29, 2010 2:04:48 AM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
Subject: Stewards of the Earth
I don't know what you mean by "socialism of the rich" or "socialism of the poor", or for that matter "socialism of survival". What socialism does mean is wresting away the natural resources of this world from the corporate profiteers and entrusting them to responsible stewards of the earth. That was the gist of the article I sent you.
Let me start by copying out a fragment from a fragmentary Jack Spicer Perry Mason script begun (and never completed) in 1956:
"R. Hamilton Burger: Look at man basically, your honor. He is a child. He wants to grow up. As soon as he realizes he is too old to grow up, he dies. Somebody shoots him or stabs him or he dies of pneumonia or a heart attack or commits suicide. This is what we in law call the basic law. Angelism [true human embodiment] is like leprosy. It tries to thwart the basic nature of man. It cannot succeed. That is its basic treason. If it could succeed, if the leprous person by having his face eaten away could make his bones seem so beautiful that all men would kiss them, if leprosy exposed the heart and the heart only, man (and nature) would not consider leprosy a crime. If there were any secrets the broken skin could lay bare, if the broken skin could display anything else but broken skin. But, your honor, you know, I know, all men know, there is nothing broken flesh can expose but more broken flesh.
Perry Mason: Your honor, I object. My client is not accused of leprosy.
R. Hamilton Burger: I accuse him of leprosy.
Mrs. Doom {the Judge}: The attorneys will refrain from personality. . . ."
Spicer never got to launch a defense of what he called "Angelism," active dis-invention ( he called it, similar to Lew Welch, "unventing") of the lie of hard-core Christian corruption or any definition of the human being as separable from God (and therefore open to trumped-up, trumpeted charges of failure). Imagine a Philip Marlowe who reads Rumi and you've pretty much got the "persona (very much gratis)" of the poet. "Angelism," he tried to tell his friends and students at this time, was the truest (appearing in its American incarnation as tough and rugged) propensity of human spirit. The truest nature of Human Nature. Spicer fought all his life against a Catholic and Calvinist sense of us as fall-guys for the Fall. Paradise, he taught me, is as much a down staircase to Earth as an up staircase to Heaven. It's got to be two ways, bi-ways, always. Angelism was to reveal another purer, incorruptible state beyond the Fall. Call it the Full. But too many boys and burgundies got in his way. So he made THE way his poetry and made it tougher than any desire--even the desire to write it and be good at it.
The first time I read Jack (some excerpts in a Gilbert Sorrentino review of "Billy the Kid") I knew Spicer was a true poet and that all true poetry prophecies liberation. How? By practicing it. "Real toads in fake gardens." Or was it "fake toads in real gardens." Both sound right. Both are right. The establishment calls such dis-invention (of the status quo) leprosy and makes it a crime like suicide. If there must be Satans (monotheisms thrive on them), then let them be the Satans of Job and the Gospels, God's handyman, absolutely dependable in his mayhem. [Note: I just finished listening to Arthur Honegger and Paul Claudel's "Joan of Arc at the Stake," which concludes with Joan giving the flames permission to consume her by sending flesh-combusting flames of love from her own heart. I don't know what actually happened up there on the stake except someone burned alive but I am convinced Paul Claudel thought he knew and Honegger believed him.]
The socialism I groped for last night was like Spicer's poetry: a socialism of instinctive rapture and regard (sometimes seeming like, or putting on airs of, rage) for the world as a protectorate of beauty. Poetry, had of necessity, a saint's kind heart but with the kicker's foot of a Christ-like Beckham giving the boot to money changers in the parking lot. It's a tough-minded, unsentimental socialism that forces the student to grab the cat whose head the Zen master is threatening to sever from the master's hands and put it back down on the floor, saying, "I rest my case." Saving the lives of threatened beings and things is the only satisfying reason for and successful argument in defense of socialism. The redemption of life is living proof.
What we are seeing in the Gulf, I fear, is a triumph of leprosy. It may be too late for the protection that is the only practical, practicable proof of God. Thankfully, we are bi-sexual--angel and man all at once. I never fail to learn the best about myself from Spicer. "Angelism" is a code word for the most irreducible form of Socialism. "Poet be like God," Spicer commanded. Angelism is the aegis and agency by which we do so. The stewardship begins, for me, with clear, articulate perception--a husbandry of speech. To see things as they are is my Socialism. Like-wise Bawa, who contrasted hard-hearted Communism with heart-to-heart Communasm, saved his best visions for song--often bursting from free speech into freed music. The first time I saw him do so I thought he was behaving like my mother, who chose to switch from English to Yiddish just when the story started to get good. One big difference: Bawa's Yiddish was perfectly intelligible. In fact, it was true speech.
I've been allowed to save some of my past with my teacher derived from snippets of song. I realize now he was confirming a lot of what Spicer and Olson were trying to teach us--but in an ashram rather than a barroom setting. This morning I felt like I was sitting in the mosque he built, sunlight pouring in, with bonus breeze. In my last days as a church-goer, I used to call the mosque Moscow and thought the imams were all KGB members. Then I remembered a Sid Caesar skit where he plays a gangster by the name of Harry Mozart ("At lest the name of Mozart will be famous!" he exclaims at one point) who exploits a law that allows men to flee burning banks with their money. I fled that burning building with plenty of wealth intact. But it can only be spent in prayers of clear perception and understanding. This wealth cannot burn a hole in any pocket because it can't be stored there. It exists only in use--its highest and best use as, in my case, song and its subsidiaries.
Here's another of Jack's incredible Boston poems, with that wonderful survivalist Philip Marlowe voice rising from the depths in the death-defying "calmness of poetry":
A POEM WITHOUT A SINGLE BIRD IN IT
What can I say to you, darling,
When you ask me for help?
I do not even know the future
Or even what poetry
We are going to write.
Commit suicide. Go mad. Better people
Than either of us have tried it.
I loved you once but
I do not know the future.
I only know that I love strength in my friends
And greatness
And hate the way their bodies crack when they die
And are eaten by images.
The fun's over. The picnic's over.
Go mad. Commit suicide. There will be nothing left
After you die or go mad,
But the calmness of poetry.
--Jack Spicer, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry, Wesleyan, 2008, p. 73.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Daniel Kasowitz"
To: "David Federman"
Sent: Saturday, May 29, 2010 2:04:48 AM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
Subject: Stewards of the Earth
I don't know what you mean by "socialism of the rich" or "socialism of the poor", or for that matter "socialism of survival". What socialism does mean is wresting away the natural resources of this world from the corporate profiteers and entrusting them to responsible stewards of the earth. That was the gist of the article I sent you.
posted by David Federman @ 7:14 AM
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