FIRSTNOTES

1

Utterly ...

It's been mutual. This book has possessed me and I've possessed it. A wrestling match. An idee fixe: l'idee maitresse. This experience is not all that uncommon. All writers it seems are possessed by something inside that keeps gnawing for a way to get outside. Particularly those who are wrestling with the thigh of the really "real" — hoping to get a "leg-up," as they say, on some abiding truth that it might walk beside us: a true, and a therefore likely ultimate, companion on our life's journey. I'm acutely aware that my subject is fundamental to the nature of life itself and our "species." Experiences of the everyday drive home this reality every day. How deal with it? What gets outside, for writers usually, is a book. Definition of "a book": document of an inner gnawing on the loose that was finally corralled. Not necessarily tamed, I must add. Same goes for a poem, a painting, a performance, a sculpture, a song, symphony, invention, movie, play, a theory, a techie idea — or whatever has creatively gnawed its way out to take its place in the world. It seems Goethe never stopped working on Faust, nor Michelangelo on his Pietas(non finito). As humans we are possessed by such things and have to make them perform somehow. (See Origins of an Opus in Altarpieces for more insight to the formation of this Trilogy.)

From the Shakespeares to us normals — it happens: a "poiesis" event to "make" something "imagined" or "felt" or howsoever ephipantic — be told as it truly is. Call this an "organic sensibility" at work: l'coeur d'affaire. Wordsworth describes the poetic process/possession as follows: "For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings but though this be true, poems to which any value can be attached, were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man (today he'd say "person"), who, being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also thought long and deeply." From his "being possessed," he penned the phrase "primal sympathy": because overcoming death, the past, and creating sympathetically from them are "primal" to life. While I can't assess my own "more," I can attest to a long and deep possession by this "sympathy," which I pluralize to "sympathies."

Yes, possessed!(Yes, it's probably some form of madness to knowingly write a book — A Trilogy! — that might never "really" be read. Done it again.) However possessed, I have not had any of these pages revealed in a Coleridge-style dream, or nuanced by visitations from Rilkean angels or revelations Biblical; nor have I experienced being a "secretary" as Blake, or Milton, or had a Jungian Philemon dictate my writings, or had full symphonies given to the mind as Mozart; nor has Virgil's Cumaean Sibyl paid a visit, or Ouiji board channeling spirits, nor have I had the assit of a channeling spouse of Yeatsian lore to bring me worlds beyond a normal day; and no mescalin or LSD adventures have gripped me, nor has Hugo's "turning-tapping tables" with three-taps a second performed in the living room of my most "at home" mind. I've yet to experience any form of automatic writing. Must be thrilling. I've no Ariel. No magic wand. Just the feeling to say what I feel the need to say as best I can say it.

Ah! — but I digress. Still, something (that gnawing need to get a two-hand grip on life's essential handle) has been pushing me to these, as you will soon see, extremes. I have wrestled with them to "really-feel" if they were "really real." (The Aoide Protocol — which I hope to clarify — has been, how shall I say it? — a revelatory guide.) Regardless of my shakiness drawing these "sympathies" out into the fresh air, they have proved to possess authentic character. They breathe real life. Along the way, somewhat like a Shelley or a Wordsworth, I've been overcome with the need to preface this book(fore and aft) with some of its infrastructure; to expose some of the bridgework and guy-wires of connectivity. Ah! Perhaps a slight touch of furor poeticus is required to process what Wordsworth referred to as "the primary laws of our nature," or to presume to be (somewhat) what Shelley called, with "social sympathies" in mind, a "Messenger of Sympathy."

With all this in my rear-view mirror, I feel more like a "driven" reporter on assignment. Some of the hairs in my "whitehead" are there because of past wrestles with poetic-philosophic Whiteheads. So, I mention at the outset that the following word-concepts of Whitehead are incorporated into my themes of "sympathies," "en-choiring," "protocol," and "belonging": prehension, concrescence, organism, becoming, presentational immediacy, aesthetic harmony, subjective harmony, nexus, creativity, process, conformity-sympathy, etc. And, while all this "process" is at work, (and I advance no pretence of Whitehead scholarship), I emphasize that the "core" dynamic is "performance": of which "creativity" is a component. Where philosophers, as scientists, must be cogent, poets(artists) must, sweating with authenticity, be boldly intuitive and sympathetic. While this does not guarantee these three (philosophers-scientists-poets) will balance, it is perhaps possible that enough sparks from their nub-rubbing sympathies will hold in the dark as we find our way. Fortunately, the accompaniment of music and the incantations of rhyme lend their harmonies to "en-choir" what's so difficult to say. And so, sometimes, here and there, an elegance forms like stones pathing the night streams as notes of a melody: giving to our passage the play of life's primal chords in all our singing. So it is, I will do my "twang" on all the pluckables(those sympathies) strung on my lute, lyre, and lyric propensities.

I recall Longfellow's caution: "The ass that thinks himself a stag discovers — His error when he comes to the ditch." Ah, there will be leapings. Stags must be careful, too, not forgeting the ever-growing " rack" they carry. What's ahead, reader, is a great rack of "sympathies." Since we all have a degree of assdom — an authentic-alert humility must prevail. In all this, Longfellow gives more guidance: " 'Tis an old ox that draws the straightest furrow." Believe me, I'm pulling this plow(in the mind's of some) as an old ox. At the same time, I'm leaping ditches with an ever-growing rack. Fortunately, I'm deeply acquainted with the give and take of the Earth; as one having crossed many streams and ditches. The poet! That great leaper of furrows bearing and barren, reaping abundances grounded in the abyss: leapings with lofty...