i am proud to present the cathartic discord of an unrhymed spirit

i've been thinking about art a lot.  in my own art, i have been trying to reach a certain level of universality.  you see, art can be so strange and idiosyncratic that no one can understand it or connect or relate with it, universality creates a bridge to cross into the artist's heart and feelings.  so a person may reach a high enough level of universality and allow people into their ideas, be those ideas ever so strange, and people will connect with them.  i think that is how the world of culture and politics and art work- we find people in history who are complete enigmas, but we are drawn to them because they make us feel like they are right and they make us feel normal, be they ever so strange.


i am going to use justin bieber as an example.  his music is perfectly universal and so, for me, slightly uninteresting after a couple of listens.  however, the way he came to his fame is perfectly strange, so he intrigues me.  he was a fifteen year old kid with one good song who happened to run into usher while he was working a lot harder than fifteen year olds work at getting their name out there; he was going around from city to city playing his song live for radio stations.  it is interesting and strange, and his music definitely has a universality to it, so he has the right combination to be famous- he couldn't have one without the other and make it in the world.  and he is changing the culture.  just look how he broke the boundaries of how people view children in art.  right after him there was the ark productions boom (rebecca black...) and a surge in people turning to listening to a younger generation's music.  i imagine there will now be more children artists who are listened to in the near future.

so art takes things that are universal and human, and mixes them with the strange, symbolic, obscure, and, for the sake of my topic, religious.  the universal is the bridge to the religious.

i had been thinking about this, and i have been excited about a poem i wrote, because i think it's the most universal poem i have ever written.  it's just got that feeling- one that can't seem to be cast aside or boiled down, but you can't put your finger on what it is.  i don't fully know where it came from, but i am happy to feel it here-

A nice treat for traveling boys

My eyes see more colors than kids with lips
Caught in bounded minds like prey
He saw her laying on the ground
Her back and profile talking with the empty ceiling
Condensing a month's worth of space
He laid down next to her
Ate the carpet
Turned
Facing her
Said,
"we just smile," he said
He said, smiling
It bent until it broke, entering the sky fluttering
"it was constantly changing, anyway," he said
"it's a relief to my mind, anyway. the kind of relief
when you suddenly see smudges on paper
after all those damned, perfect lines."
Outside, a cat was singing with the bounce of lights
"she's hungry,"
He said

this can be juxtaposed next to a line from dante, who not only had the universal aspect in his poetry, but a much more powerful mix of the weird/religious.

I came into a place mute of all light, Which bellows as the sea does in a tempest, If by opposing winds 't is combated. The infernal hurricane that never rests Hurtles the spirits onward in its rapine; Whirling them round, and smiting, it molests them. When they arrive before the precipice, There are the shrieks, the plaints, and the laments, There they blaspheme the puissance divine. I understood that unto such a torment The carnal malefactors were condemned, Who reason subjugate to appetite. And as the wings of starlings bear them on In the cold season in large band and full, So doth that blast the spirits maledict; It hither, thither, downward, upward, drives them; No hope doth comfort them for evermore, Not of repose, but even of lesser pain.

these lines, these thoughts, all of this built up to a Great, big question for me.  what is right?  between the religious/spiritual world and the secular/universal world, which is right?

there are distinctly two different worlds out there.  i have tried to hold both in my mind at once, and they have both felt so real to me.  the religious world is one of light and life, of spirituality and beautiful, egotistical humility; while the secular or universal world is the earthy, human world full of reverent pride that is no less alive than the religious world.  one is the world each of us knows individually and the other is a world that is constructed from culture and society.  it's all different from person to person and from culture to culture, but they can be distinctly divided.  as i held both in my mind, thinking, "which of these do i have to choose?  do i choose god or the world?  they are both so real," a profound line from harold bloom jumped into my mind:

"The Comedy, like all of the greatest canonical works, destroys the distinction between the sacred and secular writing,"

people in the world are now divided between these two sects because the secular and the religious are both so real.  all of a sudden, to limit your world to only a certain set of symbols and ideas and feelings seemed crazy to me.  the world keeps unfolding the more people come into it.  ralph waldo emerson said,

"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried... The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray."


the religious/irreligious/resenting gnostics try to boil the world to so many limits.  in some religious gnostics' minds, we see people with no room for anything but the Bible.  we see some who only listen to religious music or only speak on "religious" topics.  on the other hand, those other gnostics who know there is nothing of value in religion find salvation in social causes or saving the world.  but the imagination was built to be stretched!  we feel most alive when our minds are guided to make new connections- twines of the universe knitting themselves with the imaginations in our hearts; our soul thrives on feeling new things around familiar objects!


hamlet said to his friend,


"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."


the only philosophy that could be true would have to encompass all parts of the universe.


i thus return to exploring the idea of the agnostic approach of reading dante.  according to harold bloom, dante was a gnostic, but he was purely a gnostic of a knowing that he created himself.  he took parts of the Bible and bent them how he needed them; similarly he took myth and legend and places and bent them to fit his own world.  however, because he took so much of the world around him, he had a universality about him that people are drawn to.  explaining this, harold bloom said,


"Everything that is vital and original in Dante is arbitrary and personal, yet it is presented as the truth, consonant with tradition, faith, and rationality.  Almost inevitably, it is misread until it blends with the normative, and at last we are confronted by a success Dante could not have welcomed.  The theological Dante of modern American scholarship is a blend of Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and their companions.  This is a doctrinal Dante, so abstrusely learned and so amazingly pious that he can be fully appreciated only by his American professors."

do you see?  he is so encompassing of the entire world around him that even though he is terribly strange, people are able to take what he says as truth; when in fact, what he has done to their entire belief system is filter and warp it through his own knowing.

he blends the secular so, so perfectly with the religious that the distinctions become lost and it becomes grounds for whoever wants a piece of dante.  if a religious gnostic wants to see a religious dante, they see a religious dante.

an agnostic who "wants to read the Comedy as an allegory of the theologians, starts with the only theologian who truly mattered to Dante: Dante himself."  it would seem that whatever approach one takes, in an agnostic sense, one will find that the world that dante lived in was warped by his own knowing, not straightened by a religious path of ideals, which makes it almost infinitely interesting to explore and wonder about.

it seems that we can say that we do not need to take the world to pieces and then choose just one piece of the world to live on, when it comes to the religious or the secular sense.  god, the universe, it is all in both.  you cannot have the one without the other.  is it not all real and a part of reality?

in conclusion to this small discussion of agnosticism vs. gnosticism, i say that gnostics build limits around life and the universe and their feelings and their minds and ideas.  on the other hand, agnostics are, as i have seen, careful to be able to bend, to expand and to grow- to enjoy life in all its varieties.  i don't care what religion or non-religion you are, you can be a boxed-in gnostic.

the agnostic is open to the idea that there is a universality out there that may lead them to new, often strange feelings and ideas and a constantly expanding spirituality, but that that is the most desirable part of life.  those religious and spiritual feelings are grounded by the universal- making both alive.  you cannot, in all actuality, feel alive without both, neither one without the other.