John Calvin, _Writings on Pastoral Piety_, ed. Elsie Anne McKee, trans. Elsie Anne McKee and others

CALVIN'S BEST KNOWN writings (e.g., The Institutes of Christian Religion) are mainly those of a theologian arguing with other theologians and can be a bear to tackle. McKee switches things up by focusing on writings in which Calvin is talking to lay people, members of his church or his movement, about being a Christian and living as a Christian: we get sermons, some prayers, some explanations of the liturgy, excerpts from books he wrote expressly for lay people, and some letters. 

He still sounds learned and often stern, but he has taken the tone down a notch here, and he is not trying to lay waste to other people's arguments, so we get a different image of the man.

Still, he leans in hard on the basic tenets of reformed Christianity. You (and all of us) are one sorry case. (Calvin's near-perfect contempt for his own species counts for much in the general idea of him.) Nothing you could possibly do for yourself can save you. Nor can any church or sacrament save you. Only God can save you--and God did, through the agency of Jesus Christ. That's the whole story. Grasp that and hold on to it.

We can still get together in a community, i.e., a church, for mutual support and encouragement, and we can perform the sacraments recorded in the gospels (communion and baptism), but Calvin emphasizes that the bread and wine are but the "mirror" or "likeness" or "visible sign" of the atonement, not the atonement itself, as baptism is but the visible sign of your redemption, not the redemption itself. The sacraments, the pastors' sermons, the ceremonies of worship all keep us focused on the main idea, but they are means to an end, never an end in themselves. 

As for pilgrimages to saints' relics, or counting repeated prayers, or venerating statues--kick all that back down to Rome where it belongs.  None of that claptrap saves you. The priest and his sacraments don't save you. The church doesn't save you. Jesus saved you, and no matter what you do, you're going to stay saved, whatever the priest and the church say.

One item that particularly struck me is Calvin's unpacking of the Lord's Prayer, which he pointedly reminds us is not designed to be a prayer said by an individual for his or her own sake, but a prayer said by all of us for all of our sakes.

The final and for me most memorable item: a letter written to several women who had been arrested for worshipping as Protestants. In France, this worship made them heretics, who could be burned at the stake (as one of them was). I can't imagine what I would have been able to write to people about to be burned at the stake for belonging to a movement of which I was a leader. Calvin came up with something that honored them and might have consoled them. He seems like a mensch.

Bennett Sims, _White Dialogues_

 I AM GOING to go out on a limb and say Sims is my favorite young US fiction writer. I am guessing he is still under 40, though perhaps not by much...oh, let's just say he is my favorite millennial US fiction writer.

I say that having read only this, his first collection of short fiction, and his 2013 novel, A Questionable Shape (see post for March 24, 2020), but count me a devotee.

Sims reminds me of David Foster Wallace (with whom he studied at Pomona, it turns out) in his profoundly faithful representations of the tortuous paths of over-thinking--or we might call it an inability to stop thinking, to hit on a conclusion you are willing to act upon. (His novel is based on the story of Hamlet, the greatest over-thinker of them all.)

The collection's brilliant opening story, "House-sitting," about a caretaker of a cabin out in the woods, "Za," about a woman trying to figure what tone to hit and how to hit it in an email to a recently-won boyfriend who is traveling abroad, and "Radical Closure," about a person trying to pick the best spot to write, all track consciousnesses trying to solve problems that grow more insoluble the longer they try to solve them, each contemplated solution blossoming fractal-fashion into new problems.

Crucially, all three of these centers of narrative consciousness are on their own, without a trusted friend to say, "Okay, just stop. Stop now." A Questionable Shape was, among other things, about whether being a friend means supporting a friend in ever more arcane pursuits or instead trying to pull them out of a downward spiral. The characters in these stories (with a notable exception, "Two Guys Watching Cujo on Mute") have no such friend, and so wander deeper and deeper into the labyrinth.

One center of narrative consciousness, that of closing story "White Dialogues," is part of a crowd--he is attending a lecture on Vertigo--but as the lecture is being held by a film studies department in which he has recently been denied tenure, he is as alone in a crowd as one can be, and he gets deeper into a darker labyrinth than anyone else in the collection.

Giorgio Agamben, _Hölderlin's Madness: Chronicle of a Dwelling Life, 1806-1843_, trans. Alta L. Price

A FRIEND'S RECOMMENDATION of this book is what led me last fall to a rabbit hole that turned into an immense underground cavern. If I am going to read a book about Hölderlin, I thought, I should read some poems by Hölderlin, and that led to reading commentaries on Hölderlin by Heidegger, Benjamin, Adorno, Lacoue-Labarthe, and I am no longer sure who else in the following months, until I finally felt as ready as I was going to be to pick up the Agamben book.

As the subtitle indicates, the larger part of the book--216 of 329 pages--is a year-by-year account of the time when Hölderlin, accounted by his friends and family to be insane and provided with a caretaker, was living a very quiet, retired life in a small town. The chronology includes a few of the poems he wrote in that time, lots of letters and journal entries by people who visited him, and even a few invoices from the caretaker about routine expenses like shoe repair and wine. 

The book also has a prologue (70-some pages) and an epilogue (30-some pages) which sketch out a thesis, of sorts--although calling it a "thesis" implies some rigorous argument is being made, when Agamben is more floating a possibility, making a suggestion. 

The suggestion is that Hölderlin's madness might have been more a so-called "madness," that is, not a descent into unreason or delusion or catatonia but a kind of withdrawal, abdication, renunciation, a stepping away, a letting go. Not that Agaimben is saying Hölderlin was putting on an act or trying to pass for something he wasn't; he wasn't feigning madness á la Hamlet (if Hamlet was feigning). Rather, he had found a way of radically simplifying his life.

As Agamben sees it, Hölderlin was dropping the tragic mode for the comic one, relinquishing the ambition to be a prophet, a soothsayer--to utter Germany into being the way (the Romantics thought) Homer had uttered Greece into being. Instead, he was writing short, unfussy poems about the turning of the seasons and improvising on the piano.

He could be right. Agamben's version of Hölderlin's last three decades reminds me of the Bob Dylan of 1968-1973. A whole generation was hanging on Dylan's every word, scrutinizing his songs for clues about the secrets of existence, but it's as if Dylan decided, "fuck it, I'm going to cross everyone up and just write country songs until people get over this obsession with me." Hölderlin made the same move and then stuck with it, played it out.

Sam Riviere, _Conflicted Copy_

AS IN RIVIERE'S earlier volume Kim Kardashian's Marriage, all the titles in this collection come from a process of matching all the words in one list (after, darken, dead, old, pink, safe, and true) with all the words in another list (colours, dogs, fame, mode, PDF, poem, and souls), yielding such titles as "Dead Mode" and "Safe Souls." 

Absent from this volume, however, are the pairings that had already served as titles for books by Riviere: his novel Dead Souls, his re-working of Martial After Fame, and four of him pamphlets ("True Colours," "Darken PDF," "Old Poem," and "Pink Dogs"). 

As with his earlier collections, Riviere's method here is to work with material generated by automated digital processes, in this instance GPT-2. All the poems--texts?--were composed in December 2020 and January 2021, thus with software several steps behind what is available now, but they all do have that uncanny AI sheen.

I wonder if AI is getting less useful for poetry as it gets better for prose. That is, the more AI-generated texts achieve the flat neutrality of workaday prose, the less they have the happy surprises and accidents that (once upon a time) gave some digitally-created texts a certain freshness and originality, a saving touch of weirdness. 

The poems in Conflicted Copy rarely sound weird. They sound like AI-texts with their wordy constructions, gratuitous modifiers, wobbly qualifications, and superficial clarity occluding a profound vagueness. "I have always been impressed by people who / manage to maintain relationships beyond the / normal bounds of traditional marriage." They sound, that is to say, like a lot of the place-filler text that shows up in packaging, advertising, instructions, junk mail... almost everywhere you look.

As I kept reading, though, there was a poignance, or a melancholy, some ineffable stunted beauty to these poems. Sometimes the sheer baldness of utilitarian prose lends it a kind of grace, as if we can see hidden with it the luminous, memorable prose it was hoping to be. This is the secret of some of Gary Lutz's and George Saunders's stories, I'd say, and of Charles Reznikoff's Testimony, and Katie Degentesh's The Anger Scale.

Whether the poems in Conflicted Copy have this grace because of some tailoring Riviere has done, or because they just happened to have it, I don't know. In fact, it all may be in my own readerly response, my own imagination. But there is something affecting in these poems' very inability to be affecting.

_Pistis Sophia_, ed. Carl Schmidt, trans. Violet MacDermot

 A GNOSTIC TEXT, written in Coptic and likely translated from Greek, but not from the the famous Nag Hammadi haul. A western collector got hold of it way back in 1773. How it survived to that point despite the animosity towards the Gnostics no one knows, but is likely an interesting story..

Compared to the Nag Hammadi texts, it's quite long--hundreds of pages in this edition. The title might translate "Faith Wisdom," or "Wisdom's Faith," or some variation along those lines.

In the text, Jesus is in a long conversation with his disciples (including Mary his mother, Mary Magdalene, and Martha) explaining what he saw in the other realm before he rose from the dead. 

If I followed this exposition correctly--and I am not at all sure that I did--some powerful but rebellious element of the great one-ness broke away and created the material world, hoping to be worshipped as creator by that world. The rebellious element is called Authades in some parts of the text, but in some other parts is Sabaoth  the Adamas. He is keeping a number of other beings (also his creations, perhaps) in thrall, including Sophia (that is, Wisdom). But Jesus suggests Sophia will be able to free herself and return to the great one-ness.

And so will the disciples, if they straighten up and live right rather than indulging their material bodies. 

Jesus, I think, acts as an intermediary between Authades' unfortunate creations (and the creations of his creations, which would include human beings) and  the great one-ness. Jesus can show us the way to return to  the great immaterial one-ness, if we shake off our illusions (or take the red pill, I guess).

In a way, in this scenario, God the Creator is actually a breakaway Lucifer figure who is hoping we will believe he is the ultimate reality, and has suborned Wisdom herself to that end...so as to gaslight us all, shall we say. But Jesus is revealing the truth about him so we can free ourselves from his illusions and return to our true home, the great one-ness.

I kept wondering--did William Blake somehow get a hold of this?

Also of note: Mary Magdalene is obviously the top student in the class. Whenever Jesus poses a question, she has the right answer immediately, and Jesus always congratulates her on getting things right. Peter complains at a couple of points that the women are getting to do all the talking, so Jesus lets him get a couple of answers in, but the overall message is clear: Mary Magdalene is the one who really gets it.

James Shea, _Last Day of My Face_, 2 of 2

 MY EARLIER POST on James Shea's new book was about how the "I" of the poet often seems there-but-not-exactly-there in the poems--glimpsed in the reader's peripheral vision, we might say, but vanishing when looked at directly. The passage in Eliot's The Waste Land that begins "Who is that third who walks always beside you?" comes to mind.

But can one write a long poem on these principles? A long poem foregrounds the poem-ness of the poem, it seems fair to say, inclining the reader to pay more attention to its making: to the poem's structure, its patterns, its through-lines, and its suggestions of narrative. And, of course, whenever you are thinking of the poem as a made thing, you are also thinking about its maker. So, to use the same example, even in a long poem as disjunctive and fragmented as The Waste Land, we start piecing together a story or looking for a confession.

Last Day of my Face ends with a longer poem (nine sections, fourteen poems), and yes, I did look for a story or a confession, but the poem seemed to have anticipated such readings and to be playing a game with them. Take its title, for starters: "Failed Self-Portrait." So, yes, the poem portrays its maker...but no, it does not look much like him.

There is an "I" here, also a "you" with whom "I" seems to have been intimately connected ("I" and "you" break up in section 7), but the outlines of the "I" slide and shimmy, not quite staying in one place long enough for us to get a fix. In section 9, "I" apologizes for their indeterminacy with a telling nod to Robert Duncan:

                                             Often

I am not permitted to return to a meadow.

If the depth of acknowledgement

of one's failings measures success,

then I am winning in the oddest way.

It's not easy to understand silence,

to gather the ice cream in the morning.

Life's a long self-introduction that ends

abruptly.

Do not feel too bad about not quite understanding who I am, the speaker seems to say--I am still trying to get there myself--and succeeding, moreover, in the oddest possible way. And that is exactly where I was, after reading "Failed Self-Portrait" three times in a row--convinced that, in the oddest possible way, the poem succeeds.

Did I also look for a story? Yes, I did, and found myself wondering if the "I" was not the same person throughout the poem. That is, might the "I" of part 3 be the "you" of part 2? Or, perhaps, of several sections? Is there a dialogue going on? This is all, I admit, a retro-fit based on the breakup in section 7, and somewhat on the "I" of part 3 mentioning wearing a necklace while the "I" of part 5 mentions once having been a boy. But it works...in a way...almost.

The moment in "Failed Self-Portrait" that most convinces me of its success, though, comes toward the end of part 5:

Oh,

to

write

a

moderately

long

sentence

that

begins

in

my

mind

and

ends

in

yours.

James Shea, _Last Day of My Face_ (1 of 2)

 JAMES SHEA'S THIRD collection includes a poem, "That's That," about the word "that." It's short, so here is the whole poem:

Certain words I dislike.

Ooze. Lozenge. Other words

I love. Katydid. Bumblebee.

Take that, for instance,

how it comes fat from the mouth,

nowhere to elide it (massage it).

It's a pronoun (that's what I like)

a conjunction (that I might love),

an adverb (that much),

an adjective (that word

sounds like what it stands for:

is-ness). This is quiet,

less of a claim. I defer

to the sure sense of things.

That's how I approach catastrophe.

It seems to me that this poem provides a key, of sorts,  to Shea's poetry. 

For one thing, he likes echoes; another poem is titled "A Void's Void," and the collection has lines like "wind / enters every window" and "a shout from a field / very far afield." 

More crucial, I think, is the difference between "that" and "this." I would concede that "this" is quieter, "less of a claim," as Shea puts it, but "this" also often indicates proximity, while "that" suggests a certain amount of distance. Suppose we re about to enjoy a picnic at the park. When I say, "Let's not take this table, let's go over to that one," I am probably recommending we pick a table that is farther away than the one right at hand. When my grandson says, "I don't want to wear this hat, I want to wear that one," he is declining to wear the hat I have just handed him, preferring one still up on the shelf. 

Similarly, Shea's poems are less likely to say "look at this" than they are to say "look at that." In some subtle way, they gesture away from themselves to something a bit farther off.

I saw the streetlight turn on from my bedroom window,

it was dusk, the sun behind the hills still casting

a white glow against the remnants of a backlit sky,

like the sky in Magritte's painting of men falling anonymously [....]

A lot of poems, I submit, would stick quite closely to that "I" in the bedroom. Shea's poem casts out to the horizon, then for a painting even farther away (Houston, if you're curious). The difference between "look at this" and "look at that" is quite a bit like the difference between "look here" and "look there," and the above lines are a good example of how a Shea poem will gravitate towards "look there."

There are a good many windows in Last Day of My Face, and that may be a sort of key as well. Sometimes the poems almost seem to want to vanish, to become the windowpane that one does not notice because one is focused on the object beyond it. This is not a typical move in English language poetry; what one takes away from "Ode to a Nightingale" is not the nightingale, and "The Snow Man" does not try to make you see the snow man. Since Romanticism, poems tend to be, sooner or later, about the poet.

But not always. Lorine Niedecker's poetry has an effect a bit like Shea's, as does some of George Oppen's. Shea has spent a lot of time with Chinese and Japanese poetry, and that too may be making a difference.  The poems are not ego-less, exactly--first person singular pronouns do crop up--but somehow the objective that-out-there outweighs the subjective this-in-here. 

Let's look again at the last line of "That's That": "That's how I approach catastrophe." Several of the poems in Last Day of My Face do feel like they are approaching catastrophe, upheaval, loss--"Fresh Report," "Recovery Time," "Saccade"--and they all do "defer / to the sure sense of things," as calm as the two figures in the sculpture at the end of Yeats's "Lapis Lazuli," whose "ancient, glittering eyes are gay."

I haven't even gotten to the long final poem yet. Next time.