I thought this might help other readers. Your mileage may vary, this was a quick pass over a long poem.
Epigraph: The mind can be overwhelmed by meaning.
I. Bruegel’s tower, like the tower of Babble, is a symbol of ambition and folly, here is described as a kind of Borgesian hall of mirrors, self-referential, unresolvable, built incrementally but every layer misunderstands the last. “The right hand / will never know the left.”
II. Reworking of part of Eliot’s 4 quartets where he describes natural cycles, which are benign, but forgetting is part of this natural cycle, to appreciate the spring like a deer, we have to constantly remember spring. Again, knowledge is ineffectual.
III. An inevitably perspectival take on the failure of the Tower. Prophet 1: the Tower keeps dominating more of human culture, and shutting us off from nature, like our cellphones! Things will fall apart. Prophet 2: People will fight over the tower, which now, seems like religion, one of many manifestations of human imagination. Even the iconoclasts will end up creating more towers, so the one Tower will become ever more diverse. Prophet 3: Get to work, be reasonable, sounds like the Enlightenment, but later in the poem will be seem as Biblical.
IV. The tower (here, human culture) seems to be complete, so leaves no space for regeneration. But there could be something there! Just keep looking in the nooks and crannies.
V. A cold wind threatens apocalypse. We give up our projects. What was the tower in the first place? We continue building, the past is devastated, hope is gone, but wasn’t it always like this? An almost Ashberian tonal switch.
VI. Now post-apocalypse, if the apocalypse is the collapse of the tower, here civilization. Is it useful to rebuild? Maybe it was always corrupt? People are too quick to answer here. But they’re jerks! There really was something in the past, and we are merely aping it, zombielike. We live among “This ruinous debris of all our yearning.” Yearning matters to Charbonneau.
VII. Political question of distribution and justice should be periodically set aside for renewal. Every purpose under heaven has its time. Amen. Also, we don’t know where we come from or where we are going, just do your work.
VIII. Wisdom? We don’t get the vastness of God and his creations. Reason and justice and toil just lead to contradictions. Time and chance happen to all, good and bad. The mad die without expecting or wanting anything else. But what about the ideal? This is a sermon—live joyfully with your pretty wife while you can! Do what you can do! Proverbs!
IX. We should tend our souls like a house. Build it and live in it. It’s really good sometimes. Forgiveness is key. This is a continuation of last section’s sermon, but it’s just notes, provisional now. Not as heartfelt, in fact a retreat the will culminate in X's strange reversal.
X. The workshop is abandoned, nature has taken over. Is that work as in “your limited thing you have to do,” or the call of the Tower or human imagination and rejection of limits. Who knows! Only repetition remains, but is it repetition of a ground truth or a repetition of all that yearning that led to the folly of tower. Maybe the next poem will answer these questions. We end with a fire in the furnace, the “sublime imagination.” Stevens for the win! Is this like the end of a dialectic Blake poem, where the cycle (or turn of the swirling floors of the Tower) begins again? Which would imply that the folly of the Tower is recurring, even just part of who we are.
I struggled with the first stanza, but man, this was a rewarding read. The juxtaposition of the tower narrative and the Qoheleth outlining the seeming futility and purposelessness of everything that happens "under the sun" really highlights how knowledge-accumulation failed to make humanity rational. But then the poem's final section: maybe, just maybe, we can build something better. Here's to hoping.
Thank you Dan. I had the hope writing it, the last section i mean, but I've also reread it and had the sense that the whole sequence might be circular, the ambition to rebuild and restart at the end leading to the beginning again.
Reading this, I remember parts of it from your book “Tower & City,” but it seems to have been revised or at least arranged/organized differently (I would check my copy of your book but I can’t find it), the most obvious change being—if I remember correctly—that the text in the book is broken into discrete sections with titles. What prompted you to revise it, if indeed you did? I look forward to reading it—and wish I could find my copy of the book.
I did revise it, mainly by separating what were really four different sequences. I was trying to make them fit together in that manuscript, but it never really worked. The only thing that was holding them together at all were the Biblical allusions. Once I pulled them apart, I could work on them individually, and the result is much better.
That ending literally made me laugh. After the Biblical reduction and humility, you are missing the tower, the longing and ambition! Does the cycle continue then? This was a joy to read. Your best yet and a major achievement. Huge chunks of Eliot, Ecclesiastes, and Tennyson (and beneath it all, Stevens) reworked with originality. The voice especially is a treat--demotic, then proverbial, then imagistic, then erudite, all so smoothly. I especially admired the sections with the In Memoriam stanzas. I tend to like your previous poems in this mode (formally eclectic a la the modernists but colloquial too, as if mixing the Wasteland and Prufrock), but this guy brings the style to the next level. I tend to be cold to the Wasteland theme that Christians warm to (something happened, or keeps happening, to prevent a central good implicitly Christian meaning from grounding society or reality, history is a nightmare, etc) but this is a powerful vision, it brought me along against my will.
Praise in spite of oneself is high praise. Thank you Matt. It's a modernist piece for sure. I've been trying to get away from that style, but this one is from '22.
I've read 1 and 2 and I am licking my lips to finish it this afternoon. Eliot and Stevens battle for the soul of Robert Charbonneau! The thriller in Tennessee, will the jar/tower of the imagination survive this weird scotoma of the unconscious? The cliffhanger: Can he channel the poetic power and authority or just plain religious craziness to credibly stand aside from human civilization to emit prophecy? Or will it all be a repetitiousness of flies and men and 4 quartets? Can't wait to find out.
Very good. I just read Ecclesiastes, so VIII resonated especially. The promise and forgiveness of IX; foreofferings. The nature-bending gravity of the tower.
Did I also taste some McGilchrist in there--'the right hand not knowing its left'?
Thank you John. Yes, I'm a big fan of McGilchrist. His metaphor for the right and left hemisphere being the master and emissary, I think it's fair to say he's also alluding to the passage in Matthew about not letting the left hand know what the right is doing. That's what I had in mind. But insofar as you can read the poem as depicting a social or an individual, psychological process, McGilchrist is there.
I thought this might help other readers. Your mileage may vary, this was a quick pass over a long poem.
Epigraph: The mind can be overwhelmed by meaning.
I. Bruegel’s tower, like the tower of Babble, is a symbol of ambition and folly, here is described as a kind of Borgesian hall of mirrors, self-referential, unresolvable, built incrementally but every layer misunderstands the last. “The right hand / will never know the left.”
II. Reworking of part of Eliot’s 4 quartets where he describes natural cycles, which are benign, but forgetting is part of this natural cycle, to appreciate the spring like a deer, we have to constantly remember spring. Again, knowledge is ineffectual.
III. An inevitably perspectival take on the failure of the Tower. Prophet 1: the Tower keeps dominating more of human culture, and shutting us off from nature, like our cellphones! Things will fall apart. Prophet 2: People will fight over the tower, which now, seems like religion, one of many manifestations of human imagination. Even the iconoclasts will end up creating more towers, so the one Tower will become ever more diverse. Prophet 3: Get to work, be reasonable, sounds like the Enlightenment, but later in the poem will be seem as Biblical.
IV. The tower (here, human culture) seems to be complete, so leaves no space for regeneration. But there could be something there! Just keep looking in the nooks and crannies.
V. A cold wind threatens apocalypse. We give up our projects. What was the tower in the first place? We continue building, the past is devastated, hope is gone, but wasn’t it always like this? An almost Ashberian tonal switch.
VI. Now post-apocalypse, if the apocalypse is the collapse of the tower, here civilization. Is it useful to rebuild? Maybe it was always corrupt? People are too quick to answer here. But they’re jerks! There really was something in the past, and we are merely aping it, zombielike. We live among “This ruinous debris of all our yearning.” Yearning matters to Charbonneau.
VII. Political question of distribution and justice should be periodically set aside for renewal. Every purpose under heaven has its time. Amen. Also, we don’t know where we come from or where we are going, just do your work.
VIII. Wisdom? We don’t get the vastness of God and his creations. Reason and justice and toil just lead to contradictions. Time and chance happen to all, good and bad. The mad die without expecting or wanting anything else. But what about the ideal? This is a sermon—live joyfully with your pretty wife while you can! Do what you can do! Proverbs!
IX. We should tend our souls like a house. Build it and live in it. It’s really good sometimes. Forgiveness is key. This is a continuation of last section’s sermon, but it’s just notes, provisional now. Not as heartfelt, in fact a retreat the will culminate in X's strange reversal.
X. The workshop is abandoned, nature has taken over. Is that work as in “your limited thing you have to do,” or the call of the Tower or human imagination and rejection of limits. Who knows! Only repetition remains, but is it repetition of a ground truth or a repetition of all that yearning that led to the folly of tower. Maybe the next poem will answer these questions. We end with a fire in the furnace, the “sublime imagination.” Stevens for the win! Is this like the end of a dialectic Blake poem, where the cycle (or turn of the swirling floors of the Tower) begins again? Which would imply that the folly of the Tower is recurring, even just part of who we are.
That’s pretty comprehensive. Can’t argue with any of it.
I struggled with the first stanza, but man, this was a rewarding read. The juxtaposition of the tower narrative and the Qoheleth outlining the seeming futility and purposelessness of everything that happens "under the sun" really highlights how knowledge-accumulation failed to make humanity rational. But then the poem's final section: maybe, just maybe, we can build something better. Here's to hoping.
Thank you Dan. I had the hope writing it, the last section i mean, but I've also reread it and had the sense that the whole sequence might be circular, the ambition to rebuild and restart at the end leading to the beginning again.
Reading this, I remember parts of it from your book “Tower & City,” but it seems to have been revised or at least arranged/organized differently (I would check my copy of your book but I can’t find it), the most obvious change being—if I remember correctly—that the text in the book is broken into discrete sections with titles. What prompted you to revise it, if indeed you did? I look forward to reading it—and wish I could find my copy of the book.
I did revise it, mainly by separating what were really four different sequences. I was trying to make them fit together in that manuscript, but it never really worked. The only thing that was holding them together at all were the Biblical allusions. Once I pulled them apart, I could work on them individually, and the result is much better.
That ending literally made me laugh. After the Biblical reduction and humility, you are missing the tower, the longing and ambition! Does the cycle continue then? This was a joy to read. Your best yet and a major achievement. Huge chunks of Eliot, Ecclesiastes, and Tennyson (and beneath it all, Stevens) reworked with originality. The voice especially is a treat--demotic, then proverbial, then imagistic, then erudite, all so smoothly. I especially admired the sections with the In Memoriam stanzas. I tend to like your previous poems in this mode (formally eclectic a la the modernists but colloquial too, as if mixing the Wasteland and Prufrock), but this guy brings the style to the next level. I tend to be cold to the Wasteland theme that Christians warm to (something happened, or keeps happening, to prevent a central good implicitly Christian meaning from grounding society or reality, history is a nightmare, etc) but this is a powerful vision, it brought me along against my will.
Praise in spite of oneself is high praise. Thank you Matt. It's a modernist piece for sure. I've been trying to get away from that style, but this one is from '22.
What an impressive project! I'm with the other commenter that I'll need a reread. Fascinating some some really fantastic lines.
Thank you Clara. Appreciate it.
I've read 1 and 2 and I am licking my lips to finish it this afternoon. Eliot and Stevens battle for the soul of Robert Charbonneau! The thriller in Tennessee, will the jar/tower of the imagination survive this weird scotoma of the unconscious? The cliffhanger: Can he channel the poetic power and authority or just plain religious craziness to credibly stand aside from human civilization to emit prophecy? Or will it all be a repetitiousness of flies and men and 4 quartets? Can't wait to find out.
Thank you Matt, for your enthusiasm. You'll have to let me know if I pull it off or not.
Pretty epic. I'm going to come back to this for a re-read; lots of good lines. My first impression was; there are echoes of Ecclesiastes here.
Thank you Ernie. Yes, Ecclesiastes, and Isaiah, and Proverbs. And of course the story of the tower from Genesis.
Very good. I just read Ecclesiastes, so VIII resonated especially. The promise and forgiveness of IX; foreofferings. The nature-bending gravity of the tower.
Did I also taste some McGilchrist in there--'the right hand not knowing its left'?
Thank you John. Yes, I'm a big fan of McGilchrist. His metaphor for the right and left hemisphere being the master and emissary, I think it's fair to say he's also alluding to the passage in Matthew about not letting the left hand know what the right is doing. That's what I had in mind. But insofar as you can read the poem as depicting a social or an individual, psychological process, McGilchrist is there.