Spurious And Sacrificial Poem by Desmond Kon

like latin-sanskrit translations, they quarry the pits of pasts written into power
but today, the dream of jerome fathers me into watching words, watching
what walls, beholds, what ends, the dream like the flame he extinguished

like the book closed but unclasped, the skull rolled into its right brain
the dream: that red parisian hat that woman left behind after she unleashed
its twine and let free her hair; jerome’s underbite reveals two lower teeth

the skull beside him baring two incisors, his head throbbing with blue veins
like lightning dreams, bolts behind clouds and rain; this room is sheeted
like so too, into strips like death marching all our objects into queues

these we bury or cremate to forget like dreams; like dreams, the crucifix
it has none of the red, of peonies or all he wears or the sliver, dreamy sliver
of string tethering caps onto ink pots; I am similarly tethered like the copper

it spouts nothing boiling in that kettle, bronze dish beneath; must we empty
out all life in death? like dreams? the birdcage wrought as is the muslin
hiding things or the emerald table varnished over in black; such blacks

are unreal; they hide wealth, the secret geometry of scholars; but jerome is
a dream transfixed, marcello venusti’s oils behind me; he should gaze out
his granite window into limestone dreams behind him: the tree that lives

courting swans, flock of sheep, and the couple in love, and bridges covered
in carpet grass, a mongrel in mid-dash, two carriages and so many more
buildings hiding more small rooms, so many more buildings than his own

with his things, dreams too; how can we ever know of these intimate things?
there is a white signage, yards from the bridge, separated by a low fence
seems to be made from the dead mulberry tree beside it, bark already ashen





Author’s Note:

An earlier version of this poem appeared in Harvard Review, published by Houghton Library at Harvard University.

In talking about pillar symbolism, Adrian Snodgrass, in his book The Symbolism of the Stupa (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University,1985) , mentions the mulberry tree as a sacred symbol within Chinese tradition. Named the tree of the day that raises the sun and supports heaven, “it is described as standing in the East, its roots and trunk in the nether-world and its branches and crown reaching up into the sky”. In the Bible is mentioned in Luke 17: 6: “If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea, ’ and it will obey you.”

In the book, Mystics: Presence and Aporia, edited by Michael Kessler and Christian Sheppard (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press,2003) , Regina M. Schwartz writes in her essay, “From Ritual to Poetry: Herbert’s Mystical Eucharist”: “What the early modern poets were in touch with because they could so keenly feel the loss of the sacramental, was the aching emptiness of a world without that divine meaning-filling.” So they abandoned the idol and tasked themselves with restoring the icon; instead of visible icons, however, they carved out cultural icons “that could point themselves to the unseeable”. As Schwartz says, “They asked how to think otherness without naming, comprehending, controlling, institutionalizing; how to discover god, express wonder, in a work of human creativity.” Herein Schwartz’s introductory passages to her work on the mystical theology and poetry of George Herbert’s The Temple, in the hope that “after the ‘death of God, ’ the death of the author, the end of metaphysics, the end of the subject, we will still have conversation – not between beings, but conversation as such, and that conversation will constitute us as calling and responding, as praising and hearing, and, finally, as loving”:

“In The Disenchantment of the World, Marcel Gauchet distinguishes two ways that meaning can be established: through the figure of the Other or the figure of the Self. In the premodern world, the believer himself does not actively establish meaning for all that is; it is given to him. What is given is understanding of aspects of his world including, among others, community, authority, materiality, justice, loss, and love. When we do not receive meaning from the Other – whether the premodern prior or the postmodern beyond – we tend to devise meaning actively; this is what Gauchet calls the figure of the Self. In the modern world, the figure of the Other is gradually replaced by the figure of the Self who defines, controls, possesses, and masters – that is, the modern subject. What had once been the Other and inaccessible, unable to be grasped, is now comprehended, grasped, possessed, adored. This is the condition of idolatry, and in the early modern period many Reformers rejected transubstantiation and images claiming that they had become not mysteries, but idols, and they sought to restore the invisible God.

But if Gauchet and others are right about Protestantism ushering in secularization – ‘Christianity proves to have been a religion for departing from religion’ – then the Reformation’s efforts to destroy idols only produced new ones, the idols of metaphysics. Here, the threat of idolatry is not from the visible God but from the thinkable Other, the concept. According to Jean-Luc Marion, metaphysics has subjected ‘the unconditional to the pre-conditions and limits of human thought and language…. In showing too much, in their pretension to equivalence with God himself, the necessarily limited concepts produced by metaphysics would in fact show too little, for God by definition would exceed every concept or definition.’ For it is the ‘withdrawal of the divine [which] would perhaps constitute its ultimate form of revelation.’ With Levinas and other postmodern thinkers, Marion is symptomatic of a new shift in emphasis, away from the figure of the Self toward the figure of the Other, or the Beyond. It has been inflected both philosophically and theologically, and in Levinas with his debt to Talmudic Judaism and Marion with his debt to Catholicism, phenomenological givenness coalesces with the theological gifts of creation and redemption. This theologically inflected, the phenomenologically gegebenheit receives a new reading in an ethical register. Here, it becomes not a question of perceiving or apperceiving a phenomenon through a reduction but of understanding all phenomena as well as one’s own subjectivity as given. This gift is prior to our activity, our comprehension, and not available to our mastery. It evoked not manipulation but wonder, and more, responsibility. Before the ‘object” as understood by modernism, we feel compelled to analyze, comprehend, and use. Before the ‘gift’ or, better, the ‘call’ of postmodernism we feel compelled to receive with gratitude and respond with wonder. While elsewhere, I joined the widespread contemporary critique of religious idolatry in my critique of possession, here I want to elaborate a different religious legacy: not the legacy of possession but of dispossession, not of religious idolatry but of mystery.”