Preserving Fire: Selected Prose - Softcover

Lamantia, Philip

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1940696704 ISBN 13: 9781940696706

Publisher: Wave Books, 2018

Synopsis

“Philip was a visionary like Blake, and he really saw the whole world in a grain of sand.” ―Lawrence Ferlinghetti

“An inspired consciousness set at full tilt in raging protest, kisses, prayers, blessings, and outraged demands. All from the deepest silence and farthest travel.” ―Michael McClure

Preserving Fire recounts the life and thought of the Surrealist, Beat Generation, and San Francisco Renaissance poet Philip Lamantia through his fugitive prose works. Ranging from poetry to politics to mythology to dance, from manifestos to travelogues to wartime declarations of conscientious objection, these writings, expertly collected by friend and longtime City Lights editor Garrett Caples, offer a dynamic picture of Lamantia’s multifaceted intellectual life and the artistic movements he helped shape.

Philip Lamantia (1927–2005) was an influential Surrealist, Beat, and San Francisco Renaissance poet. He is the author of many books, including Erotic Poems, Touch of the Marvelous, Meadowlark West, Tau and Journey to the End, and The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia.

Garrett Caples is the author of many books, most recently Power Ballads and Retrievals. He is the co-editor of The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia and is an editor at City Lights Books, where he curates the Spotlight Poetry Series.

About this title

About the Author

Philip Lamantia (1927–2005) was an influential Surrealist, Beat, and San Francisco Renaissance poet. He is the author of many books, including Erotic Poems, Touch of the Marvelous, Meadowlark West, Tau and Journey to the End, and The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia.

Garrett Caples is the author of Power Ballads (Wave Books, 2016), Retrievals (Wave Books, 2014), The Garrett Caples Reader (1999), Complications (2007), and Quintessence of the Minor (Wave Books, 2010). He is the editor of Preserving Fire: Selected Prose (Wave Books, 2018) by Philip Lamantia, and the co-editor of The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia (2013), Particulars of Place (2015) by Richard O. Moore, and Incidents of Travel in Poetry: New and Selected Poems (2016) by Frank Lima. He is an editor at City Lights Books and curates the Spotlight Poetry Series there. He was also a contributing writer to the San Francisco Bay Guardian. He has written articles and blogged for the Poetry Foundation and occasionally blogs for blogcitylights.com. He has a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and lives in San Francisco.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Conscientious Objector's Statement

December 3, 1945

Selective Service Hdqrs.
Local Board No. 79
513 Valencia Street
San Francisco 10, Calif. To Whom It May Concern:

In order to clarify and extend my answers in the Form for Conscientious Objector, I am submitting the following statement which I hope will give you a more precise knowledge of my position and attitude.

For centuries the imperfection of man has concerned theologians, philosophers, and poets. This problem is a complex one, but in our time it has become noticeable that this so-called imperfection arose from certain deep-rooted principles which govern a great deal of man's nature—all contrary to the love-impulse and principle, which has always been the well-spring of creativity and happiness. If I were to analyze these principles of imperfection I would name them as such: hate, force, aggression, torture, and finally the culmination point for all four: mass murder, War. These principles are those of destruction, and in times of war they become its instrument. To answer how or why these destructive principles became so much a part of man's nature is extremely difficult when attempted from a purely materialistic interpretation, as one would finally be forced to consider the essence of the question still veiled in mystery. What I understand as the Original Sin—and I am not alone in this non-materialist interpretation—is the "dawn of consciousness, " the faculty of the intellect asserting itself over man's primal nature, in which a harmony existed between body and spirit, causing an inter-relationship of the two. The Serpent tempted Eve to eat of the "tree of knowledge, " adding that she and Adam would thereby become gods. Not content with the things of the spirit and the body, not content with pure feelings of love, man Fell and became a slave to his intellect, the well of conflicts, the absence of peace. From then on he was forced to make choices, to form intellectual judgments, to progress toward purely material perfection through his intellect. I assert that from the intellect man derives his imperfection, his hate, his will to coerce others, to torture and to make war. It is not through the intellect that an individual becomes free, but through a spiritual understanding of the purpose of life, which arises from a physical, non-intellectual communion with the world. In the words of the seventeenth century Christian mystic, Thomas Traherne: "You never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars, " or as D.H. Lawrence said only a few years ago: "For man, the vast marvel is to be alive . . . a part of the living incarnate cosmos. I am a part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am a part of the earth my feet know perfectly and my blood is a part of the sea . . . "

The XIX century dream of man's final perfection through scientific progress has become, at least theoretically, realized with the control of atomic energy. But under what circumstances did this come about? In a war. And how did it manifest itself? In the form of the most monstrous weapon of all time: The Atomic Bomb. The atomic bomb becomes the symbol of man's destructive principles brought to their final stage of development. It is to this state of affairs that the whole materialist-progressive tradition of our civilization has brought us. This tradition, which is the dominating one in our time, is a product of the Original Sin existing in men. It is only those, who in the spirit of Christ, strive in the opposite direction from this disease in the souls of men, that find peace and purpose in their lives. Not only have Christian and other religious writers in our time, such as T.S. Eliot, Berdyaev, and D.H. Lawrence, become aware of this basic malady, but also prominent psychologists—in particular Wilhelm Reich, whose analysis of the distortion of the love-impulse, among men, proves on a mere objective plane of investigation, what was intuited by the writers of Genesis. It has become increasingly clear in the contemporary world that one of the greatest of evils stems from the inability for man to "love his neighbor as he loves himself. " But I also affirm that men have ceased to regard their object of love—in the final, universal sense—they have lost their spiritual life. The object of love, when man turns within himself, is God. When this love is directed outwardly, through a particular human vehicle, and having been a product of a profound communication with Life, the emanation is so powerful that no evil can invade the individual. Love must be complete or not at all. To use force to abolish an evil is sheer hypocrisy; what is left is a lesser-evil born out of the first. But not only will the evil remain, outwardly, but within the person. I am reminded of Simone Weil (a Christian political writer who died a few years ago) and her brilliant essay on
"The Illiad, or the Poem of Force, " wherein she says: "To define force—it is that 'x' that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a 'thing.' Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him. " It is this purge of the spirit which takes place whenever an individual uses force, whether in war or in everyday life. It is in war that man loses any spiritual value and becomes a mere instrument in the hands of force, of every principle and idea that is contrary to Love.

************

As an individualist, I intend to be quite free from what I consider any social evil—namely the State. I think it possible for an individual to contribute very little, even if asked or forced to, or nothing at all, to the workings of the State, or for that matter, to the progress of civilization in general—and still live in the midst of it. Therefore I certainly refuse to directly participate in, or be at the mercy of, that part of the State which comprises its greatest evil: the military. Any participation in military "life " would eventually lead to the subjection to those principles of force, hate, aggression, conflict, and destruction of human lives which I have spoken of. Not only do I refuse, because of my convictions, to involve myself in using these principles against others, but I refuse to have the coercive techniques of militarism turned against me. I do not believe in the worldly authority of any aspect of this civilization or society. I believe in the inner authority that lies at the base of my religious and moral convictions, and that it will be my only guide. A complete submission to any worldly authority, demanding participation in war or its aftermath, would be an unpardonable sin against the essence of life, which is Love, and not destruction.

Though, in a sense, the Second World War has ended, I still object to participate in any service which is under military authority, and directed towards the occupation of this or that nation. I consider the so-called "peace " that follows a war to be as evil, if not more evil, than the war itself—for therein are sown the seeds of the next one. Anyone with the slightest knowledge of world affairs can see that this is the situation at the present time. But even if another "world war " were not inevitable, I still would refuse to have any direct concern with the aftermath of the last, for it still would reduce me to the state of an instrument directed towards these ends, destructive at their base, which the majority of men and nations accept and live by. Finally it must be said that everything returns to the "I, " that I stand apart from the general stream, if I wish to, by reacting, physically and spiritually, to the world, and to myself, in terms of my bodily-spiritual convictions—and that essentially my individualistic conception of life is entirely valid, buttressed, as it is, by certain Christian ethical concepts and by a traditional, yet intensely personal, sense of moral responsibility.

I hope that this statement, together with my Conscientious Objector's Form, will be sufficient evidence to prove my sincerity in the matter, and that my exemption from military service will be granted.

1945

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Notes Towards a Poetics of Weir

Dear Bob Hawley:

Certain practical matters—including short trip to Gibraltar—caused some delay in finalizing the [Touch of the Marvelous] ms; but here it is!—including special dedication, statement by Parker Tyler, chronology & biograph for dust/jacket&photo. I hope you will find it as interesting to read & publish as your anticipatory enthusiasm inferred. At least, I think it is a great improvement over my first book—by continuity & selectivity which by deletion on one hand unifies the mainstream of that period and by addition of two other sections, aptly qualified by the two section/titles, marks development & tangents—since it contains, also, about 15 pages never before collected (Erotic Poems was, incidentally, someone else"s suggested title!) as well as carrying a poem "The Image of Ardor"—recovered from Mr. Tyler—never before published! If I hadn’t, as the biograph relates, "burnt manuscripts" from that time I certainly might have had much more to represent those years; however, I do feel that qualitatively the best I have to show for first 7 years does actually appear between the pages of the present MS. Having re/acquainted myself with the work during these past few weeks, I"ve been led to wonder just how much, also, of the "lost" work might actually finally be recovered. I remember many instances sending copies to editors & friends (perhaps never recovered as in Tyler"s case, to whom I made such a request on a hunch few weeks ago!) which I could very well attempt to contact in the future, not surely for the present edition, but perhaps for a future OYEZ edition, if indeed you also continue over the years...who knows, perhaps a further, more compendious, edition of early work can be realized? Altogether, it has been a vital experience editing Touch of the Marvelous and you will excuse this possible nostalgia on my part!

***

I have—except for deletion of superfluous punctuation—kept the poems almost exactly as the originals. This may look somewhat old/fashioned at times—the hyphens for one thing & often poems with capitalized first letters—but it retains the spirit of youthful unconcern thereby with what are, I still think, very minor technicalities. The more important matter of linear & stanza structure I have adhered to absolutely—except, again, in a few minor places—where it is a question of retaining the "formal" coherence of rhythm & sense. Nevertheless, I suspect the general "linguistic" definition of poetry as "a certain highly concentrated language"—in contradistinction to the "more loosely concentrated one of prose"—to be generally correct, in so far as one can recognize the poetry as such even if it were presented as "conventional prose."

As was the case with the bulk of this present MS, the poems were a direct & rapid transcription from certain states of trance and I personally considered it a fault to alter anything but misspellings or excessive & therefore distracting grammatical errors, convinced as I was then of the orthodox surrealist dictum going something like: " . . . thought"s dictation in the absence of all conscious control & censorship. . . . "

But it is—more so after the passage of two decades of further poetic experience & experiment—that the essential vitality of this manner of writing is due to a general synthesis of feeling & ideas which profoundly directed the aforementioned "method" and this I entertained & pursued as a conscious aim, the effects of which established a rhythm of incongruous imagery, a prosodic mystique, so no matter to what formal arrangement I subjected the flow of images to afterwards, if I remained faithful to the primary condition of releasing the images from a heightened state of trance, through the sluicegates of "contradiction" and incongruity, the possibility existed and still exists of making a significant kind of Revelation. Though the orthodox surrealist definition & practice associated this with a revelation of the Unconscious and generally conceded to characterize states of dream, hallucination, fantastic/juxtaposition, etc., I find more interest in recognizing a far/wider meaning & value than the now/academic categories—Freudian or Jungian—to the degree that such poetry & its attendant prosody does reveal through the music of incongruity & imagery of the non-rational, vital "rapports" of a direct, intuitional comprehension of Reality—beyond "logical-rationalist" or common-sense appearances—otherwise unrepresented except in the vaguest "mystical" or didactic descriptions which often fail miserably because they are founded on a process of making common/sense logical statement of human experience & understanding which is ultimately non-rational, connected, as it is, to a source and cause which is beyond linguistic definition or presentation! See, in this respect, a very pertinent line in the poem "A Winter Day" which also could serve as emblem for this book: " . . . a whole world which seems to go beyond its own existence." Precisely! It is, then, a poetry most definitely of the world of appearances but giving by the very juxtaposition of images/in/apparent/contradiction—form to a universal aspiration: quest & need for evolution to a higher state of consciousness, naturally evoked by a certain rhythm & language of incongruity, fantastic juxtaposition of images & thoughts, often the speech of trance, but also opening up possibility of a consciously/directed Evocation of the Something & SomeWhereElse sensed generally as source/cause of all existence, being & becoming! This I believe again remains a fecund enough direction, now—unencumbered by merely relativist "surrealist" or "Jungian" ideas; an ever/verdant Vehicle of Amazing Marvels which I have christened elsewhere as "WEIR," both as recall to one of the supreme ancestors of this pursuit—Poe—& in order to evoke further progressions in this time & beyond. I am convinced, no matter what new "names" for it manifest, that what I am talking about (and for which Touch of the Marvelous can serve as, at least, one seminal model) is a vital vein in western thought & art, rooted in a most ancient Tradition rarely understood even today, yet recognized, generally, by a few, as "the Mediterranean genius of Analogy": our fundamental poetic heritage & most distinctive western line of apprehending reality which, at this reading, I have come to understand bears by vital cognition the key to "vital laws of Harmony" throughout the universe: For it is in the rapport of "things different from one another" that the poet reveals & communicates his vision commingling the visible & invisible, the heard & unheard, seen & unseen, intuitive and cerebral knowledge, the concrete & abstract; hence: the purely sensorial level of apprehension connected to the inborn, instinctive, cordial & supra/harmonic levels of understanding (prophecy) which are weir, a designation/emblem of analogy, a homonym/translation derived from the Latin word "to see" (vidi)!

Edition details

• Publisher: Wave Books
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1940696704
• ISBN 13: 9781940696706
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 216
• Editor: Caples Garrett