John Lord responds to http://www.
angelfire.com/wi/kokopeli/merrill.html

Dear X,

I'm sorry. I didn't catch your name. Your web site just popped up on the screen. It is a fact of James' poetry that it transfers into the reader, as voice, easily, and so you'll often find people sounding very much like James, or even assuming his bodily gestures in person, or the bodily gestures of his poetry, of which the child, the 11 year old, is among the most familiar. It's the light touch that allows in what it invites--as entrance and apparent equivalence while yet disguising something other, and yet, too, doing so openly-- just as Dante invites entrance into his person as world, esthetic device, and tomb--as all enclosure is also tomb, some bigger, some smaller.

And so your web site becomes an occasion for me and I thank you for it, and as you seem very much like James himself, or as James might present himself or appear to be, insofar as he is known to himself and others, while there is a James who is also not known, both to himself and others, or not previously kown, and like the rest of us in that, and that is as an embodiment of a more general situation, one involving all aspects of life, and from the creative spheres right down into those of the more in-general culture, two examples of which are the Washington Post and NY Times, and more specifically of the prototype of a Phil Graham, who did not stage his own death, and a James Merrill,

James staged his death as a kind of esthetic-ultimate of the boy who ran away, Huck being a natural model, but this is only the surface. Back of this is both a running away (from what--I'll mention in just a moment), a desire to look at himself and the world from the other side, as it were, as if from outside the world of life and death (part of a Gnostic-esthetic-crazy habit), and founded in a vacuum at a wall of confusion, heartache, self-betrayal, and loss, fueled with pathos balanced by a responsive but fleeting joy or manic-ness, and measurable in part to the extent he has gone in order to overcome it by means of that continuity of self-inventions that both form his surfaces, out of personal and esthetic experience, and suggest the natural conclusion of the desire to become the god of enough power to die and resurrect and walk around the world after that, confused between love, envy, and hatred of Jesus, and the limit and will of the satanic-esthete, or the power who wills himself the self-invention as god, or the natural conclusion of the esthetic domains.

For the esthete, as for the Gnostic, the world is a dualism concrete-abstract, and the abstract is experienced as an embodiable expansion that then attaches to the desire to become the concrete also, as the ultimate form, of the world and in which the former concreteness of the world is subsumed (or where megalomania artistically comes from, and from that the esthetic-Gnostic Satan, or the one who controls the forms man knows himself by and thus both murders and saves him from there, or the fundamental form of the illusion of Kierkegaard's acoustic echo here).

Just as in Dante's soft and reverential voice and initially easy-to-identify-with imagery, seduction, either intended or initially unconscious, forms the Door into the abstract that in James becomes the imagery and voice of that apparently easy to know little boy, and just as in Dante the expansion of the abstract (once through the Door) engages the mind as a puzzle does (see Missing Piece) and whose completion suggests 'truth', or the world of ultimate reality, embodied as the abstract, and whose power is demonstrated as it outlives the passing generations of men, and that in Dante, as in James, then serves as a replacement for 'the church', although a replacement that is not essentially an advance, as it is founded on just another set of esthetic forms and devices, as is 'the church' once ritualized, and not an advance, it thus is a Tomb disguised as an ultimate (even as The Ultimate) and that in James becomes the disguise of a disguise (thus accessible only essentially to the presumed and/or would-be 'initiates', and which, as with Dante's Satan-self, as the poet of the Comedies, is a vacuum at the fusion of its center and limit, or the place where life is betrayed into the abstract, whether intentional or not, and which is then structurally that part of the self which betrays Jesus in Gethsemane.

And not initially as the disciples, but as that part of Jesus that Jesus refuses, the part that, instead of drinking the cup all the way down, runs away into the imagination (Katzanzakis' Last Temptation of Christ)--and in James' case hiding in the disguise of the little boy, the one always at the center of his own Comedies and always thus easily accessible, apparently, once one, in becoming an initiate, glimpses him through the various types of filigree, projected as rhythm, sound, imagery, and so forth, and so that it is made to appear that the door-as-child both invites in and makes equal to the reader, so that there is an apparent transference of equals between the poet, the poem, and the reader, (no different, structurally, then from Bush's recent but millennially-founded technique of lowering expectations as a net to capture the potential voter into an abstraction which seeks to cohere a political and esthetic reality fused--and does so in Bush's case as pseudo-center of the whirlwind, and which is essentially merely an imaginary or esthetic form, or where the criticism of 'all form and no substance' comes from--for essentially the esthete is all form and no substance, stealing the content of its substance from those it 'invites in' seductively and through mis-direction through a continuity-of-betrayal of the real, and whatever else the real is or may be) --

Nor is this a coincidence in a world reduced to the 'triumph of banality' to use Milosz here, as such techniques are born out of a political, or usurping will, as to distinguish this from a will for the truth as The Truth) or a change of person into the abstract now, that the poet has invented and in and through which the reader, always just out of his depth and yet always too just apparently in sight of himself, has just lost his/her own unique individuality as such and in relationship to the life run away from as if, through the unfolding of the mind unfolding within and upon itself, one is moving into the greater and greater comprehensivenesses of reality, as if to some ultimate point-- and as music from the past often does, as does such philosophies as Hegel, of which alchemy is a form etc--and as does Dante among many others--but NOT as Jesus does, who drinks the cup in continuity with the ESSENTIAL non-betrayal of Life as Truth--for the imagination pretends to have undergone death and survived when under the domination of ego will to power, and it does so just as it sees itself alive after the passing generations of men, and yet, the KEY here is simply that the self who imagines has not him/its self embodied death as his own, or ever intended to--what flight away from IS-- experientially and uniquely, and as continuity with essential non-brayal of the truth--and so Dante's Satan is, as the poet-author of the Comedies, and as all such 'Satan's are, is the magician or the master-of-ceremonies of the mis-direction, and yet whose genesis is that same creatively structural location of the betrayal of Jesus in Gethsemane and specifically by that part of Jesus which Jesus had overcome in overcoming the world in truth, or the self-betrayer-as-satanic part) and as such it contains the seeds of its own destruction.

Essentially it is nothing other than the betrayal of itself in truth, or of its real self, itself what the flight away from life is, and into the self-invented and stolen imaginations of both the past and of its own conceits, and thus, too, you will find that James' central theme is this struggle between art and life (a struggle Dante does not essentially embody in the context of the comedies and simply because the entirety of the Comedies is situated within the confines of the esthetic-enclosure, and this is an after-effect or after-shock of his own on-ground experience, or that very same flight away from drinking the cup literally, and thus too, as Blake later notes, all poets--to the point of Blake's initial reversal of that--are of the devil's party--a statement that in the form in which he says it does not carry anything like the actual weight of ME IN GETHSEMANE DRINKING THE CUP and though it does point in that direction definitively).

There are 3 James': the one of his own esthetic, the one equivalent to Capelli's journals, and the one who desires life outside the esthetes' tombs. The first 2 are the embodied dualism as James--and as that they resemble Thomas Merton as much and then more than anyone else (Merton's esthetic via Seven Story Mountain--his maturity in a desire for life outside that surround--and his end in such things as his own journal and Lograire and cables 'to the Ace').

In one of our rare in-person meetings (with James appropriately disguised as Richard Buckley) we were eating cheese from Merton's monastery. The sunset outside in the flat land to the west of Albuquerque was as bleak as the horizon viewed from some ice age cave and Richard was smoking a toilet-paper wrapped cigar, in a bit of a self-deceit, as the person who sat watching the sunset was set outside the esthetic limits, empty of its illusion and with no continuity beyond those self-enclosed and dead-soul equivalents of entries in Capelli's or Merton's late journals.

A few years before this, in one of our initial communications, James spoke of looking for the 1 reader, and as one can't really relate equally, or even humanly, with those one has the power to seduce or threaten, we had, and still have, the basis of a 'creative friendship', and however much seduction and/or threat and seduction there is as perceived from each side and at any one time.

Unintentionally, the Free Event had destroyed James' esthetic conceit (as it had the entire buddy-system) but with the exception of Hass and Milosz initially, James was the only one of enough substance (relative to the group he had succeeded in surrounding himself with) to seek a relationship with it, but to do so as himself would be too risky, particularly as self was essentially no-self when set outside the esthetic mask, surround, and apparent protection.

James's love of the Free Event was essentially as simple as one recognizing the positive reconfiguration of himself in another, and his hate was simply the inaccessibility of such a self in the context of esthetic form and practice itself.

The central creative dilemma of the esthetic method is that if I forget myself in the context of the attempt to do not less than I have been given to know (or the essential ingredient of life as LIFE LIVED) then I lose hold or possession of all I have taken myself to be to that point, and yet this is the effect of something previous to it and so deeper: namely, that I cannot trust that my identity, and the language which embodies it, can be given from outside the limit of my own mind's knowledge, and however wide or narrow such a limit is.

Hence, the esthetic structurally, cannot ORIGINATE language--it can only steal it--and so it always is only then derivative, and seen from detachment (or non-reinvestment of the attempt--non drinking of the cup) it is thus always then only INFERIOR--a creature subject to death--born to death, as it were--and so too a subject fueled on hatred--the hatred of being an inferior born to death and untruth--but such an attitude is one incapable of decisively effective self-evaluation and self-criticism--hence it is a regression into before the self is flexible enough to embody the annihilation of its own former self/selves in an authentically transforming and self-transforming continuity--and thus too, one that is necessarily capable of integrating death--for all transformation that ends only in death is futile from the start--and detachment can only see it this way structurally as detachment is, by definition, the incapacity to exit the mind's enclosure (a fact the scientific-method, for instance, disguises, and structurally no different that the politically opportunistic methods do etc and that such figures as Phil Graham knew the difference in).

Structurally then, James came to the point of wanting to steal or usurp the Free Event, and simply because this can't actually be done (as the Free Event is the result of the attempt) he moved inwardly to equal, and then annihilate, it by--why yes--running away in the disguise of a boy--the effect of which was to stage his own death--and the ludicrousness of which is a structural equivalence of this-or-that Ajax running around in his own self-delusion--modern examples of which are figures such as Milosz and the entire buddy-system, many of whom hide out in the Academy of (self-invented) American Poets (grouping together as they do and unable to respond in the open to any of this).

The equivalence between James and other forms of action such as the Post and Times--or you--is part of a new accessibility, itself a part of a new restructuring of essential self and self-understanding and from that of the world as such--and as the world as such is coming to a point where running away is less and less possible (the Bomb, global warming, the Holocaust etc are each suggestive forms and instances of the same thing--but the essential form of that is of individual encounter at the limits in the situation of the attempt--or love--and so the same as LIFE has always embodied it--only now with an individually accessible passage into and through it).

And the proof is all in the pudding now.

I thank you for your Web Site.

John Lord

muzIK!