Today the Phil the mailman delivered a copy of Jack Hirschman's Arcanes, a French/English volume of nineteen or so of Jack's "Arcane" poems. Jack Hirschman is a great soul, poet, artist and revolutionary, a case of the "prophet is not without honor, but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house" in that he is better known, received, appreciated, or so it seems, in Europe that in the U.S. Here are a couple of links to Jack's poetry:

"Poetry for a New America"
Il Narratore (includes some audio files)

Anyway, in the introduction to Arcanes by Gilles Vachon, something leaped out at me. Vachon identifies "arcane" as coming from the Qabalah tradition (here's my rough translation):

"The 'arcanization' is a fundamental enterprise of the Zohar (a remarkable 13th century mystical text by Moses of Leon), which affirms the principle: divine secrets are found in all texts and in each letter of the Bible. One knows that this position on symbolic writing interested many investigators of the spirit, from de Lessing to Tzara, with Netwon, Kafka, Borges and Andre Breton in between... [and this part is sketchy] (Recall that Jacques Derrida owed to the Kabbalah many of his intuitions about textuality and multiple meanings (?plurivocité?), that Jack Hirschman and others discovered, and that, like Maurice Blanchot, were inspired by the vision of symbols and textual interpretations. [il en a été conforté dans sa vision des symboles et son herméneutics])

(In the mystical Kabbalah/Qabalah tradition, meaning is assigned to each of the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Further, numeric values are assigned to letters, so that words have a numeric value, and so some added meaning may be seen to exist between words of the same numeric value. Each letter is attributed to one of the 22 lines, or paths, connecting the 10 Sephiroth on the mnemonic Tree of Life (a kind of spiritual network diagram, with Tiphareth, the central sixth Sephiroth, as a superconnector or hub). Each letter has also been attributed to one of the 22 Major Arcana or Trumps of Tarot. Per Regardie, Cordavero describes the Sephiroth as "vessels of force or categorical ideas through which the consciousness of the universe expresses itself".)

Jack wrote an essay in 1971 called Kabbal Surrealism "trying to put together the many strains of French Surrealism, Negritude, North American poetics and politics, along with the sort of hip kabbalism I was involved with" at the time.

What struck me was this idea of divine or inspired writing not being specific to Hebrew or the Bible, but to any inspired writer, to the artist. The process of conveying meaning via text, where ideas are stored in ink-on-page, to be re-created in the mind of the reader, with levels of meaning, and meanings that may be hidden on first or second or fiftieth reading, and then revealed not because you now have the secret decoder ring, but because you understand things differently, "the understanding of a person is conditioned by his or her capacity to understand" (from "The Food of Paradise", in Indries Shah's Tales of the Dervishes). The power of poetry. For the reader, diving through the text, reaching that which inspires, and being inspired thereby.

Well in writing this down the though doesn't sound so striking perhaps, or so new as it seemed at the time it popped up in my brain.

From an interview w/ Jack that appeared in the wonderful journal Left Curve:

Poetry is ultimately what belongs to all. That is, everyone is a poet. People still reject that idea only because they have never lived in the historical conditions where that truth is realized. That's one of the reasons I struggle for the material transformation of society, to bring about that spiritual consciousness of the fact that everyone is a poet. In addition, poetry is the expression that carries within its moment much more than that moment, pointing ever toward a future through its rhythmic cries and revealed heartbeats. (from Interview with Jack Hirschman by Marco Nieli)

In a testament to the power of ideas, here's this description of the Zohar:

Moses Deleon's discovery generally went unnoticed by the world. But it was a significant turning point for mankind, as the Light of the Zohar radiated into the world for the first time in history... [T]he energy emanating from its mystical text sparked the collective unconscious of a generation. The power of the Zohar propelled the world out of the Dark Ages. (from the Kabbalah Centre website)

Which is a way to see Jack's poems.

(Jack and David Meltner are giving a talk on the Kabbalah at City Lights in San Francisco, June 9, 2005)

jd

"And what is the very essence of poetry if it is not this 'metaphorical language' -- this marking of the before unapprehended relations of things?" - Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction.