Chris Mansel: The new book you have forthcoming from 7 Points Press, Substance, Oblivion, and Infinite Communion deals with the Prescratic philosophers. You said in a recent reading that you started this investigation thirty-years ago. What have you learned from your study and through the writing?

 

Jake Berry: One thing I’ve learned is that most translations of the Pre-Socratics are shaded by either the classical antiquity that followed them or worse, a completely contemporary reading. While we need translations that are as accessible as possible we need to be aware of how greatly our thinking has been shaped by later philosophers like Plato and Aristotle and the two millenniums of development of their ideas in different contexts. It is impossible to step outside these contexts because they are the very framework of the way we formulate and articulate thought. But if we rely a little more on imagination and intuition we may at least get a hint of what lies beyond the contemporary paradigm. 

 

Anaximander and Parmenides were very different from one another because they came from two different parts of the Greek world and they were both very independent and innovative thinkers. Recent scholarship suggests that Anaximander was closer to what we would think of today as a scientist, or what, until the 17th century was called a natural philosopher. There’s some of this at work in Parmenides as well, but he was more open to intuition. Socrates, Plato and Aristotle seem to have inherited both of these traditions and developed them into what we recognize as fully developed philosophies. This is the beginning of the Western mind. 

 

It has been suggested by Matthew Arnold and William Barrett that the Western mind is a mixture of the Hellenic and the Hebraic – or the Greek philosophers and the Hebrew prophets. I tend to agree, at least at this point. I also think of Karl Jaspers’ idea of an axial age, a period of roughly 600 years or so between 800-200 BCE when the spiritual focus of humanity as a whole seemed to shift radically. This includes not only the philosophers and prophets, but also the Upanishads and the Buddha in India and Lao Tzu and Confucius in China. 

 

So what we are dealing with in the Pre-Socratics is the beginning of that shift from the earlier Persian and Egyptian modes of religion into something that remains deeply intuitive but also includes reasoning through ideas. Over the last few centuries we have abandoned the intuitive and tried to replace it with materialist literalism. After centuries of abuse at the hands of religious authorities that turn is understandable, but by trying to remove everything that seems even remotely connected to the spiritual we have lost the heart of our thought and reduced it to a very mechanistic mode that disconnects us from our deepest roots in nature and the ancient world. It’s no wonder that contemporary culture is rife with mental illness. We are expected to live full lives without the very ground of our being. This is an absurd demand. Even more absurd than the demands of religions with absolute authority. We need a radical shift toward something more open, though most certainly not a return to purely religious authority.

Your work draws on broad erudition.

 

In your writing we might hear sources from biology, physics, astronomy, philosophy, film and music, as well as literature. Are you conscious of these resources as you write or does is it spontaneous?

 

Chirs Mansel: I think it is a little of both. Sometimes when the muse is tapping into the vein it comes out as the keyboard goes along at its pace. Other times I will stop, and it will come out as it I needed. Matt Hill, the California poet, artist remarked that it basically quoting stuff that I have read back.

Last night I was writing along and I typed in the Breath of Horus and had to stop a moment and remind myself what exactly what that was. It was elocuted but the memory wasn’t giving out the info.

What appeals to you as a writer besides the job itself? The research, the self-fulfillment?

 

Jake Berry:  I see, yes, writing is always a collaboration, isn’t it? Many voices are always at work distilling into a poem, a novel or whatever they wish to be.

 

What appealed to me about writing long ago, when I was 14, was the sense that I had a found an occupation for which I seemed to be suited. It requires an active imagination and many hours alone. I had both of those from day one. When I first started trying to write poetry I discovered I had a knack for it. Poetry comes from a combination of the imaginative use of language and the magic of words and a sense of the musical. Both my parents were musicians and mom usually read poetry to me instead of a bed time story. Being a musician she knew how poetry should be read, where to place the emphasis, etc.  It’s still that sense of enchantment that occupies me. I don’t intentionally do research; I just read all the time and go down rabbit holes that attract my curiosity. I’m not sure about self-fulfillment. Writing gives me something to do that doesn’t seem to be a complete waste of time. But what is most fulfilling is when the work seems to connect with someone. My deepest hope, in all sincerity, is that the work will be helpful to others.

 

Do you mind if I echo your question back to you? Why do you write?

 

Chris Mansel: I write, because when I was eight years old, I had a dream and I woke up and write down what had happened. Turns out it was a poem and it took me a day to get started but I have been writing ever since. That was fifty-years ago.

I write because it helps to empty the contents of my head. I believe in Kerouac’s philosophy of first thought best thought so I don’t re-write. Well, hardly ever.

In music, that are many pathways to poetry. You write in your new book, “..to break the eye open and reveal what it cannot see.” How do we break the layers open and get to its primal force?

Jake Berry: That’s almost like a prophetic calling. It seems like you almost had no choice. 

 

Kerouac wanted immediacy, getting it down before the rational mind imposed it’s rigid sense of order. The approach has served you well.

Breaking the layers open is what most poets and mystics have tried to do down through the ages. There are so many techniques, religious strategies and downright insane attempts that we could talk about them all day. I think of meditation in all its variety, the weird behavior of Kabbalists, Christian monastics, Hindu sages and Taoist masters, the use of psychedelics in almost every time and place, and of course Rimbaud’s orderly derangement of the senses. I’m not sure we have to go through extreme exertion or risk brain damage to arrive at something primal/fundamental. Often it comes to us quite naturally in moments when we are going through our daily routine and are struck by a sudden sense of peace or the profound beauty of things. The simplest, least complicated approach may be to simply sit down and be still. We are assaulted by noise constantly. If we turn off the noise and be still reality tends to become more available to us.

 

Do you have a regular routine that makes it easier for you to work?

 

Chris Mansel: I think of Ingmar Bergman who wouldn’t read the newspaper until after the noise of the day had passed. That’s usually now when I write unless I get an inspiration. I wouldn’t call it a routine, but it does serve me well.

I am working on two different books presently. One of poetry and the other of flash fiction. These two forms seem to suit my ability well. The poetry is a new book, and the flash fiction is a continuation of the first book I ever wrote.

In your writing, you use animal imagery quite a bit. Is this conscious or unconscious?

Jake Berry: Jake Berry: Bergman was such an extraordinary talent. His films never grow old no matter how many times you see them. If that system worked for him, it makes sense to immolate it.

 

I remember your first book. It was a dark ride. Flash fiction in that mode might require premeditation with sedatives, but the writing would be so beautiful it would be worth it. Not unlike McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.

 

The animal imagery and nature imagery in general are those things I see all around me. I could spend all day every day sitting at my window and watching the drama unfold. It makes human civilization seem excessive and absurd. So, I’m very conscious of it in my work.

 

Chris Mansel: What is it about poetry that when read aloud you can find the mistakes or the power of a piece?

Jake Berry: Reading poetry aloud seems to me to be almost essential. It started many years ago when Jack Foley sent me Robert Duncan’s poetry. It felt like the poem would be incomplete unless I heard it aloud. Duncan’s musicality was so obvious on the page that I had to hear it. Since then, I almost always read poetry aloud. It is usually best to hear it in the poet’s voice, but hearing it is important. Poetry is a form of music. Whether it’s Gilgamesh or the Odyssey or whatever ancient poem, its primary medium was sound. That’s the way people experienced it. Written language had been around for centuries, perhaps a millennium or more, before poets, or their students, began writing the poems down. At the same time, what the poem can do on the page is also important. It has become a form of visual art as well. Most great poetry is not only great when read aloud, but also great when seen on the page. 

 

Do you read your poems aloud as you write them? Or after you write them as part of the process of composition?

 

Chris Mansel: I usually will read it aloud while I am writing it to make sure the pace and meter is going on as they need to. You can tell a lot about a piece of writing as you well know by reading it aloud. I wouldn’t want to suggest to anyone that I didn’t do this.

When I read the work of others it is more of a challenge sometimes. The work of Ezra Pound to be read out loud can be tricky.

Susan Sontag wrote, “All works of art are founded on a certain distance from the lived reality which is represented. . . . It is the degree and manipulating of this distance, the conventions of distance, which constitute the style of the work.” When you get the distance from a piece, does it change your understanding?

 

Jake Berry: One reason Pound can be difficult is because he often drew on older forms of language, even dead languages, as a source for his poetry. Those rhythms make it difficult to read aloud. Pound, however, read his own work quite well since he was familiar with the sources, or at least his understanding of the sources.

 

I’m not sure I agree with Sontag. Often art can be the lived reality instead of being a representation of it. Abstract expressionism and jazz are not representative. They are created in the moment. Maybe I’m missing her point. But within the context of representative art I think she’s correct. 

 

The kind of distance you are talking about sounds like you are talking about returning to a piece later in time. In that case, yes, absolutely, it does change my understanding. As Heraclitus said, “You never step in the same stream twice.” With time your perspective changes and you see things in the work of art that you did not see before. It can seem like a completely different work. That’s the beauty of art, it’s always new.

 

This reminds me of Rilke’s poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo.” The closing line is usually translated, “You must change your life.” Does the experience of art have that impact on you?

 

Chris Mansel: Sometimes I will look back at a work of mine and see it as an all-new work and realize that that was what I was talking about, the perspective as you say. “You must change your life” this has occurred and re-appeared in my life more times than I can count. I think we manipulate ourselves into thinking we don’t need change, but we really do. But it dissipates.

The journalist Erik Borsuk wrote that sometimes it’s like a “Prison inside a prison.” That of course can be interpreted in many ways. Rilke also wrote, “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue.”

Jake Berry: Right. We need to cherish the mystery. We seek answers when what we should be seeking is better questions. Creativity should generate a perpetual state of change and an opening to mystery.

Last question, Henry David Thoreau said, “I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there.” Does that quote tie in with the fact in your opinion that you must leave the educational system to find an education?

Thoreau didn’t intend to live in the woods permanently. A key feature of American Transcendentalism is not only communion with the divine through nature, but also communion with humanity. Whitman lived that out, especially in sitting with wounded soldiers during the Civil War. 

 

As for education. In some fields it is absolutely essential. You learn skills that can earn you a living and hopefully be useful to others as well. With the arts, education can be very useful to learn basic forms and techniques and if you can connect with the right teacher you can develop rapidly in that environment. Ultimately you have to leave the system and find your own way. You may have to abandon most of what you thought you knew, but that is part of perpetual change. You are always abandoning your past to discover the future, remembering that you are already in eternity.