Lissa Wolsak
Time of Useful Consciousness1: An Experiential Reading of The New Spirit
Hank Lazer. The New Spirit. Singing Horse Press.
Recently nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, "The New Spirit" by Hank Lazer from Singing Horse Press is a manifest pleasure arrestingly begun with Grisha Bruskin's quietly ravishing cover images, his oracular "Black and Red I2". Within, we bear witness to Lazer's exquisite grasp of the mental suspension between life and death, everywhere inferring the sublime and the poets own comfort with it. Concern with wonder and what it is to come to our precise and immanent nature, Lazer situates a state of inhering within an august presence in the broken place, so much so that he may have found a way to live without being a deepener of hierarchies, eu zen3.
This work is a fusion of feeling tones amid enlivening, ripening horizons which in having its organic causality nevertheless surrounds all and directs all to causal impasse. These are gestures in tight relation, interpreting an infinite reality all the more startling for their refusal of ensnaring yokes of dissimulation. The author seems wholly divested of facticité and posturing, is sheer and unmannered within the book's peculiar but familiar nature of things as they actually are; "The New Spirit" is a man enticed to the shore of ecuméne4,
esoteric juncture of "being with" the lucidity and frailty of (t)here. Lazer prefers to dwell cosmologically, that is...capable of the universe, with sense relations, indeed, a sensorium but integrated with a rigorous transcendence shimmering up amongst splendidly clustering sound. It is an intelligent thing he emanates: the simultaneity of reverence with autopoeisis. In engaging with numinous meta-levels Lazer adroitly slips metaleptically between worlds as dimyon, divine-human partaker, and it is there that together with his conceiving richness of moral resource, his capacity for kindness, Lazer gives questioning its heart, then in pausing, snaps autotelic sweets out of thin air along with a natural product of distance à la Plotinus, in solitude and communion.
There to a palpable dignity of wakefulness, minding and caring for what it is to be one and another in a precise incidence of light. In this stanza, that of Lazer's father passes beyond. (pg.22)
his death a final step
panting as a dog
*
your guess as to what becomes useable
the memorable not subject to prior manipulation that scene
his labored breathing continues to obliterate all others father
i ask where are you
*
One's love rushes out to our lost nevertheless, into these aethers, therein also preparing our own way there. In crisp, vague or fitful chiaroscuro, to restore focus - the body, the vacancy, is in the soul. Even when deserted by the divine of this, we have the chance to - formed by fear, lose our fear.
In this elementally mournful reverie/anamnesis, Lazer infuses an immanent molecular knowledge to overturn delusion in this cante hondo (deep song), as linguistically spare
as a singular chord of vibrancy, tranquility so strikingly from inside, outside spilling in; night lives rested upon the letting thrall of darkness as if encircling to reconcile desolation aside the atoning "teshuva" central to Lazer's work: that of making a return to origin, turning to resurrect, recreate, remain, rename, each turn a refinement of breadth qua breadth.
What fluent vehicle of mattering or opening of a mass might relax the paroxysm or core of torment so that one might manifest a midst, uncanny but revelatory near and far as buoyant as intersubjectivity directly appreciated, therefore unmediated by thought? Lazer writes from within the radiance of mature reflection which he places ~before fear of the flowing nature of what ineluctably is. Lazer's awareness is a precondition of communication and empathy, everywhere ushering intimate being alongside the nature of the impulse attended; from a potency which transfigures bitterness, excruciating loss, longing and nosos, sickness from injustice. Evermore at the overflow and excess of meaning, we find Lazer anagogically among the loving.
What can the purlieus of poetry, thus far a sequestered language but as well the musicality and language of each of our days, hope to convey unless the listener is somehow responsive or isomorphically reflects the heart of salient intent? Lazer in oblivion-deep space where language leaves off, explores what it is to hear in merciful, radical receptivity, by means of absorption, deliberation and moreover...amplitude, for the hearer, for the heard. (pg.16)
you could tune it some other way
apparent to
rhythmic conviction
insistent as you have
it as it
manifests
itself filtered breeze
crisp circle these sudden elements
sent as breath said
silently or as actually spoken
what can be heard
what
can now be attended
to hear this
the exact metaphysics
of your historical
moment
of listening
what does not change is the
will or disposition to listen
what does change is
which rhythms which combinations of
sounds what music one
in his or her time is inclined to
listen
to
perhaps close listening but more exactly
beckoned listening
audition
summoned from the criss-cross of your historical
circumstance
Lazer demonstrates a consummate openness establishing a distinctive rapport with the face of emotional turmoil, superfluity, scarcity, yet in a relative absolute depth made possible by awe.
While in the course of Lazer's audible/visible emergence from which other things approach, `to be' is a passionate invisible, intimating bewitching and magnetic loves still opaque to us, but yet the deepest love of ein sof - the eternal God beyond God beyond all specific qualities, dazzlingly clear. To the nub, "The New Spirit" unmistakably shelters a courageous, highly developed metaphysical and intentional moral imagination. Close to the instant, these are redemptive Hermes progressions. Lazer's rigorous look throughout his ontic ground is part statement, part fishing-bell, with a description of limit states, suffused all the while as transvaluer reflecting on the precious chain of being/non-being: quality and dignity of time, life/love, vagaries of dying and beyond, language as fulcrum, suspicion and trust of the values of humane society/civilization afool to its somber futility in light of servitudes that captiously seize and bias all time. This poet daringly carries himself by the crest of a structure further into his ontological ground.
We are urged to move gently and in clean infusions toward death remembering the seamless whole. Human activity perhaps at their occurrences are no longer as house-slave to the final secret. To read "The New Spirit" is not unlike watching solder flow toward an undimmable death; that which most enlightens us. Trusting himself at the quietus of age, this poet rays forth. Above all, what is eloquent, nuanced, clement and reimagined on these planes? "The New Spirit" is a regenerating vivid expression...imaginably, conceivably, as when Miles felt quiet.
Out of all possible conclusions, there is coming home.
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