Marvin’s Bell’s new book of poems, Mars Being Red (Copper Canyon Press, 2007), is quite an excellent read, and indeed an up-to-the-minute book that reminds us, “Three thousand of ours and thousands of theirs / are too many body bags to bury in the mind, / so while the gas of rotting bodies seeps up / from the ramshackle coffins and folded flags, / the young seek books or booze to soften the ache” (“The Campus in Wartime”). I don’t know that this is a book to soften the ache of the disasters of war, though it is a book to make our aches more pointed, to give them a deeper sense of purpose, such purpose as the speaker of the book’s opening poem–“Prodigal?”–displays in terms that are anything but prodigal, except in the sense of his abundant devotion. With straw for a bed in his suitcase and olive wood to burn through the night, he is “off to the front lines in the war to preserve / the privilege of myth-making, / the consternations of art, the nerve to think / the future and remember the past.” It bears repeating that the word ‘myth’ comes from a Greek word meaning story. Thus, the fight for the “privilege of myth-making” is the fight for the right to tell our own stories, which at their best respond to the past and look to the future. Civilization, in fact, consists largely in the stories that we write and sing and tell ourselves–in philosophical, theological, scientific, mathematical, historical, literary, everyday, and other terms. Each poet, singer, and speaker must in some sense invent his or her proper terms, woven out of the languages that we inherit.
This poem also looks to the language world of a remote past when the singers of tales “lived among the herioc / who did not want another life,” and continues by stating that “if / they erred in creating bigger-than-life characters, / they broke bread with the unspeakable, / and that is worth something.” Among the multitude of problems brought on by the disasters of war is the extent to which they distract from one of the central tasks of human culture, breaking “bread with the unspeakable.” About the ineffable I have nothing to say except that somehow humans keep figuring out ways to speak around, at, and toward it, even as we admit that what we’re trying to say cannot really be said–as Aquinas does in his explanation of the analogical way in theology. Some call the ineffable God–as I do–but I don’t really think that one need believe in God to believe in something in the universe that exceeds the saying–call it some universal energy, or the mystery of the material that we are and the consciousness that has emerged from it. Spirituality consists in the ways we have of experiencing meaning in our lives.
Some profound statements of spirituality emerge in Bell’s poems, perhaps most pointedly in his Dead Man poems, five of which occur in Mars Being Red–ten if one considers that Dead Man poems always come in twos; as the opening line states in “The Book of the Dead Man (Writing the Dead Man Poem),” “When the dead man writes a poem, he immediately writes another one.” I take it that the Dead Man poems have grown out of a spirituality implied in the epigraph to this poem, the Zen admonition “Live as if you were already dead.” The implied principle is a matter of letting go and letting be without ceasing to care; it means realizing how little I’m actually in control and doing what I can in the present moment. There are complicated reasons, relating to noetic history, that poets of the remote past needed such larger-than-life characters as inhabit our ancient literature; such figures were necessary to organize knowledge and language in oral and deeply residually oral cultures. That our contemporary literature favors the anti-hero (which is not the same as a villain) or even the ego-less speaking of language has little or nothing to do with a decline of values (as some rather shrill polemics would have it), but has rather to do with the demands of our moment in noetic and technological history, demands for a literature that confronts in detail the complex circumstances of the technological and linguistic moment. The ancient worlds had, of course, their own vast complications, which their poets and singers of tales confronted using the materials at hand. Part of the reason that our contemporary language can face the complexities that it formulates is that we have the classics of the past to look to. Marvin Bell invites his reader to enter the process: “Write a dead man poem if you must, but only if you must.” I confess that I’ve written many Dead Man poems of my own, but then I also remind myself of the great principle, arising from postmodern theory, that reading is a form of writing, as writing is a form of reading–the two processes are so intertwined that one always involves the other, at least in virtual terms. In our troubled times, one could do much worse than to be a companion to Marvin Bell’s Dead Man.