Norman Finkelstein
Glyphs From Beyond: Paul Bray’s Gnostic Poetry
I think it is particularly appropriate, given the subject of my paper, that I should be the very last presenter in our two panels on the New Gnostics. If gnosticism as we have come to define it today is an undercurrent in recent (and not so recent) American poetry—strong but not always palpable—then the poetry of Paul Bray makes a good endpoint. According to Harold Bloom, in his blurb for Bray’s Terrible Woods: Poems 1965-2008, “There are many implicit Gnostic poets. Paul Bray is overt. By a fine paradox, he is a vital and vitalizing Gnostic.” Yet I assume that most of you in the audience have not heard of Bray, and that if you have, you may only have read a bit of his work. Today I can merely offer a brief introduction, in the hope that you will seek out his poetry, almost all of which is gathered in Terrible Woods, which was published in 2008 by Dos Madres Press.
Bray was born in Washington, DC in 1951, and grew up in Maryland, Spain, and Central America. His father was a CIA operative, and worked undercover for much of his career. As an undergraduate at Bard, Bray won the Lockwood Prize for Most Distinguished Creative Writing; he went on to complete a Ph.D. in English at the CUNY Graduate Center, where he studied with
such distinguished scholars as Angus Fletcher and Allen Mandelbaum. His dissertation was on Finnegan’s Wake. He taught at various universities, and published a number of academic pieces and reviews, including a study of Emily Dickinson as visionary which appeared in Raritan. But we are also told in an author’s note that he was “an ominous presence on the New York art scene of the ’70s and '80s,” and “was the lead vocalist and lyricist for the band Brains in Heaven” (327) (which I could not find in the vast archives of rock bands now available online). Bray eventually moved to Santa Fe; for some time he worked as a security guard on a ranch. He died suddenly, probably of a heart attack, in November of 2011, and was found in his apartment, slumped over his computer.
A true poète maudit, Bray obviously did not have a typical career: no MFA in creative writing, no contest-winning first book, no long list of poems published in print or online journals, no appearances in prominent reading series, no tenure. Yet he does have fit audience, though few: Terrible Woods received highly laudatory blurbs from Angus Fletcher, Victoria Nelson, Paul Auster, and, as I mentioned, Harold Bloom. All of these luminaries variously acknowledge the qualities which make Bray’s poetry unique. It is formal, erudite, bristling with arcane references and shot through with words and terms that will send readers scurrying to the dictionary. Then again, it is witty and playful, with a fresh, lively appreciation for the vernacular and an instinct for turning even the most obscure historical events or metaphysical speculations into poised, seductive artifacts. It is no accident that Bray was a singer and lyricist, for though he can write ably in free verse, his use of form is both traditional and highly innovative, or as he more broadly puts it, vacillating “between the archaic and the futuristic.” In his preface (dead-pan and utterly wacky), Bray calls himself the “channeller” of Terrible Woods. Yet I suspect that he expended tremendous labor on his poems, precisely the sort of labor that Yeats, another channeller, describes in “Adam’s Curse”: “A line will take us hours maybe; / Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought / Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.” This attitude toward writing—spontaneous, otherworldly dictation coupled with highly deliberate structural precision—is not something one sees much these days. Bray’s poems, in their elaborate dance of form, trope and reference, tend to be long and dense, and though he often uses a relatively easygoing iambic tetrameter line, his elaborate rhymes produce a high level of verbal concentration. Even poems of a page or two in length call for careful analysis, or, if you will, unveiling. What we discover behind the elaborate wordplay is one of the most thoroughgoing gnostic sensibilities in modern poetry.
I say “unveiling,” but Bray made no secret of his gnosticism, and would frequently sign his emails to me “Yours in the Pleroma.” But personal jokes aside, he returned continually to those gnostic themes, symbols, and gestures which lend themselves most effectively to literary expression. Like the half-mad seekers of Poe and Lovecraft, the visionary speakers of Bray’s poems, sometimes in the company of enchanting, prepubescent witches (“She looked a sight in her dress so formal. / Like Wednesday Addams but not as normal” [289]), pour over “Glyphs From Beyond” or “The Text Beneath the Text,” in which “The words are gates which open only to those who are willing to fall” (295). Yet for Bray, we have always already fallen; the poet’s textual obsessions are intended to help him escape from the material world, “this dark prison planet” (160) where “I move along the furious Equator / And suffer the remorse of the Creator.” (161) Against that Creator—the gnostic Demiurge—Bray, like some comic book super-hero, conducts a hilariously transgressive linguistic campaign of “Gothic Heaven-Storming”:
We reach the mossy mental edge.
We reach the end of pilgrimage.
There is no way to go but up.
Instead we dare a stepping-back
into a verbal artifact.
It doubles on itself, no rope
is dangled. Help! The symbols point
to clockwork that is out of joint,
to watches crying for repair. (63)
Here, we are in crisis at the veritable edge of being. But rather than leap “up,” the poet steps back “into a verbal artifact”—the poem which ironically expresses but also curtails the act of “heaven-storming” that is the poet’s great goal. Poetic reflection provides a source of insight; in its utterance, or in the symbols of its inscription, we learn the clockwork of the universe is “out of joint,” that the watches (our beliefs? our selves?) are “crying for repair.” Yet by the end of this poem, we find ourselves struggling to get “outside the orbit of the limit // spaces that the words inhibit / us from knowing” (64). Language, therefore, may aid us in uncovering our true condition, but may also inhibit us in our gnostic quest for spiritual truth.
Harold Bloom famously argues that Romanticism may be understood as the “internalization of quest-romance.” “The movement of quest-romance,” Bloom observes, “before its internalization by the High Romantics, was from nature to redeemed nature, the sanction of redemption being the gift of some external spiritual authority, sometimes magical. The Romantic movement is from nature to the imagination’s freedom…redemptive in direction but destructive of the social self” (20). This formulation, which already verges on gnosticism, no doubt applies to Bray, but not in a direct fashion. Arguably, Bray’s poetry represents a “re-externalization” of quest-romance. The redemption it seeks is certainly a matter of imaginative freedom, and indubitably, indeed, flamboyantly, destructive of the social self. But archaically, it is also sanctioned by an external spiritual authority, magical in itself and capable of granting magical powers to the questing poet, even when he is unable to master them. Again and again, the poet finds himself thwarted by the archons, the psychic and spiritual blocking agents which only Bray’s outlandishly triumphant rhetoric can overcome in his search for gnosis.
When Bray is at his most overtly gnostic, the result is a poem like “The Alien”:
Beneath the boughs of weeping elms I wander.
I stagger under huge Druidic stones.
In strange cyclopean vales I stoop and ponder
what tribe of light left me so far from home.
From gate to gate unlocking every archon,
I carry in my tomb of flesh a portion
of captured light for fuel when I embark on
my bold escape from this immense abortion.
Watchmen and toll-collectors veil their faces.
My body-stump goes limping through the pillars.
Homesick and whored in terror’s empty spaces,
stripped to my ribs by moth and caterpillar,
cast like live dice into the teeth of panthers,
I crouch in Tibil waiting for an answer. (159)
This is wonderfully lugubrious, but it’s textbook gnosticism, and sounds more like H. P. Lovecraft than William Blake. The material universe is not the gnostic’s true home; it was created by a false demiurge, and hence the seeker of knowledge regards himself as an alien, longing to return to the fathering Abyss (about which Bray also has a short poem). The body is a “tomb of flesh”; the archons who block the initiate’s ascent are “watchmen and toll-collectors”; the realm in which the quester crouches is “Tibil,” which for the Mandaen gnostics meant the earth, the limited, limiting natural world. Fortunately, Bray’s gnosticism, however serious, can also be very funny. In the same poem, he rails against fallen humanity, with “Your strange obsession / with watching men in uniforms hurl balls / at one another. This unholy passion / for platitudes that has allowed mere clods / and politicians to replace your gods” (160).
From this we may extrapolate that Bray’s quest consists at least in part of undoing our passion for platitudes and consequently restoring our lost knowledge of the gods. These two goals are intimately connected. Consider, for example, “Alien Alphabets,” the first of three sonnets in the set called “Glyphs From Beyond”:
His technique of mystical exploration involved
projecting his consciousness into blank, embryonic
sectors of the matrix until waiting was resolved
by a sense of something moving along the tectonic
vectors of the grid where the paradigm shifts
into third and a whole world is lurking in the plasmic
halo that shimmers on the leaves and glyphs.
He adjusted the trodes and allowed the orgasmic
waves to wash over the sands behind his face
and the photisms changed into the green of the mantra
and he asked the bright beings who linger in that place
of the emblematic meaning of the giant sriyantra-
crop circle found in the Maryland field.
What was its genesis? What had it concealed? (293)
Once again, we have a dead-pan, ironic humor, a pastiche of science, science fiction, and New Age mysticism, combined with formidable technique. In his piece on Terrible Woods, in Notre Dame Review, Henry Weinfield notes that this poem works so well “because of the extraordinary use of enjambment, especially on feminine rhymes, and because the meter is accentual but not syllabic – the anapestic rhythm coincides with four strong beats per line, but extra syllables are allowed, and these contribute to the continual sense of flowing over that produces a river of sound” (209). Weinfield concludes his analysis by noting that the sonnet’s innovative form is in turn “a figure for the confrontation between the mundane and the esoteric that Bray is working with in terms of the poem’s content” (210). And this leads me back to Bray’s textual gnosticism or gnostic textuality.
Despite the manifold ironies in poems such as “Alien Alphabets,” I think that Bray is quite serious when he tells us that “the paradigm shifts / into third and a whole world is lurking in the plasmic / halo that shimmers on the leaves and glyphs.” (Here, by the way, the enjambment is very sly, since we think that “shifts” is a plural noun but it is then revealed to be a verb.) Bray’s “technique of mystical exploration” is a textual practice that declares itself to be in search of lost, hidden depths which actually come into existence through its own composition. There is a whole world lurking on the leaves and glyphs: Bray enters it through his poetry, and he calls upon his readers follow him. “I slid down a mossy bank,” he declares in “The Text Beneath the Text,” “until I found myself in a sea / of hieroglyphics and Vedic brushstrokes. The sea vomited me / up onto a distant beach and from there I came to a dark wood / where the secret life of poems brooded over me” (295). The secret life of poems broods over him still; indeed, the life of his poems is now all that remains of Paul Bray, but that is more than enough. As for his readers, the final stanza of the marvelously creepy, rollicking ballad called “Treatises in the Ground” presents us with our fate:
I scan those texts by the light of the moon,
where Seven Locks Road meets Tuckerman Lane;
I scan those texts by the light of the moon,
bent over every page.
By the light of the moon by the light of the sun
I search each word. I’ve just begun.
My studying will not be done
till I am gray with age. (292)
Works Cited
Bloom, Harold. Poetics of Influence: New and Selected Criticism. Ed. John Hollander. New Haven, Connecticut: Henry R.
Schwab, 1988.
Bray, Paul. Terrible Woods: Poems 1965-2008. Loveland, Ohio: Dos Madres P, 2008.
Weinfield, Henry. “Two Friends.” Notre Dame Review 35 (Winter / Spring 2013): 199-211.
Glyphs From Beyond: Paul Bray’s Gnostic Poetry
I think it is particularly appropriate, given the subject of my paper, that I should be the very last presenter in our two panels on the New Gnostics. If gnosticism as we have come to define it today is an undercurrent in recent (and not so recent) American poetry—strong but not always palpable—then the poetry of Paul Bray makes a good endpoint. According to Harold Bloom, in his blurb for Bray’s Terrible Woods: Poems 1965-2008, “There are many implicit Gnostic poets. Paul Bray is overt. By a fine paradox, he is a vital and vitalizing Gnostic.” Yet I assume that most of you in the audience have not heard of Bray, and that if you have, you may only have read a bit of his work. Today I can merely offer a brief introduction, in the hope that you will seek out his poetry, almost all of which is gathered in Terrible Woods, which was published in 2008 by Dos Madres Press.
Bray was born in Washington, DC in 1951, and grew up in Maryland, Spain, and Central America. His father was a CIA operative, and worked undercover for much of his career. As an undergraduate at Bard, Bray won the Lockwood Prize for Most Distinguished Creative Writing; he went on to complete a Ph.D. in English at the CUNY Graduate Center, where he studied with
such distinguished scholars as Angus Fletcher and Allen Mandelbaum. His dissertation was on Finnegan’s Wake. He taught at various universities, and published a number of academic pieces and reviews, including a study of Emily Dickinson as visionary which appeared in Raritan. But we are also told in an author’s note that he was “an ominous presence on the New York art scene of the ’70s and '80s,” and “was the lead vocalist and lyricist for the band Brains in Heaven” (327) (which I could not find in the vast archives of rock bands now available online). Bray eventually moved to Santa Fe; for some time he worked as a security guard on a ranch. He died suddenly, probably of a heart attack, in November of 2011, and was found in his apartment, slumped over his computer.
A true poète maudit, Bray obviously did not have a typical career: no MFA in creative writing, no contest-winning first book, no long list of poems published in print or online journals, no appearances in prominent reading series, no tenure. Yet he does have fit audience, though few: Terrible Woods received highly laudatory blurbs from Angus Fletcher, Victoria Nelson, Paul Auster, and, as I mentioned, Harold Bloom. All of these luminaries variously acknowledge the qualities which make Bray’s poetry unique. It is formal, erudite, bristling with arcane references and shot through with words and terms that will send readers scurrying to the dictionary. Then again, it is witty and playful, with a fresh, lively appreciation for the vernacular and an instinct for turning even the most obscure historical events or metaphysical speculations into poised, seductive artifacts. It is no accident that Bray was a singer and lyricist, for though he can write ably in free verse, his use of form is both traditional and highly innovative, or as he more broadly puts it, vacillating “between the archaic and the futuristic.” In his preface (dead-pan and utterly wacky), Bray calls himself the “channeller” of Terrible Woods. Yet I suspect that he expended tremendous labor on his poems, precisely the sort of labor that Yeats, another channeller, describes in “Adam’s Curse”: “A line will take us hours maybe; / Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought / Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.” This attitude toward writing—spontaneous, otherworldly dictation coupled with highly deliberate structural precision—is not something one sees much these days. Bray’s poems, in their elaborate dance of form, trope and reference, tend to be long and dense, and though he often uses a relatively easygoing iambic tetrameter line, his elaborate rhymes produce a high level of verbal concentration. Even poems of a page or two in length call for careful analysis, or, if you will, unveiling. What we discover behind the elaborate wordplay is one of the most thoroughgoing gnostic sensibilities in modern poetry.
I say “unveiling,” but Bray made no secret of his gnosticism, and would frequently sign his emails to me “Yours in the Pleroma.” But personal jokes aside, he returned continually to those gnostic themes, symbols, and gestures which lend themselves most effectively to literary expression. Like the half-mad seekers of Poe and Lovecraft, the visionary speakers of Bray’s poems, sometimes in the company of enchanting, prepubescent witches (“She looked a sight in her dress so formal. / Like Wednesday Addams but not as normal” [289]), pour over “Glyphs From Beyond” or “The Text Beneath the Text,” in which “The words are gates which open only to those who are willing to fall” (295). Yet for Bray, we have always already fallen; the poet’s textual obsessions are intended to help him escape from the material world, “this dark prison planet” (160) where “I move along the furious Equator / And suffer the remorse of the Creator.” (161) Against that Creator—the gnostic Demiurge—Bray, like some comic book super-hero, conducts a hilariously transgressive linguistic campaign of “Gothic Heaven-Storming”:
We reach the mossy mental edge.
We reach the end of pilgrimage.
There is no way to go but up.
Instead we dare a stepping-back
into a verbal artifact.
It doubles on itself, no rope
is dangled. Help! The symbols point
to clockwork that is out of joint,
to watches crying for repair. (63)
Here, we are in crisis at the veritable edge of being. But rather than leap “up,” the poet steps back “into a verbal artifact”—the poem which ironically expresses but also curtails the act of “heaven-storming” that is the poet’s great goal. Poetic reflection provides a source of insight; in its utterance, or in the symbols of its inscription, we learn the clockwork of the universe is “out of joint,” that the watches (our beliefs? our selves?) are “crying for repair.” Yet by the end of this poem, we find ourselves struggling to get “outside the orbit of the limit // spaces that the words inhibit / us from knowing” (64). Language, therefore, may aid us in uncovering our true condition, but may also inhibit us in our gnostic quest for spiritual truth.
Harold Bloom famously argues that Romanticism may be understood as the “internalization of quest-romance.” “The movement of quest-romance,” Bloom observes, “before its internalization by the High Romantics, was from nature to redeemed nature, the sanction of redemption being the gift of some external spiritual authority, sometimes magical. The Romantic movement is from nature to the imagination’s freedom…redemptive in direction but destructive of the social self” (20). This formulation, which already verges on gnosticism, no doubt applies to Bray, but not in a direct fashion. Arguably, Bray’s poetry represents a “re-externalization” of quest-romance. The redemption it seeks is certainly a matter of imaginative freedom, and indubitably, indeed, flamboyantly, destructive of the social self. But archaically, it is also sanctioned by an external spiritual authority, magical in itself and capable of granting magical powers to the questing poet, even when he is unable to master them. Again and again, the poet finds himself thwarted by the archons, the psychic and spiritual blocking agents which only Bray’s outlandishly triumphant rhetoric can overcome in his search for gnosis.
When Bray is at his most overtly gnostic, the result is a poem like “The Alien”:
Beneath the boughs of weeping elms I wander.
I stagger under huge Druidic stones.
In strange cyclopean vales I stoop and ponder
what tribe of light left me so far from home.
From gate to gate unlocking every archon,
I carry in my tomb of flesh a portion
of captured light for fuel when I embark on
my bold escape from this immense abortion.
Watchmen and toll-collectors veil their faces.
My body-stump goes limping through the pillars.
Homesick and whored in terror’s empty spaces,
stripped to my ribs by moth and caterpillar,
cast like live dice into the teeth of panthers,
I crouch in Tibil waiting for an answer. (159)
This is wonderfully lugubrious, but it’s textbook gnosticism, and sounds more like H. P. Lovecraft than William Blake. The material universe is not the gnostic’s true home; it was created by a false demiurge, and hence the seeker of knowledge regards himself as an alien, longing to return to the fathering Abyss (about which Bray also has a short poem). The body is a “tomb of flesh”; the archons who block the initiate’s ascent are “watchmen and toll-collectors”; the realm in which the quester crouches is “Tibil,” which for the Mandaen gnostics meant the earth, the limited, limiting natural world. Fortunately, Bray’s gnosticism, however serious, can also be very funny. In the same poem, he rails against fallen humanity, with “Your strange obsession / with watching men in uniforms hurl balls / at one another. This unholy passion / for platitudes that has allowed mere clods / and politicians to replace your gods” (160).
From this we may extrapolate that Bray’s quest consists at least in part of undoing our passion for platitudes and consequently restoring our lost knowledge of the gods. These two goals are intimately connected. Consider, for example, “Alien Alphabets,” the first of three sonnets in the set called “Glyphs From Beyond”:
His technique of mystical exploration involved
projecting his consciousness into blank, embryonic
sectors of the matrix until waiting was resolved
by a sense of something moving along the tectonic
vectors of the grid where the paradigm shifts
into third and a whole world is lurking in the plasmic
halo that shimmers on the leaves and glyphs.
He adjusted the trodes and allowed the orgasmic
waves to wash over the sands behind his face
and the photisms changed into the green of the mantra
and he asked the bright beings who linger in that place
of the emblematic meaning of the giant sriyantra-
crop circle found in the Maryland field.
What was its genesis? What had it concealed? (293)
Once again, we have a dead-pan, ironic humor, a pastiche of science, science fiction, and New Age mysticism, combined with formidable technique. In his piece on Terrible Woods, in Notre Dame Review, Henry Weinfield notes that this poem works so well “because of the extraordinary use of enjambment, especially on feminine rhymes, and because the meter is accentual but not syllabic – the anapestic rhythm coincides with four strong beats per line, but extra syllables are allowed, and these contribute to the continual sense of flowing over that produces a river of sound” (209). Weinfield concludes his analysis by noting that the sonnet’s innovative form is in turn “a figure for the confrontation between the mundane and the esoteric that Bray is working with in terms of the poem’s content” (210). And this leads me back to Bray’s textual gnosticism or gnostic textuality.
Despite the manifold ironies in poems such as “Alien Alphabets,” I think that Bray is quite serious when he tells us that “the paradigm shifts / into third and a whole world is lurking in the plasmic / halo that shimmers on the leaves and glyphs.” (Here, by the way, the enjambment is very sly, since we think that “shifts” is a plural noun but it is then revealed to be a verb.) Bray’s “technique of mystical exploration” is a textual practice that declares itself to be in search of lost, hidden depths which actually come into existence through its own composition. There is a whole world lurking on the leaves and glyphs: Bray enters it through his poetry, and he calls upon his readers follow him. “I slid down a mossy bank,” he declares in “The Text Beneath the Text,” “until I found myself in a sea / of hieroglyphics and Vedic brushstrokes. The sea vomited me / up onto a distant beach and from there I came to a dark wood / where the secret life of poems brooded over me” (295). The secret life of poems broods over him still; indeed, the life of his poems is now all that remains of Paul Bray, but that is more than enough. As for his readers, the final stanza of the marvelously creepy, rollicking ballad called “Treatises in the Ground” presents us with our fate:
I scan those texts by the light of the moon,
where Seven Locks Road meets Tuckerman Lane;
I scan those texts by the light of the moon,
bent over every page.
By the light of the moon by the light of the sun
I search each word. I’ve just begun.
My studying will not be done
till I am gray with age. (292)
Works Cited
Bloom, Harold. Poetics of Influence: New and Selected Criticism. Ed. John Hollander. New Haven, Connecticut: Henry R.
Schwab, 1988.
Bray, Paul. Terrible Woods: Poems 1965-2008. Loveland, Ohio: Dos Madres P, 2008.
Weinfield, Henry. “Two Friends.” Notre Dame Review 35 (Winter / Spring 2013): 199-211.