Higher order poetry case #2: The story from the jardin in Paris

Higher order poetry case #2:
The story from the jardin in Paris

John Bjarne Grover

Here is a brief summary of the reasons why I believe that I can can call the meeting with a woman in Jardin du Luxembourg on 12 August 2002 for a revelation - whether it was Mary Magdalene I met or an agent for a political party or Hollywood or whatever. It is the fact that both alternatives open for a joint interpretation which allows for the designation 'revelational poetry' and which can make for a shared poetic-logical platform of Jews and Christians alike. The event is a case of revelational poetry in my Endmorgan Quartet.

It is about my book "Lead lushions in a bowl", the last of the four books in 'A saga Hume', which is the third and 'adjectival' (or 'lekton') part of the full work. The 'grammatical' theme of the book can be called 'aspect', which here means 'inside' vs. 'outside' the reading.

I had written and printed the manuscript out in Vilnius before I went to Paris in April 2002, and it was in a raw transcription from my handwritten notebook, including the date annotations, but with the last part preposed to the beginining, such as I had planned already then, and without the main title. What remained as heading to the manuscript was 'I wonder', written by 'Mary', while this was really planned as a subtitle only under the main title 'Lead lushions in a bowl'. I went from Vilnius to Paris on 18-20 April 2002 and found a € 35 room in Hotel Aviator, not knowing that there were cheaper rooms in town. I may have looked briefly at the manuscript there, in an attempt to keep the spirit up with the idea that it would be only a matter of a few days before somebody helped me find a place to live and an income for my work, so I would not bhave to interrupt my project. But the work I did there would not have been more than spiritual crutches for keeping myself up and going - a few glances and perhaps some ideas noted on a paper or computer file. (Martin Scorsese later made the film 'Aviator'). After a few days, the money were out and I had to face the ditch. For several months, the thriller was whether I would run so completely out of money that I could not even pay a locker at the railway station for my 2-3 suitcases including my laptop computers and hard and other drives (the luggage was too heavy to carry around, so the alternative was to simply throw it away), and the great panic occurred when I was told that I was not allowed to store them in a locker: "Vous avez une ordinateur, monsieur?", said the uniformed guard at Gare de l'Est where it cost only 3 euros for up to several days. But somehow I just managed to make it without having to throw my things away, due to the occasional anonymous donations to my bank account. (These were not 'bribes': I had spent quite a lot of time in Vilnius with sending emails and letters around to possible welldoers and welldisposed organizations inviting them to support my poetic project, and on the background of the political history it would have to be permitted that donations were anonymous, I wrote - and indeed there came now and then a sum on my bank account which was small enough - some 6-700 euros - to be placed there in cash and in my name over the counter in the Norwegian bank, so I really don't know who the generous donor[s] was or were). I also got some financial help for asylum seekers. I was sleeping inside at the time when I may have had a brief look at the manuscript in Hotel Aviator in April, and then followed a long period with mainly outdoor-sleeping (with occasional nights in 18-20 euro hotels and some nights in a red cross centre for homeless at Bourget). This marginal inside-outside existence could of course be seen as somehow related to the theme of 'revelational aspect' in my book, although it is not wise to take that as the full explanation. There had been other events, such as the rejection of my asylum application in early June, and I was to the chapel in Rue du Bac 140 where the Madonna revealed herself very materially for Catherine Laboure in 1830. This was a few days before 12 August 2002 with the news about the death (heart attacks, I think) of Dahl-Nygaard. I had just read these news in an internet cafe on 12 August and went over to Jardin du Luxembourg and sat down on the bench under the Flaubert memorial when a woman dressed in black occurred. I had then just pulled the manuscript up from the trolley for the first time since April, and I may have read approximately through what is now the two 'motto' poems and perhaps a little down the page when she came walking with a smile and a book by Ayatollah Khomeini (a French translation) under her arm (perhaps the rectangular size about the manuscript I was reading) and sat down next to me. She was dressed in mainly black but with some white on top, somewhat the opposite of the printed text I was reading. (However, I remember her walking next to me in the street and then she was dressed entirely in black, so I am not certain about this part of the story - could be the white is something I have added to the memory later). She spoke only French (and I suppose Farsi - she was an Iranian refugee, but had, in contrast to me, got her application accepted) and my French is poor, but the conversation on the bench there lasted for perhaps half an hour or a little less. She gave me a little bottle with some yellow-golden fluid and showed me how to rub it in the palms (I later understood that it could have been nitroglycerin, and thought absurdly that she could have stolen it from Nygaard, hence his heart attack, and therefore I had to place the explosives in a garbage bin), and she wrote a poem there on the bench while I watched her write and she gave it to me, a pretty poem it was and it is hard to believe that it could have been written by an agent. She added a mystery code and her name and anagram and some other things. She invited me for a dinner in a restaurant and we left, but I was anxious about secret agents and after our 'exodus' from the park I eventually changed my mind just before we were to enter the restaurant. Could be we were photographed by surveillance cameras.

When she occurred soon after I had started reading my own manuscript, there is the idea that she was the text I was reading - about 'inside/outside the reading', the parametre of 'aspect'. The grammatical term can be studied in e.g. ancient Greek where it is found in the use of 'aoristos', a word referring to inside and outside the horizon, for inside and outside the temporal location of the event referred to.

It means that she occurred when I started reading exactly where 'Winter Princess' (book 11) ends and 'Lead lushions in a bowl' (book 12) starts.

The evidence that this is a revelation, never mind if it be from heaven or earth, is now the following:

Her name I recognized from the end line of 'Winter Princess', which goes "Hedoway/Heroway, Winter Princess". Since I had omitted the main title to the next manuscript, this line would in fact be there in its place. The top line of the manuscript I was reading told that it was 'Mary' who had written this text called 'I wonder'. In fact her name rewrites somewhat into 'Mary Magdalene', not the least due to other factors present - as well as the anagram she added.

The bottle she gave me with some yellow-golden fluid and the poem which she wrote were rather exact to the lines I had just read when she occurred, in particular when the later 'keys to heaven' (the permutational principles in Acts 10 on basis of my own poems) are included. The bottle she gave me is described in the first motto poem. The cork-shutter, the Flasko, the rubbing of the fluid in the hand, etc. The 'keys to heaven' are contained in the poem I had written when interpreted according to the last part of her poem. Her poem is then the key which I needed in order to find the keys on basis of my own motto poem.

The mystery code number which she gave me is (the 'security code'!) to the revelation in Rue du Bac 1830, the M-curl around the crossbar with the cross and the two hearts. She could have known that I had been there recently, though, but not all temporal events could have been prepared by an agent. In particular not me sitting on that bench on that day with that manuscript. However, the code number is based on the tables of the 'chevalerie spirituelle' and is partly identical with the permutation in the keys. Could it be that it is an old freemason secret?

The candle with the oval shape around, which she drew on the paper, is a part of the front page of my book, photographed by me in 2006. It is also a part of the revelation from 1830.

One may, more peripherally, add that her name rewrites to 'Mary Magdalene' as far as the 'anagram' and some aspects of her facial characteristics relative to personal experiences of mine are concerned. The anagram helps, but one really would have needed to know the two persons I had known for making the identity. If she were an agent, such data could probably have been available, but this must otherwise count as a coincidence if not supporting evidence for the assumption of a poetic revelation. There were in fact a series of persons from my personal history which 'occurred' (in my associations) in the course of our meeting, some of them in forms which could not have been known to others than me. But this could of course have been part of the dynamics of a conversation.

One can add a number of details from the half-hour or so which can add up to the impression that it was in fact the text itself which happened. But I have the poem she gave me on the paper here and it isn't my handwriting. It is also strictly speaking beyond my command of French. She was a little vague about her reasons for having fled from Iran (and the book by Ayatollah Khomeini, which she seemed to know by heart, as evidenced when she responded to a comment of mine with looking up a corresponding part of the book and read it for me, suggested that it was not religious persecution). But she smoked a cigarette of Chesterfield which she inhaled with a shade of something flashing over her face, which made me recognize the early line from my text "...and where the Q flows in / the shadows" of 04.07.01. 'Hester' is Norwegian for 'horses'.

The sum total of this is that it is a matter of a poetic revelation which perhaps can be called a divine revelation, whether she exists as a person or not. If she exists as an ordinary human in Paris, then it can be taken as general evidence for a theory of the presence of the divine in the humans. Her profession (she said she was educated in osteopathy - which in norwegian 'å stå opp i ti[d]' means something like 'to resurrect in time') is telling of 'human existence' and is that kind of professional people may seek if they start getting trouble with their sense of reality. Which means that if she were divine in human form, it was real enough. Just like the Madonna in Rue de Bac 1830 when Laboure rested her folded hands on the Madonna's knees.

The conclusion is that the event in the park was a poetic revelation in any case - which should be taken to mean a situation for which the general form can be seen to relate to or be conceived of as generated by a poetic function. And then the philosophy is that the poetic space is primary and the material space secondary and a function of poetic logic bridges from the first to the second, which means that matter is a projection from the poetic space - and hence a new physics can be made which describes the universe not by mathematical laws of nature but in terms of poetic logic (and this will be a physics which is not bound by the speed of light). The issue is whether a poetic revelation is something which can allow for a divine revelation to take place in it. This is in fact also where one can find a shared basis for the Jewish and Christian ideas about revelations and the status of the divine. It means that if Jewish poetic logic can create an information technology which allows for interfacing with eternity, Christian philosophy can venture the idea that divine revelation can take place within such a framework ('e ram-li', sort of, with a 'conjunctive[ital]' flavour in the first name), and can in principle think of Christ as such a divine revelation within the framework of a Jewish poetic revelation. But this will be when the new poetic information technology on a Jewish basis will constitute no threat against Christianity (and hence the construction of the political 'pantheon' gets uninteresting). It is when the exact nature of the revelation is not essential that one can find a shared basis for Jewish and Christian philosophy and when one can start building the new information technology which can lift earth closer to heaven. But then one must put any conflict between Christian and Jewish interests aside.

On this view, the event in the park could have been a human person who wanted to be a little friendly with me, and that 'explains' the correlations, or it could have been a divine revelation of e.g. the Madonna within the framework of what I had to believe could have been an ordinary human. In either case, this poetic revelation of aspect can be thought of as a case of 'higher order poetry' - a variant of the same phenomenon as for the distributional principles in the book "If you're going to København" in my Endmorgan Quartet.

One can compare this with the sonnet and time-form in my 'Birds to Saladin' with the heading in the form of four 'Discourse on High...' types (11.10.98). There is even mentioned that 'something happened on the 8th or the 9th', which in this case seems to be the visit to the chapel in Rue du Bac (it is well possible that I was there on the 8th or the 9th of August 2002). "I must read by the draft and have it verified indeed". The parallel text to the time-form includes (from King James): "therefore I sacrifice to the LORD all that openeth the matrix". Her name meant perhaps something like this matrix. The other part includes the parallel line "And it shall be for a sign unto thee upon thine hand, and for a memorial between thine eyes". We were sitting on each side of the memorial bench with the sculpture of Flaubert above and between us, perhaps as a sort of 'Meridian' granite like the stone against the M in my palms in Hammerfest in 1958 or 1959. Hence the fluid in the bottle which she showed me how to rub in the palms, and the revelation in Rue du Bac 1830. The rest of that parallel text (Exodus 13.9) tells about the poem she wrote there on the bench: "that the LORD's law may be in thy mouth: for with a strong hand hath the LORD brought thee out of Egypt". This is the theme of the parallel Hebrew text to the first book in the last part of my Endmorgan Quartet, the one called "Has the next millenium praxis?"

This means that the event in the park can be seen as a local function from the text in 'Lead lushions in a bowl', but also as a global function from the rest of the books in the work. This makes it comparable to the structure of 'If you're going to København'. But while the distributional phenomenon of the 'ratio poetry' in the latter has a reference to the history of poetry, for the event in the park it has a reference to the interface between historic and eternal reality. My guess is that it has a reference to the reality of the genetic space which is the topic of the diaspora issue, and that the event in the park is epistemologically affiliated with my poetic proof that Sachs and Celan are my genetic parents. This 'genetic space' would then relate to the historic reality such as the 'virtual text' in the word-distributional phenomenon relates to the factual printed text. The enigma for the 'København' book is the distributional phenomenon which cannot be rationally explained, and the enigma for the present case is the material existence of the revelation which occurs in such a way that it is hard to explain rationally. Those could be considered two cases of 'higher order poetry'. Which means poetry on a new level of poetic substance.

Click here for a photo of the Flaubert memorial with the bench in Jardin du Luxembourg.

As I mention in my ABC of politics, there is the story with Rosa Luxemburg who in january 1917 wrote a letter from the prison to Sophie Liebknecht which contained a PS - "Geschäftliches: Bitte schreiben Sie gleich, wieviel ich Ihnen in summa schuldig bin (zwei Bücher und Brosche, die wundervoll ist!). Dann wäre ich Ihnen sehr dankbar für ein Fläschchen Toilettenessig wieder und eine Puderquaste mit Flaum (ins Päckchen per Post)". She wrote the poem on a 'Post-it' paper.