New and Selected Poems, 1957-2011

Appendix

201 APPENDIX NOTES Science of the Unseen “The wise man sees in Self those that are alive and those that are dead.” In his Introduction to Patanjali’s Aphorisms of Yoga, translated by Shree Purohit Swami, W.B. Yeats quotes this line from the Chandogya-Upanishad. “Spirit alone has value, Spirit has no value. Eternity expresses itself through contradictions.” —W.B. Yeats Yeats’ book, The Rose, draws heavily on Rosicrucian symbolism. As a child, I had no inkling that the “Yeats” my father quoted was a poet. Up until the time I started college, Yeats, for me, was this Rosicrucian who wrote commentaries on texts my father brought into our previously Jewish home. Rosy Cross Father “We are the bees of the golden hive of the invisible.” The phrase originates in a letter by Rainer Maria Rilke concerning his Duino Elegies. Rilke writes “. . . It is our task to imprint this temporary, perishable earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again, ‘invisibly,’ inside us. We are the bees of the invisible. We wildly collect the honey of the visible, to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible. The Elegies show us at this work, the work of the continual conversion of the beloved visible and tangible world into the invisible vibrations and agitation of our own nature.” “There is man and woman and a third thing, too, in us,” says the poet. Here I must credit the amazing Jelaluddin Rumi. I am indebted to Paul Foster Case for his book, The True and Invisible Rosicrucian Order, which providesananalysisofboththepre-andpost-MasonRosicrucians...”CasehasdefinedRosicrucianism as “Christian Hermeticism allied with Kabbalah.” Dad’s journey from Orthodox Judaism to Rosicrucianism was not so great a stretch as I first imagined. Rosicrucian. AMORC, Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis. 202 v v v NOTE TO ROSICRUCIAN IN THE BASEMENT AND HEAVENLY SEX For my podiatrist father, Rosicrucianism is allied with Kabbalah—Jewish mysticism—and he began, following my mother’s death in 1948, to put himself “on the right track for union with the Higher Self” (his words). A small businessman practicing in a conservative Chicago neighborhood he began thinking and talking like the New Age hippies, yogis and writers I became familiar with a decade or two later. With respect to “After The Bypass” and “A Man Needs A Place To Stand,” I am thinking of W.B. Yeats. For Dad, Yeats was a Rosicrucian first and a poet second. This page intentionally left blank. This page intentionally left blank. This page intentionally left blank. This page intentionally left blank. This page intentionally left blank. ...