On Spinoza’s Concept of Love

For three months three Octobers ago I had decided I wanted to be a Spinoza guy. Everybody knows the feeling: you’re with a kid or a puppy and, goodness, you just want to squeeze them. Touch scientists have a word for this: cuteness aggression. Vivisectors of experience relate it to some caveperson impulse in the catchall black box of evolutionary history people are always rummaging for the rabbit in. Eh. I’d been teaching kindergarten for three years and I thought it had to do with love. I’d read Spinoza on a lark, it was for afternoon nap time under the live oaks in City Park and I had this waterlogged edition of Ethica, ordine geometrico demonstrata in the glovebox I reached for when the lullabies and stories I’d invent were too engaging to actually bring a nap on, the kind of private amusement kids appreciate in their caretakers without explanation. What I got from it is this: there’s a force in the universe that supersedes gravity, maybe it’s what we’d now call “weak nuclear force”, and it’s driving everything together into oneness. This is the final derangement of the world historical notion of monotheism, which has graduated to the heavy word I let loose casually a sentence ago “Universe” and Spinoza calls this force Love. I had a lot of responsibility when I was assimilating this information so I apologize to the Spinoza guys who have years under their belts if this is a little insulting a gloss. You get the cheek squeezing urge as a kind of acute impulse from this long flow of love, a curd suddenly congealing and floating to the top.

This is an essay about poetics. I’ve been totally caught up on this notion of “not getting” poetry, which is as naturalized as the ditzy schtick of being so bad at math or the giddiness of announcing your atheism in mixed crowds. So I’ve been excavating my frustration at this whole “not getting” poetry thing, which leaps up like reflux. First I thought it was a kind of snobbery, which I’m open to being guilty of. I’m not trying to be cute but when someone says they don’t get poetry they take on a kind of sickly pallor immediately in my eye, bony and desperate and bovine. It’s like someone confessing they’ve never eaten a peach. You can try to be polite about it but really what can they know about living? My friend who doesn’t get poetry was giving me relationship advice. She said to give a kind of ultimatum, him or me, name a special day like Christmas for the deadline, and to wait more than a single hysterical second before responding to their texts and, furthermore, to think a little before I spoke and a bunch of other stuff about protection and etiquette and the roast beef of life. Of course, I thought, you don’t really believe in love. It’s actually indignation. It’s not snobbery. It’s like: who do you think you are to “not get” poetry? How well grounded are your facts and what armor is your soul wearing? Who do you think you ARE that you are so untouchable? It’s called poetics, you know, the way a sweet potato roasts evening. Okay, I am trying to be cute.

Sometimes I’m in the same room with Ezra Pound and Confucius, I figure my job’s to keep the definitions of words in order. But I find myself a bad poet, then, coming back to the same old words that have been bugaboo for about six thousand years. Remember when everyone was wearing those pussy hats in the streets in 2016? It was like we hadn’t gotten past Mesopotamia 2 B.C., just the oldest form of political protest marching under the heavens with the icons of genitals. Positively back to basics. It was like we were praying for rain. Sure, it was a little silly and naive and useless but it felt like we were beginning. And I think we got embarrassed. We gave up. We didn’t get poetry for a couple of years. We got serious. I’ll make one political statement. The revolution will be hilarious. Or it won’t be any revolution at all. Well, I’m trying to do something just as stupid, just as essential, dragging the word love through my pages, trying to prop it up with all these excesses and diversions and talking about roasting sweet potatoes because it is the last day of October as I’m writing this after all. People have always felt this way about love and I enter into evidence pretty much all songs.

I want to mention a poet I’m reading, his name is Zachary Schomburg and I discovered him in a little Spork press chapbook in my herbivore High School years. He’s a Portland guy and if you were to categorize him you could say he’s writing New American Surrealism. The book’s called From the Fjords. My roommate in New Orleans was once told by a woman at the soap store to “cut out all white foods.” It’s rare you get such an alien and wondrous new way to think about food. I started making monochrome dinners. Purple potatoes and radicchio on a bed of red cabbage with raisins too. I once had a teacher who told me that everything I wrote, from lyric poetry to manifesto, was Food Writing. Anyway, it’s the purple meal that reminds me of Schomburg’s poetry, often presented in prose blocks, often containing narratives that end like the ploppingest haiku and therefore are unmistakably poetry. He’s kind of like an American Max Jacobs except he probably has a foot on him and never got caught up with Christ. It’s always unbelievable French people have a monopoly on surrealism when France isn’t even that surreal a place but America is. You could go mad with the sensibility of France, the prettiness and the spoons. But America has the sanity of an honest surrealism, of getting a little violent and forlorn when doom or unfairness rears its head. Calling spades spades is surreal. I read somewhere that Anatole France had the smallest ever recorded brain. This is a fact that I repeat all the time, am too afraid to verify, and brings me more joy than I can really explain. It operates like poetry. This is all how I began to get poetry, that’s why I am telling you, as everybody needs more convincing in these embarrassed days when we can’t even wear our genitals on our heads anymore. The more I get poetry the weaker the blue in the sky gets. Here’s what I mean. It’s like refractionary muscles, I mean the muscles that work in reverse and are constantly expending effort to keep things compact and taught. Yes, like the penis’ muscle but there are other examples. When the muscles weaken, with age or whatever, the weakness is latent. I mean the weakness is being even more out there, like lying so flat you cover North America. Even Spinoza passed right through his concepts and grinded lenses all his days. It was the Jewish G-d who said, when asked, “I yam what I yam.” A sweet potato.