Metaphrastic

A metaphrastic is a kind of alchemy in which prose morphs into a poem, in which a prosaic world transforms into rhyme and meter. Language or art can turn an incinerated container highrise into Anselm Kiefer’s Seven Celestial Towers, or a ruined city into a rippled beach.

The great hermetic painter Anselm Kiefer pairs the horror of the apocalypse with Van Gogh’s starry night and sunflowers, with the panoramic promise of Friedrich’s Sea of Ice, so that destruction morphs into salvation.

Kiefer’s duality stems from Robert Fludd’s ideas about energy. Fludd was ahead of his time; back in the 1600’s, he realized that everything was connected to everything else; his vision made him a heretic and the Church sought his destruction.

Fludd died in 1637. He believed in select theories of Paracelsus, Pythagoras, Meister Eckhart, the Cabbala. He picked out the best parts of cosmology and hermetics to attempt a theory of everything.

He believed there was a correspondence between our bodies and the heavenly bodies; we were part of a cosmic harmony.

As it became known that humanity is made from elements that can only be fabricated in stars (only stars have the higher temperatures necessary to create iron, for instance), we became starmen.

As we learned that planets and asteroids (even black holes) created sounds from their rotations, it became obvious that music originated from cosmic frequencies and that sound helped stabilize human metabolism.

Pythagoras’ belief in the music of the spheres, Plato’s belief in essences, even Buddhism shares a belief system with Fludd.

The Vatican never succeeded in discrediting Eckhard, where subsequent philosophers such as Schopenhauer and Jung have reinstated him as an Augustinian mystic misunderstood by his time.

Freed from the grime and stress of cities, my own ruins are reborn, maybe as runes, in the middle of the Pacific (all secret agents are required to have a bungalow in Koh Samui). Past summers, trade winds, palm trees, help me rebalance the chaos of cities, as Kiefer paints stars on an extinct field of ashes.

The soot at the start of the poem reforms into redemptive breezes and sun, so the poem transmutes from Armageddon to paradise, as Dorothy Sayers has stated that the point of Dante’s Inferno is his Paradiso.

I often transpose poems into prose in my fiction, as I try to create better worlds from what we’re given. Metaphrastics are one of the methods with which I reshape the world.

Another method I use is methexis (see my essay of that name): as Tom Stoppard did in his play Arcadia, I try to combine two texts to produce a third, phantom text which triangulates between the two visible bookends of the original plays: I read between the lines. Morton Feldman based his musical pieces on paintings, as Kandinsky based his paintings on musical pieces. This is ekphrasis, which I use to paint word portraits of musical structures. I call these transformations “word fugues.” An essence suggests a direction, but it’s not a direct equivalence.

All of this is a kind of multidisciplinary alchemy, exchanging atoms between essences. As Hamlet believed, matter isn’t lost; it is simply rearranged. I have a poem about that called “Arrangement.”

As the sociologist Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote, “Everything is connected to everything else.”

Anselm Kiefer has celebrated Fludd’s hermetics throughout much of his career, combining flowers and stars on immense canvases, in painted books, and in photographs, such as his version of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, stressing the dual themes of growth and devastation. Kiefer’s Foundation is called Eschaton, “the end of the world.” But out of annihilation, creation starts again, if quantum theories of the universe are proven accurate in a few billion light years.