Preface. & Psalm 1. New Species.

 Preface. Lyric Narrative. Prophetic Dialogue. Topography of Plateau, Valley and Mountain.

 

It was not at first realized that A Poetical Reading of the Psalms of David 1-41, written in 1985, must stand on its own without revision. What was to have been a revision has to hence be retitled, for it has become something else, although it derives from the Poetical Reading, it does not follow it. The consideration of Psalm 4 is an example, which only references the psalm in lying down to sleep. Likewise Psalm 1 has become a much deeper inquiry. The meditation must follow where it will.

 In such observations as the botanical humanity of Psalm 1 and the dialogue of Psalm 16 in heaven before the world began, dialogues begun as early as Psalm 2, the speech is David's, but the voices in his are a kind of forewriting, like the fore edge paintings on some books. Psalm 2 is opposite Psalm 1,  the rebel against the righteous revealed in the natural. These together prefigure the whole of the human position. The dialogue of Psalm 16 is embedded in the text, not set apart by paragraphs or quotes. In similar fashion Psalm 8 embeds the cosmos as a human domain in a simple metaphor of the hand.  The implied landscape of the traditional order of Psalms in the 20's and 30's suggests a topography of inner terrain where, like the mountains and valleys of Pilgrims Progress where Christian walks seeking the Promise, in a guise of David in his extremities, Messiah walks foregrounding the corporate person of every man and woman. It helps to have a plateau surrounded by mountains when we leave the valley below.  Such things are either so big they can't be seen or so small they elude the ear.

Insight Statutes

This understanding of the natural in the Psalms stems from having them read aloud in a two room public schoolhouse. Students would read from the front of the class at the beginning of the day such things as Lift up your heads O ye gates! A Poetical Reading  is like a hummingbird that drinks from a hose, a listening, as Isaiah says, that seeks the wakening of "my ears to listen as one being taught." Such matter makes the Psalmist declare, I have more insight than all my teachers, for I meditate upon your statutes (119.99), a revelation in words that is not words, more insight than all my teachers because you have exalted above all things your word and your name (138.2). These word shells transport to understanding more extraordinary than ever can be said in this extraordinary world.A Poetical Reading of the Psalms of David, considered  as poems with poetic research, finished the day before our first son Aeyrie was born, made available then in proof. Those literature classes also produced Between the Bath and the Body's End: Socrates Breaks the Decorum of Death,  the very first of more than twenty pieces that ensued in the fine elimae, also, A Shakespeare Code in Psalm 46 (19-25),and the Season of Troy's War, which has not yet appeared. Some of Poetical Reading circulated.  Mystical Quarterly rejected a take, but one of its referees, Elémire Zolla, translated it into Italian as Pianta celeste o stella terrestre: il retroterra biblico nel rapporto tra piante e stelle (tr. 2018) and published in his Rome journal, Conosceza religiosa (1983). Psalm 1 occurred as "New Species"  in Epiphany (Fall, 1987). A second effort with Psalms 8 and 16 at MQ was accepted, but that editor wrote a year and a half later to say  the magazine would fold. 
  Steve McCaffery and Karen Mac Cormack.
 Statement of Poetic Research
Toronto Research Group
Steve McCaffery   Archive

With the personal connected to giant forces that the pressures of earth reflect, the father is like the diamond pipe that stores the stone. Formed from pressures 250 miles down, it is delivered fine by fire. Creation reifies material from abstraction. Memory goes to touch the vein, Dante in kimberlite, Milton orbiting fallopians of birth and death, wind sprout lives, veins above and mitochondrial relations in the collective beneath. Once pressure forms the diamond, lava places it home. Head down in the mining, one arm to hold a rope to the surface as one foot presses the rim,  hung upside down in the vein, the other hand with a hammer chips the side. Communities built of kimberlites, families and tribes are forged from earth wherever kimberlites connect.

but the exile does not show his heart as he sits, "I and my frank round our cauldron." With the diamond tubes forgot, the sparking jewels, depth mining round descents brings them out. Look

"Diamonds form at a depth greater than 93 miles (150 kilometers) beneath the earth's surface. After their formation, diamonds are carried to the surface of the earth by volcanic activity. As this molten mixture of magma (molten rock), minerals, rock fragments, and diamonds approaches the earth's surface it begins to form an underground structure (pipe) that is shaped like a champagne-flute."http://apoeticalreadingofthepsalmsofdavid.blogspot.com/

 The psalms belong to the modern genre of the lyric narrative, a series of short poems joined together by one purpose with multiple interlocking themes. the object that the psalms have more than one author therefore cannot have one purpose does not reckon with the inspiration of the Spirit of God and the deep immersion these writers all felt in the same tradition. Take an example from Chapman and Marlowe. When Chapman finished Marlowe's Hero and Leander he essentially made a new poem not a continuation of the old. The biblical has a much less sense of individual identity than does the English, viewed singly to fulfill each other.the way all the psalms belong to one author David, in Book I,  Of the multiple interlocking themes we have already two, the vegetative new species and the Messianic new man, each of which takes further permutation throughout the psalms. A music of major and minor chords, crescendos and diminutives is important to the lyric narrative. Peaks of the messianic that stuck up like mountains from the textually landscaped valleys and plateaus below were explored: 2, 8, 16, 23, 24, 40, 41, etc

revising this three decades after writing makes it read like a tour of London from the top of an open air double decker bus, or down a canal in Venice, all extempore, the barker full of asides, but with good cheer so the parties will come back for more. There seems to be a lot of naked speaking herein, which seems attractive and naïve, not the clocked and hispid reaches of the moor. It also reads like a tour through a time long past of innocence when what we know of the world today had not crept in so profusely. So in the interim, of the nascent awareness of chaos become full blown criminal conspiracy of the authorities of all sorts, the critics, the governments, the world, ample documentation is elsewhere provided. Remember the first writing was pre CERN, pre Mandela effect, pre cell phone, pre internet! A totally different world and valuable in its first issue for being something we will not ever experience again, naivete without overt brainwash, although we have evidence to the contrary. Brainwash of the golden age, the Rhodes scholar, the elite is and has been pervasive since, and everybody has a date, but the 20^th century is the century of greatest deception when wars were glorified above and beyond and heroes melted into them. There is nostalgia but no going back to the era when  it was believed the authorities had our back, wanted our good, when for example Jung was thought to describe a universal unconscious of archetypes and not a series of delusions put into the human mind by crazy fallen angels. These awarenesses are kept to a minimum in the retake, even omitted, which however does benefit from the fast-brain style of the new world in its attempt to set syntax aright for the sake of the flow. Hopefully the asides and injunctions to the reader have survived. So the value of the retelling, which is the spirit of the renaissance, is that the bridge over time between 1985 and 2020 gives a view of the lost terrain below as we pass, but it is anchored in considerations of what these 41 psalms mean to a poet, who however also has been informed by a PhD, and a license to boast.

I was not worried with the vibrant interactions of the English text of the psalms first because there have been a thousand translations that differed only a little and second because none of the translators are really native speakers, nor can be, since they live out of time and place  of an age many deny anyway and treat the text like an apparition of themselves. Mere intellectual knowledge of a language divorced from itself is always a stilted affair at best. Tyndale and Wycliffe at least preserve the English of their time and place with vigor, but to pretend any translation is the thing itself is error. Only a native speaker can read between the lines. So these uses of the KJV that are too arbitrary at the same time are as plausible as any other more or less. What they do preserve from the psalm text is their own take of their time and place and speaker which is why the  text is there in the first place an aggregate of every reading ever made. There are two kinds of writing, those written after the effect and those before, like Psalm 22 and Psalm 16. Genesis 1-11 is written after the Garden I’m sorry to tell you. It is not a contemporaneous account, but has a purpose to debunk the rival views of creation in Sumer and Egypt. It is subtle and skillful in its refute of the many. The psalms are not rhetorical like this, they are celebratory

Introduction to Book I, 1-41

No note on the commentary can do better that to cite that found in the Soncino volumes like this one from Ezekiel that “this commentary is not concerned with the far-fetched critical interpretations or emendations of the text. Rabbinic exposition, as presented in the following pages, will be found in repeated instances of remove difficulties for the solution of which the modern critic has had resort to textual alteration (1950, xvi), that and Maionodies.
If revising this three decades after writing makes it read like a tour of London from the top of an open air double decker bus or down a canal in Venice, all extempore with the barker full of asides, the good cheer is the parties who come back for more. There seems to be a lot of naked speaking here, which seems attractive if naïve, not the clocked and hispid reaches of the moor. It also reads like a tour through a time long past of innocence when what we know of the world today had not blown up so profusely. So in the revision the nascent awareness of chaos becomes full blown criminal conspiracy of the authorities of all sorts, critics, governments, world. Ample documentation of these has been produced in the interim. Remember this first writing was pre CERN, pre Mandela effect, pre cell phone, pre internet! A totally different world and valuable in that issue for  being something we will not experience again, for the world is lost to naivete without overt brainwash,  although we have evidence to the contrary. Brainwash of the golden age, the Rhodes scholar, the elite everywhere has been pervasive since, and everybody has a date for it, but the 20^th century was the century of greatest deception when wars were glorified above and beyond and heroes melted into them. There is no going back to the era when  it was believed authorities had our back, wanted our good, when for example Jung was thought to describe a universal unconscious of archetypes and not a series of delusions put into the human mind by demented and impaired fallen angels. These awarenesses are kept to a minimum in the retake, which however do benefit from the fast-brain style of the new world in its attempt to set syntax  aright for the sake of  flow. Hopefully the asides and injunctions to the reader will survive. So the value of the retelling, which is the spirit of the renaissance, is that the bridge over time between 1985 and 2018 gives a view of the lost terrain below as we pass, but it is anchored in considerations of what these 41 psalms mean to a poet informed with a PhD, and a license to boot.
I was not worried with the vibrant interactions with the English text of the psalms, first because there have been a thousand translations that differed only a little and second because we can be pretty sure none of the translators are native speakers anyway, nor can be, since they live out of time and place of an age many deny even existed, and treat the text like an apparition of themselves. Only a native speaker can properly read between the lines.  Mere intellectual knowledge of a language divorced from itself is always stilted. Tyndale and Wycliffe at least preserve the English of their time and place with vigor, but to pretend any translation is the thing itself is an error. So these uses of the KJV are that too, arbitrary, but at the same time as plausible as any other more or less. What they do preserve from the psalm text is their own take of their time and place and speaker which is why the  text in the first place is an aggregate of every genuine reading ever made. There are two kinds of writing, those written after the effect and those before, like Psalm 22 or 16 or any of the Messianic Psalms. For instance, Genesis 1-11 is written after the Garden I’m sorry to tell you. It is not a contemporaneous account, but has a purpose to debunk the rival views of creation in Sumer and Egypt. It is subtle and skillful in its refute of the many. The psalms are not rhetorical like this, they are celebratory.

The thought of revising these 200 pages is made easier by the electric presence of the medium. Composing live as it were, with everything on the line, is a risk that stimulates  effort. I take it up because it seems that the time I thought to fit my writing has passed. It simply is what it is. That I have written before to magnify the glory of God in some way, or tried to do so, has also ensured that this work did not fit, none of it really. That as much appeared as did amazes me. It must be a function of some condition now passed. Some might call this the end of consciousness, leaving behind however a great deal more than ever appeared. In going back to the Psalms this catch up continues, except that the more that is written the larger the tail becomes. The years of the 80's produced more manuscripts than I'd like to mention, and that was well before all the Pennsylvania Dutch writing.

However it may be, much writing that followed  the Poetical Reading was starkly indebted to it, especially the Human Botany Review. Those years immediately prior to the Reading were also spent with Restorations of the Golden Age (1975), working at the Experimental Drug and Herb Garden (1977-80) and the writing of Native Texans (1984), a medicinal, social and philosophic contexts of plants of Texas and the southwest, so there was much unplanned preparation. My encounter with understanding the natural world must stem immeasurably more than I know from contemplation of these Psalms which I first heard in the two room Thornburg School read by students each morning from the front of the room. It is from then that I read in my own turn so many times,
 Lift up your heads, O ye gates; and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in.
⁸ Who is this King of glory? The Lord strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle.
⁹ Lift up your heads, O ye gates; even lift them up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in.
¹⁰ Who is this King of glory? The Lord of hosts, he is the King of glory.

 The two room public grammar school I attended began each day with Bible reading, the Lord's Prayer and Pledge of Allegiance. A class of ten was considered quite large. The students took turns reading the Bible from the front. Of course one chose the easiest and the shortest, so in the course of those years I read the same Psalms over and over aloud, reading them right into my memory where they took permanent root in the King James English. It is true I have added to these over the years, but I meditated on Psalm 1 for instance from before the age of ten and it is out of that experience that this Poetical Reading has come. Of course there were immediate causes in the circumstances just preceding its composition. These are spelled out in the entry at Encouragements.

From 1985 till now much has happened to deepen my understanding of those Psalms, not the least of which concerns my respect for the text and the inspiration of God in its writing, something no writer would pretend to talk about, since they use it and something like it on every chance at listening and writing what they hear. So first off, there is that, as Isaiah says, "he wakens my ears to listen as one being taught." So much greater is this that anything else. But there has been with it a refinement of the skill itself, from that and the constant practice. But also a philosophic maturation has occurred from having raised a family in these years so that of I didn’t before I learned what it feels like to undergo the various states of emotional extreme the Psalms portray. I don't think in this I am different from anyone else who has given up everything for their family and children, or risked their lives countless times in their defense, exercised foresight in the wee hours to save their lives and then seen them attribute to themselves in their naivete all those powers that have been poured into them.

I don't have any revelation to give about the inspiration of the text except a belief that it is so, and like a geologist working from theories of earth crust uses it to find oil, have practiced with that inspiration over a lifetime. It is like what Maimonides says about the likeness of the figure of a man above the throne in Ezekiel’s vision, that two different notions are joined in one word to indicate the upper and the lower, that is speech and silence, or speech without sound. As he says, “the divided likeness of man over the throne does not represent God, who is above the whole, but represents a part of the Creation….all the figures in this vision refer to the glory of the Lord, not to Himself, for God cannot be compared to anything.” The duality of the figure of the man expresses two opposite notions., ”the Intelligences, which are themselves without motion / but are the cause of all motion (chashmal), ‘ haste-pause’ one when considered by themselves, but  many when considered as causes and effects,--they are the source of all thought and speech, but do not speak.” (Guide,  III, viii). Does it help to put it like this that ‘In Hebrew tradition, language is first of all a spectacle. Revelation is, above all, seeing! And all the people saw the voices…” (Ex 20.18). The visible is the voices made writing.” (The Burnt Book. Marc-Alain Ouaknin,73) Note this about Maimonides saying that “the divided likeness of man over the throne does not represent God, who is above the whole, but represents a part of the Creation” which to ourselves presents a division which implies “the re-institution, the re-integration of every original thing.’ The coming of the Messiah is the accomplishment of the Redemption, the ‘return of all things to their original contact with God’ ( Lowy, Redemption Utopia, A Study in Elective Affinity) these things play with the oral and the written. It was not the oral law but presence appeared to Abraham, was in his bones. He was spoken to before Moses. When Sinai occurred, mere technicality, torah always was -written / un written, then revealed, repeated. Looked at from the final effect, inspiration is speech that creates speech, which I borrow from Levinas that ”the  unsaid is necessary for listening to remain thinking; or speech must also be an unsaid so that truth (or the word of God) does not consume those who listen, or the word of God must be able to enter, without causing danger for men, into the tongue and the language of men.” (Ouaknin, 16)

To me, the doubts raised by ignorance are like the supposed contradiction of Psalm 8 in the New Testament Book of Hebrews. It was Maimonides who showed me this resolution after I had sought the guidance of the author in it, as you can see when that piece is written. The audacity of thinking that God cares for anyone in particular is what thwarts the critic most. There is an outright rejection that God is good and that he delights to prove his word. One night, teaching a class of first grade boys, my own Aeyrie included, the previous day my house had been burglarized. I told them about it and spoke audaciously the words of the Psalm that I should see my accusers answered. This indeed happened within six months. It is one of three such burglars that in those days so answered my knowledge of the text into coming from these things as well.

Not enough can be said of maturity. It is hard gained and lives long after it has been tried. I hope to prove this.

One technicality, when the whole thing is done I will flip it so this entry is first. At the time of this composition beginnings were made into Book II of the Psalms. We shall have to see if these are developed.

The effort to retell the Psalms of David  of 1985 began at a site by that name, but it has changed to what is now called the Psalms on the Planet David, reflecting what Isaiah said, but what is written on the palms, engraved on His hands, and what is broadcast in the white fluorescence of KGB science is at war. A Poetical Reading of the Palms of David and all that might entail of knowledge of the One and his incarnation in time wrestles with the Neptune giants, so called, and confronts astrophysics and genetic cybernetic biology, that is so self-satisfied it has declared immortality upon itself and annihilation upon all of us

The tree of Psalm 1 is a new species that grows inside the human being in the natural and botanical processes of nourishment that is human photosynthesis and transpiration or in short, botanical humanity.  

Psalm 1 exemplifies the central biblical truth relating humanity and nature. Oddly, this truth is outside the maelstrom of Davidic oppositions; instead it directly concerns the true definition of the righteous. It tells us that the righteous man meditates "in His law day and night.” Our first impression of the righteous man is thus of a bookworm, also of one who rises at midnight to pray, but the law of the Lord is more than the ten commandments, the Pentateuch and the endless commentaries upon them. The poet sees God’s law everywhere in the heavens (Ps. 19:1-4) and in the earth, revealed with God in all natural processes: “He shall come down like rain on new mown grass” (Ps. 72:6).

The astronomical and botanical cycles of nature are posited in a verbal metaphor in Psalm 1, although the metaphor may be intended somehow literally. That heaven is a speech and an implicit law and statute we know from Psalm 19. Here the moon and the sun are grand examples, images of that divine law.  When the righteous meditate day and night they are not reading words on a page, but seeing and feeling in the universal natural drama everywhere God’s handiwork. Thus humanity is seen within, not outside these natural forces. The law in this greater context is characteristic of the natural but not the human world. The righteous meditate upon the one great law they are deeply involved in, not as indoor creatures, but outdoorsmen, Wordsworthians who seek the greater worship in a building not made with human hands. Their righteousness is cloaked, not displayed; eternal, not temporal; it is like a thought that lies too deep for human tears.

Out of this broadened sense of law comes our realization that the botanical analogy of Psalm 1 is more important than we had at first realized. It says that “he shall be like a tree.” The analogy is elaborated in the “tree,” “fruit,” and “leaf.” Each of these with the nourishing water must be understood in the general context. That God views man as a plant is immediately evident in the fact that “God planted a garden eastward in Eden” (Gen. 2:8). God is the first gardener and although Adam is enjoined to “dress it and to keep it” (Gen. 2:15) we may easily see that the important trees of the garden, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and (potentially) the tree of life, are within humanity. The garden outside of Adam in which he is placed is thus a mirror image of the garden within him or the garden that he is in fact. The expelled man is thus in the position of attempting self-germination, growth and harvest unless he returns to his original relation to the Creator-Gardener Who would perform these functions for him.

If we assume the Deity as the original gardener and man as His plant then we should view the human relation to God in vegetative terms, that is, in terms of seed, root, bough, branch, blossom, bud and harvest. Man himself may be symbolized in the plant or the tree or any of the specific varieties thereof, as well as the field in which he is grown. That he is a tree suggests many associations from the wooden “tree” of Christ’s passion to the tree of life of the New Jerusalem. He is like a tree and a gardener, but that the gardener also had a gardener seems to be the sense of Genesis.

Mary Magdalene, standing beside the open tomb, thought the risen Christ was the “gardener” and she made no mistake (John 20:15). Jesus wept in the Garden of Gethsemane for the “plants.” We observe a divine coincidence in the declaration of the man whose sight was restored: “I see men as trees walking” (Mk. 8:24). Thus  Thus we are nourished by the divine light (God) and water (Christ) that wells up within us (Jn. 4:14).

If the righteous man is a tree, then what kind? Since his leaf does not wither he is evergreen. Drought cannot occur beside the stream. If his “root” is strong and his “trunk,” he will withstand the flood and prevail. The fruit of this tree occurs “in season” as expected. His unwithering leaf represents his constancy and resistance against the changing seasons. Therein he is said to “prosper”” because he is evergreen. This idea is not exemplified only in Psalm 1. The natural botanical cycles occur throughout the biblical prophets in the form of a vegetative epic representing Israel. It is an epic, not merely an image or analogy. The godly evergreens are like living men!

The ungodly have a problem in Psalm 1. They are not like trees, though elsewhere in the psalms, the wicked do spread like the “green bay” (Ps. 37”35). In Psalm 1 they are like “chaff,” switching metaphors to the cycles of the production of wheat. The wicked are mere dust blown with the wind. No root, no branch, stalk or fruit, no wonder they cannot “stand in the judgment” (Ps. 1:5). They perish naturally, worth nothing but to preserve the true grain until harvest. While the chaff is a castoff, it is necessary to grain production. It is the outer shell that allows the wheat to ripen perfectly. Thus the ungodly are a part of the production of the divine fruit. Spiritually, in the human being, they may represent those tests and oppositions that squeeze in the ripening purity even while the elements, the seasons and rough weather, further tests and oppositions, bake the impurities out of the true see. The godly man emerges like the wheat head, whole and hardened. The Lord knows the way of the righteous.