There's Ecstasy in God Being One

Abstract

There's Ecstasy in God Being One Paul Miller Stephen (bio) With God-in-one distances between creation and judgment collapse, and since there's nothing stopping us-ongoing intensity, neurotic ongoing intensity marks not only the best Jewish poetry but simply hotpoetry, God's trademark unsingularity rippling and rippling.1 If God's one, time's blue toothed to portable eternity inhis or her belly [End Page 114] perhaps the portabilityof monotheism's and iconoclasm's literally lighter idol loads suit nomadic shepherds, and nonnegotiable, scorched earth, theocratic identification with and domination of a set place is an iconic, thus sacrilegious, elephant in the room.2 If God's one, I'm an other,3 a ghost jumping junk-to-junk,4"borrowing" boats like Mandelstam as James Bond,5 segueing observant, secular, wild if somewhat reserved Jewish feedback mechanisms, and powerfully unattached Judaisms.6You beat it, Red Sea parts, escape again, and Charles Bernstein's eyes light up. The Center for Jewish History asks I propose poetry events. Everyone I tell suggests they and their friends read,shy about linking religion and intense textual scrutiny,figuring the religion-text connection subject to fundamentalist manipulation,7 Charles, no religion but wildly liberating textual scrutiny,8 knows we'll talk"secular Jewish culture/radical poetic practice". Paul Miller Stephen Stephen Paul Miller is a Professor of English at St. John's University. His books include Being with a Bullet (Talisman), Skinny Eighth Avenue, (Marsh Hawk), The Bee Flies in May (Marsh Hawk), and Art Is Boring for the Same Reason We Stayed in Vietnam, and The Seventies Now (Duke University Press). He co-edited, with Daniel Morris, Secular Jewish Culture/Radical Poetic Practice (University of Alabama Press) and, with Terence Diggory, The Scene of My Selves: New Work on the New York School Poets (National Poetry Foundation). Footnotes 1. However one characterizes "Jewish poetry", those not identified as Jewish can write it. For instance, in Secular Jewish Culture/Radical Poetic Practice (Stephen Paul Miller, Daniel Morris, eds. University of Alabama Press, 2009), Hank Lazar describes Jewish qualities in Fanny Howe's work, Benjamin Friedlander construes St. Paul as an innovator within secular Judaism, Norman Fischer illustrates how a continuum between silence and articulation blends Jewish and Buddhist perspectives, Marjorie Perloff sees beyond simplistic historicizing to recognize Paul Celan and Wallace Stevens as poetic contemporaries, and my poem-essay points out Spalding Gray's self-portrayal as Jewish. 2. Anita Feldman, in a 2008 conversation, said, "some Israeli settlers have turned "their idea of "the land" into an icon, a sacred image, like the golden calf that the erring Hebrews set up as an object of worship. Tey've identified 'the land' as a sacred object replacing moral law and a Jewish commitment to justice. Remember the person in the audience [at the 2004 Center for Jewish History 'secular Jewish culture/radical poetic practice' panel] who faulted [End Page 115] Jewish writers for not 'making aliyah' to Israel? I think of her as someone who has replaced the Jewish devotion to justice with reverence for 'the land' as sacred". 3. To speak means to be forever on the road" (Osip Mandelstam, "Talking about Dante" [1933], trans. Clarence Brown and Robert Hughes, Delos, No. 6 [1971]: 75). 4. "The quality of poetry is determined by the rapidity and decisiveness with which it instills its command, its plan of action, into the instrumentless, dictionary, purely qualitative nature of word formation. One has to run across the whole width of the river, jammed with mobile Chinese junks sailing in various directions. This is how the meaning of poetic speech is created. Its route cannot be reconstructed by interrogating the boatmen: they will not tell how and why we were leaping from junk to junk" (Osip Mandelstam, "Talking about Dante", p. 66). 5. Like the Homeric depiction of Odysseus, the cinematic James Bond is a wandering man who is never at a loss", and, since James Joyce in perhaps the proto-postmodern English language text re-characterizes Odysseus as Jewish, through a twisted metaphoric logic, Bond can also be re-imagined as Jewish. 6. See Edward Mendelson, "New York Everyman" (book...