Searching for the Path

Crescent Earth, Apollo 11 on Return Trip

Crescent Earth, Apollo 11 on Return Trip

It was, I suppose, out of my reading, partly, in high school, of the religious scriptures of the world religions that my consciousness began to open up to other ways of life and thought, belief and faith, practice and sensibility. Later, in college, other classes in world religions and religious studies, Christian and otherwise, with continual reading of and beyond poets and writers, broadened my worldview, especially once I had found my way to the writings of Baha’u’llah.

Now I can clearly see that even back then I sensed the exclusivism implicit in the usual thinking about religion was not part of Abdu’l-Baha’s Interpretation of his father’s writings.  Abdu’l-Baha’s outlook was a wide and open embrace of humanity and all the great religions. He located “The Path” in all the great faiths, without the subsequent attempts by some Baha’i denominations to claim an exclusive authority and interpretation. It was Abdu’l-Baha’s emphasis on the unity and universal truth of all the ways to the Divine Being, the Great Mystery, that attracted me and struck a deep resonance in my soul.

Frederick Glaysher

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The Globe. A Journal.

Earth, Africa, Apollo 11

Earth, Africa, Apollo 11

As long ago as a couple of decades I thought of creating a literary journal named “The Globe,” but the time never seemed right, and I knew the required effort would interfere with my own study and writing. Being a very solitary individual and writer, I knew too I did not possess the gregariousness and patience needed to draw together a group of people of similar worldview, literary, artistic, political, and so on, that a publication must have. From very early as a writer, I realized I was largely on my own. Only Robert Hayden and I were able to understand one another, and even then I felt he failed to confront many issues of the highest import, especially in terms of the Baha’i Faith and its cultural and historical implications, especially its fanaticism, hidden out of view from the general public and even most Baha’is. The few other young Baha’i would-be artists I knew or heard of were hopelessly naive and incapable of independent thought and reflection. They had drunk the Kool-Aid, as proffered, nescient of the actual history of Abdul-Baha in the West. There were no other people of sympathetic vision, aesthetic, moral, spiritual, political, in terms of the United Nations or a cooperative body like it, to which I could turn and work together to create “The Globe.” The prevailing literary ethos of nihilism, as always, was entirely closed off in its conventional assumptions.

So I continued on my way. Solitude, study, reading and confronting the masters, wavering between the deepest ravages of self-doubt and despair and the exhilaration of vision and inspiration, writing as I could, struggling year after year to find and chart a different course, one true to my experience of life, attempting to embrace all of humanity, or as much of it as I might reach.

And now a new form comes along, over the last several years or decade, now well established, and the time is right for me to turn to and use it, enabling me to pick back up, as it were, in electronic form, the writer’s journal I left off from nearly thirty years ago, back then, after a decade of writing one. Perhaps this is The Globe I’ve wanted for so many years. And a way to speak to humankind.

Frederick Glaysher

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Crow Hunting

Earth from the Sea of Tranquility, Apollo 11

Earth from the Sea of Tranquility, Apollo 11

In my early chapbook of nine poems, Crow Hunting, from the 1970s, I found my voice and the worldview that was consonant with my experience of life, which I believe is why I’ve had to look back at it again, writing a preface for it, in order to move forward with The Parliament of Poets. It’s time I publish it now, perhaps before too long, in a limited edition.

Frederick Glaysher

Now available as an eChapbook.

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A Tool An Instrument

Worldview, Apollo 11

Worldview, Apollo 11

Saul Bellow in his 1987 Bennington College address Summations refers to Osip Mandelstam’s comment that “a worldview is a tool and instrument, like a hammer in the hands of a stonemason.” The average reader, Bellow goes on to say, looks always for the worldview, thinking it is everything, filing away the summation, its neat, little abstractions. I would say, many writers, too, make the mistake of fixating upon the worldview, the struggle to achieve an understanding of one’s experience that is not derivative from the prevailing one, a mere reflection of the already thought and written, though so much writing merely reflects the fads of the academy and literati.

Osip Mandelstam and Bellow are right. It is the hammer in the hand of the genuine artist or poet. Painfully, laboriously forged, the tool, once achieved, is no longer to the poet what is of first importance. The work of art, beyond the abstractions and the banalities of “a worldview,” reigns supreme, leads to new states of consciousness that cannot be summed up. They are what art is about.

Art transcends worldview.

Frederick Glaysher

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