Suspending the Muse: Toward the Authentic Article

By DEAN C. GARDNER

Suspending the Muse addresses issues regarding the authentic article of living in the present. It is an adventure into the unknown where the mind leaves the body to unearth what is concealed. There is a meaningful focus on redeeming time past through time present as time future becomes a grain of sand leading to an enlightened house of many rooms.

In this poetic work, author Dean Gardner uses dazzling wordplay and vivid imagery to pay homage to the artistic muse, that elusive spirit whose visits inspire great works and whose absences haunts those who create.

It is

That it was destiny

That brought him

To the threshold

Of the beyond

Through a portal

Found in the third eye

Of the muse

She led him

To the power

Of The Spirit of Truth

Allowing him

To go

Beyond phenomenal reality

As the celestial clocks

Yielded

To a parabola of time

Anyone who has pursued creative ventures will understand this look into the muses journey. Suspending the Muse is a quest for comprehension in the face of the unknown as self and muse battle with nothingness. It is an overture to postmodernism in both form and substance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Aug 23, 2017
• ISBN: 9781480851184

DEAN C. GARDNER

Dean C. Gardner, author of postmodern books, studied with Dr. Campbell Tatham, a phenomenologist, at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee for eight years, endowing him with the discipline to probe the unknown. Another foundation for his books is the work of traditional haiku poets, including Basho, Bucson and Issa - which led to Gardner's understanding of the Zen experience as the poetic leap in Western literature. Gardner is a Christian phenomenologist.

Book preview

CONTENTS

Introduction

Segment 1

Segment 2

Segment 3

Segment 4

Segment 5

Segment 6

Dedicated to Lydia,

my muse of years and years

INTRODUCTION

One of the messages from the 60’s was that art and theater, including all of written literature were dead; consequently, it was proposed that there would be a rise of postmodernism. Both prose and poetry joined the no longer.

The advance of postmodernism required a new view of what literature was meant to be. Where modernism was grounded in psychology and the portrayal of characters, postmodernism was grounded in the interaction of concepts as the rubric of phenomenology from Hegel, Husserl, Heideggar, and onto the literary theory of Derrida, Foulcoult, Merleau Ponty, Levi-Straus as well as other theorists of post WW2.

Prose was murdered by the rise of pulp fiction with emphasis upon entertainment value. Prose also was the predecessor of video games by allowing the reader to experience the virtual reality of the text. So, the reader used that virtual reality as an escape from existential being. Art had become the opiate of readers leading to escape from phenomenal reality.

Poetry experienced another type of death. For the most part, rhyme died from exhaustion.

Other forms of poetry became more narcissistic, confessional dribble of the rehashed and the stroking of the ego. However, there were a small number of poets of intense conceptual content, including Ezra Pound, T.S. Elliot and Wallace Stevens. These few returned integrity to poetry by teaching critical thinking skills. Of course, the multi-cultural influence also fed into the rubric of postmodernism with a strong factor from Japan, i.e. the haiku of Basho, Bucson, and Issa.

It should be noted that in this era of general collapse, music flourished.

So, postmodern literature pulled from the distant past to resurrect literature from the ash heap; hence, the pRoem, a return to the form of Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales, etc. In this sense, the pRoem is long narrative poetry. Early contemporary efforts show Howl by Ginsberg and The Four Quartets by Elliot, The Cantos by Pound as adequate forerunners of the form of postmodern literature. From the traditional haiku poets the play of juxtaposition and connectivity resulting in a Zen experience offers an essential component in postmodern fiction. Similar to the Zen experience is the crux of Western imagists, where idea next to another offered a poetic leap. Emily Dickinson is a good example of employing the poetic leap in her work. Another feature of postmodern fiction is the emphasis on matters of conceptualization, where ideas play against other ideas and their interaction rather than character development.

Fundamental to postmodern fiction is the emphasis on probing and questioning as the mode to explore phenomenon as the plot of the work. Postmodern literature is there not to entertain but is there to explore and teach. Postmodern fiction releases the bondage of bad faith by uncovering the role of the author. The role of the author of the work surfaces as a voice of the close at hand to shatter the illusion of virtual reality and by so doing leads to the exhaustion of phenomenal reality. From a structural point of view, postmodern fiction uses stanzas rather than paragraphs and each stanza consists of the sentence as the operative mode and elemental building block of progression and flow.

SEGMENT 1

It is

That it was destiny

That brought him

To the threshold

Of the beyond

Through a portal

Found in the third eye

Of the muse

She led him

To the power

Of The Spirit of Truth

Allowing him

To go

Beyond phenomenal reality

As the celestial clocks

Yielded

To a parabola of time

The piper was given

The gauntlet

Of another kind

And from there

He explored the unknown

With the muse

As his partner

So

They are twin beams

And she visits him

Through his dreams

While he visits her

As he trances

They are

Bound together forevermore

So

It is the power

Of The Word

That allows their connectivity

And it is

That a mansion awaits

For their place

In the house

Of The Unknown God

How

Sweet the authentic article

How

Sweet blessed assurance

*

As her third eye

Connects

To his dreams

The root

Of his being appears

In her looking glass

Massive surges

Liberate their minds

And things in themselves

Fill them

With the authentic article

As she empowers

The neural pathway

To being there

They soar on high

As their bond

Explores the integrated

Collective

The beyond is with them

Moving his form and substance

Into the unknown

She steps outside

Of herself

Out of her body

Becoming the image

Of wonder

In their body

One heart pounds

Truth

Into a parabola of time

As their bones

Dance into eternity

There is

A song between them

And it conveys

The secrets

Of being and nothingness

As their minds grow

Together

All and all become

The close at hand

An integrity shared

Through her inner eye

*

as a parabola of time aligns

with the celestial clocks

it is the advent

of a voyage

into the unknown

by stepping out of self

and onto the substance

of the muse

thunderous drum music

floods the moment

carrying being and time

through the other side

of what is there

leaving space behind

self follows the makings

of the drums

as mind sky rockets

into possibility

and the quick of thunder

fastens his mind

to the muse

here the spirit of truth untangles

the knot that ties

understanding to a millstone

and being slips

through the abyss

to a house of many mansions

a golden light glows

on and on

as the celestial clocks

leave no trace

in this now point

it is the eternal light

and it encompasses

forevermore

with the embrace

of the muse

basking in its radiance

being there fills

with amazing grace

as the manna of faith

nurtures the who

that is me

in my heart

the muse sings

*

Pyramiding through a looking glass

Accessing her third eye

He follows

The flight of a crow

And the muse directs it

Across horizons

And into countless dimensions

It is

A point of nonbeing

Where the mind separates

From the body

And visions

Of another phenomenal reality

Surfaces

As a mountsain

Of endless treasures

Embracing her grace

He enters deep trance

With her substance

Rubbing

The