Poetry like Two Ghazals falls under the category of ‘vain imagination’ (Romans 1.21.) This conduct follows from suppressing the truth of God’s eternal power. And this power the revelation of nature gives us an abundant witness of. The ‘foolish heart’ can become darkened so much that a ‘reprobate mind’ is the end result (verse 28.) John Thompson suffered from mania, depression, and paranoia before he died of drugs and booze (and suicide) in 1976 at the age of thirty-eight. After an unnamed illness (probably a stroke) Patrick Lane, his servile critic, lost his ability to think clearly enough to write, having attempted suicide several times throughout his life. He did put a novel out in 2018 before turning eighty. So recovery, this time and for awhile, was granted by the God of grace. But the God of grace is also the God of wrath. God is also like this: “According to their deeds, accordingly he will repay, fury to his adversaries, recompense to his enemies; to the islands he will repay recompense” (Isaiah 59.18.) The heart is darkened by vain imaginations; and, if persisted in, the practice of vainly imagining, or playing with ignis fatuus (foolish fire), leads to delusional thinking, abandonment, and, finally, the wrath of God (Romans 1.) The doltish fabrications of a postmodern poet are like these vain imaginations that are cursed by the Creator of man’s mind—our fearsome Creator who must be sought and found before the billows of death discomfit the mortal body to its core. Writing like in Two Ghazals is literary leprosy; every reader who comes across it should declare it to be unclean, and then walk away. This aberrant brand of writing, which is an insult to language and the image of God in man, should, for the sake of one’s mental wellbeing and ever-living soul, be abandoned speedily without looking back.
Writing dissonant verse might be fun for persons who do not highly aspire or who want to fit in somewhere. Coming up with words that clash instead of contribute is like a game without a goal. An aimless practice is bad enough. But like a woman counting calories or a man counting his ‘gains’ from weightlifting, writing discordant verse can become an obsession through the praise received for participating. Weightlifters are praised by other weightlifters in spite of hazarding their bodies through steroids. Anorexics are praised by other anorexics in spite of endangering theirs. Iconoclastic poets are praised by their likeminded, empty-headed brethren for wasting their minds inventing dissociative things to say. And all self-harming persons have enablers among non-practitioners. Who wants to hurt the feelings of a bodybuilder by telling him his muscles look grotesque? Who wants to sadden the calorie-counter by telling her she looks like a victim straight out of Auschwitz? Who wants to tell the proud poet that his poetry is illiterate madness? It is tempting to overlook the behavior, feign praise, and change the subject.
Any writer hoping to be noticed can get caught up in the vain practice of far out forms and techniques. Even way back in 1897, it could, with good reason, be asserted that: “The subject-matter of the art of the upper classes growing continually more and more limited, it has come at last to this, that to the artists of these exclusive classes it seems as if everything has already been said, and that to find anything new to say is impossible. And therefore, to freshen up this art, they look out for fresh forms…As soon as ever the art of the upper classes separated itself from universal art, a conviction arose that art may be art and yet be incomprehensible to the masses. And as soon as this position was admitted, it had inevitably to be admitted also that art may be intelligible only to the very smallest number of the elect, and, eventually, to two, or to one, of our nearest friends, or to oneself alone” (Leo Tolstoy, What is Art? pp. 73, 80.) Gibberish, like amnesia or senility, leads to isolation. We are one step further, even, than the author’s art being intelligible to ‘oneself alone.’ Even the author, now, doesn’t know what his poem means.
The fastest track to popularity is to write what the doorkeepers of literature want to see. But at what cost is it to write like a man gone mad? Should a writer sacrifice his intellect and soul by writing balderdash just because the dandies have decided that balderdash is the new genius? “This wretched brain gave way, and I became a wreck at random driven, without one glimpse of reason or of heaven” (Thomas Moore.) Write one poem that makes less sense than a few phrases of prose cobbled indiscriminately together, send it to a highbrow hipster whose platform sets the fashion, and you might be, on account of irresistible pride and magnetic fame, set on a path to invent crazy verses to the end of your sorry, unsaved life. Go down a road that you should never travel on, God might leave you to it, you will fill up your measure of iniquity, and it will make an eternity of difference.
