The Way into the Flowering Heart

 

 The Way into the Flowering invented itself as ancestors wove the outside in and the inside out, making one seamless garment of belief. Its mention is the result of a dream where, asked for a signature I signed, the Way of the Flower Heart. part of a long sequence of action that entailed riding atop a box car holding on to slats and a wild ride over dirt roads in Mexico with a ten year old boy, which no matter what the import was, to gather and write it into a book form to go with A Poetical Reading of the Psalms of David.

How I got to the flowering heart is you are born it it but then find it, so in the linens retrieved from the attic there was as clear an image as needed, but what it means has to felt in the life, in the body, in physiological changes in the psyche that when triggered go on their own to completion.  Internalized these become what they will, but the pic in all the linens and frakturs makes the fact plain.

ATTIC OR BASEMENT

Inquiry into this folk mind grasps for the unseen paradox that if unknown and unsigned, how art, anonymously more than itself,  multiplied by the numberless contradictions is the body, but what is its mind?

Path to the Pond

Say that folk art farmers are minnows in pools of market lakes and ponds, a minnow genera leading the soul that lacks the hubris gene, unknown because it wants to be, that hides in a fellow's home. There we seek the bigger thing, the unconscious brought to light, truest beauty of love, and follow this path to the pond. Among  remnants is a voice.

They hide their riches in plain sight. Not everybody calls them riches. Not everybody calls them plain, black suits and dresses, black and white caps. The image is prim if the dresses are not, stored in attics, basements, heads. Late in life old men queue to spend time in attic or basement, but who can decide? The wood stove with the old claw foot table was down with Harvey Mack's white cabinet, a banker who drove an ambulance and worked in reconstruction France, remained a carpenter the rest of his life. Jake's rough brown finished cabinet was down with the wood handled tools. The wood stove’s cookware was in the attic though, along with a childhood rocker in perfect condition, trunks on metal rollers, wardrobes and pottery that wouldn’t fit the above. They weren’t to be handled or named, the doll ensembles, patchwork quilts or the Mennonite dress of a slender girl, even you were an antiquarian. These artifacts collected themselves. One didn’t want to be worldly. Back up the truck with inscribed German books, linens of Pennsylvania folk aesthetic and a way of life.

The Pond

 Ancestry in the present looks back and down and squints at facts, motivations, half lights and grays But the elder looks forward and up, is nearly blind, wonders why they just don’t shut up. Looking down is one thing, but from below, reversed, looking up, brightness, clarity, color hurt the folk eye against the blue. It really only matters to the present, the one alive to plumb. That said, from sky down, folk appear reluctant to admit delight, couch desire for beauty and art almost contraire affirming a love they shun. The iron coat removed at night is decorated beneath. Apologies to the free artist pursuing it, doubt is no defense.

Crabs scuttle sideways, fish dart from rocks, loud noises, assumptions, keep the body under, but come up in habits of dress, submission to rigor in the sun. Can deep contain sky? Couldn't they have patched it up / Made compromises like we all must do? It's an old story. Provoked by audacity to doubt the light, from above they hide their glory. A seabed skilled at redirecting light hides in hand painted china, clothes in handmade dressers, canning jars, as though resigned, but these were their struggles to come ashore. This quietude of sea, its undertow, hid the intensity of a child. Wait a half century, you will understand.

Reserve overlays a spontaneity of heart, seeing and not saying, “here’s the tale, you won’t remember it,” survival technique for people who lived in the community of centuries. Mortality was quick, lives sudden. Families lost children, skin cracked and body became a dowage. Beauty walked this way and hid as best she could, but with no aids to forget.

The Pond Is the Sea

Reversal of viewpoints repeats in every genome. Soul comes up from sea to live on land, recedes to origins.
We look at the lives that preceded ours but they are not our own. We too rise from the sea, and sink back down, view ourselves ascend but go into life submerged.

Coming out, hyperbole develops. Lines increase with contexts, then reverse, converge to a focus that generations had a purpose to reveal, which could be named and attitudes repeated, but best not tell. Let details, artifacts, contexts speak. Let each generation name its history. The name is the same.

Each one views the positive, but present and past are opposed. The modern predicated on the past takes freedom and rights for granted, knows nothing else, but forebears struggled, sacrificed to produce this grant.
The debt of gratitude with the present tempts to fault fathers and mothers for not being like themselves.

They are not like us. We would not be us without them.

10. Mystical Heart Diagrams of Paul Kaym

 

The mystical heart diagrams of Paul Kaym 

http://www.jacobboehmeonline.com/paul_kaym

 

 @ Levity

The Helleleuchtender Hertzens-Spiegel, (A Bright, Shining Heart-Mirror), Amsterdam and Gdansk, Heinrich Betkius,1680, a visual interpretation of John Tauler, in the form of sixteen copper-plate engravings. is thought have been been compiled and edited by Paul Kaym from writings of Abraham von Franckenberg . The title page indicates that it written on the doctrine of Johannes Tauler (an "illuminated" 14th century German mystic), but it takes much from the mystical Jakob Boehme. Kaym had written to Boehme in 1620 asking him about the 'end of time', and was answered in letters 8 and 11 of Boehme's, later published, Epistles.  (numbers 4 and 5 in Collection 1 of THE EPISTLES OF JACOB BOEHME) which Kaym published as OF THE END TIMES.  

Time has ended over and over since then. Kaym also wrote commentaries on the Song of Songs and the Book of Revelation. He is called an eschatologist and a theosophist, believed in the thousand years, an immanent end of the world and dissed the organized rituals of religion for inward illumination for spiritual growth. He held internal, inward and inner,  internal absolution, inward Baptism, and inner union with the divine. Sounds like Matthius Bauman, born just after.  Helleleuchtender Hertzens-Spiegel is a spiritual journey of the human heart in images of obstacles of enlightenment. The sixteen images were most likely engraved by Nicolaus Häublin, who illustrated works for German followers of Boehme.

The Mystical Heart Diagrams of Paul Kaym @ Jacob boehme online

The following are from a 1705 Amsterdam edition which includes only the first 14 diagrams. Nos. XV and XVI are taken from adern facsimi

Brightly illuminating Hertzens mirror: by means of a threefold presentation ..., I. The Erknnnis, II. The exercise, and then III. The secret of true godliness, that is, the whole act, Krafft and Hertzens theologia ... with highly valuable Kupffer figures ..., including a short-fisted yet complete prayer booklet, or devotional spear

 by Wehrd, N. of ; Tauler, Johannes, ca. 1300-1361

Publication date 1680

Topics Christian life

Publisher Amsterdam and Franckfurt: Bey Johann Bielcken, Buchhändl.


Reference:  
Divine Diagrams: The Manuscripts and Drawings of Paul Lautensack (1477/78-1558). Berthold Kress

Norwegian Dower Chest, 1889

A  hand made painted and rosemaled decorated Norwegian immigrant dower chest inscribed with the name Magdeli Jahns dr [dotter] Laupsa 1889.

To Display this chest the last day of the old year ending, the new year beginning, both chest and year represent a way of life that you may think no longer exists, but it does, and is chronicled here, close on the heels of present virtuality. An app where speech itself is superseded and thought is made into text. However, since you don't know what you think until you speak, the mind is essentially inchoate in communicating with its physical vessel without the medium of speech, and must make simple its multifarious instructions to communicate with the physical--that is the purpose to illustrate how this happens in the speech and writing and writing of this chest. Some pains are taken to explain this in  Language In Voices Out and The Alien Voice.

It seems this chest was made for the young woman Magdeli to come to America, if only because that is where it ended up, in Prescott, Arizona, at an auction with the effects of an old family. It had another box on top as it rested on the auction floor. We removed this and stood guard to prevent any further scratches. It is painted a blue swirl

on the inside top and till, and down two thirds toward the bottom. Two folio sized pages of writing were folded up inside the till. The writing was in ink, in a flowing assured hand on a sturdy ruled tablet paper. I scanned it at the time and it seemed a meditation upon a wedding, hence, a dower chest, but it celebrates a dower for the Wedding of Christ and the church. The writing references King Solomon, but with such poetic speaking as if it were written by Donne with the assurance of Blake. The writing of the decorated outside is Norwegian, but this written proclamation is in British, as is clear from its spellings. No results yet for the author, but a number of efforts were tried. 

For anybody who loves Pennsylvania chests, this chest and its decoration offer contrasts and similarities of several kinds. It feels as if it was hand made by her father from thick barn wood. The bottoms boards have shrunk. It is held by irregularly spaced dovetails and black  iron hasps, hinges and lock. The front is rosemaled, the background and the whole painted brown, and looks as if the front were varnished. It is painted black below and above the center hasp in front and up the sides to mimic the ironwork.

Both floral designs of the front panel are hand painted with slight differences. Leaves form orange swirls downward to meet black swirls coming up from the pedestal base or foot of the design. Each panel is enclosed in squares of orange.

Flower petals go up the black strips on the ends painted to look like metal, also in the center under the lock, which is in the shape of a heart, further evidence of dower.

The whole is painted brown with an overlay of varnish. The sides are irregularly dovetailed, showing they were hand done. Metal straps hinged in the back extend over and down the top from the back to the lip.

 The content suggests Donne. The British spelling of centre in the third paragraph suggests that generic origin. The fourth paragraph, "before us today" suggests a public address, a sermon. The many references to her attire are bolded to show the fine linen in every such chest. 

  ***

This writing  found in the till of a hand made painted decorated immigrant (Norwegian) trunk, that is, a dower chest, inscribed with the name Magdeli Jahns dr[dotter] Laupsa 1889 purchased at auction January 2007 is a prophecy of what is to come.

 Here is the text:
Eph 5- 15-21  Matt 22. 1-14 “Come behold King Solomon, with the crown wherewith his mother crowned him in the day of his espousals, in the day of the rejoicing of his heart.”

It was written for Him, who was greater than Solomon. Mother earth of whose substance his body is composed—thrust a crown of thorns upon his head, in the day of His suffering and death. He would not take the crown before His resurrection, because in His death, all nature died: in His resurrection the new creation first appeared. 

The resurrection of Jesus was His true divine birth as man into that condition in which God had determined that man should be. Jesus is the only true man, the only one, on whom the eye of God can rest with satisfaction, the only one who fulfills God’s purpose when He said “Let us make man in our image.” 

Around Him all the cycles of time revolve, all the purposes of God from the beginning (when there was no man) centre in Him. All the mighty acts of God in heaven and earth and under earth have in Him their chief doer. Is there treasure hid in the field? He it is who searches for it. Is there a goodly pearl? He is the merchant, who sells all that He has, that He may buy that pearl. Is there a sheep lost from the fold of God? He it is who leaves the ninety and nine who never strayed and seeks the lost one till he finds it and bringeth it home on his shoulders rejoicing. A world restored! Not one of them is lost.

And so we have before us today the climax, the crowning act in the salvation of our race, the marriage of the King’s son, and His Coronation.

He would not take the crown when offered it upon earth! He would not take the crown when He sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high! He would not take the crown without His bride. 

The prophetic scriptures give us two views of the woman the church; the one sits a queen before the time without Her Lord, without them who wait their resurrection. Of the other it is said  “Unto her it was granted that she should clothed in fine linen, clean and white for the fine linen is the righteousness of saints. It is the wedding garment provided by the King. The King’s servants clothe the guests therewith freely.

 It is not a splendid vesture covering filthy rags, the defilement remaining beneath such a condition would be horrible even upon the earth, how much more so in the presence of the King? It is the righteousness of Christ imputed to us, imparted to us, in wrought in us. The righteousness of Christ indeed! Made effectual by the Holy Ghost in purging out the old nature, and assimilating our character with His so that we also become righteous.

It is a gradual painful self sacrificing work but necessary for we know that “without holiness, no man will see the Lord” and into those pure gates “Entereth nothing that defileth or maketh a lie.” 

The King’s daughter is all glorious within; his clothing is of wrought gold.” She shall be brought unto the King in raiment of needle work with gladness and rejoicing shall they be brought, they shall enter into the King’s palace. Instead of thy fathers shall by thy children, whom thou mayest make princes in all the earth – when the First fruits are caught away—there is heard a loud voice in Heaven saying “Now is come salvation and strength, and the Kingdom of God, and the power of his Christ wherefore rejoice ye heavens, and ye that dwell in them.

When Babylon is destroyed – “the four and twenty elders, and the four living creatures, fall down and worship God that sat upon the throne saying Amen, hallelujah and a voice came out of the throne saying Praise our God all ye his servants small & great, and I heard the voice of a great multitude, and as the voice of great waters, and as the voice of might thunderings saying Allelujah For the Lord God omnipotent reigneth. Let us be glad and rejoice, and give honour to Him For the marriage of the Lamb is come, and His wife hath made herself ready- Then shall the Heavens rejoice and the earth be glad. Then shall the sea roar and the fullness thereof.” 

            Then shall creation which once grew for Him a crown of thorns yield Him such honour, that it shall be said to all the intelligent beings around the throne of God “Come see King Solomon with the crown wherewith his mother crowned Him, in the day of His espousals, in the day of the rejoicing of His heart.

When we meditate on these things we think, who is sufficient for them? Let us who are strengthened by the Cup of Salvation, and the bread of everlasting life answer joyfully By the grace of God we are.

And unto the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost only as be ascribed in the Church all honour & glory, might, majesty, dominion and blessing now henceforth and forever. Amen.

 Let this be the call for the new year. We no more have such chest but shall get them.

After bidding for the chest we found the  marriage troth handwritten in the till:

 “Come behold King Solomon, with the crown wherewith his mother crowned
 him in the day of his espousals, in the day of the rejoicing of his heart.”

 Chests of old wood, fraktur, rosemaling, folk arts are as extinct to us as electricity soon enough. The new chair of the Joint Chiefs, Martin Dempsey, worries that the lack of redundancy in the internet puts all our social-technical systems at risk. Redundancy means here also that books, chests, linens, crafts, even writing itself, all things done by hand, set aside by the virtual machine invention will incapacitate society in their loss, for there is an app where typing is superseded and speech is automatically translated to text. This results in much loss of mental clarity and depth, for syntactic relations make new pathways in the brain that establish cognitive grasp.

 Comparisons to follow in the manufacture of brain pathways Faulkner's sentences produce great mental strength in those who read them.

Acq 2007

2. Way Into The Flowering Heart

This is the same double day lily that grew in Anna's garden in Media but which Elizabeth revealed came originally from Uncle George's farm in Worcester, home of the Schwenkfelder emphasis on inner spirituality over outward form. They brought saffron to America and declined amalgamation with the United Church that swallowed most of the other pietistic groups. Their pastors were chosen by lot from the congregation like Mennonites. Several of Uncle George Reiff's daughters, Katie, Lena and Susie, were members.

 

 

 

 

Raising Hands with the Mind

The scandal of the flowering heart has always been Christ, His audacious life and His blood. Interpreted and taken every way in the art of the flowering heart in fraktar, linen, wood, stone, forge and even in words, it is a Pennsylvania scandal, starts in Philadelphia and spreads west, leaving the bodies of ancestors all along the way in Northwood Cemetery, West laurel hill, Methacton Mennonite Cemetery, Salford Mennonite Cemetery. Lower Skippack Mennonite Cemetery, Old Mennonite Cemetery of Hereford (Bally).

A lily is the centerpiece of this imagination that transfers Christ and His redemption to nature. Perhaps the likeness is more than symbolic. Among architectures of furnished rooms and philosophies of hymns, gardens and kitchens, this sacrament is the inner garment of earth.

The inward care of earth, the great poem of earth that remains to be written, Wallace Stevens says in The Necessary Angel), finds its unspoken search of the  devotional attitude flowering in Johann Arndt's Paradies Gartlein, the book that would not burn (Sachse, German Sectarians, I, 245, and in Gerhard Tersteegen's Spiritual Flower Garden of the Inner Soul (Geistliches Blumen-Gärtlein inniger Seelen, 1729, Germantown 1747), which was also sung. So if it is said that “Pennsylvania German folk art is basically spiritual in concept and its motifs and designs are non-representational expressions of traditional Christian imagery” (Stoudt, vii),  there is some likeness here with theologian Cornelius van Til calling it a Christian earth along with a Christian moon and sun. Citing Stoudt in defense of the lily is a little like taking Wallace Stevens as he is, a Pennsylvania Dutchman, for we delight to equivocate Dutch men. Stoudt says that when the underlying faith of this people was lost, so was its art. Wallace Stevens also changed from a Berks County farmer to a poetry sophisticate.

If you're of this folk you will be feeling better when you understand that before its elaboration in the writing of Boehme and in Pennsylvania's Ephrata Cloister the lily in the hymns and gardens is an image from the Song of Songs . This inner garden of the larger medieval setting of the terrestrial paradise, of  the German Minnesong and baroque German religious poets (Stoudt, 56), Bernard of Clairvaux and even more obscure Dionysian Neoplatonists, contemplated the lily much as did the English metaphysical poets. Hymnists and poets “escaped to illuminated writings, to the decorated chest, and to pottery” (Stoudt, 92). So a four fold progression accounts the Bible, Boehme, hymns and folk art.

Blossoming the Lily

Fraktur

 As its primary philosopher, Jacob Boehme, was vexed with the soil of this flowering, for the lily was of the earth. "A fair flower grows out of the rough earth which is [also] not like the earth, but declares by its beauty the power of the earth, and how it is mixed of good and evil; so also is every man, who, out of the animal, wild, earthly nature and quality, is born again so as to become the right image of God."

This flower was to the soil what the human was to the animal, except that man was also a plant. For Boehme the image of God in man in the earth emerged as if from a plant: "For those who are a growth of such a kind, and are shooting forth into the fair lily in the kingdom of God and are in process of birth, have we written this book” (Jacob Boehme, Six Theosophic Points, 4). So "he will blossom like a lily" (Hosea 14.5) making a paradise where none was before. This imaging of the man as a plant overcame the notion that nature was tainted with the human. As all creation groans and travails for its redemption,  the man is both its fall and its rise.

A flowering heart would connote a flowering mind much as the mystical heart diagrams of Paul Kaym, Helleleuchtender Hertzens-Spiegel (1680) give as a series of heart-head images engraved by Nicolaus Häublin, who illustrated the works of Boehme. Many works of alchemy find comfort in Boehme, who exchanged letters with Kaym whose16 engravings showing how the heart is attacked,  receiving light waves from the sun and moon, as in letters 8 and 11 of Boehme's, later published, Epistles. Paul Kaym had written to Boehme in 1620 asking him about the 'end of time', and was so answered. Kaym also wrote  commentaries on the Song of Songs and the Book of Revelation. That these  are concomitant awith alchemical texts or other mystical Boehme letters is irrelevant to the fact an air clogged with unseen spiritual beings. The study of alchemical texts cannot produce such life altering effects, it rather defeats them, since the person is bogged in rituals and sacrifices that only embroiled them further in darkness, as witnessed by the brows of patrons at S.  Weiser books. Why do the rich and the royal families seek alchemy then, if it’s only for profit? Because they have no other means of life.

 The lily as an image of nature's redemption, is not however drawn strictly as a botanical lily. This Lily is unknown, a stylized “use of natural events and objects to describe spiritual conditions." Stoudt said that such collective images underlay the life of the Pennsylvania Dutch in hymns, flowers, pottery and linens and “produced an American decorative art which, with few minor exceptions, is the only indigenous art of its kind in our land” (3).

The last thing Pennsylvania Germans  would want to seem is spiritual, which partly explains the discredit Stoudt suffered even if the spiritual intellectuals, Conrad Beissel (1691-1768), baker, founder of Ephrata and Boehme, a shoemaker, were peasants. Boehme influenced Milton, Newton and Emerson, they say, and was early translated to English (1647-1661). At the other end of the centuries Wallace Stevens, baptized at his death, reaffirmed his early life in this tradition of luminous indicia of imagination in his The Necessary Angel, a reflowering from his mother's Bible. The hymnals sang of die unfgehende lilie, the opening lily, the lilen-Zweig, the lily twig and wohlriechenden lilen, the fragrant ones (Stoudt, 85, 89, 95). This inescapable Dutch “tulip,” as Stoudt has it, was an “inarticulate belief in [all] the artist’s heart.” (Pennsylvania German Folk Art, 15).

Detail, silver napkin ring Berks County c. 1880

Pennsylvania German art embodies a spirit of  Inwendigkeit, interior, innerness that decides everything material and immaterial by the mind. Marriage is an imagination, dress an imagination, praising God is an imagination, raising hands with the mind and with the arms. All things are first and last imagined, whether household effects such as chests, linen, plates, or  fraktur art, all celebrate an “uncontaminated good within natural reality” (Stoudt, Pennsylvania German Folk Art, 101). Is it too much to say all human life is this way?

6. The Inself Border. Good Friday Riding Westward. Leaf Meditation.

Can  word be both text and the image,  graffiti over-top? We cannot deny the inself in three dimensions even if it lives in four. The truest representation is the sculpted. A scientist claims to the artist, "you made the leaf, but I discovered it," but the sculptor replies, "you described it, plucked it, preserved it in glue. It is a construct of your mind and mine," but neither of them did. Neither have traveled to that far country from which when you return you cannot speak and if you did no one would believe.

  The Branch cries out to the image seen and the word spoken and the word longs to be seen. Fraktur text and image twine these together, Concrete poems, vispo pretend  to do it on paper and type. Blake illustrates. We must know the leaf inself alive. The botanist who presses a leaf  must know the leaf alive, but image and word are incompatible.

 The Cover

So the Inself concedes the Out as leaf, or in human terms, mask, a covering of face for what exists but cannot be seen. It can't be seen because it is thought which does not exist in language, but in image. 

This is all Levinas before I knew him.

Walking one side of this border, up against it, cross immediately the other side.

The Speech of Corn

Twine a poem about a branch,
it will not leaf.
Tendrils do not speak.
 The Inself  speaks the plant.
What is the speech of corn?

What says aloe? Every thing has breath. Plants breathe light. THOSE WHO LOOK TO HIM ARE RADIANT.  I will consider in my dwelling place like a clear heat upon herbs, a cloud of dew in the midst of harvest.

 At Altamira many millennia of horses and bulls had no words, but rhythm and color. They had no language, nothing written the stones cry.  Breuil says art was an extension of hunt, the worship of life, a celebration.

 These matter when the content is greater than itself. The words show something more than mundane. Why else make the effort?  Charles Williams designs the figure of a woman and stretches it over the kingdom of Logres, over all of Europe (see the endpapers of Taliessin Through Logres, Oxford, 1938), like the Cave at Altamira and its bison, except Williams' Europe is Logres, Arthur's kingdom, and did not exist as the bison in the real, or it did and now only remains expressed on the cave wall, as the bison, Williams' Taliesin.

Inself sounds like Inscape. A true statement about Hopkins is that "seen from one point of view Hopkins' work is some dozen nearly perfect lyrics. Seen from another perspective it is a heterogeneous collection of documents...but within this seemingly chaotic mass we can detect a certain persistent structure." J. Hillis Miller. This describes life on the borders. 

Take the border between image and word.

The verbal is the interior leaf,  

images the internal sense,

the leaf inself of the seen,

the leaf inseen of the self.