"The Eclipse of Meaning" by Elijah Perseus Blumov

Topics discussed in this episode include:

 -My life story
-Poetic "throat-clearing" 
-Curtal sonnets 
-Why sonnets are the supreme lyric form 
-English vs. Italian sonnets 
-I'm basically Aristotle 
-The inscrutability of life and the nihilist's overreaction 
-The tragic mistake behind global warming and the meat industry 
-What does autochthonic mean?? 
-Sartre can eat my shorts 
-Aseity 
-The meaning of meaning 
-Semiotics, as if I wasn't pretentious enough 
-The impossibility of an immanent being perceiving or understanding a transcendent being 
-Science is not revelation 
-Apophatic theology 
-The burden of intelligence 
-It is what it is, and that means something 
-Lunar action at a distance 
-God as Solar Eclipse 
-My title is clever, guys. 

Text of poem: 

The Eclipse of Meaning 

The world may be unyielding, mute, deaf, blind 
to its own cries, and still no claim will hold 
so bold to preach no meaning— meaning meaning 
autochthonic being we can find. 
This truth, of which we cannot speak, we learn 
as much through logic as sublime emotion; 
we drown amidst excess of thoughts, but know 
that something sets these tides of ours in motion. 
Some terrifying moon in this abyss… 
dark forever, but too bright to miss. 

Transcript

Versecraft Episode 10: “The Eclipse of Meaning” by Elijah Perseus Blumov 

I have a bit of a special episode for you all today, as you can probably tell by the title. To celebrate the tenth episode of Versecraft, I’ve decided to read and analyze one of my own poems, and I’m thinking that I’d like to do this every tenth episode or so. In most podcasts, a large part of what draws listeners in is not the content per se but a personality engaging with the content. In my podcast, I’ve tried to put content first in an effort to be as compact and educational as possible, but I also recognize that speech becomes more engaging when people feel like they’re acquainted with the speaker. Today’s episode then is an opportunity to tell you a little bit about myself and share some of my artwork and process with you. I hope you enjoy. 

As always, let’s start with some background on the poet.  Elijah Perseus Blumov was born in New York City in 1995 and is thankfully still alive. He spent his childhood in Austin, Texas, where he learned to adore the heat of chili peppers and despise the heat of the sun. He expressed at an early age a love for mythology and ancient and medieval history, and originally thought he was going to be a historian. Due to a positive experience with puberty, in early adolescence he became cocky and egotistical, and as such became a theatre kid and an avid fan of Hip Hop. These preoccupations followed him to high school, and for a while he actually wrote and recorded his own rap music and founded a successful DJing company with his best friend. Other than a couple of poems written in middle school, His experience as a rapper was his first true exposure to the joys of writing in rhythm and rhyme, and he has not lost his passion for it since. 

Following high school, he took a gap year before college and lived in New York City by himself. This proved to be a formative experience in several ways. He slowly let go of Hip Hop to embrace Heavy Metal, a shift which proved decisive after concert-going became his primary social outlet amidst a routine of solitude. Metal, with its epic atmosphere, dark themes, and warrior mentality, appealed both to his long-time interest in mythology, history, and adventure as well as his developing spiritual angst and desire to explore his masculinity. During this time, he also experimented with bodybuilding, and took psychedelics for the first time. This latter activity dramatically awoke in him a desire to understand the truth of reality, and he became intensely interested in philosophy. Once in college, he quickly discovered that his patience for the theatre community had worn thin, and because of his newfound desires to compose Metal music and explore metaphysics, he became a double major in Classical music and philosophy. At this time, it was common for him to express the idea that these majors represented two sides of the same coin, the exploration of reality and human nature through intuitive feeling and abstract cognition, respectively. 

Though he had always loved reading and thrived in his English classes, he still had not developed a deep desire to pursue literature. This changed abruptly about midway through college, due to the influence of a brilliant friend and roommate who exposed him, for the first time, to what a passion for poetry could look like. As with most new things that interested him, he dove in head first, and began to read and write poetry with a fury, channeling the muse which he had once harnessed for rap and metal lyrics into a literary hobby. Initially taking inspiration from romantic, decadent, and mystical poetry as well as his own psychedelic experience, and later from the conceptual wit and formal poise of the Metaphysical poets, his grasp of the craft of verse remained limited by his lack of formal study to what osmosis he obtained through his copious reading and writing, and he lingered in this state for quite a while. After an aimless and mostly unemployed year after college, he moved back to Austin to live with his long-distance girlfriend, now fiancée. During this time, he became a bookseller and got into a prominent low-residency MFA program in Creative Writing, which he began attending over email and Zoom months after the beginning of the pandemic. 

Just prior to his enrollment, he had had what is to date his most important artistic breakthrough— during quarantine he had read every book by the famous literary critic Yvor Winters, a thinker who emphasized the importance of metrical and formal mastery, the regulation of emotion by reason, the responsible and precise use of language, and the moral dimension of art-making. These were as revelations to our young poet, who swiftly accommodated the Wintersian ethic to his own practice, ruthlessly reforming himself until he could meet his new and much higher standards of craftsmanship. It was thus with the mindset of a rigorous and austere classicism that he pursued his degree in creative writing, which put him somewhat at odds with his peers and professors who favored looser techniques and more emotion-driven, personal subject matter. Nevertheless, he had a wonderful experience, read deeply, wrote much, and improved his artistry significantly. 

After two years in Austin, he and his girlfriend moved together to New York City, where he spent one year as a cheesemonger in midtown Manhattan and finished his degree. After proposing to his girlfriend on a vacation in Belgium, the affianced man and woman moved to Cleveland, Ohio so that the latter could pursue a master’s degree in Art History. The former now works in another lovely independent bookstore. And that, dear listener, is where you find me now at the ripe young age of twenty-seven, with no professional accomplishments to my name, but full of experience and ready to make my mark on the world. If I were a 19th century Romantic poet, I would probably be dead by now-- be that as it may, I remain optimistic. I’m not so much a late bloomer as someone who has meandered intellectually, unsure of my vocation and how to direct my creative energy. Now that I’ve embraced poetry as my calling, I can only justify such a reckless choice by giving it my all. This podcast represents part of my attempt to influence both the poetic culture and the larger culture for the better, and I hope to continue to communicate the power of poetry, both in my own work and the works of others, until I die, and hopefully, well beyond my death. 

On that note, let’s get to today’s poem, entitled “The Eclipse of Meaning.” I wrote this poem a couple years ago, and before this recording I edited it a bit to reflect my improved notions of artistry. The most significant change I made was to cut the confusing, vague and unnecessary first quatrain. Once a sonnet, it is now a ten-line poem which still maintains the general shape of a sonnet. There are many ways to improve your poetry through editing, but one very easy and useful rule of thumb is to make sure you really need the beginning section of your poem, and if you don’t, cut it. Very often, poets will begin a poem with what a former professor of mine called “throat-clearing,” busying themselves with establishing a scene, argument, or idea before diving into the actual substance of the poem. Such throat-clearing bloats the poem, decreases its potency and immediacy, and is usually unnecessary. Much as the Roman poet Horace famously advocated to begin an epic poem in medias res, in the middle of things, it is often advisable to begin a poem with exactly what you want to talk about and forgo tedious exposition. This is true even in the case of a poem which mainly concerns itself with abstract ideas, as mine often do. As long as the logical argument remains sound, the poem is better off for it. 

You might be wondering why I chose this poem over others in my body of work. There are three reasons: the first is that this is a poem which, because it is both abstract and condensed, is a bit more difficult to immediately understand than the majority of my poems, which I typically endeavor to write with as much clarity as possible. Because it’s perhaps less immediately comprehensible, it’s a good candidate for analysis. The second reason is that, because this poem is didactic and philosophical, with very little concrete imagery, it’s less likely to appeal to poetry magazines. For those who don’t know, once any given poem is out on the internet, it’s considered published, and most magazines that publish poetry won’t publish work that has been published before. Thus, every poem of mine I feature on this podcast is essentially one that I’ve removed from consideration from being published in a literary journal. The third reason is a post-hoc reason, which is that, as a ten-line poem which effectively functions as a condensed sonnet, or what is known as a curtal sonnet, it’s an interesting form to consider. Without further ado then, let’s get into it. 

The Eclipse of Meaning

The world may be unyielding, mute, deaf, blind

to its own cries, and still no claim will hold

so bold to preach no meaning— meaning meaning

autochthonic being we can find.

This truth, of which we cannot speak, we learn

as much through logic as sublime emotion;

we drown amidst excess of thoughts, but know

that something sets these tides of ours in motion.

Some terrifying moon in this abyss…

dark forever, but too bright to miss. 

Though the poem consists of one ten-line stanza, we can see that it’s further subdivided by its rhyme scheme. When analyzing a rhyme scheme, we use a letter of the alphabet, beginning with A, to represent each different rhyme sound. Line which rhyme together receive the same letter. Lines which don’t rhyme with any other line receive the letter X. The rhyme scheme of this ten line poem is AXXA, XBXB, CC. The A rhymes frame a quatrain around the two unrhymed lines between them; the B rhymes create a distinctive sequence with the unrhymed lines which interlock with them, and the C rhymes form a distinct couplet together. Thus, we can see that though we have a single ten-line stanza, what is called a dizain, the rhyme scheme sonically subdivides it into two quatrains and one couplet. We should note that the punctuation also indicates this arrangement—periods are found only at conclusions of these subdivisions, further clarifying that the sonic, grammatical, and semantic structures of the poem run parallel to one another. As you might remember, a traditional English sonnet, though it has a somewhat different rhyme scheme than this poem, has exactly this structure of subdivisions, but with an extra quatrain before the couplet. Thus we can say that this poem is an abridged form of the English sonnet, a curtal sonnet. The phrase “curtal sonnet” is most associated with the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who coined the phrase and wrote a few ten-and-a-half line sonnet style poems, the most famous of which is “Pied Beauty.” His curtals have a different structure than this one of mine, but the intention is similar: namely, to take an already condensed form and condense it further, while still preserving its structure. 

If it’s not clear already from my choices on this podcast, I really really love the sonnet form. I love it for three main reasons: the first is that I think it lies right in the goldilocks zone of the ideal length for a poem— it’s short enough to make a concentrated and elegant statement, but long enough to make a complex statement. The second reason is that it’s incredibly flexible: a fourteen-line poem can be subdivided into many different stanzaic configurations, all of which have interesting expressive possibilities. The third reason is that sonnets have the structure of a dialectical, logical argument built in to them from the start, and if, like me, many of your poems strive to be logical arguments, sonnets are the perfect form. In a traditional English sonnet, the emphasis is on laying out and developing an issue in a complex, nuanced way— the first quatrain states the issue or argument, and the second and third quatrains examine different sides or facets of the issue or argument. Only in the concluding couplet do we get anything like a resolution, and because this resolution is so brief, it usually has an epigrammatic character, and comes across as sparklingly witty, surprising, ambiguous, or subversive. The English sonnet’s strengths can also be its weaknesses however: if a poet doesn’t have a complex topic in mind, the quatrains are often used merely to list different examples of an idea, and the poem becomes long-winded. If the poet doesn’t have a sharp and insightful conclusion in mind, the brief ending couplet can often feel anticlimactic, cliché, or simply too pat. Even the master sonneteer Shakespeare is often guilty of these pitfalls. 

An Italian sonnet by contrast, which consists of an octet and a sestet, has a more balanced structure: An issue or argument is fully developed in the first eight lines, and then a substantial solution or reaction is explored in the ending six. Because the turn, the volta, comes earlier, the poet has more time to develop a response, and Italian sonnets can often feel more conclusive than English ones. Because Italian sonnets are written in larger stanzas, they also have the potential to be written in a greater variety of rhyme schemes. Despite these advantages, Italian sonnets can often feel more static than English ones—the latter have the advantage of portraying quick shifts in thought, and this can often make for a more exciting poem. 

In my poem the first quatrain lays out a proposition; the second quatrain gives grounds for this proposition, and concluding couplet attempts to give force to the proposition through a vivid metaphor. We can think of it almost like an Aristotelian speech in miniature: the tone and style of the first quatrain establishes, in addition to the argument, the speaker’s ethos, their credibility; the second offers logos, the logical justification; and the third, with its image of the eclipse, offers pathos by attempting to win over the imagination and emotions of the reader. The absence of a third quatrain decreases the level of complexity of the argument, but it also increases its concentration and potency— the argument is all essence, no divergence or decoration. Cutting the rate of end rhyme from 100 to 60 percent increases the freedom of what can be said in the poem, but the remaining rhymes ensure that the structural and harmonic functions of the rhyme scheme remain intact. 

Metrically speaking, this poem is very orthodox—with the arguable exception of the third line, every line is iambic throughout. The last line is acephalous, and so could be mistaken for having a trochaic rhythm if the overall momentum of the poem isn’t taken into account, but it remains functionally iambic. Monotony is avoided however through rhythmic modulation of stress, diverse punctuation, and diverse word lengths. In particular the caesura, the mid-line pause, shifts often from line to line, giving the rhythm an extra sense of dynamism. Despite all these factors however, the poem does read as rhythmically straight-laced, possibly even a little stilted, and this could reflect the fact that at the time it was written, the poet was relatively new to metrical composition, and felt less confident in his ability to take licenses with his lines. 

So now the question remains—what am I talking about here? Let’s go back to the first quatrain: 

The world may be unyielding, mute, deaf, blind

to its own cries, and still no claim will hold

so bold to preach no meaning— meaning meaning

autochthonic being we can find.

The first line and a half is a concession—yes, it’s true that the world does not respond in any satisfying way to our desire for meaning, justice, or truth. Nature is beautiful, but it doesn’t give us answers. I say that the world is deaf to its own cries because I include all life forms not only as part of the world, but as conscious expressions of the world. We are nature alive to itself—to distinguish between humankind and nature can be a useful distinction, even a glorious one, but it is not a metaphysical distinction—trouble arises when we forget that this split is merely a heuristic convention. Humans certainly occupy a unique role in the cosmos due to our intelligence, but the moment that we alienate ourselves ontologically from the world around us is the moment that we become heartbreakingly cruel—it is because of this fallacy that we slaughter around 200 million innocent animals every single day; it is because of this fallacy that we are in the environmental catastrophe that we are. 

            To get back to the poem, it may be the world is deaf to its own cries, but still “no claim will hold so bold to preach no meaning.” That is, just because the world doesn’t explicitly reveal meaning to us doesn’t give us an excuse to lapse into nihilism. Nihilism is then defined as a belief that there is no “autochthonic being we can find.” “Autochthonic” technically means “self-earthed” and refers to the quality of being native or indigenous—being made out of the earth that one inhabits. There are three things I’m trying to accomplish with this word: etymologically, it refers back to the idea that we are the world, and that this is meaningful in itself. Denotatively, it refers to a kind of being which is essential to the very nature of the universe—it is native to it, not an artificially imposed construction or convention, something we could theoretically discover, not something we create. What I have in mind here is a refutation of the core belief of existentialism: namely, Jean Paul Sartre’s claim that “existence precedes essence.” What Sartre means by this is that things initially exist without any identity or meaning—it is up to the individual to invent meaning for themselves and the world. On the contrary, I insist, it is presumptuous to assume that there is not an underlying reality which is significant in itself, a distinct essence, a sense of being independent of time, space, or human concepts. I will explore this idea in the next stanza. 

            Finally the word “authothonic” can be understood to suggest the idea of aseity. In theology, aseity is the attribute of being self-creating, self-caused, an attribute unique to God. The Being I am referring is precisely this primordial entity which exists at the horizon of cause and effect. It is the circle without beginning and without end, which is because it is. 

            Before we move on, let’s look at a few of the linguistic choices I’ve made here. In the first line: “the world may be unyielding, mute, deaf, blind” the last iamb is very heavy, containing two speech stresses: “deaf, blind.” It is still an iamb however, because the word “blind” is still slightly more emphasized. The heaviness of the rhythm drives home the brutal indifference of the world. In the next line, the phrase “to its own cries” consists of a very light iamb followed by a much heavier iamb. This contrast sonically emphasizes the crucial idea behind “own cries” which I’ve already discussed. These are examples of how rhythmic modulation can make an expressive difference even in the absence of metrical variation. 

            I’d also like to point out the third line, where I use the word “meaning” three times in a row. I did this not only to be a little witty, but to dissociate the word “meaning” from its meaning, and thereby prompt the reader to become conscious of how words are sounds that signify meaning. The word “meaning” thus becomes not only a sign of what it refers to, but an occasion to embody what it refers to. It is both referential and meta-referential. From the perspective of semiotics, it is both a symbol, an arbitrary sound which represents something, and an index, a piece of evidence for what is being represented. 

            This line is also the line that could be read as containing a substantial metrical variation. It can be read straight through iambically, but if we take the strong caesura at the dash into account, we might feel justified in analyzing the two hemistiches, the two half lines, apart from one another. If we did this, we would have to read the line as: iamb, iamb, amphibrach, trochee, trochee.” Ba-BUM Ba-BUM Ba-BA-bum, BA-bum, BA-bum. This is a case where I think scansion comes down mainly to personal preference. 

            Now let’s start at the beginning again, and move on to the next quatrain:

The world may be unyielding, mute, deaf, blind

to its own cries, and still no claim will hold

so bold to preach no meaning— meaning meaning

autochthonic being we can find.

This truth, of which we cannot speak, we learn

as much through logic as sublime emotion;

we drown amidst excess of thoughts, but know

that something sets these tides of ours in motion.

            “This truth” refers to the existence of the “autochthonic being” of the previous quatrain. We cannot speak of it for the same reason that the eye cannot see itself—this being which is the foundation of reality cannot be perceived and described from the outside, because we are all inside it; it is the precondition of our existence, and ourselves and everything we ever interact with are only indirect evidence of this more fundamental existence. It is for this reason that science will never prove or disprove the existence of God, because science is only built to observe and describe immanent phenomena, not the transcendent source of phenomena.  Furthermore, the fact that this transcendent source necessarily exists outside the limitations it creates, namely time and space, means that our language is not equipped to describe it. We can speak about it—we can figuratively point to it—but we cannot speak of it, we cannot encapsulate or understand it. This is the logic behind Apophatic or Negative Theology, a method of theology which does not attempt to describe what God is, but only what God is not. 

            We learn of the presence of this indescribable being, the presence of meaning beyond our own invention, through both logic and sublime emotion. Religious experiences, experiences of intense beauty, overwhelming terror, or even moral rectitude can do much to convince us of the existence of a higher or deeper power, but we don’t need to rely exclusively and irrationally on emotion to substantiate our beliefs. “We drown amidst excess of thoughts.” That is, our higher intelligence is both a blessing and curse—a curse because it makes us anxious about how much we don’t know, how many ways there are to interpret the world, and how poorly the world satisfies our intellectual and spiritual desires. Our incredible intelligence can thus be a source of despair, and may lead to our spiritual or even physical death. Even in the midst of the struggle though, we should recognize that “something sets these tides of ours in motion.” That is, there is an underlying force which creates and sustains our minds, space and time, and this force, logically, is the source of meaning. It is the cosmological cause, and by orchestrating the universe in the way that it has, it has provided a means by which to interpret it. It would be a leap to say that this force has a personality or even a mind in the way we understand it, but it is the ultimate authority—it provides the laws— and by making nature and human nature as it has, it provides sources of significance: for humans, this has been bestowed in the forms of love, morality, and beauty above all. To deny the legitimacy of these source of meaning is to deny the nature of one’s own species, and this is neither logical nor advisable. 

            Let’s now return to the beginning, and the read the poem all the way through: 

The world may be unyielding, mute, deaf, blind

to its own cries, and still no claim will hold

so bold to preach no meaning— meaning meaning

autochthonic being we can find.

This truth, of which we cannot speak, we learn

as much through logic as sublime emotion;

we drown amidst excess of thoughts, but know

that something sets these tides of ours in motion.

Some terrifying moon in this abyss…

dark forever, but too bright to miss. 

            Just as the moon is the source of the tides, influencing them from afar, so this source of being influences us even though the causal link is not obvious. Furthermore, just as the moon hangs in the void of space, so too this being is the one constant in what is otherwise a world devoid of apparent meaning. It is terrifying to us because it is forever unknown and unknowable, and so vastly beyond our powers and our faculties. I tie this visually to the image of a solar eclipse, where the moon completely obscures the sun, presenting a terrifying and beautiful orb of darkness that in many mythologies has been considered either a cosmic battle between good and evil or an omen of divine displeasure. This orb of darkness is thrown into relief by the brilliant corona of the sun which blazes behind and around it, creating what Milton would have called “darkness visible.” Metaphorically I hope to evoke, in the image of a solar eclipse, the simultaneous obscurity of the Absolute and the blazing light of creation, bright with divine intelligence, by which we know the darkness and perceive its shape. To us, it is “dark forever” like the dark side of the moon. Of course, eclipses do not last forever, and I hope to suggest that there may be, in the fullness of time, a timeless moment when we can, like Dante, look directly into the light of truth. 

One thing remains to be said about the title. “The Eclipse of Meaning” is a pun insofar as it can be read in two ways. If “eclipse” is read as a verb, the title refers to the overshadowing of meaning, presumably by human doubt and confusion. If, on the other hand, “eclipse” is read as a noun, the title refers to the concluding image of the poem: An “Eclipse of Meaning.” The title is a synthesis of the thesis and antithesis of the poem. 

Last thing I’ll mention is that there just so happens to be a total lunar eclipse early tomorrow morning—a very cool bit of serendipity. On the slim chance that you happen to listen to this podcast before it happens, I hope you enjoy it, and I hope you’ve enjoyed this window into a poem of mine. 

With all that we have learned and explored, let’s encounter this poem one last time, as an old friend.

The Eclipse of Meaning

The world may be unyielding, mute, deaf, blind

to its own cries, and still no claim will hold

so bold to preach no meaning— meaning meaning

autochthonic being we can find.

This truth, of which we cannot speak, we learn

as much through logic as sublime emotion;

we drown amidst excess of thoughts, but know

that something sets these tides of ours in motion.

Some terrifying moon in this abyss…

dark forever, but too bright to miss.