Boundary Violations/Imaginal Love-Tom Cheetham

Boundary Violations

Tom Cheetham
Loveland, Ohio, Dos Madres Press, 2015; 129 pp.

Also cited:

Imaginal Love: 

The Meaning of Imagination in Henry Corbin and James Hillman
Tom Cheetham
Thompson, Conn., Spring Publications, 2015; 200 pp.

In prose or poetry, Tom Cheetham is interested in angels.

“not actually even angels/ but in where they live/ which is in between things/ where the light is funny and everything shimmers/ and where very much strangeness watches and breathes/ and can make you kind of nervous and uneasy,” he specifies in his only poetry book so far, Boundary Violations.

we should all be uneasy a lot more often. 

(Page 82)

  Like angels, Cheetham’s five books of prose live in between things in their treatment of subjects including the imagination, Islam, the scholar of Islam, Henry Corbin, and the archetypal psychologist James Hillman. Cheetham himself lives in Maine, is a fellow of the Temenos Academy in London and will lecture and lead a workshop for the C. G. Jung Society of Montreal on April 26 and 27.

He insists that any kind of writing, including philosophical writing, is a genre of literature and there is no clear distinction between the literal and the fictive.

“What we have instead are styles of imagining and genres of thinking and writing,” he writes in Imaginal Love (Page 111).

… What is crucial for any humane life is an ability to move among these styles in accordance with your desires and intentions and the demands of the world. In order to do that, there has to be a space, a cosmos, in which all these styles coexist and in which you can learn to move with some assurance. There is only one world big enough: the world of what Corbin called the creative imagination, and that we might call the world of the fictive.

In Boundary Violations, Cheetham practices what he preaches. 

In one poem (“Coke,” Page 80), the poet’s personified attention wanders around the house, from the bird feeder to his bookshelf to the refrigerator to his body with its aches and pains and then heads “into outer space to andromeda or/ betelguese than which there is no better name then it goes/ all abstract and tries to run its fingers over numbers and/ then we take a theological turn looking over at angels who/ are too bright to look at but you can sort of hear them crackle/ and it looks up at God Who reminds it of zeus and athena/ who smell all sweaty because greece is after all very hot.”

Another poem, (“Authors”) starts with theology and the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, then segues into terrain shared by anatomy, astronomy and politics:

RIGHT NOW the inside of my head is expanding quite rapidly!!/ i see constellations of stars arranged along/the suture lines and where my ears were/ my pineal gland has become the sun a luminous giant/ whereas my limbic system is an incredibly beautiful and multicolored nebula like the crab maybe or the horseshoe/ there is an intense cluster of white dwarfs dancing and hopping/ around down below where my pons used to be!! oh wow!! oh/ wow!! and jesus h. christ!! how can anybody/ even think of being a terrorist when all this shit is going on??? (pps. 31-33)

The title Boundary Violations is absolutely appropriate. Cheetham is quite concerned with boundaries, and crossing them.

The only way we know where we are is because of the experience of crossing boundaries. 

Imaginal Love (pps. 115-116)

The notion of an imaginal realm suggests boundlessness and spiritual freedom. Corbin certainly meant to imply this. But it does not signify boundary-less-ness or unconstrained freedom  … The imaginal realm in which the so-called literal world and the worlds of fantasy, psychology, art, and fiction all have their place is replete with constraints, boundaries, discontinuities, blockages, walls, and difficult realities of too many kinds to count. (pps. 113-114)

    So it is in one of the half-dozen poems (of 61 in the book) in which angels play a part. 

i can’t sleep thinking about all those levels of control and/ all the levels of Editors that brings to mind or being or existence/ or something i guess it’s like the ranks and ranks of angels and the/ scribes who write and the guardians who order and are there angels for typing mistakes maybe that girl i forget her name but she had/ dark hair Margie actually which is not a good name for an/ angel but who knows and and maybe the bottom-most rank would be/ for gibberish typing and there is a mess of really fallen angels who/ hang out in the basement smoking and drinking and playing cards when they are supposed to be Ordering the gibberish so at least it/ stays in Being and doesn’t vanish into Nothingness. (p. 34)

  “For Corbin,” Cheetham writes in Imaginal Love, the “human imagination is distinct from but continuous with the divine imagination. It is our connection to the Angels and to God ... It is in poetry and the arts that we will most readily come face to face with that creative imagination that is the life blood of the extensive self, of the human soul and the soul of the world. It is this creative activity that binds together body and mind, thought and being, the soul and the world.” (Imaginal Love, [pps. 44-45])

Cheetham’s poem “Laws of Motion” (pps. 15-17) arrives at the same place:

it is not that the/ gods have gone but they do not arch over us in any sky no/ zeus no yahweh no separation of the heavens and the earth no/ primordial dark destroying sea we are all in the permanently/ eddying flood all of us there is no us and them no sinners to be/ destroyed no ark no prison i am the horse and she is me herm-/ aphrodite centaur god & angel & devil/

& HOLY JEEEZUS!!

the imagination!

                   —Harvey Shepherd