Norman Mailer said at the Rolling Stone Party 2000, "The need to understand human nature is now prodigious, because technology is advancing at such an incredible rate that we're going to destroy ourselves if we don't explore into deeper and deeper recognitions of who and what we are"; we need "new religions" or "old religions [to] become new" (Issue 830/831, p. 110). And "[t]he task for the twenty-first century is that we come up with some profound new ideas about the nature of God, and perhaps the devil."

Why did this make me think of William Blake? I began hunting through my dog-eared Oxford Anthology of Romantic literature. And, yes, everyone knows that "Tyger Tyger" poem. My husband can still quote it from memory; I had to memorize it my freshman year but immediately forgot its "fearful symmetry." Still, who pretends to get that little gem? I remember Dr. Sarah Wingard was a greedy eagle picking my soft, freshman brain after what I considered was a Promethean-recitation of my Blake assignment; I can still see that killer smile-"And please can you tell us who or what the Tyger represents?" "Um, uh, well, gee, uh, maybe…" is how I still feel considering that question.

Maybe the questions of the poem are meant to be unanswerable. "Mystery happens" would make a good bumper sticker. But I would also like to think that I possess an "immortal hand or eye" and so do you and that we are the ones who make both Tyger and Lamb. We create our own impenetrable personal and communal "forests of the night" (frightening as that wobbly video camera's images in The Blair Witch Project), and we can also, as Blake writes in "The Lamb," speak, fly, drive, play racketball, buy groceries, make friends, and write columns (hopefully) with "a tender voice" that recognizes our own vulnerability and our need for each other.

No one memorizes Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, but it's a fun poem, turning our ideas of good and evil, devil and angel on their heads. Blake believed that "all Act is Virtue," that Vice is what happens when I "hinder" someone-"Murder is Hindering Another. Theft is Hindering Another. Backbiting, Undermining, Circumventing and whatever is Negative is Vice." Thus, some of the "Proverbs of Hell": "The cut worm forgives the plow." "If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise." "He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence." "Shame is Prides cloke." "Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion." And later, "Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse. Not from rules." An antinomian God!

This made me think of a few other iconoclastic guys, Stephen Crane and Walt Whitman. Stephen, youngest son of a Methodist minister, wrote that shocking and wonderful book about an (oh-my-God!) PROSTITUTE named Maggie (of the streets). Walt, we all know, had lines of his poetry where "preachers" and "prostitutes" lie side by side. Unthinkable!

Then I think back. It appalled my old righteous Southern-Baptist nature to learn in writing my dissertation thesis that that first great master of English prose and Anglo-Saxon monk Aelfric lacked the unadulterated fire-and-brimstone of, say, Wulfstan, his contemporary. Nor did he use shock tactics, as did the Blickling homily, which reminded its audience that one day they would all be "wryma mete" ("worm-meat"). Aelfric's main message was Mercy. Fancy that. In his homilies, God is always someone ready to forgive and move on. And this is a tenth-century dude. Aelfric never saw an airplane or a modem, computer or car. (But was well-acquainted with styli, Vikings, cold stone floors, and mead.)

Now I think his is a great theme leading me to a good second-millennium question-If God is love, then who is God? Or, as Oscar Wilde's Lord Henry sermonizes, "I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely...the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy...we would forget all the maladies of mediaevalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal-to something finer, richer, than the Hellenic ideal, it may be...Live!...Be afraid of nothing."

Pound, Carle, and the Search for Something More Meaningful than a New Car

"Three years ago I moved from Charlottesville, Virginia, to Walnut Creek, California, and my first impression was 'What a lot of shiny, expensive cars'." I only recall this trashed opening sentence of my first online column because whenever I click on the current file, it shows up in a mysterious yellow box, then disappears. Ah, computers. Years ago, when I cyberspaced friends Gravity's URL, some e-mailed back, "URL?" But now who hasn't heard of URLs and "stickiness"? The web is no longer an outsider delineated clearly from the old dinosaurs of print magazines, and even the TV. The lines are happily blurring.

Just wait till the Boob Tube becomes Pandora's Box-watch movies, order pizza, send mail, and talk on the phone all at the same time. It will make staring out the window even more attractive to me. But I like knowing big change is coming and will provide me with another fun gadget. I'm also waiting for my husband's Palm Pilot to become passé and mine. Then I can take my leather filofax bought in London and bulging with a decade of dead (snail-mail) addresses as well as expired British Museum and Senate House library cards and store it carefully away. (I keep addresses that no longer work. My soul requires it.)

And my husband tells me the Internet is still in its infancy. Oh, yes. The AOL/Time-Warner merger just a little sparkler in the hand of a child compared to the tons of Australian and Parisian millennium fireworks to come. I remember a teenager at the oh-so academically elite Governor's Honors Program at North Georgia College the summer of '77 reading a "required" book about a far-off date, 1984, along with Brave New World, and being told the big new thing coming in telecommunications was FIBER OPTICS. Talk about futuristic. That was it.

But back to my line. John Carle, one of the finest editors ever*, asked me the end of the last century would I do a column for Gravity. I accepted this first daffodil of spring because I love yellow. A column grew under my fingers, and then, being a reviser sort of writer, I rewrote it. Up till then, I'd written poetry exclusively for the last ten years; as soon as I quit writing a dissertation, my body said Phooey! and began to cling to the few words well said, where each word must count or be burned. It was a necessary chastening. Academism had allowed me to write as pompously and as overlong as I would like. Did I say "allowed"? I mean encouraged. In short, it taught me logorrhea. Which sounds like an STD, and is just as hard to cure.

Then I showed my husband my 700-word baby. He read it slowly, poker-faced, then shook his head, and I heard the criticisms rattling under his hair. "Well-" he started, "I don't get it. What's it about?" I spat an answer, adding, "What? It's no good? How can you say that?" He lay down the two meager sheets with something that looked like enduring silence. I tacked. "Does it not make any sense? Tell me. Please." "Well," he picked the pages up again and then paused for at least three months before finding the softest words, "I think you've been writing poetry so long you've forgotten how to write prose. Don't be so abstract. I understand it now you've told me what it's about. But your readers won't."

I took my prize and saw what he meant. I rewrote radically. I thought of Ezra Pound savagely cutting T. S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" with blue ink marks, how Eliot was smart enough to take his good advice, and a modern miracle was born-whittled down and lean. My point? No matter how technological we are, communication rarely combusts but remains the sweetest tussling, a computer chip is not peace, and a good editor is never old-fangled.

(I still like that line I eventually rejected. Yesterday Jewel noticed the same thing, only it's 1952, and she's pulling into L.A.-"Everyone here dr[i]ve[s] new cars. That [i]s the plain and simple truth of where we [a]re." This is California constancy to my cracker's-eye view.)

Author's note: Jewel is the fascinating protagonist in Bret Lott's 1991 novel by the same name (p. 288). (I'm half-way through.)

* Ed. note - Carmen isn't being paid anything to say this. Really.