Comedy, Book Three

Inspired by Dante and William Blake, Secular Revelations is the third and final book of the long poem Comedy. Still in the form of a waking dream, this volume is a meditation on paradise, not as a transcendent place but as an expression of human experience and desire. It consists of poetic dialogues, some with the spirits of well-known artists and philosophers (Richard Wright, John Lennon, Norman O. Brown, Michael Cimino, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Marlon Brando), others with more personal contacts. In an autobiographical mode, this book is a journey through the places, mostly real, in which the author underwent intellectual transformations. Critical motifs in this book are references and allusions to cinema (as in Book 2) and to popular music from the blues to rock-and-roll. There are some satirical and dystopian visions of the future, but the goal of the poem is the affirmation of the power of the human multitude to continue a permanent struggle against that which subverts infinite truth procedures, such as freedom, justice, and democracy. It presupposes that every human mind incorporates the living and the dead in one immeasurable mental process.