Authors: Michael Boughn Robert Duncan Victor Coleman
Like those instinctual wishes of incest, cannibalism, and murder that Freud thought most real, “born anew in every child,” the inexorable will of the father and the lasting good wish of the nurse belong to the very stuff of fairy tale and god lore.
•
“Playfully,” like poetically, can mean that things are not to be taken seriously. Yet, to charge the word with its utmost degree of meaning, there are seventeen columns under the word “Play” in the O.E.D. Like Pound’s “time,” it may not be money, but it is nearly everything else.
Among adults it is agreed that play is not to be taken seriously. “I thought we were only playing.” But the play of the child is his very being where alone he is completely engrossed. It is the ‘As If’ world. And it is, where the child has survived in the life of the adult, the creative fiction of man’s religions and arts.
•
The locus of Yeats’s image of Michael Angelo where:
With no more sound than the mice make
His hand moves to and fro
is, back of the Vatican hall where the Renaissance master works, another room where the child Yeats sits in solitary play at making up a world:
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.
And back of these images, we remember from
The
Z
ohar
—that Yeats knew well in his occult studies—the Child Creator of the Universe playing with the letters of the alphabet.
•
The Christ then in a sense says to John that the Crucifixion is child’s play. Unless you play with me, unless you are intent as I am in the thing, you will not understand what is going on. He had had, after all, only to surrender to the reality principle and to deny His role—cry out “
I am only a man!
” and Pilate would have let him go from His fate; he would have found his liberty. Or to have let the pleasure principle guide him.
But the play we are talking about has its own laws; it uses reality or pleasure as it will. This high play, like the high novel or high poetry, will not shape its ends to provide a happy or a likely consequence. It refuses the sensible.
•
The reality principle sees the Oedipus complex as a fixation where sexual wishes are in conflict with tribal custom, or even, as Freud does at times, as an instinct to incest and murder. The pleasure principle insists it would be best to let well-enough alone.
“Let me,” Teiresias insists:
go home. It will be easiest for us both
to bear our several destinies to the end
if you will follow my advice.
But Oedipus must, for the play’s sake, climb up into the uneasiest state necessary for the moment at which the crisis of the play shows forth and we realize the fulfillment of the plot. Beyond the pleasure
principle, beyond the reality principle, is the play principle seeking its passionate formal fulfillment. This is the only glory we know.
Oedipus, with the blood streaming down from his eyes, having come into the fullness of the knowledge of his play, is like Christ with the blood streaming down from his hands—eyes that looked with love upon his mother; hands that touched with love his fellow men.
The difference between the neurotic nursing his guilt or sin and the hero is the dramatic gesture, the formal imperative.
•
“Are we at the beginning of a great religious crisis?” Burckhardt wrote in 1871: “We shall be aware of ripples on the surface very soon.” He saw that “even languages are traitors to causes” and quoted from Bacon: “whereas the meaning ought to govern the term, the term governs the meaning.”
“Art, however,” Burckhardt continues: “is the most arrant traitor of all, firstly, because it profanes the substance of religion, i.e., it robs men of their faculty for profounder worship, putting eyes and ears in its place, and substituting figures for feelings, which are only transiently deepened by them.” Then he goes on to speak of the high and independent selfhood of art. “The real work of art,” he concludes, “is born of its own mysterious life.”
The figures of Child and of Christ in passion that we have drawn upon do not belong then to the world of religion; for what they are and undergo is not “for profounder worship” but “of its own mysterious life.” They belong not to the Church, that has its gods or God to be worshipped, as the Church in turn must be obeyed, but to the Art. Both meaning and term are governed in the art by the apprehension of the form. The spirit and the letter of the law, the betrayal and the cause, appear as elements of a structure that is at play. What Burckhardt calls the Art’s “high and independent selfhood” is not only the poet’s form, but the underlying relation and meaning in the story of things. It is the selfhood of Poetry that makes of the writer’s self no more and no other than a persona of the cast.
•
We have come a long way from that
Dream of the Last Day.
There were angels there, but there was no sign of Christ the Child or of Christ the Crucified. There was, instead, the turning back of the waters into their first courses. There may have been then an appearance of the reality principle, the inexorable will of the father, in the landscape that was the scene of modern war and the universal fear of—but it is also a wish for—total destruction. The turning of the waters at the spring may then have been the reviving of the mother-world, the Mutterrecht? But now, as the news comes from diggings in the first agricultural civilizations, in the very world of the Mothers, we see clearly that this is not the spring.
As the Father-World is a world of nations, the Mother-World was a world of cities. There was not one Mother, there were Mothers, and their crowns were armed citadels. Poets sang by heart long before there were cities, but the Mothers developed writing to keep their household records. Their soldiers went out from the hive to pillage the surrounding countryside and reduce its farmers and herdsmen to domestic order. “They culminated,” Robert Adams tells us in “The Origin of Cities” (
Scientific American,
September 1960), “in the Sumerian city-state with tens of thousands of inhabitants, elaborate religious, political and military establishments, stratified social classes, advanced technology and widely-extended trading contacts.” Universities, armies, industries, city administrations, political organizations belong to the realm of Mutterrecht.
No, the spring in the first direction refers to “that prehistoric old woman,” to an age when all men worked at the sources of their life. The Age of the Maker where at Jarmo he shaped the stone vessels. The Age of the Nurse where plants and animals were brought into the human commune and man discovered the sowing of seeds and the breeding of herds. We have come back, along the path of the Christ of St. John at Ephesus and his Round Dance, to the Christ of the country man, to the spring that lies in the grain. For before He was the Logos, He was the grain-food. We have come back to the first talk I had, sprawled on the lawn of the campus at Berkeley, twenty-five years ago, in 1947, with Charles Olson, for we talked then of cities, and of how they exploited the first things, having to coerce the men of the countryside to supply them with food and the necessities of life. The root or
spring was pagan. The heart of the god was in the work, the essential work of the material source.
We have come, back of the dream, to “Against Wisdom As Such,” Olson’s essay on my early work. In the dream I play again with wisdom, speaking of the last days and apprehending as I did that alternative of black-as-a-clinker and the pure light. But then a change comes, and there is something to be done. I must draw, not conclusions but beginnings, the stream of thought and feeling into life.
“There are only his own composed forms,” Olson writes of the artist as a warning against the tendency of my thought, and the warning must remain: “each one solely the issue of the time of the moment of its creation, not any ultimate except what he in his heat and that instant in its solidity yield. That the poet cannot afford to traffick in any other ‘sign’ than his one, his self, the man or woman he is. Otherwise God does rush in”—does he mean Authority does rush in? He may mean, as I do here, that the God of the profounder worship is not to be mixed up with the art: “And art is washed away, turned into that second force, religion,” Olson puts it. Then, driving home, he calls upon those forces of fire and water that reappear as elements of the landscape in my dream of the glowing disk and the spring.
“I said to Duncan,” he continues: “ ‘heat, all but heat, is symbolic, and thus all but heat is reductive.’ I asked Duncan if it wasn’t his own experience that a poem is the issue of two factors, (1) heat, and (2) time. How plastic, cries Wilhelm, is the thought of ‘water’ as seed-substance in the
T’ai I Chin Hua Tsung Chih.
And time is, in the hands of, the poet. For he alone is the one who takes it as the concrete continuum it is, and who practices the bending of it.” So, in the dream I go with Olson to bend the waters.
“Rhythm is time (not measure, as the pedants of Alexandria made it). The root is ‘rhein’: to flow. And mastering the flow of the solid, time, we invoke others.”
•
When, in that letter of 1916, H.D. writes to Williams of “your Spirit,” she refers to this agency we know as the Poet who serves the selfhood of the poem and would bend time to its purposes. “A very sacred
thing,” she calls the “business of writing”; and again “real beauty is a rare and sacred thing in this generation.”
The ardor or fire remains constant in her nature as a poet. Among the earliest poems, in “Pygmalion,” she gives voice to this place in the fire or in the swirl of water where God does rush in and the artist begins to traffic with spirit in the matter:
am I master of this
swirl upon swirl of light?
Pygmalion is the Maker engrossed in the Making. He is no longer at liberty. His own has become confused with properties of the work itself:
have I made it as in old times
I made the gods from the rock?
have I made this fire from myself?
or is this arrogance?
is this fire a god
that seeks me in the dark?
•
In the dream I faltered but had to go on. I had to act in the nexus of belief and disbelief to draw the reins of the water. It was not belief or disbelief about the life-force of the waters that was at issue. I knew no other world but this universe of pulsations and exchanges. Everything existed by visible powers: the stars were radiant suns of energy that belonged too to the orders that wax and wane, that are born and die; the waters of the sea moved in tides drawn by the gravity of the moon and of the sun from the gravity of the earth—and we, too, who were animal, having the breath of life, had our origin in the alchemy of the cosmos where tides of the sun and tides of the sea cooperated under the aegis of the moon. “Earth-caused tides in the liquid Moon,” Gamow tells us, “must have been eighty-one times higher than the lunar tides in our oceans.”
The alchemist searching for the life-force in his alembic did not believe or disbelieve in the life-force. That nexus in which belief and
disbelief become terms of our consciousness arises when we must act to direct those forces. To draw the reins of the horses, to draw the rains down into the circulations from which life first rose, is to draw upon our own life-force being to charge our self-consciousness. The self is surcharged. The consciousness raised to the testing point where it wavers between inspiration and inflation is seized by hopes and fears, beliefs and disbeliefs. Belief and disbelief are a protective order, the sense we have when we over-reach our limits.
•
This consciousness, this picture the human organism can make of what the cosmos is and of his operation there, is a special organ of life. It has evolved and is evolving, as all the other organs of our bodies have evolved. How close our common sense of the meaning of belief and disbelief is to our digestive tract. “I cannot swallow that” means that the consciousness resolutely resists trying the idea at all. “I cannot stomach that” means that the consciousness becomes sick with the idea and must throw it up. Then, when we take in certain facts about the universe or entertain new ideas, there will still be the sense that we cannot digest all the potentialities we sense are there—“I cannot take it all in.”
The rest is “shit,” “crap”—what the organism, the consciousness cannot draw upon at all in the fund of human ideas. The waste matter thrown off is not without virtue; it is just what we are unable as organisms to use. Or it is deadly—a ground of poisons that threaten, were we to take them in at all, the very structure of what we are.
In inspiration, this consciousness makes some organic leap. It sees the light or is struck by the light. Its whole relation to what is poisonous and what is nourishing changes, for its inner being or code-script has changed. The mind must conform to its seed-pattern, its identity or species, or die. But within a life, in a stroke of light, the mind can be in-formed. It can pass from one order into a new more complex order. It can come into a new species of mind.
For the uninspired, for all of us as we are our own selves, the urgency of our self-life commands the testing and tasting at its borders, filled with the apprehension a structure has that may or may not be able to tolerate this new food for thought. A matter of taste is an arbitrary
thing, and we may be in error in our choice, but taste is all that preserves us from the chaotic possibilities beyond our ken. The real apprehension for the organism in what can be believed or tolerated is for its own survival in identity.
•
“This bitter-sweet poison,” Freud called religion, unconsciously recalling the sweets his nurse had fed him, the bitter consequences, and the poison he had come to see them as after his father’s counsel. He might have been converted, his mind poisoned by Catholicism against the way of his ancestors, but in the crisis his identity with his father was threatened. He was to keep faith all his life with that choice to affirm the way of his free-thinking Jewish father, but he was to imagine in psychoanalysis new terms in which Catholicism, Judaism, and free thought too, were to be translated into the language of an underlying humanity. An inspiration, a mutation, had come in thought that was more various to survive. Old intolerances gave way, and the range of man’s food for thought was extended.