Nathaniel Mackey’s Esotericism
What compulsion lies behind the recitation of a text, sacred or poetic? What leads the words into life, clothing them with meaning? In 610 CE, in a cave on Mt. Hira just outside Mecca, the archangel Gabriel revealed himself to Muhammad, an unlettered merchant from the city who, responding to the call of a spiritual vocation, was involved in a month-long period of fasting and meditation. Gabriel urged Muhammad, in the words of the Quran, “Recite! In the name of thy Lord who created!” announcing to him the first verses of the book the meaning of whose name is derived from the Arabic word for recitation. The Islamic scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr refers to this moment as a sonoral revelation, which in turn would be written down: “When the archangel Gabriel first appeared to the Prophet, the sound of the first verse of the Quran reverberated throughout the space around him.”1 The scholar Karen Armstrong points out that, in what seems comparable to the reverberated sound signaling the beginning of the Quran (“the central theophany of Islam”), Muhammad took the name of God in Arabic, al-Lah, and deliberately thickened the sound of the L at its center, transforming it into al-Llah, to distinguish the uncreated God of Islam from the pagan gods who bore the same name in the Arabian peninsula at the time.2 One might describe the liturgical art of Quranic recitation as a metaphorical thickening of the sonoral revelation, whose art and variety arise from certain severe restrictions: the inviolability of the text itself, which cannot in any way be altered, expressed through breathing techniques that allow for only one phrase at a time to be vocalized (or, in the case of long phrases, half of a phrase), ornamented by the extension of vowel sounds and the nasalizing of hummed sounds, specific to the Arabic in which the Quran was revealed.3
Sacred texts necessarily involve proscriptions about how to tell them, what interpretations of them might be permitted. Robert Duncan, in one of his most authoritative pronouncements, defines the compulsions of recitation in terms of permission and restraint, insisting,
Myth is the story told of what cannot be told, as mystery is the scene revealed of what cannot be revealed, and the mystic gnosis the thing known that cannot be known. The myth-teller beside himself with the excitement of the dancers sucks in the inspiring breath and moans, muttering against his willful lips; for this is not a story of what he thinks or wishes life to be, it is the story that comes to him and forces his telling.4
I’ve always found the pun of the myth teller beside himself to be especially telling of Duncan’s sense of myth and poetry: It’s as much a state of alienation as of involuntary emotion (as in being beside yourself with anger). Myth, whose current is filled with poetry, demands to be told but then forces its teller to reveal things that should never be told. In this sense, Duncan constructs an understanding of myth parallel to Freud’s famous understanding of the word “uncanny,” when Freud claims that, because of its volatile nature, which is prone to various forms of doubling, its meaning merges with the increasingly ambivalent definition of its opposite (heimlich, or familiar, in German). “The uncanny,” Freud writes, “is in some way a species of the familiar.”5 Myth, Duncan proposes, is that inexpressible, secret part of the fabric of everyday utterance, as much a license as it is a prohibition.
Nathaniel Mackey is a poet unusually attuned to the thickening of the word that the compulsion to a poetic myth commands and inspires. And in Mackey’s mind, this compulsion is as much an imprisonment as it is a liberation. Remarking on the circularity that drives much of his poetic composition, Mackey suggests:
Recursiveness can mark a sense of deprivation, fostered by failed advance, a sense of alarm and insufficiency pacing a dark, even desperate measure, but this dark accent or inflection issues from a large appetite or even a utopic appetite.… Recursiveness, incantatory insistence, is liturgy and libation, repeated ritual sip, a form of sonic observance aiming to undo the obstruction it reports.6
Splay Anthem, his fourth book of poetry, permits readers to make some important claims about his work, even as it also forces some serious reconsideration of what is happening in that work. Mackey’s poetry has been dominated for four decades by two recurring series, “The Song of the Andoumboulou” and “mu,” both of which, in recent years, have begun more and more to resemble each other. The publisher of Splay Anthem, New Directions, wisely compelled the poet to write a preface for the book, presumably to help orient new readers into the labyrinth of these series. I say wisely because the suggestion to write the preface prompted the typically discreet Mackey to make certain of his positions clear. For one, speaking of the two series’ involvement with each other, Mackey admits, “Each is the other, each is both, announcedly so in this book by way of number, in earlier books not so announcedly so. By turns visibly and invisibly present, each is the other’s twin or contagion, each entwines the other’s crabbed advance.”7 In “Song of the Andoumboulou: 46,” he puts it this way:
They lay entwined, asymmetric
twins, each the other’s
long lost remnant, each
in what seemed like speaking
mounted skyward, each
the
other’s complement, coughed
up a feather, watched it
float.8
Mackey’s earlier books of poetry—Eroding Witness, in which both of these series originated; School of Udhra, which pursued both series in different directions; and Whatsaid Serif, devoted entirely to “Song of the Andoumboulou”—are each marked by the poet’s obsessive themes: disintegration (erosion), knowledge (witnessing), the transmission of knowledge (schools/esotericism), lore/mythology (West African, Afro-Caribbean, African American), neology/punning (whatsaying, serif/seraph), and the kinds of hermeneutic, religious systems that provide interpretive structure for fraying, splaying knowledge and its secret transmissions. Splay Anthem advances these themes while involving them more deeply in the poet’s strange and idiosyncratic mythology and his strategies of esoteric expression. More recently, Mackey has published two additional books, Nod House (2011) and Blue Fasa (2015), both of which continue to extend and transform these two series (“Song of the Andoumboulou” reaches number 110 in Blue Fasa; “mu” reaches number 88). “The song of the Andoumboulou,” writes Mackey, “is one of burial and rebirth, mu momentary utterance extended into ongoing myth, an impulse toward signature, self-elaboration, finding and losing itself. The word for this is ythm (clipped rhythm, anagrammatic myth).”9
The voice in these poems is characterized by several verbal and rhetorical strategies, and I’d like to emphasize three of them: Undercutting the poems through the act of “whatsaying”; thickening the word of the poems through specific sonic and grammatical wordplay, especially evident in his use of the conditional mood; and expressing an esotericism unique in American poetry. First among these strategies is “whatsaying,” a term Mackey borrows from West African storytelling to designate the activity of a jester/fool figure whose duty it is to interrupt the normative narration of a myth with subversive, “paracritical” commentary. In this sense, I equate Mackey’s whatsaying with “unsaying,” as it has been defined by Michael A. Sells in Mystical Languages of Unsaying. There, Sells asserts that unsaying, or apophasis, is “a propositionally unstable and dynamic discourse in which no single statement can rest on its own as true or false, or even as meaningful. In such discourse, a rigorous adherence to the initial logical impasse of ineffability exerts a force that transcends normal logical and semantic structures.”10 Consider, for instance, the following lines from “Song of the Andoumboulou: 50”:
Verge that we wanted
verge was the song we sang had there been a
song we sang. No song left our lips.
Nonsonant, we rounded circle’s edge,
nonsonant ring shout, verge our muse
and mount.
.….….….….….……
Sparks rose near the well, an
extinguished fire, hung like a signal
or a sign of moving on, a symbol, some
said, showing forth … “Post-ecstatic”
was
a word we heard, “copacetic” a word we
heard, “After ecstasy what?” a question
posed in smoke …11
A crucial term here is “nonsonant,” a Mackey coinage, ringing of nonsense and no-sound but also of consonance. Whatsaying, like unsaying’s illogical pull, is nonsonant. Norman Finkelstein regards nonsonance as a metonym for Mackey’s poetry in and of itself, resonant of its commitments to wordplay and its somatic insistences. “Nonsonance is both prefigurement and warning, a foretold or destined place or experience felt in the body, the blood, to which the poet and his company crosses, toward which we go.”12
The action of Splay Anthem, such as it can be discerned, involves a crew of beings who speak in the first-person plural, the “andoumboulouous we” Mackey mentions in the preface. The Andoumboulou, as initiated readers of Mackey’s poetry know, are a mythical species invoked in Dogon funeral song, representing a failed human species, now ghostly, who haunt human memory. “I couldn’t help thinking,” Mackey confesses, “of the Andoumboulou as not simply a failed, or flawed, earlier form of human being but a rough draft of human being, the work-in-progress we continue to be. The commonplace expression ‘man’s inhumanity to man’ has long acknowledged our andoumboulouousness.”13 Note the flexibility Mackey coaxes from this unusual word, such that it is at once proper noun, adjective, and abstract concept. He takes advantage of this flexibility in the mythical narrative of his poem, such that his “we” finds itself in a perpetually transforming journey of uncertainty. Take the opening of “Spectral Escort” (“mu,” seventeenth part):
Not exactly a boat or
not only a boat …
Weathervane, boat,
flag rolled into
one, furled spur
it
fell to us to
unravel14
The figure of a scroll as a vehicle is repeated in “Eye on the Scarecrow” (“mu,” twentieth part), such that it is Islamic pilgrimage, frayed carpet, and mysterious text simultaneously:
It was a journey we
were on, drawn-out
scrawl we made a road
of, long huthered hajj
we
were on. Raw strip
of cloth we now rode,
wishful, letterless
book
the ride we thumbed.15
In “Song of the Andoumboulou: 42,” Mackey identifies the vehicle of the journey explicitly as a book,
What we rode was a book. We
fell out of it, scattered16
only to revise the book in “Song of the Andoumboulou: 44” into a club where “we” watches a jukebox spinning records:
Wherever we were it was a tavern
we were in, a bar we stepped up
to, ordered … Stood in front of
the jukebox, bartender at our backs,
rapture
what before we thought ruin …
Whatever we rode it was a record
we spun17
Note Mackey’s compulsive use of the “w” sound in these selections, ones that permit/force him into a disorienting, conditional indeterminacy, so that “we” is never sure of where it is—wherever, whatever. Mackey’s fixation on the sound of the letter w signals the second of the strategies mentioned above: w is the letter Mackey most frequently uses to thicken the word. “We” is the operative pronoun in his serial epic, an indeterminate collective speaking most often in unison but never in certainty adrift in the world in a way that is plaintive, subjugated, and Gnostic because this condition alludes to a revelation never entirely arrived at. Finkelstein has noted, “Removing pronominal categories to form a collectivity grounded in both history and myth is fundamental to Mackey’s poetic.”18 This removal defaults at “we,” suggesting that a thickening of the word is a densifying and sacralizing of the collectivity, even as its use removes certainty. Notice what happens in “Sound and Semblance”:
It was the bending of boughs we’d
read about, Ibn ’Arabi’s reft
ipseity, soon-come condolence,
thetic
sough. We saved our breath, barely
moved,
said nothing, soon-come suzerainty
volubly afoot, braided what we’d
read and what we heard and what
stayed sayless, giggly wind,
wood,
riffling wuh …19
“W,” a consonantal sound that drifts into the openness of a vowel, makes the sonic space for reft ipseity—broken selfhood—to be collectively, temporarily constituted in the thetic sough whose note is a sayless “wuh.” “Where we were,” writes Mackey in “On Antiphon Island” (“mu,” twenty-eighth part), “not- / withstanding, wasn’t there …” Collective identity has the property of an erasure or deliberate disorientation. The poem goes on:
Where we
were was the hold of a ship we were
caught
in. Soaked wood kept us afloat … It
wasn’t limbo we were in albeit we
limbo’d our way there. Where we
were was what we meant by “mu.”
Where
we were was real, reminiscent
arrest we resisted, bodies briefly
had,
held on
to.20
To finish with:
Where we were they said likkle for little, lick
ran with trickle, weird what we took it
for … The world was ever after, elsewhere,
no
way where we were
was there21
The world was ever after: as close to a direct statement of Mackey’s Gnosticism as we’re likely to find in his work. The ongoing process of testing and contesting reality by thickening its components enables the Gnostic vision as well as the poetry. “To replace waking with realization,” as Mackey puts it.22
The realm between dream and waking, between vision and realization, is presided over by a demiurge less menacing than obfuscating and disorienting:
Some we
met said it was only a trap, rapt-
anagrammatic diminution we were
shadowed by, mango seed retreat
notwithstanding, demiurgic trick …23
Here, “trap” and “rapt” make anagrammatic foreshadow of the demiurgic trick of the mango seed (most of the letters of “mango” are there in “anagram”). And the ellipsis serves as Mackey’s most characteristic punctuation, a continuance without reference, a provocation for his readers to imagine the endlessness of the journey of “we” forward. Watch all of these features—the repetitions, the “w” sounds, the disorientations and double-takes, the unfinished ellipsis—come together in these lines from the same poem as the lines quoted above, “Song of the Andoumboulou: 50,” in which we get a hint of the meaning of the book’s title:
Verge that we wanted verge kept
insinuating, song we’d have sung
had there been one, anthem
circling assumed. It was a healing
song
we sang had there been a song we
sang, swirling water we intimated
wet our feet …24
I take the lines “It was a healing / song / we sang had there been a song we / sang” to serve as ideal text for the amulet Mackey makes of his poetry. The poem itself is understood as something lost, something no longer existent but whose memory compels the telling the poet is incapable of ceasing.
Which makes for something very mysterious, to say the least. In Mackey’s poetry, mysteriousness gives way to striking but unresolveable esoteric professions. Mackey’s esotericism is so rich, so permutative, and so vexing, I’m willing to claim him the most esoteric poet in the American tradition, even more decidedly hermetic than H.D. or Robert Duncan, both poets to whom Mackey is deeply indebted. Mackey’s work moves to the limits of reason to engage the transrational phenomena that occupy the peripheries of our perceptions. Think of his work as a sequence of precipitations, in his own words, from “the intuitive, the uncanny, the oneiric, the sympathetic, the coincidental, the ecstatic, the intangible, the paradoxical, the oceanic, the quirky, the psychosomatic, the quixotic, the religioerotic, and so on.”25 In Splay Anthem, he fixes these elements into a grand, idiomatic, and catastrophic mythology that is esoteric in a primary sense of the meaning of that word. The historian of hermeticism Antoine Faivre defines esotericism as the theory that makes the practices of occultism possible.26 He defines occultism as “the homo-analogous principle, or doctrine of correspondences,” by which “things that are similar exert an influence on one another by virtue of the correspondences that unite all visible things to one another and to invisible realities as well.”27 Faivre elaborates the definition of esotericism to suggest that it
has a meaning that is apparent from its etymology, which refers to an “interiorism,” an entry into the self through a special knowledge or gnosis, in order to attain a form of enlightenment and individual salvation. This special knowledge concerns the relationships that unite us to God or to the divine world and may also include a knowledge of the mysteries inherent to God himself.… To learn these relationships, the individual must enter, or “descend,” into himself by means of an initiatory process, progressing along a path that is hierarchically structured by a series of intermediaries.28
The Andoumboulou serve, I think, as intermediaries for Mackey’s esotericism, just as “mu” records the transformation of the initiation, a kind of litany/liturgy invoked as part of a rite of change. In “Song of the Andoumboulou: 50,” Mackey recognizes,
Limbo the book of
the
bent knee … Antiphonal thread
attended by thread. Keening string
by thrum, inwardness, netherness …29
The word “netherness” captures something unique about Mackey’s esotericism. This word, and the myth of the Andoumboulou more broadly, represent what the historian of Kabbalah Joseph Dan calls “the imperfection of beginnings.” Dan uses this provocative phrase to characterize the thought of Isaac Luria, the sixteenth-century Palestinian Jewish mystic who revolutionized the Kabbalah of this period. According to Dan, in answer to the bold but rarely asked question, Why everything?, Luria formulated a mystical perception of catastrophic origination, based on his conviction that “existence does not begin with a perfect Creator bringing into being an imperfect universe; rather, the existence of the universe is the result of an inherent flaw or crisis within the infinite Godhead, and the purpose of creation is to correct it.”30 And at the core of Luria’s formulation was the threefold description of catastrophe: tsimtsum, or withdrawal at the moment of creative intensity; followed by shevirah, or shattering, as a result of the influx of overwhelming divine force exploding into creation; culminating in tikkun, or restoration by human intervention of the brokenness of the cosmos. Dan identifies shevirah as the esoteric core of Luria’s teaching, describing it as “very destructive for religious thought: the supreme divine power undertook an endeavor, and failed to carry it out.”31
Kabbalah is something only rarely alluded to in Mackey’s poetry; it would be inaccurate to ascribe Jewish mystical elements to his work. Nevertheless, I would describe Mackey’s poetry as Lurianic, at least partially. It’s Lurianic at least in its perception of creation as crisis, in its conviction in poetry’s netherness that gestures toward an unrectified inwardness. Mackey’s attraction to the Andoumboulou mythos attests to his interest in brokenness, netherness, waywardness, ghostliness, and the unfixable. Just so, his reading of reality is not fixed; rather, it’s a revision, a destabilization of the presumptions involved in the imperfection of beginning. I say partially Lurianic because, notably, there is no tikkun in Mackey’s work. The narrative progress of the reft “we” in Splay Anthem offers no consolation of restoration. Rather, there is a crablike, discrepant movement, as signaled by the epigraph from Charles Olson that begins the book: “and all motion / is a crab.”
Reading Splay Anthem, I’m compelled that Mackey’s work is driven by a negative epistemology.32 This means that the hidden truth discovered in Mackey’s poetry is, overwhelmingly, disastrous, disintegrating, disabling, and catastrophic. A positive epistemology, by contrast, typically involves a kind of transcendence resulting from the exposure to the hidden truth—a clarity, a gnosis, an imaginal reality perceived and understood. Historical Gnosticism, for instance, presents the prospect of deliverance from the fallen, created world through revelation of its ultimate reality. This is not to say the process of acquiring this knowledge doesn’t involve hardships—horrors, even. But it is to say, deliverance is the promise of this sort of epistemology. The relatively recently published Gospel of Judas offers many instances or promises of extraordinary, liberating knowledge. Early in the gospel, in a scene typical of the canonical Gospels as well as other Gnostic gospels, Jesus is standing with the disciples, who are struggling to understand him and trying to define who he is. Jesus says to them, “How do you know me? Truly [I] say to you, no generation of the people that are among you will know me.” This provocation enrages the disciples, who begin cursing Jesus in their hearts. Jesus provokes them further, challenging them, “[Let] any one of you who is [strong enough] among human beings bring out the perfect human and stand before my face.” In spite of their insistence that they have the strength to meet Jesus’s challenge, none of the disciples would stand before him “except for Judas Iscariot. He was able to stand before him, but he could not look him in the eyes, and he turned his face away.” Then, Judas says, “I know who you are and where you have come from. You are from the immortal realm of Barbelo. And I am not worthy to utter the name of the one who has sent you.”33 The translators of the Gospel of Judas helpfully indicate that Barbelo refers to the immortal realm of “the divine Mother of all, who often is said to be the Forethought (pronoia) of the Father, the infinite One.”34 For having apprehended this truth, in essence, by revealing the secret name, Judas is rewarded with private teachings from Jesus, who promises, “I shall tell you the mysteries of the kingdom. It is possible for you to reach it, but you will grieve a great deal.”35 This entire exchange fairly characteristically represents a positive epistemology, through which an adept arrives at a greater understanding of reality, albeit typically by way of considerable struggle.
But Mackey’s negative epistemology offers no such promise, no such delivery. My intention here isn’t to discredit Mackey’s Gnostic leanings, ones I’ve described in the past to characterize and to understand his work.36 Rather, I’m struck by the nature of the knowledge acquired in this poetic journey, whose expression is various forms of unendingness, as in this under-the-line conclusion to “Song of the Andoumboulou: 51”:
To ride was a well gone to too often, a
dry world we circumambulated suddenly
awash, Anuncia’s belated largesse.
The
road was all there was and ride was all
we did.37
I sense the circumambulation—reflective of many other circularities in the book, from spinning records to curlicue winds—to refer obliquely to the long huthered hajj identified in “Eye on the Scarecrow.” Pilgrims fulfilling the Hajj, the annual Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca, must circumambulate the Ka‘ba, the shrine in the center of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, seven times, in an act of sanctification called tawaf, initiating them for the holy deeds to follow. Reza Aslan writes that during tawaf, “the Ka‘ba becomes the axis of the world, and every direction is the direction of prayer. It is, one might say, the centrifugal force of praying in the presence of the sacred shrine that compels the worshipper to orbit the sanctuary.”38 The circumambulations of the pilgrims in Mackey’s “Song of the Andoumboulou” series seem less focused, less intent on any kind of sanctification. Theirs is an experience of transitoriness without focus, wandering without reprieve. The mysterious word huther characterizes something of this drift and uncertainty. “Huther” is a peculiar word, arriving out of the obscure fifteenth-century noun huther-mother, or hudder-mudder, which means concealment or hiddenness. Mackey’s use of the word brings about many questions. For one, where does he get this word? The epigraph for the poem, which comes from Wilson Harris’s novel Black Marsden, offers a clue. It reads, “ … that there existed a scout of love from whose effects of grief no one could escape …”39 Mackey draws the word “huther” from the middle of Harris’s short novel, which takes place in Edinburgh, Scotland, and in which two characters have the following exchange:
Mrs. Glenwearie looked away from him and out through one of the windows. “It is not for me to say, sir,” she said. “But since you ask me I would say that he’s a very unusual gentleman. My dear mother would have called him a kind of hutherer.” Goodrich was baffled. “What is a hutherer?” he asked. “It’s just,” said Mrs. Glenwearie, “och, I don’t rightly know how to explain it. Just a hutherer, that’s all.”40
Mackey’s transformation of Harris’s “hutherer” to “huthered,” a participial adjective, is telling. A hutherer, in Harris’s use, appears to be an eccentric, perhaps a clairvoyant? Even a mystifier. Certainly someone for whom hiddenness and concealment are operative forces. So why does Mackey use the word in his poem as a modifier? Recall the lines from the poem,
It was a journey we
were on, drawn-out
scrawl we made a road
of, long huthered hajj
we
were on.41
Mackey’s huthering is directly related to writing; the pilgrim road is a drawn-out scrawl. Writing is a kind of circumambulation, perhaps an obfuscation. At any rate, it’s long, it’s huthered, and it’s drawn out. In “Sound and Sentience” (“mu,” thirty-second part), Mackey wonders,
Scales what would once have been
skin … Feathers what would once
have been cloth … There that
claiming heaven raised hell, fraught
sublimity, exits ever more to
come …
and then, later in the same poem, overlooking a
Blent
vista such that splinters reared up
and walked, went remitless … Endless
reconnoiter, endless vex, revisitation.42
Reconnoiter, vex, revisitation—these characterize the long huthered hajj. (Blent appears to be an obscure word for mingled, presumably a compression of blended.) Its endlessness invites the metaphors of circulation that repeat but never arrive at a conclusion throughout the book, permitting my sense that an overarching negative epistemology defines Mackey’s poetic project.
I think it is fair, even necessary, to link this negative epistemology with Mackey’s esotericism. The secret knowledge his work conceals is one of ruinous, catastrophic, vexatious, interminable truth, rather than of transformative liberation. Finkelstein reads Mackey’s Gnosticism as nevertheless restorative, if only because the hope for some revelation or truth pervades the work. “History is the record of a gnostic catastrophe,” writes Finkelstein, “the violent cosmic upheaval that has led to our current fallen condition. The human community, like the cosmos itself, longs to be ordered and made whole, and I read Mackey’s poetry as a shamanic attempt to bring about that order, that cure, despite a nearly irredeemable sense of despair.”43 In Finkelstein’s reading, Mackey’s poetry itself becomes a “continuous, recursive, sideways movement” between a cataclysmic despair of the actual and the utopian domain of “Mu.” Mackey’s two poetic series “veer between the extremes of catastrophic fall and ecstatic redemption, traveling through landscapes and dream spaces variously shaded by idealism and foreboding.”44
My sense is that, through the twists, distortions, estrangements, and alienations that mark the progress of his two poetic series, the mythologies out of which “Song of the Andoumboulou” and “mu” originate—namely, a Dogon funeral rite that commemorates a disastrous mythology of the antique, sacred past and an etymological exploration of myth and meaning prompted by American jazz and its African American practitioners—serve less as fields of meaning than they do as thematic sources for the work. Over the course of their existence, Mackey’s series have proliferated a wild, idiosyncratic, nearly nonsensical set of locations and personas whose variegated names remain steadfastly opaque, even to devoted readers: Ahtt, Nath, N’Ahtt, ythm, Ba, B’Us, Ouab’da, Ouadada, B’Dot, B’Leg, Ra, Stra, C’rib, C’ahtt, Zar, Qu’ahttet, Lag, Nub, Atet, B’Hest, B’Head, the Late Night Lounge, Lone Coast, Dread Lake, Outlantish, Southern California, Los Angeles.45 What, after all, is the nature of Mackey’s esotericism? He’s not, like H.D., inscribing a hermetic reading of history nor, like Duncan, insisting on a theosophical, emanative caretaking of Poetry. Nor is he, like Jay Wright, invoking Dogon lore toward suggesting an equation between poetic composition and religious initiation. While it’s true that when you read “Song of the Andoumboulou,” you do, after all, learn something about the Dogon, I sense increasingly, however, that this learning is auxiliary to the main treasure Mackey’s work is protecting, the true knowledge it is hiding at its center. Mackey’s true project is an esotericism of the poetry of the Open Field.46
Mackey’s work has long harbored several clues to his devotion to the poetry of the Open Field, his whatsaying service to its mythology and meaning. Open Field poetry was the subject of his dissertation, for one thing. It’s also been the main subject of his critical writings, from his ongoing preoccupation with Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, and LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka to his metonymic association of modal- and free-jazz forms with the poetry he writes. It’s his creative projects—the serial poetry and the serial fiction—that most compellingly indicate this esotericism of the Open Field. These are two projects Mackey refuses to close. Though Splay Anthem ends—with the unpunctuated word “foot”—the two poetic series don’t. Were the nature of Mackey’s esotericism directed toward a positive epistemology—a deliverance from the world’s woes—I suspect the poetic project would, in some form, draw to a conclusion. It’s hard to say whether the negative epistemology that I’m arguing now defines the poem is original, which is to say, something there at the start, or whether the compulsion to repeat and to carry on the process of the poem has forced Mackey into increasingly negative epistemological involutions. Whatever the case, this is the poem we keep finding in Splay Anthem, gleaned throughout in reference to a mythic book and the interpretation undertaken with it:
Had it been a book Book
of the Opening the Book it
would’ve been called,
kept
under lock and key …47
(I hear an echo of Duncan’s The Opening of the Field in Mackey’s imaginary, conditional title. There’s an equation to be made between book and field.)
Flat realm, no rise,
no resonance, booklessness the
book they thumbed … No biblic
aura,
no alternate life, at last they were
only where they were.48
(Another Duncan reference: “An Alternate Life” is the sequence that opens Ground Work II: In the Dark, Duncan’s final poetry collection.) Elsewhere in the same poem, “The Sigh of the Moor” (“mu,” thirty-third part), he writes,
Beneath a window overlooking Lone
Coast, the sound of waves pounding
salt on the eardrum, a dream of
exegetic sleep. Unbooked but for the
water’s ripped edge, frayed page
the rotating earth turned, tore,
one
would someday see … So spoke the
oracle, the exegete, dream of
a ceased read read endlessly,
read
annulling omen’s end …49
Unlike the fields of projective verse that Olson and Duncan opened up for American poetry in the 1960s, and even as the password that granted Mackey permission into the Open Field was found in the works of Olson and Duncan, Mackey’s poetic range is one of a decidedly restrictive perception, delineated by second guesses, false starts, crabwise movement, and retrogressive whatsaying/unsaying. It’s a field, to be sure, but its contours are quantum: a series of mysterious, mythological equations:
It wasn’t an epic we sang had
there been a song we sang, heroic
waste
around us though there was. The
beloved’s long-distance voice
was what it was. Muse meant lost
in thought it reminded us, erstwhile
epiphany, snuffed … It was all
a wrong
turn or we took a wrong turn.
Later, Mackey puts it bluntly, like a latter-day Bogomil: “Heaven it was we were in, / not knowing we were. Hell was not / knowing. / We were in hell … So it was in the / kingdom of Nub.”50 In the preface, Mackey defines Nub as a “place name and diagnosis fraught with senses of diminishment: failed extension or falling short but not only that.” He confesses, “I don’t know everything Nub is or implies or might mean (nubbed version of Numb as well as Nubia but not only that),” but admits he feels himself to be living in a “flailing republic of Nub the United States has become,” where (becoming unexpectedly political for a moment), in a “match that seems to have been made in hell, hijacked airliners echo and further entrench a hijacked election, cycles of recriminatory assault further confirming a regime of echo the poem’s recourse to echo would cure homeopathically if it could.”51 In the book’s last poem, “Song of the Andoumboulou: 60,” Mackey resonates familiar themes:
Nonsonant scruff held
on to, sheerness … Nothingness
it seemed we grabbed at, gathered,
beginning to be unending it seemed.
We
were beginning to be lured again,
ready to be hectored, huthered, move
on, beginning to be uprooted again.52
Whatsaying is the poem’s repetitive lure, the project of spelling out—magically and linguistically—the open field in which “we” wander, compulsively attended to, even as it huthers the speaker(s), rendering us connoisseurs of esoteric nonsonance. There is nothing so curious, so strange, so mythically idiomatic being written right now in the United States as this work, and, just so, there is very little else quite so good.