The final measure of the “Chiasma” lectures for the New Sciences of Man is the outcome of Olson’s concern with materialized humanity, something like tin or coal to be tuned or used up or burned off. Rexroth saw this as “the pure form / Of the cutting edge of power— / Man reduced to an entelechy.” For Olson, “man himself is the universe the materials and motions of which call for primary investigation, that he is the unknown—and no longer allowably unknown” (“Chiasma,” 68). At midpoint of the century, which in 1953 Olson clearly felt astride, the dead heaped in the pathway,* in plain view, imposed the equation:
The dead in via
in vita nuova
in the way
You shall lament who know they are as tender as the horse is.
You, do not you speak who know not.
“I will die about April 1st …” going off
“I weigh, I think, 80 lbs …” scratch
“My name is NO RACE” address
Buchenwald new Altamira cave
With a nail they drew the object of the hunt.
There are two images here to ponder : the hunt and the sacrifice. Since the domestication of plants and animals (and urbanized humans), hunting has become one of the great unconsidered constants of human instinct, to the point that now, post 1945, we have doubts about the ultimate identity of the victim : man or animal? After citing Jane Harrison on the link between Greek drama and animal sacrifice, Olson says, “the dance was both mask and twin to the paintings under which they were performed, that the men who danced were costumed literally in the animal’s features (again, the literal)” (“Chiasma,” 54). We have, between the routinized genocide of Buchenwald, and the carefully prescribed assault on larger mammals on Altamira cave wall, a midpoint, neither dance nor image, but ritual : the Aztecs, when sacrificing prisoners, would cut and peel the skin of the victim’s head away so carefully that it was fitted over the celebrant’s head literally like a mask and worn for days until it stank.
From the mute bodies of exhumed bog people (victims by hanging) to the ceremonial transit in a death barge, D. H. Lawrence’s “Ship of Death,” “Bavarian Gentians,” and the rest of his Last Poems, or Whitman’s late “little tags and fringe-dots (maybe specks, stains)” and Dickinson’s “Goblin—on the Bloom” (no. 646), there is a fitful alliance of writing with mortuary circumstance, at once commemoration and indictment, celebration and dispatch. There is a sense with the exhumed bodies of Egyptian kings—in vaults filled with trunks of books, the walls of the vaults covered with writing, the kings’ bodies wrapped in discarded papyrus—that the bodies are writing—“Each word a / flash-pod correspondent / to an event / in the Great Beyond.” The Bible opens with the universe created in or as a word and ends with the vision of a mortal god resurrected into the Word of his Book. The culmination of the Koran is orientation to the Ka’ba, a tomb. A tomb, vault, or sarcophagus is the receptacle of a treasure, immutable currency.
The dead that persist in books : this is what religious teachings commonly report and verify.* Earlier Egyptian and Mesopotamian scriptural and burial practices indicate that an entire library is required for the passage into death. Writing commemorates a relationship to death, a faith in the transmissibility of the dead psyche (or breath-soul) through association with the logos, that break in the flow that spurts, leaks, stains, ruptures into sediment. The dead are a library, a fulcrum of layers that unfold, unwrap, untomb. The interanimating negotiation of those apparently opposing principles, life and death, is made pliable to the mind in Lucretius’s fecund concept of the clinamen, or unaccountable swerve of the atoms plummeting through the void. The swerve affords contact between them, and contact is magnified into concupiscent mortality, momentary cleavage and coagulation. The swerving atom endows a turbulent pocket, a cove or shelter of generation. These pockets are pleats of the manifold, the creases through which nature increases (the pli in complication, explication, application) in clump and clot. Clinamen : tiniest aperture opening on animation.†
It may be through Heraclitus, conspicuously, that we can trace the origin of psyche as the conceptual animation of a subhuman continuity through this rumored, difficult domain of the imponderably small. Heraclitus is unique among his contemporaries in taking psyche to be something other than a synonym for any of the other general “soul words” (thumos, menos, etor, ker, kradin, noos, phrenes). Among Heraclitus’s esoteric resources were the visionary topographies of Persia and India,‡ enabling him to speak of psyche in such a way as to imply “a connection between the soul as the physiological animator and the cosmic processes to which, in that capacity, it is plainly analogized” (Claus, 127). Heraclitus is one of the earliest to imagine what life is from the perspective that life is what imagination is—a reciprocal animation of soul and cosmos in the medium of logos : “you would not approach the limit of psyche, so deep is its logos” (fragment 45).
Cosmos is made of neither men nor gods, but is all fire (to which he bears primary fidelity, and a key Zoroastrian link), kindled in meter and quenched in meter (metra, measure [fragment 30]). For Heraclitus, psyche becomes the medium through which the metrics of logos in cosmos are regulated and maintained. In the surviving tattered relics of his statements and turns of phrase (and punch lines, to judge by some), we have a deep logos : that is, he used common words of his day with such force of differentiation that we read him even in fragments as momentous, convening a place of enlarged exchange, composted fully in the sense that entire parts have disappeared. Depth is a contingency of disappearance. Reconstruction of a “philosophy” from such scattered remains is an act that the science of paleozoology and the classics portend in a single motion. It is only in instances of the willful violation of these bits of verbal matter—humus, compost—by poets and other wreaders that they remain active as particles: Heraclitus’s fragments constitute a fiery particulate combustion like a volcano spewing elemental chunks (the terms psyche, logos, cosmos) into the atmosphere. In all subsequent measure of who we are to the dead and who the dead are to us, the use of these words has been imperative.
Heraclitus and the atomist philosopher-poets of the sixth century B.C. lived at the end of a civilization longer than that which the Christian West can claim for itself. Their relation to the mutation of lore and text in religious dogma, shrines and oracles, mysteries and myths may have encouraged an awareness that human perception registers with certain evident restrictions : we see something too far away to make out, hear something too faintly to know the words, touch too small a surface to know what we touch. By such analogies analytic thought was first imagined; by intuitions developed in the mutable world, on the principle (everywhere abundantly illustrated) that all organic matter cycles through compost, some could imagine these words that were by no means abstractions (or generalizations), but attempts at indicating specifics beyond the capacity of the isolate human perceptual apparatus to verify. They imagined all to be composed of atoms; they imagined the earth was round; they imagined words so deep nobody could ascertain their limits, and breath-potency so persistent it could survive the mortal body as logos or psyche—but only in a cosmos, a place where such minute imponderable contingencies could register as continuities (where truth must dazzle gradually, as Dickinson puts it [no. 1129]). This is—enlarged to a universal frame—the library, where all is stored consequentially, even if buried or as yet folded away from our attentions, dystopically rendered by Borges as a “feverish Library whose chance volumes are constantly in danger of changing into others and affirm, negate and confuse everything like a delirious divinity” (Labyrinths, 57). To read has always meant to unfold, to experience in the passage from sense to mind the implicit gesture with which a flower or leaf responds to the sun, implicated in its shining. As mortality is bound in the life ready to flow from a wound, so the psyche is ready to flow forth in sympathy (sym-patheia, fellow feeling), toward the cosmos, which is all we know of that which flows (“Everything flows” in Heraclitus’s declaration [fragment 20]), and all we know also of psyche. From Heraclitus’s composting intelligence, we carry the legacy of the library as a residuum of leaking souls.
It is quite remarkable that Heraclitus applies to the ψυχ
the journey metaphor by which the daimon of a Pythagorean would seek knowledge beyond that of ordinary men. One wonders whether there is not in this a reply to all such shamanistic pretensions. The journey that matters to Heraclitus is not the journey of the ψυχ but within the ψυχ, in the sense that one must try to understand the Logos by which the ψυχ in the self imitates the behavior of fire in general (Claus, 137).
To others the psyche wandered, but Heraclitus attends to a wandering in psyche, which opens the crypt, in a sense, to read the script, the “colossal cipher” Emerson insists on as the basic literacy of the new American poet. His (Shakespearian) mirror carried through the streets by the great artist pertains retrospectively as far back as the Paleolithic, in the caves of which we find a silhouetted horizon of animal life, a mirror of mortality humans conducted their own mortal epiphanies in the reflection of (a mirror of analogy, not resemblance). To reflect is to see reflections of mind in matter, to behold a cascade of elements in cosmos, “as if our condition now is / hugely umbilical” and perception itself enduring a confinement, a pregnancy seeking its issue in an enlarged view of the matter at hand. The mortal struggles of twentieth-century terrors are now giving birth to whatever unpredictable mode of being it is that follows the human—an era consummately named by Yeats’s premonition of the “savage god” and Pound’s lament for that wasteland “where the dead walked / and the living were made of cardboard.”
The post-human—the posthumous Homo Sapien—passes from cosmos to chaos. But chaos has always been with us, intrinsic to cosmos if not to cosmology (words about the world). The subterranean transmissions of composting poetry have been compacted in the compost library, where biodegradable thinking occurs, where we can conceivably speak of an “ecology of consciousness” in which psyche wandering is in touch with human boundaries, noting the logos that forestalls the corruption of cosmos by chaos. Chaos, now, may be nothing other than business “as usual” in assuming reflection to be simply that which glitters.* But for the proportionate intelligence, seeking ratio or the metrical ingenuity of events, “Wisdom is whole : the knowledge of how things are plotted in their courses by all other things” (Heraclitus, Davenport translation, 31). The Indo-European root of chaos (and of chasm) is gbi, meaning “open wide.” When Duncan writes of “opening the field,” following Olson’s propositions of composition by field in a continuum of open forms, chaos is the opening. The aperture and its fathom.