In Gnomonology—a primer of poetics and practical wisdom—Howard McCord speaks of the need “to SHAPE expression beyond the bleating self.” “You would know the whole?” he asks, and amidst his bibliocentric cartography urges a path “Through the force of love, by the heart’s blind eye, in the swiftness of glimpsed forms, in lightness, in balance.” McCord’s references range widely, including works like Ron Linton’s Terracide, the plant lore of Oakes Ames and Edgar Anderson, Yi-Fu Tuan’s The Hydrologic Cycle and the Wisdom of God, Adolf Portmann’s Animal Forms and Patterns, and a richly synthesized compilation of similar resources. Many of the coordinates continue to compel tactics of poetic attention, including Spencer Brown on “the membrane, the border” (in Laws of Form), René Thom’s probing into catastrophe theory (Topological Models in Biology), Marcel Griaule’s Dogon cosmology (Conversations with Ogotemmêli), Henry Corbin’s Avicenna and the Visionary Recital, biologist C. H. Waddington’s concept of the chreod (meaning “pathway of change”), and Michel Foucault’s (then just published) The Order of Things. Vital evidence of a poetic eclecticism, and native savvy of the compost library.
Charles Olson provoked such cartographic study guides with “Bibliography on America for Ed Dorn.” Elsewhere he proposes seven “hinges of civilization to be put back on the door” (Additional Prose, 25–26). These include the valuation of “a more primal consequent art & life than that which followed” to consist of the full Semitic prebiblical lore, an accounting of the roots of fifth-century Athens back in its earlier Asiatic connections (recognizing Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Buddha, and Confucius as contemporaries), and several other “hinges.”* Another in this milieu of bibliographic provocations is Gerrit Lansing’s manifesto “The Burden of Set” with its resounding declaration : “It remains to be seen what cannot be permitted” (92). The function of the trickster, that intrepid avatar of the impermissible, “is to add disorder to order and so make a whole, to render possible, within the fixed bounds of what is permitted, an experience of what is not permitted” (Radin, 185). “We are in a rough time, the most difficult transition age of all, a real Interchange of Tinctures, where a kind of personal life is being exchanged for a kind of ‘universal’” “To each man, for use, what he has is given, & if he hasn’t, well, it’s being taken away from him, & pretty fast” (Lansing, “Burden of Set,” 90). Lansing also proposes certain labyrinthine labors as “beginnings, opening of the figures of Time that compose the structure of our necessity, how by poetry we investigate the needs” (87). The prophecy is exacting : poetry is investigation into “the structure of our necessity.”*
The proprioceptive and ecological necessities impinging on the creative act—the psyche acting in the poem on cosmos through logos—are vital to Olson’s legacy. His characteristic swagger was mostly a register of his absorption in the materials. Robert Duncan was more adept at making his claims understood as provisional. Turning away from heroic posturing is, as he puts it, a “phantasmagoria,” invariably “mythological vision and folklorish phantasy,” a bewildering interplay of chaos and cosmos, clown and king (Truth and Life, 38). This philosophical wedding, hieros gamos, which was taken by Freud and Jung to be the confrontation of psyche itself with the modern world, as if mind itself were atavistic, obscenely outdated (and with the increased offloading of computational tasks to random access memory devices, enfleshed psyche does begin to seem an anachronism). To activate this archaic capacity of mind or soul is to pathologize, as James Hillman calls it, or to be generative in Olson’s term. Myth, in other words, is profane. Simply to tell tales of the gods is hubristic, misbehaving before the temple (pro-fanum). So Duncan regards the poet as involuntary mime of the marvelous, whose profanities (as in Bottom’s dream) stumble upon the sacred. Ineptitude signifies that another order is at hand. When we try to imagine the archaic we know neither what we’re looking for nor what we’re seeing. The old lore is at once a body of testimony and an invitation to risk.
The stakes in myth are always high—that is, risks are not recuperable to the apologetic posturing of “development” routinized by history. It is a mistake to link myth with belief, says Roberto Calasso; rather, “we enter the mythical when we enter the realm of risk, and myth is the enchantment we generate in ourselves in such moments. More than a belief, it is a magical bond that tightens around us. It is a spell the soul casts on itself” (Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, 278). As Duncan attests, “The depths emerge in a kind of dream informed by the familiar tale. It is important here that the myth be first so familiar, so much no-more-than an old story, that the poet is at home with what is most perilous” (Truth and Life, 27). The peril must be harbored by the familiar, so as to engage the possible. “So when we look at a little bit of American Indian folklore, myth, read a tale, we’re catching just the tip of an iceberg of forty or fifty thousand years of human experience, on this continent, in this place” (Snyder, Old Ways, 80). This is from an essay on the trickster in which Gary Snyder can be seen working, like Olson and James Hillman, toward depotentiating the image of the hero : “so the trickster image is basic; it has to do in part with that turning away from heroes” (85), and putting Adrienne Rich’s question to the tally of human cost:
… male dominion, gangrape, lynching, pogrom
the Mohawk wraiths in their tracts of leafless birch
watching : will we do better?
Clayton Eshleman, watching a documentary on the Nazi concentration camps, ventures his credo “There is no proposal the imagination cannot assimilate / But it is only through Pleistocene mercy that we’re still here.”
Another of Snyder’s imperatives is that we at least know we’re glimpsing thirty or forty thousand years’ experience. The only way of examining such material is by sniffing it out, through intuition, empathy, superstition. Reconstructing a history, unless it attains psychological animation, is not enough. History is inconsequential data unless animated by the old story sense of psyche (a protagonist) working on creation (cosmos) with some tool (logos). To recover the old lore as evidence of a prior logos is insufficient; one’s own psyche mingles involuntarily with psyches elsewhere or in other times. Story—logos—stirs and disturbs psyche. We can now recognize the singularity attributed by Duncan to poetry’s involuntarism and clownish trifling with sacred matter : this is elemental stirring, primary animation of cosmos by deliberately tampering with boundaries, loosening psychic materials by mouth, myth, muthologistics. This brings us to the relation between the old lore and the archaic I want to underscore : the old lore is logos tatters from the compost library; the archaic is the cosmos as we—our psyches so disposed—can conceive it, notably the broader “40,000 year view” the old lore invites.*
“The psychosis or principle of the soul-life,” writes Duncan, “is its belonging to the reality of what we know to be true to our story-sense. In the light of the mythological, events and persons can seem true or false to the true story of who I am” (Truth and Life, 8). James Hillman : “It is not life that matters, but soul and how life is used to care for soul” (Re-Visioning Psychology, 175). William James : “the world that each of us feels most intimately at home with is that of beings with histories that play into our history” (Pluralistic Universe, 652). Psyche is always the “true” story—being true to its own story-sense—yet such truth is thought discrepant from historical truth. But even history lies outside the actual experience of psyche in a human lifetime. Myth is psychology—reenacting history in the imaginal palette of psychic issue : “To inherit or to evolve is to enter mythic existence” (Duncan, Truth and Life, 59).
Think of wings pushing through shoulders.
Think of drinking the compass to become a map.
Think of rain pouring from an eave
with no cloud above, a wet alphabet trembling
inside the spine. Or to escape through the letter O
to be naked inside the curve of an S.
~
The past is not a husk yet change goes on
~
oak powers renewing the mythopoeia