From emptiness or blank, a scene arises; there is always a scene, a presentiment of knowing, the viewer’s gnosis in the prehensile grasp of the elements. But prior to the scene there is a mood, a predisposition, whether expectation or aversion. The mood is black bile; whatever its temperamental coloring, it does dark work, work in the dark. The black bile “obliges thought to penetrate and explore the center of its objects, because the black bile is itself akin to the center of the earth” (Ficino, in Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl, 259). Each object is fruit, a fleshy covering over the treasure of the pit or pith, the myth or meat of it. Saturnian bile is Ficino’s name for the sovereign esoteric genius of melancholy : “by withdrawal from earthly things, by leisure, solitude, constancy, esoteric theology and philosophy, by superstition, magic, agriculture, and grief, we come under the influence of Saturn” (261).* The Hermetic function of Saturn is division, making many out of one, these from that. But in astrology and in the humours there are baleful associations : paralysis, fixation, obsession—countertrends to the more positive features, motion, flexibility, and vivacity. So melancholy is a mood of dark breaks, segues of blue notes and duende.
The scene, then:
Boulders blunted like an old bear’s teeth break up from the headland; below them
All the soil is thick with shells, the tide-rock feasts of a dead people.
Here the granite flanks are scarred with ancient fire, the ghosts of the tribe
Crouch in the nights beside the ghost of a fire, they try to remember the sunlight,
Light has died out of their skies
—light has died out of their skins, I’m prone to read. “Apology for Bad Dreams” names a mood of despondence and dread. The Saturnian gloom that rekindles by virtue of sheer intensity a black explicitness. It is a masculine severity Jeffers practices, in which breakdown extends to the whole tissue of human affairs in a communal narcosis of grief.
He brays humanity in a mortar to bring the savor
From the bruised root : a man having bad dreams, who invents victims, is only the ape of that God.
He washes it out with tears and many waters, calcines it with fire in the red crucible,
Deforms it, makes it horrible to itself : the spirit flies out and stands naked, he sees the spirit,
He takes it in the naked ecstasy; it breaks in his hand, the atom is broken, the power that massed it
Cries to the power that moves the stars, “I have come home to myself, behold me.
I bruised myself in the flint mortar and burnt me
In the red shell, I tortured myself, I flew forth,
Stood naked of myself and broke me in fragments,
And here am I moving the stars that are me.”
Only at the end does Jeffers come to any abatement of rage, let alone tranquil acceptance. He is the Saturnian seismologist of harsh times gleaned from the rugged visage of ocean and sky, rocky shores and headlands—the cruelty sometimes generalized (a symptom of melancholia) as the given condition of things.
A conceptual and temperamental alternative to Saturn is Demeter, the corn goddess. Hers is an instruction about black descent as germination. Her perspective construes division differently than Saturnian collapse. In the voice of Mina Loy, writing as one of “The Dead”:
We have flowed out of ourselves
Beginning on the outside
That shrivable skin
Where you leave off
Of infinite elastic
Walking the ceiling
Our eyelashes polish stars.
“We splinter into Wholes,” Loy goes on to specify. “Our tissue is of that which escapes you / Birth-Breaths and orgasms … / The unsurpassable openness of the circle.” And in “Parturition” the circle assumes a new dimension:
I am the center
Of a circle of pain
Exceeding its boundaries in every direction.
In this parturition Loy finds that an “open window is full of a voice”; and in that voice she finds a backward-spiraling nebula of other voices, animal noises, and a continuum of birthing-matter with the “Stir of incipient life / Precipitating into me / The contents of the universe.”
There is a climax in sensibility
When pain surpassing itself
Becomes Exotic
And the ego succeeds in unifying the positive and negative poles of sensation
Uniting the opposing and resisting forces
In lascivious revelation
Relaxation
Negation of myself as a unit
Vacuum interlude
I should have been emptied of life
Giving life
For consciousness in crises races
Through the subliminal deposits of evolutionary processes
~
The was—is—ever—shall—be
Of cosmic reproductivity
Rises from the sub-conscious
Impression of small animal carcass
Covered with blue-bottles
—Epicurean—
And through the insects
Waves that same undulation of living
Death
Life
I am knowing
All about
Unfolding