The stars point to an articulate order surpassing language, evolving a realm in which
art is not construction, artifice, meticulous
relationship to a space and a world existing
outside it is truly the ‘inarticulate cry’
as Hermes Trismegistus said, ‘which seemed
to be the sound of the light’
~
These stars
are fragrant and I follow their scent.
I am their hunting hound,
predator of the marvelous.
In the region of the inarticulate cry, where all sensations reduce to blank dazzle, “Life is an ecstasy. Life is sweet as nitrous oxide,” Emerson writes (“Illusions”).* “Thus events grow on the same stem with persons; are sub-persons. The pleasure of life is according to the man that lives it …. Life is an ecstasy” (“Fate”). “We are extrusions, facets, auras, in vibratory flowing surge of infinite possibilities,” McClure barks in unison with his animal cohorts in “Wolf Net” (Scratching the Beat Surface, 160). And “A ribosome in a liver cell in a salmon might relate to a field of energies or a point within a quasar or a distant sun” (126). “Our experience of the universe is also the universe perceiving itself” (127)—the same bifold self/other inspection, the fertile sundering of a universe that has to slice itself in two to observe itself (according to Spencer Brown in Laws of Form).
In the wisdom of the ancients, the stars were mirroring provocateurs of human affairs. To look up was to gaze inward and see the milk of the stars become the maternal plangency of galaxy’s gala—its milky blast, its nourishing forecast of fate’s influx in animal blessing; the inimitable span and paradox of poetry that “love is not made caressingly from pore to pore, but from pore to star” (Lezama Lima, 175).
Sex on earth is rhymed angelic motion.
Outer space and inner space misnomers
when what is meant (nomen, numen)
is rhymed in megalith and microspore
But the solar heart defines the blood
How far out you go
it is within.*
As, even for the infant in utero, “pressing a knee or elbow / along a slippery wall, sculpting / the world with each thrash”—even there in that sanctuary—“the stream of omphalos blood [is] humming all about you.” In the plush grace of the womb, every heartbeat resounds, as “The sweet virile hair of thunder storms / Brushes over the swelling horizon.”
Stars and storms are respirations:
before us gods goddesses at the ends of words
dead and alive among apple trees in the old
orchard the sky is first an inhalation,
then smaller and tinted, an exhalation —
and the words are not winds
but small movements, ruled
in a largeness that is not ourselves
~
shuddering …
under and through the universe
rides the brows of the sounding whales
& swells in the thousand
cow-bells.
It undulates under each meadow
to thunder in the hills, the crow’s call,
& the apple-falls.
I hear it always, in a huge & earthy fugue,
from inner ear, to farthest owls
~
The ringing in your ears
is the cricket in the stars.
The reckoning of selfhood in the span of planets and stars is not instantaneous, but a labor of time : “the distance between the star and its subject are complemented by the antiquity of the light which finally arrives” (Kuberski, 77). The legendary music of the spheres is the sound of that arrival, a gratified constellation attuned in audible delight, in musical realization.
Freedom. It isn’t once, to walk out
under the Milky Way, feeling the rivers
of light, the fields of dark—
freedom is daily, prose-bound, routine
remembering. Putting together, inch by inch
the starry worlds. From all the lost collections.
The dance of the stars is real and consequent motion, directly engaging earthly affairs, “mold[ing] them to its sequences in a cosmic manifold in which past and future called to each other, deep calling to deep” (Grossinger, 56).
But the long-held glimpse of these heavenly measures lapsed, and medieval cosmology endowed sublunary existence with a purely receptive capacity : in the Christian worldview, ascension was a contingency of faith, not deed. The modern (post-Renaissance) cosmos is dualistic, folding the inside over against the outside like type and antitype, but endowing both with an unlimited power of expansion (as infinite universe and craving ego). Kant pitches his moral law on the fulcrum of the balance between “the starry heavens above” and the unique mortal soul.
The [starry heavens above] begin from the place I occupy in the external world of sense, and enlarges my connection therein to an unbounded extent with worlds upon worlds and systems of systems, and moreover into limitless times of their periodic motion, its beginning and continuance. The second begins from my visible self, my personality, and exhibits me in a world which has true infinity, but which is traceable only by the understanding and with which I discern that I am not in a merely contingent but in a universal and necessary connection, as I am also thereby with all those visible worlds. (Kant, in Kuberski, 70–71)
What Kant understands as a force that “exhibits me in a world which has true infinity” is extensively described by Suhrawardi (the Ismaili Sufi) in terms of the mundus imaginalis, a “concrete spiritual universe,” not a (Kantian) world of concepts or paradigms or universals.
[T]he archetype of a species has nothing to do with the universals established in logic, but is the Angel of that species. Rational abstraction, at best, deals only with the “mortal remains” of an Angel; the world of archetype-Images, the autonomous world of visionary Figures and Forms, is on the plane of angelology. To see beings and things “in the northern light” is to see them “in the Earth of Hūrqalyā,” that is, to see them in the light of the Angel; it is described as reaching the Emerald Rock, the heavenly pole, coming upon the world of the Angel. (Corbin, Man of Light, 6)
The encounter with the Angel instigates “the awakening of consciousness to the soul’s condition as a stranger, and, in this emergence to itself, its meeting with him who shows it the way, its Guide, its Noūs” (Corbin, Avicenna, 23–24).
The gnostic precepts underlying this vision of cosmic estrangement are evident also in Corbin’s attention to the concept of ta’wīl, in which the Guide leads the soul on a journey of homecoming, turning (troping) from exoteric to esoteric, and returning to its source in a “universe ‘in which spirits are corporealized and bodies spiritualized’” (35). Ta’wīl also refers to a mode of textual exegesis Corbin takes pains to distinguish from allegoresis : “instead of seeking a secret in or under the text, we must regard the text itself as the secret” (33)—a principle worth bearing in mind while reading the poets of This Compost. The concept of ta’wīl—in both its cosmological and textual applications—was important to Olson (who thought it might provide “a basis for a physics of psyche at this revolutionary point in re-taking the cosmology of creation as fact, both in instant and in consequence” [Additional Prose, 71]); discussed at length by George Quasha and Charles Stein in conversation with Robert Kelly (probing the notion of the poem as ta’wīl of its first line, the exemplary instance for Kelly being Duncan’s “Poem Beginning With a Line by Pindar” [“Ta’wīl or How to Read,” 117]). Ta’wīl is also vital for Nathaniel Mackey in his ongoing multivolume “Songs of the Andoumboulou” and “mu.” Mackey is explicit about his debt to Corbin : “The idea that essence is alienated rather than immediate and the linkage of gnostic estrangement, esoterism and poetics are among the things that stuck and stayed with me.” “My adoption of the Andoumboulou as a figure for our present as well as past condition, the suggestion that the Andoumboulou are a rough draft of human being and that we’re (still) that rough draft, is a gnostic one” (Naylor, 655, 656).
The gnostic yearning is to return to the pleroma, the fullness of Being. It’s too easy to equate pleroma with a Golden Age or a Heavenly City. Corbin obliquely offers a useful discrimination when he says “ta’wīl causes the letter to regress to its true and original meaning” (Avicenna, 29). Mackey’s work is intimately bound up with such regression, testing the legroom available to that “atavistic two-headed / beast, / one head we call Stride, the / other Obstruct.”* The muthos mouthed in travail belabors a “‘mu’ more related / to miss than to myth”—where, however, miss becomes gnostic mission. In its repudiation of materiality, gnosticism sees earth and body as symptoms of a cosmic degradation. But these are prejudicial terms; there is more at work in what was occult to begin with. Poets preoccupied with gnosticism—like Olson, Duncan, Kelly, Mackey, Gerrit Lansing, Brenda Hillman—have been drawn to its hidden dimensions. Another poet, Kenneth Rexroth, clarifies the nature of the appeal : as a heterodoxy, gnosticism was open to a bewildering diversity of resources and seems capable of assimilating them all, coupling scientific knowledge with ancient ritual (“Primer of Gnosticism,” ix); and it established the individual at the center of a cosmic drama. Ripe material for poets working in the compost library.* Rexroth adds another incentive : “Since the official Church was patriarchal and authoritarian, Gnosticism gave expression to those matriarchal and libertarian tendencies which are there, suppressed or not, in all societies” (xix). The psychodynamic absorption of social trauma, coupled with spiritual presentiment of cosmological redemption, is richly evident in The Maximus Poems and in Mackey’s work in particular†, which certainly answer to Rexroth’s claim that “[Gnostic] mythology is a symbolic portrayal, almost a deliberate one, of the forces which operate in the structuring and evolution of the human personality. It is, more than almost any other religious system, because it is of all others the most invented, the most ‘made up,’ an institutionalized panorama of what Jung has called the Collective Unconscious. The whole Gnostic heresy is a sort of socially therapeutic dream” (xix). At the heart of the dream is therapeia, or work to be done; pragmatic, restorative labor that might as well go by the name ta’wīl.
The therapeutic dream continued to erupt in sectarian form long after gnosticism subsided in the Mediterranean, and Ezra Pound commemorated the last of them, the Albigensians, integrated in the Cantos into a matrix of luminosity. Pound’s illuminations are always light bound, oriented to that “room in Poitiers where one can stand / casting no shadow, / That is Sagetrieb, / that is tradition.” The vegetation rites of Rock-Drill and Thrones petition the deep visage of the sky, asking what compensation is to be made for the capture and cultivation of photosynthetic compounds in the heavenly body of falling light. The stars ensoul, as Kuberski points out. “‘To look at’ is a figure of speech which presupposes a discarded theory of optics which holds that our eyes emit rays of light toward perceived objects. To see the stars, to be looked at by the stars, is to be penetrated and illuminated by starlight” (Persistence of Memory, 63). To encounter light at all is to be consumed in its enigma, time,
to see the world focused back at us
like a wide flower:
river, vascular lightning
& leaf-vein.
The condition of this consumption is mortality. “After a long time of light, there began to be eyes, and light began looking with itself. At the exact moment of death the pupils open full width.”