Language is inconceivable without a granary of words, a “mill of particulars” in Robert Kelly’s parable. But particularity can run amok without an informing pattern, a disposing matrix. The pestilential vision of parts overrunning the whole takes the form of bacterial invasion in Kenneth Rexroth’s vision of the onset of World War II,
Spreading over the world, lapping at the last
Inviolate heights; mud streaked yellow
With gas, slimy and blotched with crimson,
Filled with broken bits of steel and flesh,
Moving slowly with the blind motion
Of lice, spreading inexorably
As bacteria spread in tissues,
Swirling with the precise rapacity of starved rats.
In the matrix of total war, ghostly avatars of the past begin to swarm around the pools of blood, like the clamoring shades in Hades aroused by Odysseus’s sacrificial slaughters as he prepares his descent to the underworld. Clayton Eshleman’s heraldic figures are calculated incubations hatched in intestinal sanctuaries of the poems like the embalmed relics of his own childhood dipped into the contemporary atrocities of El Salvador in “Tomb of Donald Duck.” As the figures of elsewhere and otherwise arise, an atavistic insistence overtakes us, and out of such grotesquerie oozes the bracing perspective of an “Aurignacian Summation”:
“… you must now take into consideration
the savage Excalibur working back and forth
against the ratio of the living and the dead.
In 2000 A.D. the living may outnumber the dead.
When the life side of the balance, heavier,
swings down, the death end, lighter, will lift
not only this bridge but this rowboat
that to you still appears to be ‘down there,’ ‘obsolete,’
under the glassine shadow of a weeping willow
but which in a way even we are just starting to grasp
may already be carrying us toward a Jacob ladderjacked heaven,
inverted Niagara in which the water rushing up and away
is the suction of astronomical design to return
to Betelgeuse the energy with which we have pick-up-styxed Orion
when our task, from the beginning, was to learn how to vomit fire.”
Eshleman’s Aurignacians, inspecting the late twentieth century from the most remote region of Hades, conceive the earth as a system dedicated entirely to burning itself up, finding in our time their most conclusive evidence of human dereliction.
For what we cannot accomplish, what
is denied to love,
what we have lost in the anticipation—
a descent follows,
endless and indestructible •
~
The ear
catches rime like pangs of a disease from the air. Was it
sign of a venereal infection raging in the blood? For poetry
is a contagion • And Lust a lord
who’ll find the way to make words ake and take on
heat and glow.
There is a land and a time—Morgan le Fay’s—
marsh and river country, her smoky strand
in whose lewd files I too have passt • to
tell the beads of that story again.
This is a topos to which Robert Duncan returns in “The Regulators”—specifically “In Blood’s Domaine,” a chilling summation of pestilential intensities and catalog of malignancy and debasement.
And if I know not my wound it does not appear to suppurate?…
Link by link I can disown no link of this chain from my conscience.
What Angel, what Gift of the Poem, has brought into my body
this sickness of living?
“Mind comes into this language as if into an Abyss”—the language of “viral fragments” in atomic weapons and biological metastases alike. Duncan’s understanding moves in the realization that “There is no ecstasy of Beauty in which I will not remember Man’s misery.”
In Wallace Stevens’s “enemies … whose whispers prickle the spirit” and Duncan’s “not men but / heads and armors of the worm,” an imaginal pestilence feeds off its own worst images become incarnate, alive in the actual world, insinuating itself into the will. So a full commitment to the body of imagination opens directly on the incredulous realization that imagination can do no worse than the banal perpetrations, the horrors and atrocities that exceed the bounds and test the fortitude of creative empathy. Aldo Leopold reckoned the cost of ecological literacy as that of “living alone in a world of wounds” (Meine, 165). Nathaniel Mackey even considers the danger that “one could so rhapsodically lick one’s wounds as to acquire and promote a taste for woundedness” (Naylor interview, 661). Assessing “the / hollow coil of our own dark scribbles,” Gustaf Sobin estimates “nothing’s written, in effect, that’s not underwritten : / no world, in effect, that’s not—ultimately—underworld.” A. R. Ammons laments, “all this garbage! all // these words : we may replace our mountains with / trash : leachments may be our creeks flowing // from the distilling bottoms of corruption.”
That constant local bilge of atrocity, the everyday, requires an extra effort of imaginative sympathy just because it is so mundane. The routinization of evil under the Nazis is still too flamboyant an image. Edward Dorn marks the reckoning on a much less charged, but no less consequent, circumstance:
Posses led by a promising girl wielding a baton upon the street
A Sacagawea wearing a baseball cap, eating a Clark bar
And always they smirk at starvation
And consider it dirty … a joke their daughters learn
From their new husbands.
One of those daughters, author of Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, roused by the Gulf War, proves
… bent on fathoming what it means to love my country.
The history of this earth and the bones within it?
Soils and cities, promises made and mocked, plowed contours of shame and hope?
Loyalties, symbols, murmurs extinguished and echoing?
Grids of states stretching westward, underground waters?
Minerals, traces, rumors I am made from, morsel, miniscule fibre, one woman
like and unlike so many, fooled as to her destiny, the scope of her task?
Charles Olson comes to regard the suburban sanitation of the world’s dark heave as terminus, end-of-species:
Actually the stirrings now of man faced
with a wall going
up—man is now his own production, he is
omnivorous, the only trouble with his situation is he eats
himself and since 1650 this
infestation
of his own order has
jumping to
2,700 million and
going to 6,200 on
January 1st 2000 is
his—the People are now the science
of the Past—his
increment. Only he has no
thought left, nor money nor
mortalness. He is only valuable
to himself—ugh, a species
acquiring
distaste
for itself.
When, in other words, do our own covert cannibal exertions stand fully disclosed as the complicitous reserve on which our sense of bounty abounds?—“To unmean with moaning, / adamant, / gutteral gist inexhaustibly / ancestral to itself?” Tellus old earth whose houses are perched like ‘the language of the birds’ / giants of genocide slice the shadows to species suicide.” William Carlos Williams, combing the century’s calamities for solace, finds it intact in this grim extremity,
recalling the Jew
in the pit
among his fellows
when the indifferent chap
with the machine gun
was spraying the heap •
he had not yet been hit
but smiled
comforting his companions •