Imagination is the organ of inner ecology. In the nineteenth-century volkisch view, the imagination transcended individuality, giving rise to the notion that great artists “belonged” to a nation, that intensity in an individual brightened the race. This short-circuited into a racial stinginess, a prophylactic urge to preserve the purity of imaginative expression, with nationalism as self-appointed custodian of purportedly “universal” values. The stage was set for the absorption of all cultural activity into a bureaucratic network of filtered “exposure” to “culturally enriching” events. Every citizen is delegated a personal sensibility to cultivate like a suburban backyard garden plot, a compound of sensibility, a reservation of privacy, a concentration camp of civility. The milieu is indelibly registered by Samuel Beckett in the cadence of “Imagination Dead Imagine”:
No trace anywhere of life, you say, pah, no difficulty there imagination not dead yet, yes, dead, good, imagination dead imagine. Islands, waters, azure, verdure, one glimpse and vanished, endlessly, omit. Till all white in the whiteness the rotunda. No way in, go in, measure. Diameter three feet, three feet from ground to summit of the vault. Two diameters at right angles AB CD divide the white ground into two semicircles ACB BDA. Lying on the ground two white bodies, each in its semicircle. White too the vault and the round wall eighteen inches high from which it springs. Go back out, a plain rotunda, all white in the whiteness, go back in, rap, solid throughout, a ring as in the imagination the ring of bone. The light that makes all so white no visible source, all shines with the same white shine, ground, wall vault, bodies, no shadow.
This is the ultimate depository of civilization. The vault or cockpit becomes the law, the cocoon of cyborgian command-control options. An entire population can be neutralized, plugged into addictive neurosensory inputs. The hominid neocortex seems porous to this assault : “The rotted man inside, who used to seem archetypal, is biological and his ‘language environment’ is amniotic and porous to heroin. He is the new wilderness announcement that there no longer is a wilderness which has not been mixed with non-wilderness.” Human ecology has been consigned to the manic joyride of History, or the System as it appears to Thomas Pynchon:
Kekulé dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World. But the meanness, the cynicism with which this dream is to be used. The Serpent that announces, “The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally-returning,” is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that “productivity” and “earnings” keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit : and not only most of humanity—most of the World, animal, vegetable and mineral, is laid waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it’s only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which sooner or later must crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life. Living inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide. (Gravity’s Rainbow, 412)
The maniac driver is not an individual; nor is it a collective will; rather, it is an aggregate of behavioral tendencies precipitated by historical growth cycles now reaching the planetary limit. In terms of ancient cosmology, the world has become porous to chaos. The eruption of chaos is psychic event, not messy circumstance : “preformed chaos / strives to form / into play and ploy / plot and lore of discourse,” as David Meltzer puts it in his “Biodegradable Prose Specks” on chaos. It may be that chaos was man’s initial recognition of himself as twin to the universe, his body a distortion loop through which external unboundedness internalized itself; and this upside-down image (passed through the fovea centralis like a Möbius strip, inside out and upside down en route to turning right-side up again; like Maximus with his head in the ground and feet in the air) came out as soul or psyche.
Psyche is the cabin of a cosmos, a cabinet of that cosmetic that is the makeup of each person (persona or mask); make up your mind; make it up as you go along. Psyche folds logos into itself, exfoliating cosmos. The trivialization by habitual reference to William Carlos Williams’s red wheelbarrow upon which “so much” depends should not disguise the fact that everything does depend on this tool for hauling compost. Cosmos too is compost, though its rate of decay and recycling is imperceptible except by analogy. Or by trope : to speak of cosmos as universe is to be reminded that it turns around as words in the mouth, that language is biodegradable, that “what is said of what is said” (myth for Charles Olson) is the whole of the law. The animated imprint, the knowledge (or logos enacted) with which the earth is signed and designed, is what the toss is for—play of the dice. Rollin’ and tumblin’. Painting cave wall, incising tablet, staining papyrus, and multiplying human deeds by technology—these archaic impulses constitute a discrete evolutionary ecology, creating spaces in which apparent destinies can be reconsidered, new destinations conceived.
Hermetic, terrible from joy,
A rude imagination blazed
This iconography, not
To animate the game of nerves
Nor galvanize a rotting fiber,
But, as supernatural,
To lead the florid intellect
Through lovely glades of calm conceiving
Until it know its final earth.
The hermetic imagination in every era has reflected not so much a craving for secrecy as an effort to pressurize psychic issue so as to insulate it from assaults on inner ecology. If Greek soil is filled with the blood of soldiers, whose ghosts beg heroes to reimburse them of their spilled essence, then American soil is saturated with implacable spirit exiles sifting through and infecting poetic imagination.
The ghosts of Odysseus’s descent to the underworld sift down through the eleventh-century Latin of Andreas Divus, to lie there undisturbed till the blood flows for them in Pound’s awakening of Divus into English in Canto I. Contemporaneous with Pound’s text is Jeffers’s “The Torch-Bearer’s Race” with its tribe of lost ghosts:
Dark and enormous rolls the surf; down on the mystical tide-line under the cliffs at moonset
Dead tribes move, remembering the scent of their hills, the lost hunters
Our fathers hunted; they driven westward died the sun’s death, they dread the depth and hang at the land’s hem,
And are unavenged …
Thirty-five years later Olson offers a magnified glimpse of these same ghosts, uncannily risen out of an abandoned vehicle:
As the dead prey upon us,
they are the dead in ourselves,
awake, my sleeping ones, I cry out to you,
disentangle the nets of being!
I pushed my car, it had been sitting so long unused.
I thought the tires looked as though they only needed air.
But suddenly the huge underbody was above me, and the rear tires were masses
of rubber and thread variously clinging together
as were the dead souls in the living room, gathered
about my mother, some of them taking care to pass
beneath the beam of the movie projector, some record
playing on the victrola, and all of them
desperate with the tawdriness of their life in hell
I turned to the young man on my right and asked, “How is it,
there?” And he begged me protestingly don’t ask, we are poor
poor. And the whole room was suddenly posters and presentations
of brake linings and other automotive accessories, cardboard
displays, the dead roaming from one to another
as bored back in life as they are in hell, poor and doomed
to mere equipments.
Hindrances spread like nets across each plane of being; angels and demons, spectral revenants ascend and descend in a network encompassing both the living and the dead:
The nets we are entangled in. Awake,
my soul, let the power into the last wrinkle
of being, let none of the threads and rubber of the tires
be left upon the earth. Let even your mother
go. Let there be only paradise
The desperateness is, that the instant
which is also paradise (paradise
is happiness) dissolves
into the next instant, and power
flows to meet the next occurrence.
The visiting ghosts in these poems of Pound, Jeffers, and Olson emphasize the historical context with its tacit sense of place. There are numerous similar recountings in poets of subsequent generations that seem more personal, less historical, yet the place continues to be concretized by the sightings. Clayton Eshleman’s exploration of Paleolithic caves in Hades in Manganese is framed by poems concerning the nourishment of dead companions. Several poems in Robert Kelly’s Flesh Dream Book have a comparable function. In The Holy Forest, Robin Blaser takes great care in the placement of commemorative poems (not necessarily elegies) in the concluding sections. Jerome Rothenberg’s “Khurbn” opens itself to the unburied plaint of the Nazi death camps. And up the coast from Jeffers’s Big Sur, Kenneth Irby is witness to an oceanic visitation. “The table top looked glassy for a few seconds,” the setting begins, “shimmered, watery, showing the ocean dimly in the distances, then faded into ordinary wood again.” An extensive excerpt is needed to convey the unrest in this overlap between the living and the dead, and how it is as much a function of place (the cosmos, glimmering on ocean marge) as it is of an individual psyche.
Everything happened instantaneously, as at the end of the Diamond Sutra, with the dream intensity. He could only lengthen it, telling himself later. He knew each of them was dead, with the possible exception of Lenhoff, and all but him suicides, but he couldn’t say this to their faces, neither could they ever admit it, and any conversation depended on that, confronting them with their deaths?…
What did they all want from him? If he kept looking long enough he’d see everything he ever knew about them. If they all stayed long enough, everyone he’d ever known would show up too. All of them wanted touch again? The earthly again, out of those terrible emptinesses, but not some hand on the knee, as in a dream once he’d leaned forward to reassure David, or around the shoulder, or even a handshake, because they no longer shared any common substantiality. A rag of Sam’s sleeve, but not Sam himself. They couldn’t return to people they didn’t know, only to some love, remembrance, the warmth of shared thought, the touch of some shared attention. Prayer, he thought, must be about this. They didn’t know, desperate, wrenched from life, what they wanted, but from the living, release again, as if here, here, they might be free, to continue, wherever that went, warmed anew …. All his life he’d been learning how to receive. What they wanted of him wasn’t just what he gave, his love, but to receive theirs. To be open, as he’d told himself for years and years. To enlarge the space of the living. Nothing is lost. Take us when we come, we have no other place to go but those we love.
In the glassy surface of the table waves receded and pounded. He heard the roar of the eucalyptus grove, the wind was up, the door had come ajar and the wind was in cold, the post-alcoholic chill, he thought, it’s time to go to bed.
Where are you now? In the house of friends, on the Northern coast of California, in the grip of the elements, altogether alive.
The scene provides a portal for the continuity of longing as conditional imprint of the western shore. If Whitman’s Atlantic carried him back to boyhood refrains—which Olson continues in Gloucester, feeling himself always the son—then the Pacific gaze looks simultaneously on the immensity of the species’ terminus and the “compost line of any mind of any / time to map the world line.” The Pacific shore is one end of a land soaked with blood:
the dark gods
wait in the blooded underground
their visage is more shapeless
and more terrible than ever
~
the hermetic secret floats elegantly among the muddy images
~
in a place named No-Such-Place,
burred
speech of a ghost named
Not-All-There.
The question, then, posed by such coastal limits:
which direction now
does distance take
that aches in the feet?
There is—this is the hope in the ache—a way of looking at, attending to, cosmos, that catches the whole arc in the vision of its end, that can perceive in the individual a public yearning, “the Jurassic longing … we are the inheritors of that gaze.”
Mind exists in the overlap between territory and map, the archaic and the old lore. Chaos is the place of, or force behind, this difficult perplexity of betweenness : “it is in the deep mind that wilderness and the unconscious become one” (Gary Snyder, quoted in Eshleman, Hades in Manganese, 14). “Let a man look for the permanent in the mutable and fleeting; let him learn to bear the disappearance of things he was wont to reverence without losing his reverence; let him learn that he is here, not to work but to be worked upon” (Emerson, “Montaigne”); or, as Dickinson tells it, to feel the “Omen in the Bone” (no. 532). “I want to see the unknown shine, like a sunrise,” wrote William Carlos Williams (in Paul, 192).
k
the letter cutting
a the letter starting
o the alarm
s the snake again
~
All life long
you include something
that includes your life.
You are in the egg.