“Life will show you masks that are worth all your carnivals. Yonder mountain must migrate into your mind” (Emerson, “Illusions”—reiterated in Aldo Leopold’s famous exhortation to think like a mountain). This migration mimics the interplay of real and ideal in the “loom of time”: “Illusion, Temperament, Succession, Surface, Surprise, Reality, Subjectiveness—these are threads on the loom of time, these are the lords of life” (“Experience”). The loom is a figure attracting not only Emerson but Melville in “The Mat-Maker” (Moby-Dick, chap. 47). In a dreamy stillness aboard the Pequod, Ishmael says, “it seemed as if this were the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving and weaving away at the Fates.” But the very powers of the Fates produce a counterforce : “The weaver-god, he weaves; and by that weaving is he deafened, that he hears no mortal voice; and by that humming, we, too, who look on the loom are deafened …. Ah, mortal! then, be heedful; for so, in all this din of the great world’s loom, thy subtlest thinkings may be overheard afar” (chap. 102). Such a figure provides the scale and plectrum on which Robert Kelly tunes and turns and untunes tales of an alchemical anatomy in his four-hundred-page poem The Loom. The point of a loom is twofold : to make a covering shelter (the counterpane of Queequeg and Ishmael), and as cover or disguise of Penelope’s stratagem of delay in the Odyssey. Both produce a design, or pattern, and both retain a sense of having designs.
In texture we feel the tug of particulars in the claim and counterclaim of the weave. “The web is woven and you have to wear it,” intones Wallace Stevens in “The Dwarf.”
It is the mind that is woven, the mind that was jerked
And tufted in straggling thunder and shattered sun.
It is all that you are, the final dwarf of you,
That is woven and woven and waiting to be worn,
Neither as mask nor as garment but as a being …
Within the parameters of the loom, contraries interpenetrate and form a subtle bond. The loom is a sensible figure for the mind, which never stops concealing its meanings from itself and then unconcealing them in particular increments—alternating/overlapping threads in warp and woof; Heidegger’s dialectic of vorhanden/zuhanden; Freud’s game of fort/da, “wo es war, soll ich werden” (where it is, there I’ll be), which becomes Lacan’s “locus of speech” in which “The Other is, therefore, the locus in which is constituted the I who already speaks to him who hears, that which is said by the one being already the reply, the other deciding to hear it whether the one has or has not spoken” (Écrits, 141). Selfhood; identity; fly in the ointment. Like Tarbaby, the struggle to escape intensifies the grip that retains. Cross purposes, slantwise, refractory : the ties that bind are always the work of a web. A web orders filaments of assimilation. So does a dream.
In a dream reported to me long ago by a friend (whose passing I commemorate in the telling): he was at the top of some steps, where he cupped both hands together, leaving a circle between thumb and forefinger through which to peer. When he looked in, he saw a butterfly sitting calmly, stared into its eyes, which were—he realized at that instant—as fully and momentously alert and penetrating as any human eyes he’d ever seen.
it let me stand
above it ten minutes
watching it quiver
while it did what?
what do souls do?
Organic respiration is synthesized in these wings, prompting a delirium of infinite regress. Cosmos, psyche, logos : to our working plenum of inherited intelligence these words are like mineshafts condensing an ore of lore. The butterfly dreamt as a soul is a familiar glimpse. In asking of his image “what do souls do?” Robert Kelly presses a finger against the pulse of the wingbeat. It’s an image of the psyche of psyche, of psyche ad infinitum. Psyche folds logos into itself, exfoliating cosmos.
The dream material appears like this : the logos—a pungency of psyche or soul—is folded by psyche into itself, held in its hands, and the exfoliation as if from a world-tree is leafy, winglike, a thin membrane bounding animate being, clearly and startlingly (to the dreamer) possessed of intelligence. A wing is a sentient web, a “body of paradigmatic fields” in the title of Catherine Webster’s poem:
Wooing swallow, quivery hilly wings, shape the eaves.
Hurry the ditchbank wild hair in bloom back to the nest, flurry the crimped in.
Crisscross the porch, waxy bird, pack the soil and the pond back in, opened.
Sink in, flush an ovary, worry the fringes of ditches, vernal pools, whir madly,
flash below the flowering cut-leafed daisy’s hair, bull thistle,
skinning surface mud,
skin the toothy-margined rothrock, lobes of maiden clover.
Skin a second time the waxy margins, squeeze
the paean sallow, spit the crude back into the nest.
~
detritus pathways, “delayed and complex ways
to pass the food through webs.”
maturity, stop and think, draw on the mind’s
stored richness, memory, dream, half-digested
image of your life, “detritus pathways”—feed
the many tiny things that feed an owl.
send heart boldly travelling,
on the heat of the dead & down.
The phrase “to have heart” speaks of the courage required to follow “the heat of the dead & down.” The heart taken through detritus pathways is an original animus, the “breath that was consciousness in the chest” (Onians, 170)—the cavern of coronary empathy—but eventually the Greeks posited psyche in or of the head, distinguishing it not by its consciousness but by its vividness.
The shape of the head reinforced archaic configurations of the soul as circular (the head as seat of the crown, the nut in the halo). Psyche as procreative essence in the body was the manifest serpent of the fluid of Okeanos encircling earth and bathing the stars (Onians, 249). Greek placement of Okeanos at the margin is instructive, suggesting that the generative exceeds human affairs and extends to the cosmos as such. Telos—fate or end—was circular, as time was : the telos of an individual was the circle of a personal destiny, a radius of time and space. To die was not to come to the end of a line but to break the circle, shatter the egg; to vibrate beyond identity, and even beyond entity. The Pythagoreans held Kronos to be the psyche of the universe. Kronos’s circularity and cyclicity (as time, Chronos) make him another web overlapping with Okeanos, telos, psyche, ouroboros, all images of circulation, all evidence of the conviction that where soul is in motion a cosmos appears.
Onians writes that “chronos was perhaps originally expressive of that which touched one’s surface” (451). That is, as the circle of one’s telos came into contact with encircling Okeanos (through psyche’s link with Okeanos’s incubating compass), Kronos linked each surface with a facing countenance, inside with outside, form and counterform folding and unfolding. On the surfaces of bodies where touch is expressed as kronos (and is chronic), the consequence of circulation is expressed in the word “uni-verse” as a single turn. As Benjamin Blood put it, “the universe is wild—game flavored as a hawk’s wing. Nature is miracle all; the same returns not, save to bring the different. The slow round of the engraver’s lathe gains but the breadth of a hair, but the difference is distributed back over the whole curve” (in William James, Will to Believe, 448).
We can assign the earliest commemoration of cosmic circulation to the encircling walls of Paleolithic caves; and by this, the arousal of psyche and the posing of the question, “What do souls do?” The caves encompass the witness all around; circularity is immediate location, and location is sensation; the walls are webs, detritus pathways, overlays of contact and boundedness (telos, awakening the kronos of fluidity from stone), early expressions of the concept of an inside that is not to be confused with subjective interiority. Psyche could come forth only as enactment, only in spatial terms as the attention to sacred location as simultaneously spatial and temporal. The time unfolding in transit through the caves to the painted chambers was echoed in the overlapping images of different times that covered the walls. Paleolithic psyche is not containable within the individual, but is the chemical residuum of images overlaid by generations of application. Psyche, art, and myth are ways of attending to the human by circulating images of the lives of species. The plural is important : for the Paleolithic mind, the human is syncretic, compounded of enabling pluralities of which other species were contributing features. Masks. Applications. Supplicants.
“Paleolithic space appears to be multidirectional, not only a world of broken interrelation where everything is in association, but also a world that is not partitioned from its material by a frame or some other boundary device” (Eshleman, Antiphonal Swing, 163). Therio-expulsion created the cosmic hollow of a gnostic gap in matter, Eshleman imagines, and “What we project as abyss, and into it, are the guardians, or sides of boundary, the parietal labor to bear Hermes, to give a limit to evasiveness, to contour meandering, to make connections” (“Paleo-Ecology,” 340). Mythic potential, actualized in the framework of humanism, gives us a field manual of applications called Literature. All that we know as “literature” may be the domestication of myth, that formerly wild, autonomous psychic emanation—pulsing between the “unmade boundaries of acts and poems.” In the Paleolithic the human had not yet come into focus as a clear receptacle; man tended “to depict animals realistically and himself as a hybrid monster” (Eshleman, “Seeds of Narrative,” 45). Human participation in the world was through animals or as animal, but no image of a clearly human figure emerges until much later. But if, as Foucault maintains*, “l’homme” is the last stopgap in our ongoing Western estimation of the finite, we are on the brink of a return to chaos, facing the unbounded, the pervasive condition in which we are the ouroboros biting our own tale. “Someone, at this point, must take in hand the task of being everyone, & no one, as the first poets did. Someone must pay attention to the real spiritual needs of both her neighbors (not her poetic peers) & the future” (Notley, Scarlet Cabinet, vi). We are free to entertain scruples and assess the bounty of the superfluous.
As species disappear, the paleolithic grows more vivid. As living animals disappear, the first outlines become more dear, not as reflections of a day world, but as the primal contours of psyche, the shaping of the underworld, the point at which Hades was an animal. The new wilderness is thus the spectral realm created by the going out of animal life and the coming in, in our time, of these primary outlines. Our tragedy is to search further and further back for a common non-racial trunk in which the animal is not separated out of the human while we destroy the turf on which we actually stand.
~
“The brush
May paint the mountains and streams
Though the territory is lost.”