Fear and trembling, awe and dread reverberate the archaic animal body in cultural personae. Gorgon and Medusa are such figures, the Muse is another, bringing on shudders, rapture, palsied compliance;* allowing no deviations, her strictness is meter, pulse, rhythmos. She is part of a tide of intercultural drift, a detritus like glacial boulders. But in cultural morphology—what Guy Davenport calls the geography of the imagination—there are forces of distribution and distillation that have little to do with human boundaries, historical or social. He describes the geography as a map:
Such a map would presumably display such phenomena as the contours of the worship of Demeter and Persephone, coinciding with grain-producing terrain, and with the contours of Catholicism. This would not surprise us. It might also show how the structure of psychology and drama nourished by grain-producing cultures persists outside that terrain, continuing to act as if it were inside, because its imaginative authority refuses to abdicate. (Geography of the Imagination, 10–11)
Out of such obscure persistence we seek the recovery of a terminological tool kit. Certain words come to hand : soul, psyche, logos, cosmos, anthropos, physis, and more. They are all archaic insofar as we can regard them with—and behold them in—superstition.
We are of a moment in which the “imaginative authority” of the image of man in his uniquely human potential “refuses to abdicate.” We still seek a psychology that is humanistic (instead of animistic—vegetable, mineral, animal); we hanker after an art and literature that is “imaginative” yet possessed of “authority”—wondering, like Anne Waldman, “Was the agreement that words shine like sun, / or glint as weapons in moonlight?” We want authorities, not authors. This “we” is of course one I would prefer to disengage. Yet disaffiliation now—even from that which oppresses—results in exile into a worldview spooked by dread of chaos, driven astray in search of an autonomy that often turns out to camouflage authority and privilege:
Now I subtract myself from the industrial
white hive, a worker slinking off
from my queen valve position,
letting it spurt, knowing that in a moment
another will be plugged in my place.
It is Soweto miners whose 115 degree eyes
gleam from the neighboring houseside,
the studs supporting our king-sized bed.
I subtract myself while I add up
the multiplication that I am part of,
the scorpion-tail cornucopia that,
with nature disappearing, the earth is becoming.
As in Kafka’s story of the Great Wall, only the nomads are in a position to know how extensive the wall is, how close to completion, how irreparable the consequences. “With the growth of military skill and political suspicion, the wall might turn into a complicated system” (Mumford, City in History, 66). What Gilles Deleuze calls nomad thought best approximates this state of superstition poets have maintained in the face of an expanding wall. In wreading this composting poetry, we see that all human production needs urgently to be deglamorized, unframed the instant it appears, each saying bound up with its unsaying. The classical image of civilized citizen allows only certainties. Charles Olson, following Keats, proclaims the necessity of persisting in doubts and uncertainties. Robert Duncan said of Olson, “He wanted not only a crisis in consciousness but a crisis in the unconscious” (“As an Introduction,” 82). What we have at hand now is a need to reimagine the archaic (soul: the archaic word for human) so that it includes logos (certitude, sign) but is not dominated by it, leaving room also for psyche (our personal bit of chaos, which daily and nightly delivers a recycled portion of our “faculty of tact as members of life”). The Great Wall is now not a construct but the gap in biodiversity looming before us : impenetrable as a wall because, once the diversity lapses, nothing imaginable within the total time frame of human experience can repair it. Psyche is the only receptacle deep enough to make the consequences palpable:
… where drought is the epic then there must be some
who persist, not by species-betrayal
but by changing themselves
minutely, by a constant study
of the price of continuity
a steady bargain with the way things are.