Myth arises, reputedly, as participatory response : the interjected mu of onlookers in a circle around a performance or recitation. The mu of myth is the oracle of circularity : myth is psyche affirming a circulation and is as innate to the individual as the distinctive whorl of fingerprint by which we are identified : an implicating fold, a personal labyrinth, a diagram of detritus pathways. The very notions of psyche and myth are unambiguously concentric in their bias. Jacques Derrida’s critique of logocentrism couples the image of centrality with the logos, that traditional antithesis of myth. In Of Grammatology Derrida covertly addresses the collapsed legacy of the ouroboros in terms of the infinite regression of the signifier, which is a variant of the perpetuum mobile of Zeno’s paradox. The lapse of outer circumference, fatigued beyond repair, boomerangs as binding indecision in the slippage of “différance”—that syncopation of distress that, from another perspective, becomes the sound of a startled pounding heart.
Myth—the nigredo of artifact, smelted into tale or image—has long been the “content” of art, and art attests to a profusion of life exceeding any single time or place. “The transformations of culture do not take place in history, they take place in myth. It is because the individual cannot perceive in the limits of his own lifetime such transformations as the Neolithic or Industrial revolutions that we have need of myth” (William Irwin Thompson, Falling Bodies, 135). To reiterate Robert Duncan’s point from The Truth and Life of Myth, “To inherit or to evolve is to enter mythic existence” (59). Myth is amorphous and protean because it so freely changes hands or mouths. Myth is the legacy of biodegradable thought, compost rumination. Myth comes to mouth to make apparent what the eye can’t see. It is a means of giving scope to idiosyncrasy and gratuitous bounty—the bounty of gratuity. The preponderance of indirection in poetry acknowledges drift—as does Thoreau’s “saunter” (from, he says, sans terre), the Situationist derive, and the clinamen of Lucretius. “God said, ‘Let meanings move,’ and there was poetry.” It is Robinson Jeffers’s “Divinely superfluous beauty”; the “high superfluousness” by which we “know / Our God.”
… to fling
Rainbows over the rain
And beauty above the moon, and secret rainbows
On the domes of deep sea-shells,
And make the necessary embrace of breeding
Beautiful also as fire,
There is the great humaneness at the heart of things,
The extravagant kindness, the fountain …
~
The great Mind passes by its own
fine-honed thoughts,
going each way.
Rainbow hanging steady
only slightly wavering with the
swing of the whole spill,
between the rising and the falling,
stands still.
I stand drenched in crashing spray and mist, and pray.
Superfluity sharpens the edge of awareness. The prayer combines wonder and danger; the gist of any prayer is a poet’s question. Muriel Rukeyser asks, “Do I move toward form, do I use all my fears?” This is a presentiment of duende, the Spanish uncanny that (playing off the German sense of unheimlich as unhomely) Federico García Lorca found in New York, sensing himself “not a man, not a poet, not a leaf, / only a wounded pulse that probes the things of the other side.” “A certain arch and/or ache and/or ark of duress, the frazzled edge of what remains ‘unsung,’” as Nathaniel Mackey puts it. “An undertow / of whir im- / mersed in / words”: “it is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing / but you cannot stand in the middle of this” (wrote Marianne Moore of the ocean), “in which dropped things are bound to sink— / in which if they turn and twist, it is neither with volition nor consciousness.”
Feeling herself superfluous, “too old to be useful” in London during the blitz, H. D. came into a premonition of superfluity as bounty and began to reanimate the tangible threads of hermetic ancestry latent in her art:
we are the keepers of the secret,
the carriers, the spinners
of that rare intangible thread
that binds all humanity
to ancient wisdom,
to antiquity;
our joy is unique to us,
grape, knife, cup, wheat
are symbols in eternity,
and every concrete object
has abstract value, is timeless
in the dream parallel
whose relative sigil has not changed
since Nineveh and Babel.
This glimpse of detritus pathways through the old lore sustained H. D. to the end of her life through her major works : Trilogy, Helen in Egypt and Hermetic Definition. She was part of a “home front” scattered over battleground Earth during the war, recuperating by occult measures a civilization shattered into pure symbol-detritus, a compost heap from which archaic values could be gleaned. Eliot, like H. D. in London during the blitz, affirmed an equally ancestral if less occult heritage, as he acknowledged “the communication / Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.” In his search for the “crowned knot of fire” where “the fire and the rose are one” in Christian concord, Eliot could find no place for war.
Where is the point at which the merely individual
Explosion breaks
In the path of an action merely typical
To create the universal, originate a symbol
Out of the impact?
Poetry is a life, Eliot found, whereas “War is not a life : it is a situation.”
William Carlos Williams had a different view, accepting war as the manifestation of an essential reality.* Poetry “is the war or part of it, merely a different sector of the field,” he wrote in preface to The Wedge (1944). The field was kinetic energy, “its movement is intrinsic, undulant,” evident equally in the subjects of the book’s first four poems : the saxifrage (“my flower that splits / the rocks”), a woman giving birth (“The new opens / new ways beyond all known ways”), the falls of the Passaic River in Paterson (“the empty / ear struck from within, roaring”), and in the rollicking dancers of Brueghel’s painting, The Kermess.
What is war,
the destroyer
but an appurtenance
to the dance?
The deadly serious
who would have us suppress
all exuberance
because of it
are mad. When terror blooms—
leap and twist
whirl and prance
“The vision of exuberance requires identification with the exuberant life of the whole,” wrote Norman O. Brown after the fall of the Berlin wall (Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis, 198). But the whole, being full of energy, is strife and discord. “The science of enjoyment is also a science of death,” for “it is a universal principle of biological life that growth leads to excess : and excess leads to laceration and loss” (194). But loss is also passing on; it is the extravagant abandonment of the torch bearer’s race commemorated by Jeffers. Transmission is a conflagration, and “The book sets the reader on fire. The meaning is the fresh creation, the eruption of poetry; meaning is always surplus meaning, an excess extracted” (193). “Burning up myself, I would leave fire behind me” (Blaser, “The Fire,” 236).