Facing American derelictions of surplus meaning becoming global fate, Olson laments:
The individual
has become divided
from the Absolute, it is the times promised
by the poets.
~
I’ve seen it all go in other directions
and heard a man say why not
stop ocean’s tides
and not even more than the slow
loss of a small piece of time, not any more vibration
than the normal wobble of the earth on its present axis
… He is only valuable
to himself—ugh, a species
acquiring
distaste
for itself.
~
… One even, at this date begins to look on man as
a pure decline from
Paleolithic, so animal—or as birds make love—is
the human eye, when, inside, it does not know
any more than what it can express by living &
that sight be in this man’s eye is the expression we call love …
The following poem is quoted in full:
Same day, Later
Contemplating my Neolithic
neighbors, Mother and Son, while Son mows
noisily, with power mower the grass & Ma
hangs over the fence simply
watching—and Maiden, or Unmarried Sister
comes around the corner to see him,
too
& if you let the ape-side out the eyes
have died or become so evolutionary
and not cosmological (vertical
not the eyes any longer of the distinctness
of species but of their connections
And then Nature is a pig-pen or
swill, and any improvement or increase
[including the population] of goods—things,
in the genetic sense, plural, and probable,
in that lottery—are then what human beings
get included in, by themselves as well as by any
administrative or service conditions such as contemporary
States find the only answer, the ticketing or studying of
—or selling of—family relations among contemporary Americans and
not Africans but of the baboons as a kin group in
Africa: I prefer my boundary of
land literally adjacent & adjoining mid Mesozoic at
the place of the parting of the seams of all the Earth.
These passages of late Maximus Poems recapitulate most of my themes. From his early formulation “polis is / eyes,” Charles Olson comes twenty years later to “if you let the ape-side out the eyes / have died”; we are a species acquiring a distaste for itself, and our eyes no longer register the omnivorousness with which we devour the biological and ecological basis of our condition. “The universe is filld with eyes then, intensities … / benemaledictions of the dead.” It’s only within a framework like that of Maximus—proposed as the enlarged image of human capability—that Olson manages to pinpoint homo sapiens as transhistorical fatality.
The wars and brutalities of the twentieth century are unique, but still characteristic of a much longer time span in which the degradation of the human is the final chapter in a terrestrial legacy of despoliation. We face a dilemma unprecedented in the entire epoch of Christian moralism or the preceding age of Greek pride : the danger is no longer wicked tyrants and evildoers, it is the cumulative byproduct of normality, with its increasing disinterest in plants and animals, the earth and the stars; its marginal awareness of economic and political dereliction; and a corresponding hyperattention to mass-mediated fame and fortune. In the new world of “infotainment” and “reality programming,” the traditional figure of (Vitruvian) “man” is itself a blank integer, a joker in the pack—in response to which Don Byrd has coined an integrally inquisitive word to replace this generality : whoman (which includes woman as well as man and human and embodies them in the imperative of open identity : who). “Whomans / in the whosmos” emerge from humans when “history is a leaky ball-point, / fouling the pocket.” But
History cannot end as history;
for it to end, beat
as history
it must exceed itself,
drt drt.
The nature of this prospect is not the Hegelian one of self-overcoming, but a tropologistical excess unimaginable to planning commissioners and rights activists alike. The challenge is not “monumental” (the term displays its misplaced imperial honorific): it is the unnamable pressure on every articulation of global prospects.
The World
has become divided
from the Universe. Put the three Towns
together
So begins Olson’s fable of the three towns, as viewed from the heavenly tree growing downward (Gerrit Lansing) or Maximus’s feet in the air (Olson): head in the earth, human in humus, a foothold on the stars. In Olson’s projection the three towns are like Blakean states, permutations in chaos that form human propensities (the third town, for instance, of which men know the least, is overpopulated). The Dialogue of the second town begins only after the collapse of the use of reason. In this state, as in Hesiod, “The earth / shall have preceded love.” In the first town there is communication without need of the explicit. The three towns—which must be recovered (“without three Towns / there is no Society, there is no / known / Absolute”)—compose an image of necessity or ananke that is archetypal in the vital sense : ignored with peril.
Olson’s “The Festival Aspect” is based on an Indian tale of cosmic tyranny. The tyrant Maya welds his three fortresses into “a single, prodigious center of demonchaos and world-tyranny, practically unassailable” (Zimmer, 185). The Jungian attraction to mandalas predisposes archetype to idealism and its rules of symmetry. But in Olson’s case, the type is literally on the page, materialized (mothered) in the mask of a typeface. The text is a threnody on tyrannical conditions, conditions exceeding the span of the witness (Olson) who draws on a tradition of reference (muthologistics) to substantiate the diagnosis, recasting it into gnosis. His use of such materials suggests that they are not sources but resources. The poet seizes on a text as the here and now of the poem; in this sense, one could claim there are no “references” in The Maximus Poems. Archetypal vitality is preserved only in the sense of type—singular, but not hypostatized as the or an. In restoring the sense of archetype through Maximus—the figure of the large, the impending, not necessarily human at all—Olson resumes an ability of the species fallen into neglect millennia before : the capacity to trace our boundedness and discern our limits. Reread “Same day, Later” with its contemplation of Neolithic neighbors : the poem revitalizes archetype by beginning with the comedy appropriate to archetypes, concretizing images in the immensity of geological time, “literally adjacent,” to which we act and finally “come to rest.” A comedy in Dante’s sense : the spectacle of where we all, each by each, end up. And are upended.
Trope is conceded in the word “universe,” which speaks of one turn—taking a turn on the dance floor—and calls it a verse. Trope is also friction, a rotation of heat bound to the sun, around which the earth migrates:
Migration in fact (which is probably
as constant in history as any one thing : migration
is the pursuit by animals, plants & men of a suitable
—and gods as well—& preferable
environment; and leads always to a new center.
The in-spiritus, the “Animus” of the new centered occasion is
… that the Mind or Will always
successfully opposes & invades the Previous, This
is the rose is the rose is the rose of the World.
Change, turbulence, power, catastrophe, beauty : these features of the poem make up a face or mask through which we still peer out, observing the accidents and subtle surprises of what will fit and what will work in the ever-expanding persistence of difference.
In Olson’s continental drift poem “Astride / the Cabot / fault” (printed atilt on the page), central images of continental migration, the Diorite Stone, and the polar icecap come together mysteriously in the phrase “Frances Rose-Troup Land.” True to the fortuitousness of accidental fit, this phrase names the historian of early Cape Ann on whose work Olson consistently relied for The Maximus Poems, yet in doing so he discovers that the name itself undergoes a fault or slippage by which it is embedded in “the rose is the rose is the rose of the World,” which is part of Gertrude Stein’s trope of “universe”—and by a turn of emphasis in the mouth Olson’s historian is rose-trope, circulating its contingencies in the accidental essential.