The old question recurs : in this trope of universe, what is our place?
Ficino had the idea
life circulates from the earth
to the stars
“in order to constitute the uninterrupted
tissue of the whole of nature.”
But what if we are the interruption, the clog; we are the discord, festering the scales of the serpentine ouroboros?
There is no life that does not rise
melodic from the scales of the marvelous.
To which our grief refers.
If Ficino’s vision of an “uninterrupted tissue of the whole of nature” marks the Renaissance (in its unique preservation of mediaeval cosmology filtering a recovered Hellenism), it is the interruption that has proven mesmerizing in modernity, favoring History as “a declaration of independence from the deep past” (Shepard, “Post-Historic Primitivism,” 46). The previous fifteen hundred years had been devoted to examining the tissue called Jesus and Mary, Jehovah and Holy Ghost, Moses and Aaron, Saul and David. Yet traditions persisted—hermetic, sealing their preserves tight—that spoke of Zeus and Hera, Apollo and Dionysus, Isis and Osiris, Pan, Mithra.
… theft of what the heart desired
made so beautifully by theft’s magic that
men still remember the walls of Troy,
the horse-traders’ town; and young boys have heroic affinities,
immune by the Mother-Dragon’s blood,
except that Eros marks one spot to be betrayd as His,
close upon Death.
All that we’ve lived obscured truth on these pages.
The elemental man is a humpt bank where
the hair grows, heapt up of time,
folded upon fold, lifted up from what he was,
a depth of silt, into this height
above sea level.
Compressions, oppressions—the horde gathering
in the poorest lands,
shifting the weight of continents. And continents
are only what giants must be
Theosophists teach that primeval man is a vast dispersed being,
having as much intelligence in the sweep of his tail
as in his claws or those ravening jaws, back of whose
row on row of teeth ripping the meat
a brain like a child’s fist pushing those eyes;
and see the force of intellectual hunger
focus, ravening towards such rest
a diamond has in structure, sustained by pressure. Man
so exclusively defined he is
a figure of light.
To be restored to light is no easy thing, though it falls from the sky each day, as Whitman aspired to judge his own time : the poet, he declared in his 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass, “judges not as the judge judges but as the sun falling around a helpless thing”; and Dickinson grapples with that “Light a newer Wilderness / My Wilderness has made” (no. 1233). The light of the Orient of theophanic apprehension, the light of Xvarnah,* the tag “All things are lights” of Erigena, is beckoned by Pound in Canto XCIV, in his quest
saÍd Ocellus.
Howard McCord’s Gnomonology includes Rudolf Steiner’s analogy : “The mind is related to thought as the eye is to light.” The Chinese Taoist Secret of the Golden Flower that was crucial to Charles Olson is on “the circulation of Light.” “Heaven is not the wide blue sky, but the place in which the body is made in the house of the creative” (Wilhelm, 25). The light is what circulates; its currency is more pervasive than coin, its credit not interest but pure gift. Gratuitously everlasting,
these lights never die whose embers glow wilder
than wilderness at the beginning of words
to catch the ring of stars.
The transfiguring principle of light permits us to speak of a human nature reciprocal with nature, an ecology enfolding person and world. The heaven of exaltation that soaks into the earth in the Golden Flower is the heavenly flower that grows downward. The light in man spreads down through breath (conceivably one of the book’s attractions for Olson, with his emphasis on breath units in prosody). The two invariable conditions, Master Lu Tzu says, are breath and image. “Should a man have no images in his mind? One cannot do without images. Should one not breathe? One cannot do without breathing” (Wilhelm, 44). “The elk mind moves its antlers / flourishing the trees.”
In later Cantos Pound hovered like a bee around an elemental perception : the circulation of light established in ecological tact cultivates a psychosm. “A man’s paradise is his good nature”; while “to perambulate the bounds of cosmos” is Olson’s sense of the determinable good of one’s nature. Space is unframed, and cosmos comes unwound like a lute string, if it is not knitted into coextensive reverence and habitation. In some cosmologies the brain, in the “heights” of the spine, is the end of a drawstring that tunes the place by orienting the individual within the Orient of destiny. This is the telos of one’s contact with the encircling serpent of light. The string spans the length of an instrument stretching from earth to heaven—heaven as both the astronomical field and the paradise of “good nature,” an ecological state as deftly woven with interdependent modes of energy as a climax forest.
In a climax situation a high percentage of the energy is derived not from grazing off the annual production of biomass, but from recycling dead biomass, the duff on the forest floor, the trees that have fallen, the bodies of dead animals. Recycled. Detritus cycle energy is liberated by fungi and lots of insects. I would then suggest : as climax forest is to biome, and fungus is to the recycling of energy, so “enlightened mind” is to daily ego mind, and art to the recycling of neglected inner potential. When we deepen or enrich ourselves, looking within, understanding ourselves, we come closer to being like a climax system. Turning away from grazing on the “immediate biomass” of perception, sensation, and thrill; and re-viewing memory, internalized perception, blocks of inner energies, dreams, the leaf-fall of day-to-day consciousness, liberates the energy of our own sense-detritus. Art is an assimilator of unfelt experience, perception, sensation, and memory for the whole society. When all that compost of feeling and thinking comes back to us then, it comes not as a flower, but—to complete the metaphor—as a mushroom : the fruiting body of the buried threads of mycelia that run widely through the soil, and are intricately married to the root hairs of all the trees. “Fruiting”—at that point—is the completion of the work of the poet, and the point where the artist or mystic reenters the cycle : gives what she or he has done as nourishment and as spore or seed spreads the “thought of enlightenment,” reaching into personal depths for nutrients hidden there, back to the community. The community and its poetry are not two. (Snyder, Real Work, 173–74)
William James would concur with such ecological imperatives. “I am against bigness & greatness in all their forms,” he declared, “and with the invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, stealing in through the crannies of this world like so many soft rootlets or like the capillary oozing of water” (Correspondence of William James, 8:546). Communities of exchange exist like root hairs. When that realization is dormant, and knowledge dissociated from practice, the art of living atrophies.
For centuries, the term “America” has meant an intuited vertigo of the social body, signifying throughout much of the world a perplexing combination of opportunity and abuse. This trope on a man’s name is not so much a nation as a word for an image in time. Speaking the word is myth. No matter what we do, myth precedes us. The circulation of images in time is myth. Or, in the image of the Heavenly Flower, myth circulates through the two indispensable features of Anthropos : image and breath, taking myth as mu to mean breath expelled in the exchange of images. The biological insistence of organic analogies has been evident from the earliest Paleolithic art. We are axiomatically and unavoidably organic in our possession of a treasury—but nothing more efficient than a heap—of recycled lore, images, desires, attractions, fascinations, dilations. Biodegradable thought. Myth is the image of the image. The eye confirms the passage of light even if the object is unfamiliar.
The poets in This Compost have affirmed the poem as a space possessed of a nature, which absorbs “symbol detritus” like the photosynthesis of light in chlorophyll. They confirm the poem as a passage, akin to the elaborate cave passages leading to Paleolithic image sanctuaries, leaving the temporality of the wreader’s experience of it as the orientation, as the Orient of one’s own good nature stands revealed. Such poetry is esoteric in this time when nature is no longer analogous to inner ecology, in this space where the topos of the tropics is not inclined to trope or apprehend anything other than opportunistically.
In ancient gnosticism of the Near East, the circulation of images convenes a visionary topology through which one moves with the agency of a Guide. Psyche is not the Guide, but the agency of Light through which the Guide is apprehended. As the history of the Americas instructs : inner ecology is outer; psyche without cosmos is an illness : it ceases to be psychosm, totem, Pole Star. But there is still an Orient where the sun we circulate comes to warm us in the beds of our composting minds. It is a hieros gamos, a sacred wedding. By being born, by descending among the company of the living in these tropics of American compost, we are exalted game, a sacrificial occasion that had better be sanctified, because a
… philosophic wedding
seeps down to the heart
& we find ourselves married to the fact of it,
married to all of us!
one flesh of world & no divorce!
The philosophical wedding commends the real to the transtemporal figuration that is myth. Ronald Johnson, by suspending two words and postponing a third, gives us a Jung disposed to reveal the pivot of the full weight of the world in the head:
Jung : “There are unconscious aspects of our perception of reality. The first is the fact that even when our senses react to real phenomena, sights, and sounds, they are somehow translated from the real of reality into that of the mind. Within the mind they become psychic events, whose ultimate
nature is
Psychic events, whose ultimate “nature is”—: “An Inlet of Reality, or Soul,” in which the tiny words that mean so much pour more and more meaning out through such open and simple vessels as ear and eye, mouth and skin; and “whatever might chafes away under the peel, the body eats away at the seeming.” “From the ape at my shoulderblade I see angels. Our embryo dreamt the fishes’ sleep, became a ripple, leap-frogged itself, and later a mammal : perception is a slingshot drawn back to first plasm.”
Pound and his tribe of composting poets remain first instructors in how a poetics of history can be a poetics of light. The loosening or unbinding Pound proposed in the “rag bag” of the long poem could begin to include anything of use (and by the Pisan Cantos obviously all that was necessary). Engaging poetry as bricolage (not simply the juxtaposition of collage, but the activated working assembly of refractory materials), the poet is of necessity a bricoleur, a language-handyman for whom all written and spoken matter is readymade, spare parts, data, testimony; and the poem is “the contingent result of all the occasions there have been to renew or enrich the stock or to maintain it with the remains of previous constructions or destructions” (Lévi-Strauss, Savage Mind, 17). “The poem is the Gestalt of what it can assimilate” (Kenner, 185). The strength peculiar to subsequent American poetry is its wreaderly inclination, opening the poem to the full textual compost of the written record of the old lore and its imaginal overlap with an emergent sense of the archaic. It has meant the reanimation of a working space within language where the mundus imaginalis is transparent to history, where the individual is accountable to the species, where logos can be extracted from psyche and soul restored to cosmos, that interpersonal charm against the unbounded. The poetry I’ve been wreading here enacts myth as carnal movement of words within words, seeds of image and story, feeling and thinking, emerging from the muthologistical certainty of all the evidence we can lay claim to as the centrifugal force of our inner inherence. Net and web, ring and circle, coil and labyrinth, whorl and cup : all shapes, forms, insignia of nature, as Pound’s “Secretary of Nature” John Heydon put it. Finding or “experiencing” nature makes no difference at all without the sense of good nature that stamps all force and form with grace and tact.
