“The Homestead Called Damascus” was written before I was twenty years old. The two final pieces, addenda to “The Heart’s Garden, The Garden’s Heart” were finished after the book had gone to the publisher. Written between five and ten years apart, all the sections of this book now seem to me almost as much one long poem as do The Cantos or Pater-son. The plot remains the same—the interior and exterior adventures of two poles of a personality. The brothers Sebastian and Thomas are still, really, arguing with each other right to the last page, and the third figure—the anonymous observer—is still making wry comments. Partly, each of the separate long poems is a philosophical revery—but a revery in dialogue in which philosophies come and go. The sections in “The Phoenix and the Tortoise” and “The Dragon and the Unicom” which expound a systematic view of life are dramatic dialogue, not the sole exposition of the author, and always they are contradicted by the spokesman for the other member of the polarity. If there is any dialectic resolution, it occurs each time in the unqualified, transcendent experience which usually ends each long poem. The ending of “A Prolegomenon to a Theodicy” may be more conventionally mystical, but after this the lesson has been learned, the ladder has been climbed, and so is kicked away. The recurring word is, “visions are a measure of the defect of vision.”
In my Collected Shorter Poems are some that are long but not “longer” which well could go in temporal sequence with those in this book. “The Thin Edge of Your Pride,” the story “When You Asked for It Did You Get It,” “Organon,” “Ice Shall Cover Nineveh,” and even “Past and Future Turn About,” a pendant to “The Phoenix and the Tortoise,” just as sections of the long poems, especially of “The Dragon and the Unicom,” stand as “shorter poems” in their own right. Most poets resemble Whitman in one regard—they write only one book and that an interior autobiography.
Besides the triad of witnesses, there are other members of the cast, other personae of the person. Most important, of course, are the girls and women who come and go, the polarity to which the dialectic of the Twins and their commentator together form a pole. From Leda’s eggs sprang not only Castor and Pollux, divine and human, but Helen and Clytemnestra, innocence and power. Marichi, an avatar of the Shakti of Shiva, has three heads: a sow, a woman in orgasm and the Dawn. “Goddess of the Dawn,” as Westerners call her, her chariot drawn by swine, she haunts “The Homestead Called Damascus” and comes back as a beautiful Communist girl in “The Heart’s Garden”—as does Vega, the jewel in the Lyre, the Weaving Girl who weaves and ravels and weaves again.
Sebastian returns in another martyrdom in “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” And in the verse plays, Beyond the Mountains [now published by City Lights Books], the same cast of characters deals even more explicitly with the same themes. In the plays the women take over the consequences of the men in the longer poems as the descendants of Genji’s friend Tojo no Chujo take over the Bodhisattva perfume from Genji. Who stands for who? The vicarity is ambivalent. Who blinds who on the road to Damascus with allillumi-nating light? Lux lucis et fons luminis—the threads are still weaving in Kyoto, Mount Calvary above Santa Barbara in California, at the Cowley Fathers by the Charles and on the loom set up across the Hudson at Holy Cross in the opening of “The Homestead.”
The political stance of the poems never changes—the only Absolute is the Community of Love with which Time ends. Time is the nisus toward the Community of Love. One passage is a statement in philosophical terms of the I.W.W. Preamble, another of the cash nexus passage in The Communist Manifesto. “The State is the organization of the evil instincts of mankind.” “Liberty is the mother, not the daughter, of order.” “Property is robbery.” And similar quotations from Tertullian, St. Clement, Origen, St. Augustine. It is easy to overcome alienation—the net of the cash nexus can simply be stepped out of, but only by the self actualizing man. But everyone is self actualizing and can realize it by the simplest act—the self unselfing itself, the only act that is actual act. I have tried to embody in verse the belief that the only valid conservation of value lies in the assumption of unlimited liability, the supernatural identification of the self with the tragic unity of creative process. I hope I have made it clear that the self does not do this by an act of will, by sheer assertion. He who would save his life must lose it.
“What endures, what perishes?” The permanent core of thought could perhaps be called a kind of transcendental empiricism—”the ‘ineluctable modality’ of the invisible.” The real objects are their own transcendental meaning. If reality can be apprehended without grasping, the epistemological problem vanishes. The beginning of experience is the same as the end of it. The source or spring of knowing is the same as the fulfillment of it—experience begins and ends in illumination. The holy is in the heap of dust—it is the heap of dust. Beyond the object lies a person—objects are only perspectives on persons. But the experience of either is ultimately unqualifiable. Epistemology is moral. There is no “problem.” Visions are problems. Vision is the solution that precedes the problem. It is precisely the thing in itself that we do experience. The rest is reification. So too the I-Thou relationship is primary. The dialogue comes after. Everything else is manipulation—reification again—and so, illusion. It is love and love alone … as it says in the old popular song.
“Thus literally living in a blaze of glory.” True illumination is habitude. We are unaware that we live in the light of lights because it casts no shadow. When we become aware of it we know it as birds know air and fish know water. It is the ultimate trust.
“If thee does not turn to the Inner Light, where will thee turn?”
KENNETH REXROTH
Whitsunday, 1968