Orphic Memos

Dead Poets Society

2024-06-21T15:44:00.000-07:00

The famous poets were all disreputable in life, and died in obscurity. Let’s say that again: the famous poets were all disreputable in life, and died in obscurity. Sounds hyperbolic, not to mention paradoxical. Yes, there was Pope, and Longfellow – but for every Alexander Pope there were at least two John Clares. And for every Longfellow there were at least three shorter fellows, such as Melville, Dickinson or Sidney Lanier.

And what, really, do we know about Homer, the person? Approximately enough factual data to fit within the orbit of a single atom of helium. And Dante? Dante died in exile, buried quietly in the backwater town of Ravenna. And Shakespeare? Sweet Will, the historical individual, on the 400th anniversary of his passing? (Let’s not even go there.)

The famous poets struggled in life and died in obscurity: let us contemplate, if ever so briefly, this conundrum. But for contrast, let’s begin with a detour.

Picture the poetry section in a bookstore. Any bookstore: a bland outlet in a suburban mall, a university shop in a fancy college town... you’ve been there, as I have, mon semblable, mon frère, ma soeur. There is a particular, peculiar bookstore feeling. It suffuses, ineluctably, every would-be poet – every unknown, unsuccessful, or even half-successful versifier. A toxic blend of melancholy, nausea, vertigo, anxiety, envy, skepticism and self-consciousness (with maybe a dab of paranoia) – catalyzed by the proximity of these cliff-like wooden aisles, packed neatly with clean bright poetry volumes, pinned on the chest with gold-leaf medals, on the rear with probing squeals of approval. These are the immense high fortress walls of official recognition – which you, nondescript interloper, typical nonentity, will neither scale nor penetrate.

Some talented writer could devote an entire essay to this sad etching of darkness at noon, this invisible eclipse.

A few years ago there arose from the swamp of literary journals a good deal of complaint about the poetry “glut”. The avalanche of bad or mediocre poems fomented and sent into circulation was drowning out the good, and this phenomenon marked a decline or morbidity in cultural values and aesthetic taste. But such jeremiads failed to convince. The writerly schools coalesced, instead, in the opposite direction: the U.S. was undergoing a veritable poetry renaissance, an unprecedented, explosive convergence of interest, talent, energy and relevance. It was the dawn of a new, uncharted, and vital era for poetry.

Where does this leave that glum, marginal character loitering by the “Poetry & Criticism” shelves? Don’t pay any mind. She’s a loser.

Yet something uncanny happens there, under the mall’s desolate fluorescent lighting. That abject nobody-poet shares one minor feature – infinitely insubstantial as it may be – with the splendid canonical poets of our glorious tradition: that is, she struggles in life and dies in obscurity.

And in a flash, we recognize a kinship between these rows of gleaming, nauseous, fiberboard bookshelves, and the archaic labyrinth-tombs of Knossos and Thebes. What then is the skeleton key to this riddle? Where is Ariadne’s thread?

The great anthropologist A.M. Hocart, characterizing our prehistoric ancestors, put it in a gnomic nutshell : “the first king was a dead king.” Not for nothing was Eliot’s signature volume of criticism titled The Sacred Wood. This was borrowed from Sir James Frazer’s anthropological classic, The Golden Bough – a study of the roots of cultural mythology in sacrificial kingship. Our so-called canon – the authorized diachronic transmission of literary authority (a particularly Eliotic obsession) – is intertwined with the legacy of prehistoric tribal succession rites.

The king must die. Le Roi est mort – vive le Roi! Anthropology has hovered for generations around the problem of vicarious sacrifice. Its most radical theorist was the late René Girard, who proposed that mob violence and the scapegoat mechanism are actually constitutive of human culture, a subconscious stratum which configures human social experience in toto. The king must die so that we may continue to have abundance of life, blessings of the gods. The death of the scapegoat brings peace to rivalrous tribes, does away with sin and all uncleanness.

In Western culture, our poets must suffer in life and die in obscurity before mounting to the heaven of the pantheon. Art’s aesthetic pleasure is inextricably woven with the remoteness and otherness, the difference, the finish, of its maker’s ends. As Mandelstam, himself an exemplary literary scapegoat, put it (in my rough paraphrase): “the poet’s meaning is fulfilled by his death.” Or, in Wallace Stevens’ terms : “Death is the mother of beauty.”

But are we on the right track here? Is there even a track? Ariadne’s thread seems to be leading us into ghastly, spectral regions, the haunts of a Poe. Can we really credit Girard’s claim about a universal scapegoat reciprocity-mechanism, a version of Original Sin? Must poets die in order to dwell in the canonical Elysium of our hearts?

For the sake of our thread, let’s continue down this trail. Ezra Pound wrote somewhere that “literature is hero worship”. He may have been speaking with reference mostly to himself, but the statement has some relevance to the general phenomenon of poetic filiation, affinity, attraction. We adore what is far-off; we honor what is complete, finished, accomplished, whole. “The achieve of, the mastery of, the thing” (Olson). This tendency works somewhat against the grain of that normative American shibboleth – progress, change, growth (the Future, the Open Road). Rather, Past and Future balance one another; each radiates its distinct values and excellence.

But what of our lonesome traveler, that no-count figure in the bookstore aisles, looked down upon, mocked by the tall cemented guile of prestigious literary marketing? For him, for her, the maze only gets darker, the spiderweb thickens.

Then, unaccountably, she reaches the center... and instead of a Minotaur, she discovers, on the dirt floor, a single copper coin (maybe a penny). She flips it over (it’s a two-faced image). Beauty and Death, Poetry and Life... Wallace Stevens’ wife Elsie, on the Liberty dime...

This place is haunted. Do I wake or sleep?

All-a-Mistakeo !

2024-06-11T19:13:00.000-07:00

In the befuddlement of yesterday's late-night blog post, I mis-spoke. I mentioned two books by Marcel Detienne, and described Detienne's passage (in his Masters of Truth) on the origins of secular, philosophical thought in the political culture of early Greek cities. And Detienne does indeed cite another author, Jean-Pierre Vernant, on this question. But it was Vernant's own argument – in his excellent study, The Origins of Greek Thought – that I meant to cite last night. My apologies! [This is authentic blogging at its best.]

The Writing of Orpheus

2024-06-10T20:04:00.000-07:00

I'm reading this book by Marcel Detienne, which I picked up from the library after finishing his earlier book about pre-Socratic philosophy : The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece. Which book I found very helpful. His argument was that the revolutionary appearance of non-mythical, pragmatic, scientific and philosophical thought was connected with the early communal, quasi-egalitarian, political character of Greek city-states – the polis.

The Writing of Orpheus has got me reflecting tonight, in a vague scattershot way, about my own writing track over the last 40 years. There are all these quite long, book-length poems and sequences (In RI, Island Road, Forth of July, Lanthanum, Ravenna Diagram... & forthcoming, The Green Radius). There's a prose memoir (Holy Fool) and its companion, a semi-autobiographical novella (Chapel Hill). There's a selected shorter poems (1968-2020), Continental Shelf. All these compositions are out there, for the most part – available, though scarce. They are almost completely unknown to the reading public. They are mostly dismissed or ignored by the established literary cognoscenti.

What I'm thinking is, that with its grand (or grandiose) obsessive scale, I've produced a kind of American poetry counter-world – submerged, underground. And the reason I'm harping on it, in this context, is that you might be able to discern an Orphic shape to my interlocking scribbularium.

F.M. Cornford, in an earlier study of Detienne's subject (Principium Sapientiae), asserts that, even after the intellectual revolution of pre-Socratic philosophy, these new worldviews of rational thought still retained underlying forms of archaic myth. The original undifferentiated One of Parmenides, Empedocles et al., after dividing into binary forces and the "limits", was organized, coalesced, in mythical, ritual processes, by the prior, very archaic cultures – in their own ways (sacral kingship, rites of hieros gamos, etc.).

Myth and poetry have always been closely intertwined. If by some miracle someone bothers someday to examine my poetry, they will find a clear if tenuous thread or pattern. There is presented a wild panoramic historical vision of continental America; and it is held together by a kind of "spiritualized" hieros gamos. The narrative pattern is roughly Orphic. Poet & Muse = Orpheus & Eurydice = Osiris & Isis = Henry & Juliet/Bluejay/Jonah/"Dove"/"J". It's as if I've been semi-consciously trying (sleepwalking) to return to that original cosmic Unity, Parmenides' arché – through a quasi-archaic, ritualized "sacred marriage". A United State, so to speak.

It Must Have Been Abstract

2024-06-09T20:35:00.000-07:00

Apparently it's pleasant to me, for me, to ramble on (sometimes at great length) about the character of poetry in general, poetry in the abstract. I've been doing it for many years on various blogs. Maybe the pleasure is due in part to the lack of pressure. There's no specific artistic object or product involved; no magazine editor out there to say, "Sorry, this does not fit our current needs"; no critic or professor ready with a reprimand or a call to order. The process is a kind of discursive daydreaming.

There was something in my run-through of those older posts here, from 14 years ago, that stuck with me tonight.

First of all, the suggestion that poetry in every case depends on, dangles there glittering from, beauty – some experience or intuition of same.

And following from that, the idea that you can't really grasp the character of poetry without seeing that it is a multidimensional – maybe tripartite? – phenomenon. I mentioned three facets or aspects that interact :

1) the maker of the poem, who undergoes or "suffers" the sensibility or experience of an encounter with the beautiful – with beauty, in some form, some dimension.

2) the poem itself, which is a kind of response to this encounter : a reenactment, a memorialization, a mimesis, a dramatization of the passion – the passio, the suffering – of this event.

3) the reception of the poem in the life-experience, the sensibility, of the reader … all the concrete richness, complexity, and unknowable mystery of a person's ordinary life into which the poem, the work of art, makes itself felt.

Of course all this kind of abstract discursive explanatory prose is instantly boring... "murder to dissect" and all that. But I mentioned some other things in in relation to this abstract pattern, that might bear further thought : I mean in regard to Orpheus as the "figure of the poet" – of poetry itself coming to reflective or self-reflexive consciousness in this mythical person. And how the mythical cruxes of the story – the singing that brings healing and joy to Nature itself, the quest to rescue Eurydice from Hades, the later murder/sacrifice by the Maenads – amount to a ritual dramatization of this idea of Beauty suffered in experience : an exaltation for which the poem is a kind of evidence or testimony.

Aside : I'm looking for an experience of poetry beyond the glare of the obvious, or the fashionable trumpeting of self-expression, or the manufactured virtue of opinion. I'm looking for something oblique and hard to find (but beautiful).

Orpheus Resurfacing

2024-06-09T15:04:00.000-07:00

I began this blog – an offshoot of my longstanding mega-blog HG Poetics – in August of 2010, almost 14 years ago. It lasted a little over a month. Now, much later, much older, and under changed circumstances (retired from library work, living in Minneapolis) I've decided to revive it.

My thinking (and feeling) since then have also changed, perhaps more than I realize. But rather than pursue a critique of my previous effusions, I will try to start over, somewhat.

Rereading earlier posts here, I can see I was referring, indirectly, to my own poems and long poems. That's probably inevitable. But at least I'm going to try a slightly different approach, more in keeping with my current state of mind and interests.

As mentioned, I'm retired; 72 years old; living back in my old home town, the very Minneapolis blocks where I was born, and where 3 or more generations of my family have lived. Here, and now, I feel all kinds of isolation (physical, psychological, political, literary-critical) from the larger world, the writerly world, and my fellow poets. So this blog is just another way for me to send sonar signals to that larger world – way off there, on shore.

The Word is Psyche

2010-10-07T09:46:00.000-07:00

If it were possible to graph the trajectory of the emergence of new poetry - which is, actually, an impossible abstraction, but if it were possible - it would look less like a straight line or rising curve, and more like a sort of back-&-forth : an alternating current, a dance. A give-&-take between younger generations - Stevens' "ephebes" - & the classics, the achieved works of older generations, the past.

This is not just a matter of nostalgia or conservatism. The older poetry of past times & foreign places has gone through a certain cycle, which for the new, is ahead - still inchoate, still not yet. This cycle actually reveals itself only after the present has become the past : it's an effect of history, you might say. What I'm thinking of is a kind of "naturalization", of acculturation : the process by which a work of art, of poetry - produced by the artist in a state of great stress & anticipation - is finally received, absorbed, accepted, responded-to, and to some extent comprehended by the culture which called it forth in the first place & for which it was made. Until such a work is taken in this way, becomes a part of its surrounding culture, it remains somehow incomplete - it's an orphan, like a plaintive cricket calling out for its cricket family.

& what I'm thinking of (when I say poetic emergence is a kind of alternating back-&-forth, a dialectical dance) is the visceral, quickening (Eliot's term) impact that these "classics" - these fully-absorbed works from past & foreign places - have upon adolescent readers & young poets. The blissful shock these ephebes are registering is the full effect, the double impact, both of the work itself and of its naturalization - the way it shines through the adorable paper & binding & sweet-scented glue of the cherished paperback - which the young reader, much like a chipmunk, immediately runs off with - retreating to some private hideout, worthy of the poems' warm & secret inner glow.

Again, I would argue that this whole process can't be reduced to some sort of sentimental regression, nostalgia, or "classicism" for its own sake. As Mandelstam puts it, "the Word is Psyche." We might say the process of poetic reception is actually tripartite : there is (1) the poem itself; there are (2) the delicate reverberations of its cultural naturalization, as we have described; & finally there is (3) the psychological dimension, the readers' own ground of feeling. The harmony, the music, we respond to in "ancient" (say, 19th-cent., for just one example) poetry, is, ultimately, not an anachronistic property belonging to those old writers of another, better time. Rather, the poets themselves caught some elusive "affluence" (Stevens' term) - penetrating, permeating & transcending their own time & place - of natural harmony, beauty in general. Pushkin's glory for Russians, for example, has to do with the fact that he drew something out of the harmony that exists as a kind of promise everywhere, giving it a "local habitation and a name." So that poetry feeds on, & actually stems from, this future-oriented promise of joy & harmony - the potential of goodness - which we tend to think only visits us in childhood, briefly, not to return. On the contrary, what we experienced in childhood was a stronger "feeling-perception" or intuition of that same promise of a yet-unknown but overwhelming happiness. Childhood & adolescence are absorbed in this sense - this longing for the future. & the indirections of poetry - its "resistance to the intelligence" (Stevens), its elusive basis in feeling & emotion - its "telling it slant" (Dickinson) - are all involved with evoking this irrational life of feeling, flowing gradually beneath the turbid commotions we experience "on the surface" of clock-time & the day-to-day.

Beauty will save the world

2010-09-16T09:26:00.001-07:00

There's a dialogue between Ange Mlinko & author Iain McGilchrist in the October 2010 issue of Poetry. McGilchrist, a sort of cross-disciplinary brain-scientist/literary scholar, published The Master and his Emissary, a new meditation on right/left brain differences (shorthand : right brain = holism/synthesis/emotion; left brain = definition/analysis/abstraction). Mlinko & McGilchrist explore some of the implications for poetry of McGilchrist's work.

This dialogue appears around the same time as Elif Batuman's lengthy review of Mark McGurl's book The Program Era, on the impact of creative writing programs on British & American fiction-writing (which I haven't read). Both Batuman and McGurl address the academic divide between MFA programs and the other intellectual disciplines (humanities & sciences) - the split, generally, between "knowledge" and "creativity."

All of which makes me consider the possible connection between the two. Is the MFA/humanities divide a symptom of a deeper distinction between two dimensions or functions of the mind?

I wonder if this old conflict between knowledge & creativity, or what used to be called science & art, has something to do with an absence in our civilization of a philosophical ground in aesthetics - of a viable ontology of Beauty. The ancient Greeks (Plato, Aristotle) had a notion of beauty as musical harmony, rooted in natural proportions, which they were able to synthesize with ethics and metaphysics - natural beauty had its analogue in moral rectitude. The Middle Ages, in turn, synthesized the knowledge of nature with the metaphysics of divine creation, so that all intellectual investigation & knowledge was believed to have its origin in God, and its end in wonder & mystical contemplation. But the disenchanted naturalism of the Modern era was rooted in a scepticism about the metaphysical grounds of knowledge. Scientific truth was opposed to the superficial ("accidental") illusions of beauty. Thus the ground for aesthetics no longer existed.

Postmodernism & deconstruction, stemming from Nietzsche & Heidegger, attempted to dismantle the hegemony of scientific positivism by means of a sort of language-oriented but anti-rational vitalism, centered in a notion of poetry & art as displacing scientific reason. Hence postmodern literary Theory pushed a sort of intellectual wedge between American MFA programs, on the one hand, with their "naive" devotion to self-expressive creativity, and traditional academic disciplines, with their "naive" roots in "logocentric" rationalism. Yet postmodern Theory's anti-rational propositions were destined to fall by the weight of their own self-contradictions - and thus the contemporary scene seems to have returned to a strange state of intellectual dispossession, with echoes of 19th-century naturalism & scientific positivism emerging in the contemporary devotion to brain science and reductive biological determinisms.

"Beauty will save the world," famously reported Dostoevsky. Perhaps a new metaphysics, able to discern purpose & meaning in the mysterious phenomena of art and beauty, will tend somehow toward the fulfillment of that prophecy. & I suppose at the center of the chessboard will have to be a new challenge to the deeply-rooted modern-positivist doctrine - that beauty is a surface illusion, floating over a structure of what are simply forces : of non-human, abstract, cosmic physics, and of amoral, remorseless biological nature. Keats's taciturn (but stubborn) urn long ago set all the pieces into play :

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty, - that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

- Grace Ravlin (Venice, 1908)

Orpheus & Stephen Hawking

2010-09-09T08:48:00.000-07:00

Physicist Stephen Hawking, in his new book, argues that God (or a god) is not necessary for physics theory, with regard to the origin of the universe (or multiple universes). Curious image of the wheelchair-bound savant, surrounded by near-infinite invisible strings of M-theory, declaring his un-belief in theology (& God). Here is one of the most highly-respected exponents of contemporary scientific rationalism, stepping from experimental science into the realm of philosophy & religion (as Einstein & other physicists have done before him).

If this represents an authoritative viewpoint (though certainly not the only one) of Science on a crucial & controversial matter, what about Art? Is there an approach to God and theology from this direction?

Clearly Art (just as with Science) does not allow for a single authoritative opinion on this question. It's not the proper work of the artist (nor of the scientist) to manufacture opinions on what is, finally, a mystery, unavailable to proof. On the other hand, opinions and personal predilections are unavoidable regarding God's existence or lack thereof. It seems to me that Hawking's statements fall into this category. They are opinions. His statement, quoted in news articles, to the effect that God is unnecessary in the light of "M-theory" - in which universes emerge naturally out of "nothing," as a simple consequence of the laws of physics - this is certainly no proof; it's not even an argument. It skirts the question : where did these laws of physics come from? Whence comes the "logos" (word, order, ratio - law)? According to another authoritative (& theological) opinionator (the Gospel of John), "In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was God, and the Logos was in God. He was in the beginning with God, and all things were made through him." Another free-standing opinion.

What, then - beyond a reasonable detachment (or division of intellectual labor) - might be Art's relation to theology or belief in God? It seems there are two ways to think about Art : as a means or an end. As a means, the application of art gives elegance, practicality, usefulness and appeal to all sorts of made things. That is, it makes them beautiful. As an end (in what's called the "fine arts"), art involves the production of objects which are beautiful-in-themselves : whose main purpose is to reflect and express beauty.

We have been musing, in this incipient blog, on relations between the figure of Orpheus, poetry, music, harmony, beauty. I'd like to oppose (facetiously) the image of Hawking, surrounded by the hypothetical string-threads of M-theory, to the image of Orpheus, strumming the taut strings of his harmonic lyre. Scientific rationalism as opposed to artistic imagination. Disenchantment vs. enchantment. (I say facetiously, because, put so baldly, it sounds like a washed-out version of old binaries from the Romantic period... but I guess I'm not quite ready to forego this contrast.)

The end of a good scientific theory is useful elegance, which is beautiful in its own (scientific) way. The end of a work of art is a sense of harmony & rightness (whether happy or sad, comic/tragic, or some Shakespearean gumbo-combination) - the beautiful in itself. Art achieves this end by way of both imitation (mimesis) and expression - in which identifiable things or events or ideas are harmonized and synthesized into one beautiful whole. Just as the scientist harmonizes disparate facts within an elegant theory, so the artist harmonizes disparate elements into a beautiful representation. These are two distinct acts of synthesis.

But I would say that at the root of the distinction between "Hawking" and "Orpheus" lies the issue of consciousness. Science proceeds by way of the abstraction and measurement of universal forces and material. In the realm of such analysis, even "consciousness" or "mind" becomes an abstraction : reduced to one factor among others involved in the theoretical harmonization of phenomena. Art, on the other hand, represents the workings of consciousness suffusing every dimension of human experience. Reality here is inseparable - inalienable - from conscious action & reception. Philosophical idealist George Berkeley is the unacknowledged patron saint of every artist. And with art, there is no consciousness without personhood. Consciousness is not an abstraction or a force; it is the personal presence of "mind" (which is, in a cosmic perspective, of course, a mystery). Thus art is inescapably personal and dramatic. Even the abstract designs of, say, Islamic art are produced within a context of dramatic personal affect, in that the prohibition of imagery in Islam is considered a part of the submission to the will of Allah. (Strict iconoclasm is nothing if not dramatic.)

Russian poet Osip Mandelstam had a word for consciousness, by way of art & poetry, synthesizing and suffusing our comprehension of reality in general : he called it "hellenism" (or "domestic hellenism"). In his essay On the Nature of the Word, he wrote :

"Hellenism is the conscious surrounding of man with domestic utensils instead of impersonal objects; the transformation of impersonal objects into domestic utensils; and the humanizing and warming of the surrounding world with the most delicate teleological warmth."

(Henceforth to be known as Acmeist Osip M-Theory.) The notion of some kind of "cosmic humanism" - wherein consciousness is recognized as the (mysterious) origin, end and foundation of the cosmos - is obviously not a "proof." It is not even a theory. To assert its existence is no more or less valid than for a physicist to assert the contrary. Yet whenever the scientist (Hawking) dares to reduce consciousness to an abstract law, then the artist (Orpheus) is bound to emerge again, in defense of consciousness.

Happy Birthday, Edwin Honig

2010-09-03T11:44:00.000-07:00

Edwin Honig, who turns 91 today, took an interest in the figure of Orpheus. One of his books is titled Affinities of Orpheus. I am speculating that his interest may have originated in the death (from cancer) of his young first wife in the early 1960s, which he took very hard. (I'm sure there are others who have more definite information on this.) This dimension of mourning, loss & shock in Honig's poetry is fairly pervasive - he was also obsessed with the death of his brother, a young child hit by a truck on a Brooklyn street. The experiential/biographical shades, with Honig, into the symbolic & the allegorical (he wrote a massive critical-historical study on allegory, with the excellent title Dark Conceit). Orpheus (as we have been exploring here) is the symbolic or allegorical figure for the poet and for poetry : a figure through whom poetic myth mythologizes itself.

Honig may have identified - emotionally, experientially - with the figure of Orpheus. For me, on the other hand, Honig in a sense represents the figure of Hermes. Hermes, the messenger, the guide, the communicator, who leads Orpheus to Eurydice. For me, the figure of Honig is rather "hermetic" in this sense : he helps me knit together various disparate threads of my own knowledge & experience. A poet-teacher & mentor, he was a guide & source of encouragement as I entered that (shady) world. & now as I look back so much later I note several "affinities" which are still at play in my thinking about poetry.

For example, there was Honig's connection with John Berryman (the title of the first edition of Affinities of Orpheus was Shake a Spear with Me, John Berryman). Berryman was only a few years older than Honig; both of them shared a scholarly passion for the Renaissance dramatists (Berryman's focus was Shakespeare; Honig's, Ben Jonson & Calderon). & Honig brought Berryman to Brown University as a visiting professor in the late 60s (Berryman lived briefly at his home in Cranston). After Berryman's death, Edwin asked me to organize a memorial reading at Brown.

Then, there is Honig's introduction to the important anthology he co-edited with Oscar Williams, the Mentor Book of Major American Poets. Here Honig describes what is distinctive about American poetry in terms of that tradition's down-to-earth this-worldliness, its celebration of the particulars of things in nature and of ordinary life for its own sake. This emphasis, as I have pointed out elsewhere, rhymes with the program of the Russian Acmeists : anti-Symbolist, aiming for the clarity of things-as-they-are (Gumilev's "chaste" vision). (See, by the way, the poetry of Zbigniew Herbert, for a Polish take on this "way of seeing").

But how would one reconcile the "mythic" Orpheus - the visionary/Romantic/lyric poet, the shaman, the antagonist of disenchanted rationalism - with this down-to-earth, practical, transparent, "realist" aspect of American writing & culture? I suppose this may be somewhere near the perennial crux of the "problem of the poet" in America...

But if we look at both the Russian Acmeist phenomenon (again, Gumilev's concept of "chasteness", the integrity, the dignity, the quiddity of things on earth), and at the characteristics of the original Orpheus - who was connected with Apollo - maybe we can recognize something like an answer... let me sketch it something like this : Orpheus (ie., the poet, and poetry) is the manifestation of the integral harmony pre-existing in life, in things. Orpheus sings (expresses, shapes, imitates, celebrates) this order. And celebration as such changes our perception of the nature of that order. Like M.H. Abrams' Romantic "lamp," the human eye of poetic vision humanizes reality as a whole (see, in this regard, Mandelstam's concept of "domestic hellenism"). Even a poet as "disenchanted" as Zbigniew Herbert still proposes a moral order of humanizing wonder : an eye for the poetry of the ordinary (& of the marginal, the powerless, the weak) as opposed to the rhetoric of power, and the power of rhetoric. (Herbert famously said he believed, contrary to everyone else, that poetry should "make men sober.") In Herbert, in Gumilev - and in Honig's introduction to perhaps the classic anthology of classic American poetry : here perhaps we are beginning to make out the lineaments of a poetics which is both cosmopolitan and deeply, truly American; which is both Orphic-visionary and normative, of the everyday.

For her heart was a mediterranean cradling the earth
- E. Honig,, "For an Immigrant Grandmother"

Happy Birthday, Edwin.

The uncanny quietude of Orpheus Mediator

2010-08-28T18:07:00.000-07:00

A few follow-up thoughts on previous post, before I conk out (it is Saturday night, after all).

We sketched out an idea of beauty as something we undergo, something we "suffer" in the old sense of the term : an effect, not a cause : an end in itself. A phenomenon whose source is (in some fairly inexplicable sense) spiritual, not material. And we suggest this "spiritual" origin is the root of all those aspects of art which we designate roughly as wholeness, fulfillment, "complete-in-itself", finish, the "sense of an ending", etc.... the pleasure we take in what Aristotle called a "whole action" (beginning, middle, end). Organic. Integral. Independent... & so on. Unwilled, uncontrollable, ungraspable...

& we argued that Orpheus exhibits a sort of passivity, a "quietude" if you will, a willingness-to-suffer (in contrast to Dionysius) which parallels the sensible stasis or static wholeness exhibited by works of art. & that Orpheus behaves in this way because he is at the crossroads of spirit & matter, spirit & flesh : he represents the union of the two, in the harmony of the art which he performs (music, poetry).

Let's extrapolate some of the consequences of all this. If we accept the foregoing, then the concept of an inherent dualism is inescapable : ie., spiritual and material, spirit and flesh. And at some level we insist on this duality, because without it there is no possibility of eternal life. And we sorely desire eternal life, in some form or another ("Eternity, O Eternity - that is our business!" Roger Williams exclaimed).

(This does not necessarily entail the relegation of matter to a secondary position. Far from it. We noted earlier that all beauty is necessarily embodied beauty. This state of affairs has its theological underpinnings in the notion that spirit fuses with matter for the sake of the "glory of God" : ie. the universe is being "restored" through the "providence" of God. Belief in a "resurrection of the body" expresses theological confidence that both spirit & flesh will be restored, somehow, to life.)

Let's make one further extrapolation. All these previous assertions depend on a single overriding metaphysical concept : the idea that the source of the physical universe resides, somehow, in consciousness, in "the spirit." How can we relate this to what we have been saying about Orpheus, and poetry? In the light of such a notion of "logos" - a cosmic order, in which spirit or consciousness pervades and orders matter & "flesh" - the myth of Orpheus taming nature with his song, and entering the underworld to restore the dead Eurydice to life, begins to reverberate as a symbol, an analogy... a myth representing the existential (human) condition in general. For if humanity is trapped in mortal flesh, subject to time and death, then a poetic word which signals a rescue from these existential limitations (ie., eternal life) is like unto Orpheus, calling Eurydice back from the grave.

Orpheus & the beautiful

2010-08-28T12:43:00.000-07:00

Let's follow this thread a little further. Orpheus with his lyre can be viewed as the ur-mask, the archaic arch-persona of the poet; Orpheus can also be seen as the representative figure for the mythical, the poetic word in its own right, per se. The poet is the person devoted to the muse - bonded in a formal relationship with whatever or whoever it is that instigates music & song. The poetic word is language under the sign of that muse - "music" - harmony; it is language fused in a formal bond with art, with beauty.

This is an unfashionable way of thinking; we hardly know what these terms mean anymore. What is the beautiful to us? What is beauty? Think of how we experience it in ordinary things. The encounter with beauty is an end in itself. It is non-utilitarian; it is an experience, an effect not a cause - it is something we undergo, not something we create from nothing. Even in our works of art, where we aim to produce something beautiful, all we can do is aim toward it, labor toward it - and perhaps it will coalesce & appear. We can't will it into being.

There is something a little frightening about our inability to control this dimension (perhaps the "sublime" is actually a sort of psychological projection of this terrifying, unmanageable aspect of beauty). Let us suggest that beauty is fundamentally a "spiritual" phenomenon, where by spiritual we mean precisely that dimension of experience which we can only undergo, which is always a little bit beyond our ken and out of our grasp. (I realize this doesn't really "explain" what I'm trying to get at : but this thread we're following is headed toward that very border of the ineffable, the inexplicable.)

I would like to suggest further that all beauty is embodied beauty. Even abstract mathematical proportions only "make sense" in terms of their extension into dimensions, their applications. It follows then, from our sketch of a definition, that the encounter with beauty happens at the conjunction point of the spiritual and the material - the ineffable and the knowable. Beauty in its very substance is a conjunction of opposites, then - a coniunctio oppositorum.

This brings me back to the duality or agon outlined earlier here, between the Apollonian & the Dionysian. The Apollonian calm, the beautiful order, the harmony represented by Orpheus is rooted in a "passion of undergoing" : the experience of beauty itself, of its paradoxical union of dual worlds. Here we approach the peculiar "stasis" inherent in beauty and in art - Eliot's chinese vase, "still moving" in its stillness. All this reaches back to our own basic and ordinary undergoing of beauty (as a "spiritual" dimension of everyday life). The challenge of the Dionysian, then - the orgiastic glee/rage of the Maenads - can be understood as part of the process (dialectical, conflictual) of the senses' submission to the uncontrollable spiritual power (of beauty). It is natural force submitting to spiritual order.

2010-08-27T10:34:00.001-07:00

The old skinny bards in the old skinny days never sang without accompaniment; they all plucked or bowed a little stringed catgut thingamajig, playing off their yowling verses. In doing so, they shored up the effect of art : they framed their speech within its magic circle, they distinguished it, set it apart. Set apart : a holy thing. Filled with dangerous charisma & spiritual mana : the word set to music.

*

We have heard that poetry is the art of the word. But what is art? A kind of order, an ordering. A framework. In time (beginning, middle, end) & space (perspective, view). An ordering, itself ordered toward one end : the beautiful. Ordered by means of, what? Vision (a kind of inward vision, involving all senses). "Beauty is truth, truth beauty..." mumbles Keats's urn. Art is an ordering, an orientation, toward the manifestation of that pre-existent beauty (natural and spiritual).

*

Poetry manifests harmony in the forms of polyvalent rhythm. Not just the rhythms of ordinary speech or patterns of words & lines : these staccato elements are upheld on deeper sound-waves, sea-surges of verbal flow - dialectical turns & counter-turns, suspense & procession, gradual or sudden unfoldings & appearances. & underlying these are yet more vast & mysterious organic changes, imponderable circuits of time itself - life's emotional cycles (say, the films of Satyajit Ray or Jean Renoir...).

*

When they twanged their thingamajigs & yodeled the myth of Orpheus, those skinny old bards entered an echo chamber. Self-reflexive (how postmodern!). The myth of Orpheus the Singer was the story of themselves : taming the wild beasts, enrapturing everyone with sweet melody... descending even unto Hades to fetch back dear Eurydice... child of Apollo, torn apart by unreasoning (Dionysian) Maenads... Yet this myth also reflected back another way, onto Myth itself : for what is myth, if not a kind of ritual orientation? A harmonizing activity, meant to resolve chaos into order, to humanize life, make it intelligible - by means of words, stories? Myth in general has an orphic dimension. So in the story of Orpheus these dual reverberations overlap and intertwine.

*

The God of the Torah and the prophets is also a kind of Orpheus, in medias res (& before all things). Creating an ordered cosmos by his word, his "Let there be..." As is the Christ of the Gospels, who says "Heaven & Earth shall pass away, but my Word shall not pass away".... who after Good Friday descends Orpheus-like into Hell, to liberate imprisoned souls. Renaissance poets (Ariosto, Spenser, Milton), in all their furry & bejeweled verbal elegance, made much of this blended Yahweh-Jesus-Orpheus. & Dante, following the call of Beatrice from Hell to Paradise, played Christo-Orpheus Redivivus to the glittering hilt of heaven.

*

& someday some inspired scholar might penetrate to the unity of Shakespeare's oeuvre... tap the spine of his deepest motive... & Hamlet's play-within-a-play-within-a-history-play within the play of History will reveal a certain Orphic ambience... & we, who are the mortal, sinful audience, outside the magic mirror of the Tempest, might recognize Prospero as a type of Orpheus-in-reverse : not so much descending into Hell, but calling to us, calling us back to, that echoing, heavenly Island of well-tempered sounds...

*

Those scrawny ancient minstrels, whether Jew or Greek or otherwise, provided metaphors, analogies for experience in general - for Everyman & Everywoman. Thus the descensus ad Inferos, the Harrowing of Hell, by Orpheus- and Jesus-Hero, presented an icon, an exemplary tale : reverberated with unspoken (or unspeakable) dimensions of human life. Such as, the well-known Fall of Man. We know, intuitively, that both as individuals and as a species we have fallen away, we have lost something, we have forgotten some early heaven, we have drifted from eternity to mortality. & the Hero who climbs down to Hades & redeems its pitiful denizens is the saving (self-saving) dream of Man, of Species-Man, Everyman : to climb from the nightmare of history & become the rightful Gardener of the planet : to fulfill the deep-sown mission of humankind itself, the ultimate human telos...

*

The scent of Orpheus (pine-boughs?) hovers around Modern poetry too (both an explicit & implicit presence). Eliot set the tone with "The Waste Land", that desiccated nowhereville in extremis, in direful need of a redemptive Word (shantih). Pound & Crane followed & divagated in their different ways. But the Greco-Christian Orpheus was never simply an Apollonian savior, heroic, powerful & glorious; he was tainted with blood & passion & Dionysius. The Christian "descent into hell" was not just a nekuia : it was also a kenosis : a humbling, a shedding of divinity & glory. Jesus-Orpheus as Suffering Servant. & I note an echo of this (kenotic) theme in the 20th-cent. long poem - the poem of shards & local facts & glittering fragments, the "grab-bag", the Whitmanish loping & limping life-poem, the wayward processions & unfinished works-in-progress, the poetry of dissociated bits & pieces, humiliated poets... it's a mode of Everyman-kenosis : the shattering & scattering of the Orphic Word, of the Son of Man, into the grimy, glimmering wasteland of forlorn & chirping backgrounds & back alleys... (think David Jones here).

*

Walking to work today I passed the fine sculpture "Orpheus Ascending," by Gilbert Franklin, at the RI School of Design. Orpheus clutches his lyre, while Eurydice, led by Hermes, heads back to Hades. The lyre was Orpheus' bardic thingamajig : the lyre, the frame of sound, the scaffolding of harmony, which accompanies & merges with the word in poetry. (Muse+Word = Music.) Hermes plays a key role in this story : messenger, communicator, mediator between realms (heaven, earth, underworld). If Orpheus represents beauty, art & Apollonian order, and Eurydice the (lost, repressed, imprisoned?) feminine spirit, Hermes stands for the occult connections & affinity between differences, opposites, antagonists. In Franklin's work, we behold these three at the point of tragic disjunction (yet united by another "lyre" - the shell of form underneath their feet). The title, "Orpheus Ascending," strikes me as somewhat ironic : Orpheus stretching up toward heaven, ready to crow like a rooster (in a major key), is by this very action separated from Eurydice and Hermes, moving away and down (on a minor chord). Or is it the tragic irrevocable chord itself that Orpheus strums, as he makes the fatal (human) mistake - a failure of faith (turning to see if Eurydice's still there).

*

We have pointed toward notions of art as an achievement of harmonious order - of finish, completion, fulfillment; a kind of labor, which rests on the most natural and instinctive human (aesthetic) responses to beauty in general, beauty pre-existent in nature. But our contemporaries may (rightly) be skeptical of such notions : in fact all the flummery about Orpheus, mythology, Jesus-Orpheus, & so on, might be seen as laughably irrelevant to the manifold existential crises of the present day. We inhabit an age of science, disenchantment, a knowing disillusionment : so what's the point of all this archaic play-acting, these mystifications? And our skeptic will likely be well-trained and steeped in such doubts - since a strong, perhaps the strongest, current of thought, since 1914 at least, has been thoroughly Nietzschean, Dionysiac, iconoclastic. A notion of art as order is viewed with great suspicion (& not without basis, considering how such a notion was distorted and manipulated by fascism, Stalinism, etc.). 20th-century art was largely anti-art: self-contradictory, enmeshed in a struggle with its own processes, repudiating any claim to its own autonomy or authority, cannibalizing and parodying its own backgrounds... Paradoxically, however, when we remind ourselves of this central struggle - between icon and iconoclasm, between Apollo and Dionysius, between harmony and force, between order and chaos, between "beauty" and "truth" - we inevitably restore the relevance of the now-maligned, diminished side of this battle (the Apollonian, the Orphic). The "return of the repressed"....

*

We have suggested a sense of the Orpheus myth as self-conscious, self-reflexive. Orpheus is the "type" not only of the myth-maker, but of myth itself, when myth is considered as the basic expression of human (poetic) imagination. In the story of Orpheus the poet steps forward onto the stage, like Shakespeare playing Hamlet's father, or Hitchcock strolling through his films. Orpheus is poetry's "play-within-the-play." Again, the chorus demands : the relevance of all this for today? Well, take a look at the August 2010 issue of Poetry magazine, in the essay there by Tony Hoagland. Hoagland recasts and re-imagines the too-familiar "binary" of the American poetry wars, between "mainstream" and "experimental" (& all the other brand-names for same), as an issue between two essential approaches : poetry as an art of : 1) "perspective" or 2) "resistance." For these terms, read, respectively : Apollonian or Dionysian. What we have here is a very ancient duality dressed up in today's terminology. What we have, at root, is an inner struggle within art : between a sense of beauty as order, finish, fullness, completion - and a contrary sense of beauty as invigorating, enlivening, liberating, aleatory, chaotic. & just as in the realm of politics, the ideological partisans (of both sides) resist any mediation of this polarity, any proposed resolution of this conflicted conundrum. Orpheus, with his temperate, well-tempered lyre, continues to be torn apart by joyfully inebriated Dionysians : harmony opposed by, & opposing, force (say, since May 29th, 1913 - & the first performance, in Paris, of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring).