Post by sisyphus on Jun 1, 2006 1:14:38 GMT -5
The Poet As Anti-Specialist
By May Swenson
What is the experience of poetry? Choosing to analyze this experience for myself after an engrossment of many years, I see it based in a craving to get through the curtains of things as they appear, to things as they are, and then into the larger, wilder space of things as the are becoming. This amibition involves a paradox: an instinctive belief in the senses as exquisite tools for this investigation and, at the same time, a suspicion about their crudeness. They may furnish easy deceptions or partial distortions:
Hold a dandelion and look at the sun.
Two spheres are side by side.
Each has a yellow ruff.
Eye, you tell a lie,
That Near is Large, that Far is Small.
There must be other deceits…
W.B. Yeats called poetry “the thinking of the body” and said: “It bids us touch and taste and hear and see the world, and shrinks from … every abstract thing, from all that is of the brain only—from all that is not a fountain jetting from the entire hopes, memories, and sensations of the body.” But sometimes one gets the inkling that there are extra-senses as yet nameless, within the apperceptive system, if one could only differentiate them and identify their organs.
Not to be fully aroused to the potentialities of one’s senses means to walk the flat ground of appearances, to take given designations for granted, to accept without a second look the name or category of a thing for the thing itself. On that ground all feelings and notions are borrowed, are second-hand. The poetic experience, by contrast, is one of constant curiosity, skepticism, and testing— astonishment, disillusionment, renewed discovery, re-illumination. It amounts to a virtual compulsion to probe with the senses into the complex actuality of all things, outside and inside the self, and to determine relationships between them.
Aroused to the potentialities and delights of the senses and the evaluating intellect, and using them daily, the poet, however, comes eventually to their limits, and notices that their findings are not enough—that they often fall short of yielding the total, all-comprehensive pattern that he seeks. A complete and firm apprehension of the Whole tantalizingly eludes him—although he receives mirages of it now and then that he projects into his work. He is not so separate from every man as not to be fooled by tricks of perspective, seduced by the obvious, or bogged down in old and comfortable myths.
The limitations of our minds and sensory equipment partly stem from the brevity of our physical lives. Stendhal somewhere says that man is like a fly born in the summer morning and dead by afternoon. How can he understand the word “night”? If he were allowed five more hours he would see and understand what night is. But unlike the fly, man is sorely conscious of the vastness of the unknown beyond his consciousness. The poet, tracing the edge of a great shadow whose outline shifts and varies, proving there is an invisible moving source of light behind, hopes (naively, in view of his ephemerality) to reach and touch the foot of that solid what-ever-it-is that casts the shadow. If sometimes it seems he does touch it, it is only to be faced with a more distant, even less accessible mystery. Because all is movement—expansion or contraction, rotation and revolution—all is breathing change.
The experience of poetry is to suppose that there is a moon of the psyche, let us say, whose illuminated half is familiar to our ordinary eye, but which has another hemisphere that is dark. And poetry can discover this other side, its thrust can take us toward it. Poetry is used to make maps of that globe, which to the “naked eye” appears disc like and one-dimensional, seems to “rise” and “set” rather thanto orbit; which remains distant and merely a “dead” object until, in the vehicle of poetry and with the speed of poetic light, we approach it. It then enlarges and reveals its surprising topography, becomes a world. And passing around it, our senses undergo dilation; there is a transformation of perception by means of this realization of the round.
Miniature as we are in the gigantic body of the cosmos, we have somehow an inbuilt craving to get our pincers of perception around the whole of it, to incorporate infinitude and set up comprehensible models of it within our little minds. Poetry tries to do this in its fashion. Science tries it, and more demonstrably. The impulses of the scientist and the poet, it seems to me, are parallel, although their instruments, methods, and effects are quite divergent. Contrasts between science and poetry are easily illustrated by such apparent opposites as: objective/subjective, reason/intuition, fact/essence—or let me boldly say: material/spiritual. However, a point of contiguity between them is that the poet and scientist both use language to communicate their findings.
As a rule the scientific investigator works as one of a team. He works with formulae or with objective facts that are classified and reported as nakedly as possible so as to convey, in each instance, a single, specific, unambiguous meaning. The poet works alone, handling concrete sensual particulars, as well as their invisible and intangible essences, with the tools of intuitive perception; he then presents his discoveries wrapped in metaphor, metrical patterns, and, often, multifarious symbols. The scientist has an actual moon under observation—one he soon hopes to have under manipulation—although no robot or human explorer has yet succeeded in getting to it. “Until one does,” I read not long ago, “scientists cannot tell whether the lunar surface is packed hard, porous, or buried deep in dust.” And, “because of fuel limitations of the rockets that will orbit the moon and lower a ferryboat to the lunar surface, moon landings must be held within five degrees north and south of the moon’s equator and within forty-five degrees east and west of the moon’s central meridian. Within this narrow zone of safety, flat lands must be found to receive the spaceships from earth.”
My moon is not in the sky, but within my psyche. More or less subliminal, it orbits within the psyche of every man, a symbol both of the always-known and the never-to-be-known. I do not try to land on that moon. To do so would be lunacy. But in 1958 I wrote a poem called Landing on the Moon, that outlines, in its first three stanzas, a capsule history of the moon’s psychic pull on man since primitive times to the present. The two concluding stanzas speculate as to whether it is well for man to succumb, literally, to that hypnotism and let himself be drawn up onto the moon:
When in the mask of night there shone that cut,
We were riddled. A probe reached down
And stroked some nerve in us,
The glint of a wizard’s eye, of silver,
slanted out of the mask of the unknown—
pit of riddles, the scratch-marked sky.
When, albino bowl on cloth of jet,
It spilled its virile rays,
Our eyes enlarged, our blood reared with the waves.
We craved its secret, but unreachable
It held away from us, chilly and frail.
Distance kept it magnate. Enigma made it white.
When we learned to read it with our rod,
Reflected light revealed
A lead mirror, a bruised shield
Seamed with scars and shadow-soiled.
A half-faced sycophant, its glitter borrowed,
Rode around our throne.
On the moon their shines earth light
As moonlight shines upon the earth…
If on its obsidian we set our weightless foot
And sniff no wind, and lick no rain
And feel no guaze between us and the Fire,
Will we trot its grassless skull, sick
For the homelike shade?
Naked to the earth-beam we will be
Who have arrived to map an apparition
Who walk upon the forehead of a myth.
Can flesh rub with symbol? If our ball
Be iron, and not light, our earliest wish
Eclipses. Dare we land upon a dream?
Psychologically, then physically, what will happen to man made to mount the moon? The moon being his first wobbling step in a march to the stars? Either extinction or mutation? In an eon or two, will he have become a rocket and a robot combined? Maybe. Yet, whether it is well for him or not, It hink man will probably colonize the moon, eventually infiltrate the solar system, and go beyond. It may be his destiny. But he may have to pay for it with a transformation amounting to an evolutionary replacement of his species by some other creature-thing, Homo mechanicus.
I confess to being envious, in a way, of the astronaut. Though not only in my imagination, where I can make him hero and lone adventurer. What an array of absolutely new sensations is handed him, like a Christmas paintbox; what an incomparable toy, his capsule with its console of magic dials, gauges, buttons, and signal lights; and what a night in shining plastic he is in his silver suit. To escape the earth ball, its tug, and one’s own heaviness! To dare the great vacuum and, weightless, be tossed—a moon oneself—around the great roulette wheel with the planets! But, in actuality, could I bear that claustrophobia in a steel womb, attached to that formidable placenta by a synthetic umbilical, dependant on a mechanical nipple for my breath of air?
In space there is so little space. And who but a preconditioned, tranquilized, de-nerved, desensualized, automatically responding “test-subject” could stand for long that swaddling as in a rigid iron lung? Not only freedom of movement and of action, but freedom to think an aberrant thought or do an individual impulsive deed must be forfeited, it seems to me. Hooked to the indispensable members of his team by the paraphernalia of intercommunication, the astronaut, I imagine, must learn to forget what solitude, what privacy tastes like. His very heartbeat becomes public, his body and brain an encephalograph, a fluroscope, a radio, a video screen. First trained to become a piece of equipment; next, perhaps, born so. (Sometimes I long to remember my life as a cephalopod under the sea, and cannot.)
But let me go back to a consideration of the poetic method and its effects, compared to the scientific.
For the poet, self is a universe, and he is embarked on a conquest of inner space. From the outside, in this accelerated age, our consciousness is being bombarded with the effects of rapid change and upheaval. It’s as if we could see the earth shift and change while we walk on it. Familiar space and time have hooked together and we have spacetime. Matter has split into uncountable explosive bits and become energy. On the one hand—and virtually with the same engine—man prepares to fly to the stars, while on the other he seems intent on annihilating himself along with his sole perch in the universe. There is the temptation sometimes to stuff up the “doors of perception” and regress to that long-ago world that was flat—that was static and secure, since it rested immovably on the back of a turtle! Because the poet’s pre-creative condition must be an emptiness, a solitude, a stillness close to inertia. It is a blankness behind and before him, while he is centered within the present moment, expectant only of the vividness to come, slowly or suddenly, with the combustion of sensations and impressions gathered and stored beforehand from his active life.
The method is the opposite of analytic industry spurred by communal effort (teamwork) proceeding according to prearranged outline, operating upon the material from the outside. Rather than grasping it a piece at a time, construction-wise, the poet seats himself within his subject, at its axis, so that, equidistant from all points of its circumference, he can apprehend its potential form as an immediate whole. This is the organic technique, allowing the growth from within, from the initial seeds of attention, until, as Rilke puts it, “All space becomes a fruit around those kernels.” I speak here of poetry in its conception; obviously there is an industrious and conscious work of building to be done before the body of a poem is complete.
Science and poetry are alike, or allied, it seems to me, in their largest and main target—to investigate any and all phenomena of existence beyond the flat surface of appearances. The products as well as the methods of these two processes are very different—not in their relative value but in the particular uses that they have for their “consumers.” Each has a separate role and concern toward the expansion of human consciousness and experience. Poetry has a psychic use. Along with the other arts it is a depository for, and a dispenser of, such psychic realizations as wonder, beauty, surprise, joy, awe, revelation—and, as well, fear, disgust, perplexity, anxiety, pain, despair. It provides an input and an outlet for all the complex, powerful, fleeting grains and rays of sensation in the human organism. It is a quickner of experience, and it renews the archetypes and icons necessary to the human spirit, by means of which personality is nurtured and formed.
“The world is poetical intrinsically,’ Aldous Huxley has written, “ and what it means is simply itself. Its significanced is the enormous mystery of its existence and of our awareness of its exeistence.” Who or what are we? Why are we? And what are we becoming? What is the relationship between man and the universe? Those are questions that ached in the mind of the first poet. They can be said to have created the first poet, and to be the first source of the art of poetry. Does the fact of our consciousness, unique and seemingly miraculous among all of nature’s creatures, a priori indicate a super-consciousness shaping and manipulating the cosmos?
How is it that with our minds we can explore our own minds? And can we develop a technique to explore Mind—that aspect of the universe we might postulate exists in addtion to its mere structural organization? Maybe such a Mind is not yet in existence, but in process; maybe our nervous systems and cortexes are early evidence of its future evolution. As Huxley reports in Literature and Science, psychologists know a great deal, but as yet they “have no recognized hypothesis to account for the apparent interaction of mind and matter in a simple act of consciousness.” Nor is there even a firm hypothesis to explain the operation of memory. But atomic physics (the most exact of the sciences) is uncovering a factual foundation for many intuitions of existentialist poets and philosophers. According to a statement made by physicist Werner Heisenberg, cited by Huxley, for the first time in the history of the planet man approaches a willingness to admit that he is alone with himself “without a partner and without an adversary.” This I believe to be an intuitive hunch, not only of the poet or philosopher, but every thinking man when in moments of extremity he is forced face to face with his own soul. Huxley puts it that “man is in the process of becoming his own providence, his own cataclysm, his own Saviour and his own invading horde of Martians. And he adds: “in the realm of pure science the same discovery—that he is alone with himself-awaits him as he progressively refines his analysis of matter.” Modern science, according to Heisenberg, “shows us that we can no longer regard the building blocks of matter, which were considered originally to be the ultimate objective reality, as being things-in-themselves….Knowledge of atoms and their movements in themselves—that is to say, independent of our observation—is no longer the aim of research; rather we now find ourselves from the very start in the midst of a dialogue between nature and man, a dialogue of which science is only one part, so much so that the conventional division of the world into subject and object, into inner world and outer world, into body and soul, is no longer applicable and raises difficulties. For the sciences of nature, the subject matter of research is no longer nature in itself, but nature subjected to human questioning, and to this extent once again, meets only with himself.”
From reflection on a statement such as this one can almost reach the spooky conclusion that all we conceive as objective, and under examination by our own sensorial and intellectual equipment, is really subjective and a projection of our own heads!
In 1665, or thereabouts, the American poet Edward Taylor wrote a remarkable poem trying to penetrate into the origin of the universe. A portion of it reads as follows:
Infinity, when all things it beheld,
In Nothing, and of Nothing all did build,
Upon what base was fixt the Lath, wherein
He turn’d this Globe, and riggalld it so trim?
Who blew the Bellows of his Furnace Vast?
Or held the Mould wherein the world was Cast?
Who laid its Corner Stone? Or whose Command?
Where stand the Pillars upon which it stands?
Who Lac’de and Fillitted the earth so fine,
With Rivers like Green Ribbons Smaragdidne?
Who made the Sea’s its selvedge, and its locks
Like a Quilt Ball within a Silver Box?
Who Spread its Canopy? Or Curtains Spun?
Who in this Bowling Alley bowld the Sun?
Who? Who did this? Or who is he? Why, know
Its Onely Might Almighty this did doe.
Its interesting that Edward Taylor should have made Infinity, that great abstraction, the protagonist of his poem—even though he refers to it as “he”—and his expression, “It’s Onely Might Almighty this did doe,--i.e., Energy—sounds like an intuition prefiguring a finding of modern science rather than reflecting (as he no doubt consciously intended) a god-centered metaphysics of the seventeenth century.
The poet’s universe had better be centered within the present; it had better not install itself (and stall itself) in anachronisms either conceptual or expressionistic. Because the poet, I believe, should be the vanguard of his time. He can, in his unique way, be a synthesizer and synchronizer of the many components and elements of a great new pattern emergent in the investigations of biologists, psychologists, anthropologists, astronomers, physicists, et al. the poet’s material has always been nature—human and otherwise—all objects and aspects of our outer environment as well as the “climate of the soul” and the “theatre of the emotions.” The poet is the great anti-specialist. Still possible in our overorganized, compartmentalized culture, and still needed, is the work and play of the artists. As a free-floating agent, medium and conduit-a kind of “divining rod”—he may pass anywhere—over, into around or through the multifold fabric of experience and present the results of his singular discoveries and delights to fellow searchers, fellow beholders.
The play of the artist is psychologically very important. As the philosopher Huizinga has written in Homo Ludens: “…in acknowledging play you acknowledge mind, for whatever else play is, it is not matter. Even in the animal world it bursts the bounds of the physically existent. From the point of view of a world wholly determined by the operation of blind forces, play would be altogether superfluous. Play only becomes possible, thinkable and understandable when an influx of mind breaks down the absolute determinism of the cosmos.”
I said earlier that a point of contiguity between the poet and the scientist is that both employ language to communicate what they find. At this point there is also a crucial departure, for language is not only a tool in poetry, it is its very being. In a poem, Subject is not presented by means of language but Language is the thing presented with the aid of a subject. Being merely instrumental, a scientific exposition can be restated in various ways without a loss of end effect; when new facts render its message obsolete, such expositions are replaced and forgotten. But tamper with, or reconstruct, the tissue of a poem and you deal death to its cells and molecules. The poet reaches for a vision of reality that is whole, seamless, and undivided; if he succeeds in that, his product need not suffer obsolescence. True art combines the properties of change and endurance.
What is poetry, beyond subject, beyond what is being said, that is given? The management of language for the poem must be such as to capture and fix the essence of the immediate experience—the sensation, illumination, extra dimension—that the poet felt when the impulse for the poem (the emotion or psychic mental discovery that engendered it) fell upon him. It must be such that the receiver of the poem recapitulates, as it were physically, the same illumination because it relates to or fuses with a vision within himself, dormant and dark until the moment the beam of the poem strikes into him. In the handling of his material, which is language, metaphor is to the poet what the equation is to the mathmatician.
In one of his essays on art, published as long ago as 1919, Ezra Pound said:
We might come to believe that the thing that matters in art is a sort of energy, something more or less like electricity or radioactivity, a force transfusing, welding, and unifying…the thing that counts is Good Writing. And good writing is perfect control. It is quite easy to control a thing that has in it no energy—provided that it be not too heavy and that you do not wish to make it move…
Discussing the origins of language Pound said:
The whole thing is an evolution. In the beginning simple words were enough: food; water; fire. Both prose and poetry are but an extension of language. Man desires to communicate with his fellows. And he desires an ever increasingly complicated communication. Gesture serves up to a point. Symbols may serve. But when you desire something not present to the eye or when you desire to communicate ideas, you must have recourse to speech. Gradually you wish to communicate something less bare and ambiguous than ideas. You wish to communicate an idea and its modifications, an idea and a crowd of its effects, atmospheres, contradictions…
Words and their sense must be such as fit the emotion. Or, from the other side, ideas, or fragments of ideas, the emotion and the concomitant emotions, must be in harmony, the must form an organism…
Poetry is a centaur. The thinking, word-arranging, clarifying faculty must move and leap with the energizing, sentient, musical faculties.
At one time, wishing to clarify to myself the distinction between poetry and other modes of expression, I put down these notes:
Poetry doesn’t tell; it shows. Prose tells.
Poetry is not philosophy; poetry makes things be, right now.
Not an idea, but a happening.
It is not music, but it sounds while showing.
It is mobile; it is a thing taking place—active, interactive, in a place.
It is not thought; it has to do with senses and musles.
It is not dancing, but it moves while it remains.
…And it is not science. But the experience of poetry is animated with the insatiable curiosity of science. The universe, inside and out, is properly its laboratory. More plain than ever before is the potent fact that we are human particles in a culture of living change. We must either master the Great Whirl or become victims of it. Science is unavoidably reshaping our environment, and in the future will influence prominently the next development of individual man and his species. Art, more intimately, deals with, and forms, the emotional and spiritual climate of our experience. Poetry can help man stay human.
By May Swenson
What is the experience of poetry? Choosing to analyze this experience for myself after an engrossment of many years, I see it based in a craving to get through the curtains of things as they appear, to things as they are, and then into the larger, wilder space of things as the are becoming. This amibition involves a paradox: an instinctive belief in the senses as exquisite tools for this investigation and, at the same time, a suspicion about their crudeness. They may furnish easy deceptions or partial distortions:
Hold a dandelion and look at the sun.
Two spheres are side by side.
Each has a yellow ruff.
Eye, you tell a lie,
That Near is Large, that Far is Small.
There must be other deceits…
W.B. Yeats called poetry “the thinking of the body” and said: “It bids us touch and taste and hear and see the world, and shrinks from … every abstract thing, from all that is of the brain only—from all that is not a fountain jetting from the entire hopes, memories, and sensations of the body.” But sometimes one gets the inkling that there are extra-senses as yet nameless, within the apperceptive system, if one could only differentiate them and identify their organs.
Not to be fully aroused to the potentialities of one’s senses means to walk the flat ground of appearances, to take given designations for granted, to accept without a second look the name or category of a thing for the thing itself. On that ground all feelings and notions are borrowed, are second-hand. The poetic experience, by contrast, is one of constant curiosity, skepticism, and testing— astonishment, disillusionment, renewed discovery, re-illumination. It amounts to a virtual compulsion to probe with the senses into the complex actuality of all things, outside and inside the self, and to determine relationships between them.
Aroused to the potentialities and delights of the senses and the evaluating intellect, and using them daily, the poet, however, comes eventually to their limits, and notices that their findings are not enough—that they often fall short of yielding the total, all-comprehensive pattern that he seeks. A complete and firm apprehension of the Whole tantalizingly eludes him—although he receives mirages of it now and then that he projects into his work. He is not so separate from every man as not to be fooled by tricks of perspective, seduced by the obvious, or bogged down in old and comfortable myths.
The limitations of our minds and sensory equipment partly stem from the brevity of our physical lives. Stendhal somewhere says that man is like a fly born in the summer morning and dead by afternoon. How can he understand the word “night”? If he were allowed five more hours he would see and understand what night is. But unlike the fly, man is sorely conscious of the vastness of the unknown beyond his consciousness. The poet, tracing the edge of a great shadow whose outline shifts and varies, proving there is an invisible moving source of light behind, hopes (naively, in view of his ephemerality) to reach and touch the foot of that solid what-ever-it-is that casts the shadow. If sometimes it seems he does touch it, it is only to be faced with a more distant, even less accessible mystery. Because all is movement—expansion or contraction, rotation and revolution—all is breathing change.
The experience of poetry is to suppose that there is a moon of the psyche, let us say, whose illuminated half is familiar to our ordinary eye, but which has another hemisphere that is dark. And poetry can discover this other side, its thrust can take us toward it. Poetry is used to make maps of that globe, which to the “naked eye” appears disc like and one-dimensional, seems to “rise” and “set” rather thanto orbit; which remains distant and merely a “dead” object until, in the vehicle of poetry and with the speed of poetic light, we approach it. It then enlarges and reveals its surprising topography, becomes a world. And passing around it, our senses undergo dilation; there is a transformation of perception by means of this realization of the round.
Miniature as we are in the gigantic body of the cosmos, we have somehow an inbuilt craving to get our pincers of perception around the whole of it, to incorporate infinitude and set up comprehensible models of it within our little minds. Poetry tries to do this in its fashion. Science tries it, and more demonstrably. The impulses of the scientist and the poet, it seems to me, are parallel, although their instruments, methods, and effects are quite divergent. Contrasts between science and poetry are easily illustrated by such apparent opposites as: objective/subjective, reason/intuition, fact/essence—or let me boldly say: material/spiritual. However, a point of contiguity between them is that the poet and scientist both use language to communicate their findings.
As a rule the scientific investigator works as one of a team. He works with formulae or with objective facts that are classified and reported as nakedly as possible so as to convey, in each instance, a single, specific, unambiguous meaning. The poet works alone, handling concrete sensual particulars, as well as their invisible and intangible essences, with the tools of intuitive perception; he then presents his discoveries wrapped in metaphor, metrical patterns, and, often, multifarious symbols. The scientist has an actual moon under observation—one he soon hopes to have under manipulation—although no robot or human explorer has yet succeeded in getting to it. “Until one does,” I read not long ago, “scientists cannot tell whether the lunar surface is packed hard, porous, or buried deep in dust.” And, “because of fuel limitations of the rockets that will orbit the moon and lower a ferryboat to the lunar surface, moon landings must be held within five degrees north and south of the moon’s equator and within forty-five degrees east and west of the moon’s central meridian. Within this narrow zone of safety, flat lands must be found to receive the spaceships from earth.”
My moon is not in the sky, but within my psyche. More or less subliminal, it orbits within the psyche of every man, a symbol both of the always-known and the never-to-be-known. I do not try to land on that moon. To do so would be lunacy. But in 1958 I wrote a poem called Landing on the Moon, that outlines, in its first three stanzas, a capsule history of the moon’s psychic pull on man since primitive times to the present. The two concluding stanzas speculate as to whether it is well for man to succumb, literally, to that hypnotism and let himself be drawn up onto the moon:
When in the mask of night there shone that cut,
We were riddled. A probe reached down
And stroked some nerve in us,
The glint of a wizard’s eye, of silver,
slanted out of the mask of the unknown—
pit of riddles, the scratch-marked sky.
When, albino bowl on cloth of jet,
It spilled its virile rays,
Our eyes enlarged, our blood reared with the waves.
We craved its secret, but unreachable
It held away from us, chilly and frail.
Distance kept it magnate. Enigma made it white.
When we learned to read it with our rod,
Reflected light revealed
A lead mirror, a bruised shield
Seamed with scars and shadow-soiled.
A half-faced sycophant, its glitter borrowed,
Rode around our throne.
On the moon their shines earth light
As moonlight shines upon the earth…
If on its obsidian we set our weightless foot
And sniff no wind, and lick no rain
And feel no guaze between us and the Fire,
Will we trot its grassless skull, sick
For the homelike shade?
Naked to the earth-beam we will be
Who have arrived to map an apparition
Who walk upon the forehead of a myth.
Can flesh rub with symbol? If our ball
Be iron, and not light, our earliest wish
Eclipses. Dare we land upon a dream?
Psychologically, then physically, what will happen to man made to mount the moon? The moon being his first wobbling step in a march to the stars? Either extinction or mutation? In an eon or two, will he have become a rocket and a robot combined? Maybe. Yet, whether it is well for him or not, It hink man will probably colonize the moon, eventually infiltrate the solar system, and go beyond. It may be his destiny. But he may have to pay for it with a transformation amounting to an evolutionary replacement of his species by some other creature-thing, Homo mechanicus.
I confess to being envious, in a way, of the astronaut. Though not only in my imagination, where I can make him hero and lone adventurer. What an array of absolutely new sensations is handed him, like a Christmas paintbox; what an incomparable toy, his capsule with its console of magic dials, gauges, buttons, and signal lights; and what a night in shining plastic he is in his silver suit. To escape the earth ball, its tug, and one’s own heaviness! To dare the great vacuum and, weightless, be tossed—a moon oneself—around the great roulette wheel with the planets! But, in actuality, could I bear that claustrophobia in a steel womb, attached to that formidable placenta by a synthetic umbilical, dependant on a mechanical nipple for my breath of air?
In space there is so little space. And who but a preconditioned, tranquilized, de-nerved, desensualized, automatically responding “test-subject” could stand for long that swaddling as in a rigid iron lung? Not only freedom of movement and of action, but freedom to think an aberrant thought or do an individual impulsive deed must be forfeited, it seems to me. Hooked to the indispensable members of his team by the paraphernalia of intercommunication, the astronaut, I imagine, must learn to forget what solitude, what privacy tastes like. His very heartbeat becomes public, his body and brain an encephalograph, a fluroscope, a radio, a video screen. First trained to become a piece of equipment; next, perhaps, born so. (Sometimes I long to remember my life as a cephalopod under the sea, and cannot.)
But let me go back to a consideration of the poetic method and its effects, compared to the scientific.
For the poet, self is a universe, and he is embarked on a conquest of inner space. From the outside, in this accelerated age, our consciousness is being bombarded with the effects of rapid change and upheaval. It’s as if we could see the earth shift and change while we walk on it. Familiar space and time have hooked together and we have spacetime. Matter has split into uncountable explosive bits and become energy. On the one hand—and virtually with the same engine—man prepares to fly to the stars, while on the other he seems intent on annihilating himself along with his sole perch in the universe. There is the temptation sometimes to stuff up the “doors of perception” and regress to that long-ago world that was flat—that was static and secure, since it rested immovably on the back of a turtle! Because the poet’s pre-creative condition must be an emptiness, a solitude, a stillness close to inertia. It is a blankness behind and before him, while he is centered within the present moment, expectant only of the vividness to come, slowly or suddenly, with the combustion of sensations and impressions gathered and stored beforehand from his active life.
The method is the opposite of analytic industry spurred by communal effort (teamwork) proceeding according to prearranged outline, operating upon the material from the outside. Rather than grasping it a piece at a time, construction-wise, the poet seats himself within his subject, at its axis, so that, equidistant from all points of its circumference, he can apprehend its potential form as an immediate whole. This is the organic technique, allowing the growth from within, from the initial seeds of attention, until, as Rilke puts it, “All space becomes a fruit around those kernels.” I speak here of poetry in its conception; obviously there is an industrious and conscious work of building to be done before the body of a poem is complete.
Science and poetry are alike, or allied, it seems to me, in their largest and main target—to investigate any and all phenomena of existence beyond the flat surface of appearances. The products as well as the methods of these two processes are very different—not in their relative value but in the particular uses that they have for their “consumers.” Each has a separate role and concern toward the expansion of human consciousness and experience. Poetry has a psychic use. Along with the other arts it is a depository for, and a dispenser of, such psychic realizations as wonder, beauty, surprise, joy, awe, revelation—and, as well, fear, disgust, perplexity, anxiety, pain, despair. It provides an input and an outlet for all the complex, powerful, fleeting grains and rays of sensation in the human organism. It is a quickner of experience, and it renews the archetypes and icons necessary to the human spirit, by means of which personality is nurtured and formed.
“The world is poetical intrinsically,’ Aldous Huxley has written, “ and what it means is simply itself. Its significanced is the enormous mystery of its existence and of our awareness of its exeistence.” Who or what are we? Why are we? And what are we becoming? What is the relationship between man and the universe? Those are questions that ached in the mind of the first poet. They can be said to have created the first poet, and to be the first source of the art of poetry. Does the fact of our consciousness, unique and seemingly miraculous among all of nature’s creatures, a priori indicate a super-consciousness shaping and manipulating the cosmos?
How is it that with our minds we can explore our own minds? And can we develop a technique to explore Mind—that aspect of the universe we might postulate exists in addtion to its mere structural organization? Maybe such a Mind is not yet in existence, but in process; maybe our nervous systems and cortexes are early evidence of its future evolution. As Huxley reports in Literature and Science, psychologists know a great deal, but as yet they “have no recognized hypothesis to account for the apparent interaction of mind and matter in a simple act of consciousness.” Nor is there even a firm hypothesis to explain the operation of memory. But atomic physics (the most exact of the sciences) is uncovering a factual foundation for many intuitions of existentialist poets and philosophers. According to a statement made by physicist Werner Heisenberg, cited by Huxley, for the first time in the history of the planet man approaches a willingness to admit that he is alone with himself “without a partner and without an adversary.” This I believe to be an intuitive hunch, not only of the poet or philosopher, but every thinking man when in moments of extremity he is forced face to face with his own soul. Huxley puts it that “man is in the process of becoming his own providence, his own cataclysm, his own Saviour and his own invading horde of Martians. And he adds: “in the realm of pure science the same discovery—that he is alone with himself-awaits him as he progressively refines his analysis of matter.” Modern science, according to Heisenberg, “shows us that we can no longer regard the building blocks of matter, which were considered originally to be the ultimate objective reality, as being things-in-themselves….Knowledge of atoms and their movements in themselves—that is to say, independent of our observation—is no longer the aim of research; rather we now find ourselves from the very start in the midst of a dialogue between nature and man, a dialogue of which science is only one part, so much so that the conventional division of the world into subject and object, into inner world and outer world, into body and soul, is no longer applicable and raises difficulties. For the sciences of nature, the subject matter of research is no longer nature in itself, but nature subjected to human questioning, and to this extent once again, meets only with himself.”
From reflection on a statement such as this one can almost reach the spooky conclusion that all we conceive as objective, and under examination by our own sensorial and intellectual equipment, is really subjective and a projection of our own heads!
In 1665, or thereabouts, the American poet Edward Taylor wrote a remarkable poem trying to penetrate into the origin of the universe. A portion of it reads as follows:
Infinity, when all things it beheld,
In Nothing, and of Nothing all did build,
Upon what base was fixt the Lath, wherein
He turn’d this Globe, and riggalld it so trim?
Who blew the Bellows of his Furnace Vast?
Or held the Mould wherein the world was Cast?
Who laid its Corner Stone? Or whose Command?
Where stand the Pillars upon which it stands?
Who Lac’de and Fillitted the earth so fine,
With Rivers like Green Ribbons Smaragdidne?
Who made the Sea’s its selvedge, and its locks
Like a Quilt Ball within a Silver Box?
Who Spread its Canopy? Or Curtains Spun?
Who in this Bowling Alley bowld the Sun?
Who? Who did this? Or who is he? Why, know
Its Onely Might Almighty this did doe.
Its interesting that Edward Taylor should have made Infinity, that great abstraction, the protagonist of his poem—even though he refers to it as “he”—and his expression, “It’s Onely Might Almighty this did doe,--i.e., Energy—sounds like an intuition prefiguring a finding of modern science rather than reflecting (as he no doubt consciously intended) a god-centered metaphysics of the seventeenth century.
The poet’s universe had better be centered within the present; it had better not install itself (and stall itself) in anachronisms either conceptual or expressionistic. Because the poet, I believe, should be the vanguard of his time. He can, in his unique way, be a synthesizer and synchronizer of the many components and elements of a great new pattern emergent in the investigations of biologists, psychologists, anthropologists, astronomers, physicists, et al. the poet’s material has always been nature—human and otherwise—all objects and aspects of our outer environment as well as the “climate of the soul” and the “theatre of the emotions.” The poet is the great anti-specialist. Still possible in our overorganized, compartmentalized culture, and still needed, is the work and play of the artists. As a free-floating agent, medium and conduit-a kind of “divining rod”—he may pass anywhere—over, into around or through the multifold fabric of experience and present the results of his singular discoveries and delights to fellow searchers, fellow beholders.
The play of the artist is psychologically very important. As the philosopher Huizinga has written in Homo Ludens: “…in acknowledging play you acknowledge mind, for whatever else play is, it is not matter. Even in the animal world it bursts the bounds of the physically existent. From the point of view of a world wholly determined by the operation of blind forces, play would be altogether superfluous. Play only becomes possible, thinkable and understandable when an influx of mind breaks down the absolute determinism of the cosmos.”
I said earlier that a point of contiguity between the poet and the scientist is that both employ language to communicate what they find. At this point there is also a crucial departure, for language is not only a tool in poetry, it is its very being. In a poem, Subject is not presented by means of language but Language is the thing presented with the aid of a subject. Being merely instrumental, a scientific exposition can be restated in various ways without a loss of end effect; when new facts render its message obsolete, such expositions are replaced and forgotten. But tamper with, or reconstruct, the tissue of a poem and you deal death to its cells and molecules. The poet reaches for a vision of reality that is whole, seamless, and undivided; if he succeeds in that, his product need not suffer obsolescence. True art combines the properties of change and endurance.
What is poetry, beyond subject, beyond what is being said, that is given? The management of language for the poem must be such as to capture and fix the essence of the immediate experience—the sensation, illumination, extra dimension—that the poet felt when the impulse for the poem (the emotion or psychic mental discovery that engendered it) fell upon him. It must be such that the receiver of the poem recapitulates, as it were physically, the same illumination because it relates to or fuses with a vision within himself, dormant and dark until the moment the beam of the poem strikes into him. In the handling of his material, which is language, metaphor is to the poet what the equation is to the mathmatician.
In one of his essays on art, published as long ago as 1919, Ezra Pound said:
We might come to believe that the thing that matters in art is a sort of energy, something more or less like electricity or radioactivity, a force transfusing, welding, and unifying…the thing that counts is Good Writing. And good writing is perfect control. It is quite easy to control a thing that has in it no energy—provided that it be not too heavy and that you do not wish to make it move…
Discussing the origins of language Pound said:
The whole thing is an evolution. In the beginning simple words were enough: food; water; fire. Both prose and poetry are but an extension of language. Man desires to communicate with his fellows. And he desires an ever increasingly complicated communication. Gesture serves up to a point. Symbols may serve. But when you desire something not present to the eye or when you desire to communicate ideas, you must have recourse to speech. Gradually you wish to communicate something less bare and ambiguous than ideas. You wish to communicate an idea and its modifications, an idea and a crowd of its effects, atmospheres, contradictions…
Words and their sense must be such as fit the emotion. Or, from the other side, ideas, or fragments of ideas, the emotion and the concomitant emotions, must be in harmony, the must form an organism…
Poetry is a centaur. The thinking, word-arranging, clarifying faculty must move and leap with the energizing, sentient, musical faculties.
At one time, wishing to clarify to myself the distinction between poetry and other modes of expression, I put down these notes:
Poetry doesn’t tell; it shows. Prose tells.
Poetry is not philosophy; poetry makes things be, right now.
Not an idea, but a happening.
It is not music, but it sounds while showing.
It is mobile; it is a thing taking place—active, interactive, in a place.
It is not thought; it has to do with senses and musles.
It is not dancing, but it moves while it remains.
…And it is not science. But the experience of poetry is animated with the insatiable curiosity of science. The universe, inside and out, is properly its laboratory. More plain than ever before is the potent fact that we are human particles in a culture of living change. We must either master the Great Whirl or become victims of it. Science is unavoidably reshaping our environment, and in the future will influence prominently the next development of individual man and his species. Art, more intimately, deals with, and forms, the emotional and spiritual climate of our experience. Poetry can help man stay human.
