Ends of Calm Looking, Hearing, Feeling

Afterword Essay to Black Orchid (1981): restored and revised

Poetry always involves a motion toward reality on every level. The word manifests our situation, to ourselves and afterwards to others, and in poetry the word most nearly approaches its own reality. A poem, once created, stands before us as an enigmatic being which reveals that expression is a phenomenon of presence: its nature is not so much informative as sacramental. Like beings, words communicate not by imparting facts-about but by participating in the reality to which they also allude. The sector from which the poem emerges is that of the human: but at the same time it is composed of the human’s background and beyond, all the threads drawn from all aspects of being to make up the human person, just as all the elements and forces of nature compose the human body.

Through poetry a person is in the presence of the world, his/her fellows, his/her self. Poetry’s omnipresence is thus explicable in terms of humankind’s impulse to make tangible the nature and dimensions of its situation. The race at its strongest has a fierce desire not to be deluded; it wishes to be saved but not to believe in a salvation that is illusory. The resulting movement, infinitely fragile and always involving critical intelligence, is a project of the will necessitating a continual destruction of concepts and reinstatement of the full presence to each person of his/her life and situation. It is poetic awareness that first solicits this assault on behalf of reality against the shell of schemas, and it is finally accomplished in the poem, which, like a child, springs from contact with the “other” and bodies forth both its own self and ourselves, mediating the two.

It might be said that an approach to reality characterizes every human activity taken in its healthy or “normal” phase, and this is in some sense true, but poetry (along with the arts) has the unique property of moving essentially from intercourse with the real toward concreteness and incarnation in a sensible, phenomenal being: the poem. The other disciplines move essentially toward concepts, schemas, abstraction, and must continually be recalled to the task of probing for reality. (This is even and perhaps especially true of the religions; Christianity, the anti-religion, is beyond the scope of these remarks, but one can say that its nature is profoundly bound up with that of poetry.) All activities cast about initially for some bedrock on which to establish a footing, something that can be known to be irreducible to self-deception. Can this be found? Surely “reality” itself is the most problematic of all concepts, the one that requires the most frequent dismantling or destruction. It is the subject of innumerable definitions, redefinitions and criticism. Finally, in recent times, many strategies have been developed for limiting assertions in view of the perceived baseless fideism of all previous claims to know the real.

Also, we cannot forget that concepts themselves are experienced as realities—creative realities for some persons, environmental ones for others—and that this concept of the unknowability of the real thus composes the cloudland of the contemporary intellectual. It seems to him/her that these fogs are a world, and that it is a semantic delusion to appeal to some presumable beyond to dissolve and replace them; the statement involved, that reality is not real but that there is somewhere a true reality which is at present not real to us, is nonsensical. Yet in poetry the living unity of expression and being negates this conceptual and linguistic dilemma by incarnating that remote possibility which is yet the most overwhelming of all present facts.

In the realm of thought, science is often still said to preserve faith in a movement toward the real. But today, science’s primary presence is as a myth that congratulates our culture on its realism and fact-based wisdom. True science, insofar as it is still pursued, contradicts ever more clearly the mechanistic model of reality on which this culture is based. Science’s formative social role has in fact been usurped by technology, whose standard for judging reality is power, the manipulative and constructive power of rational, efficient techniques. Men and women still tend to conceive technology as machinery and its effects as material ones; to the extent that it has “spiritual” consequences, these are widely supposed to be side effects of the difficult human adaptation to material change.

But in fact technology has become an omnipresent, apotheosized efficiency that extends its hegemony over all aspects of life. This abstraction has installed itself as the deity of the state and of all so-called revolution, in the thought systems of our critic-philosophers (always the products of circumstance), and—through the agency of a chimera whose body is mass media and whose head is advertising and propaganda—in the heart of language itself and the individual person. In this way, the technology/state complex has become a pantheistic god that is at once world and creator, that calls modern humanity into being and places it in its environment, which this god has provided. This environment perhaps possesses the potential—not as yet fully accomplished—of quelling all desire to see beyond it and escape it. It is more satisfying than the environment provided by God; indeed, it has been erected precisely in order to eliminate the difficulties of nature. Where those difficulties cannot be removed, as in the case of death, it works to disguise and ameliorate them and reduce anxiety.

Its early, clumsily oppressive manifestations called forth the protest of socialism. Today it has adapted to this challenge, and rather than destroying the potential enemy has institutionalized it as a distraction from the real issue, technology’s own delusive and dehumanizing effect that occurs identically in all political systems. In fact Marxism, with its insistence on “development” as a liberating force, became the most useful of tools for bringing backward nations, which exist “beneath” technology’s reach, into the sphere of its omnipotence. The technological world today exhibits to humans the divine quality of immanence-cum-transcendence: it infuses materialist and mechanistic needs, rights and goods, into human consciousness, and afterwards comes itself to dispense them. If, then, technological and statist civilization is not reality, it is at least a shell which guarantees that human protest—and even the awareness that there is any need to protest—will progressively weaken, unless a decision is taken to the contrary.

Thus, within our culture man has become something which poses to himself only at one remove the essential questions of his own being. His sense of anxiety and emptiness is the experience of one who is not in contact with himself, who is involved in a technological and sensual sleep and has become a driven cog to which function and distraction almost suffice. Even the tremors that occur in him are ever more frequently, more successfully diverted into the rapidly merging channels of political action and popular entertainment. This is a major problem in itself, but it is merely a screen before the vital problems; it is a question of not being able to feel and confront the basic human situation, an addiction to security and luxury in a being which can live only in adventure, in being open to any departure.

Today the protest against this situation comes not primarily from man but from the earth. The earth’s degradation began simultaneously with man’s. This is as true of the history of technological ascendancy as of the history of the Fall; indeed, the former is only an acceleration and deepening of the sensual sleep and cyclic entropy initiated by the latter. Not being as malleable and adaptable as humanity, earth has tended more and more to protest by becoming exhausted and dying under the pressure that grows progressively more unendurable. In this regard, the earth’s current state is virtually a revolt in the human sense: a saying “No” despite the certain fatal consequences. It is this “No” which at the present time still represents an undeniable evidence that comes to us from beyond our closed borders.

But we ought to hear this voice not only because it denies us, but because it is a modulation of the one we heard in childhood, before we recognized the weight that could deform it, and before it would allow us to be troubled. The hearing of it is, to the poet, that bedrock for activity mentioned above: childhood that granted images, words, and flesh to being, and made us praise birth.

This experience can be termed a sense of the sufficiency of our existence; it stands at the gate of conscious life, and the moment it emerges to view it is already fleeing from an angel who brandishes a sword. It is contradicted immediately as it arises to consciousness by the awareness of limitation, isolation, death: facts. Hence it is suppressed or modulates into a desire, defiant or tragic. Yet poetry retains the original knowledge of it, the memory of its occurrence as a touch from something beyond; the poem always bears some allegiance, however etiolated, to the position that the joy of communion, i.e. love, is ontologically if not temporally prior to all else. The stronger a poetry is, then, the more urgently will it test this sense against the most powerful indications of the inadequacy of nature—and indeed of any phenomenal existence—to human aspiration. The poetic impulse is to defend phenomenal existence and personhood against unity/extinction. Or rather, not to defend them but to find that they are original and superior; poetry is an exploration undertaken in hope and guided by memory.

Thus, vis-à-vis contemporary thought, poetry may be forced to insist that it stands with life as against personality and culture. Despite all that can be said about the pain of emergence into life on both the individual and social levels, despite the possibility that personality and culture represent self-protective mechanisms necessitated by the natural, familial and social environments’ corrosive impact on a “pleasure principle” or desire for omnipotence, it remains true that growth and death represent the fundamental direction of human being in nature. If, truly, personality and culture do not reflect the movement in this direction except as threat, and even resolve into a “death principle” or death wish, then poetic awareness must be seen as something apart from and before them, and the poem itself, while capable of being confused with them, will bear to them the same relation as a sculpture to its stone.

This is an example of poetry’s concrete approach to reality and the criticism of concepts it always involves. It is true that the experience of joy and sufficiency springing from contact with a real other may be delusory; but the poetic task of testing it is both a desire to find it true and a determination not to be deceived in it; this results in a radical skepticism toward all human formulations and the determination to proceed wholly through experiencing and testing experience.

With respect to “order,” the primary operation of poetry is precisely the opposite of that which is generally taught to be its meaning, its origin and its raison d’être, namely the “ordering of experience.” On the contrary, poetry comes to smash order and admit the real, to show that ordered experience has in fact been non-experience, an abstract existence within a schema, a shell. Our experience has not been experience at all. It has been a life which is death, and for it poetry insists on substituting the death which is life: death to pride and constructed reality, the instatement of humility and attention.

Poetry may destroy some concepts and “adjustments” with regret, others with pleasure, but destruction is a constant. Secondarily, of course, poetry builds up its own schema. It does not necessarily wish to demolish personality and culture; in fact, it is precisely the greatest poetry that envisions the possibility of accomplishing the human desire to fulfill, harmonize, and preserve all things, and destroys schemas by presenting a coherent prophetic experience. The two things, opposites, are frequently mistaken for one another, but the sign of prophecy is that what may seem an “order” actually engenders terror, joy, and humility rather than self-satisfaction, comforting safety. It is a home but a different type of home, a home that is open to adventure, to leaving home, and in itself it is, strangely, the perpetual leaving, the setting out. Poetry is always shipwreck and gives clear sight.

This indication that the poem embodies a pure experience of the real which shatters adjustments and the schemas of rationality has as its corollary that poetry results from an “inspiration” to which man serves mainly as an Aeolian harp. But earlier the opposite of this so-called romantic and Dionysian position was also maintained: that poetry is a human task which must be taken up and directed by an act of will, and that it involves the criticism of concepts; this implies the classical or Apollonian view of the poet as a person who constructs poems as discourses to communicate. Much is sometimes made of the “creative power of the imagination” as a means of harmonizing these two concepts and removing the questionable aspects of each. The classic view exalts man’s inventive powers but tends toward arid, rationalistic isolation; the romantic view puts man in touch with great forces but tends to overwhelm and belittle him, even sweep him into madness.

In fact, the “creative power of the imagination” is a term that gives the illusion of explaining a fact for which it is simply a label. And despite the many redefinitions “imagination” has undergone, the term still carries with it the hidden difficulties of the obsolete faculty psychology from which it derives. Why isolate powers of the mind and advance the claims of one over the others? “Intelligence” or “reason” as much as imagination could justifiably be identified as poetry’s psychic point of origin. The writer knows inwardly that he/she is given to write but at the same time must will himself/herself to write. The poet knows that what he/she writes is dictated but at the same time he/she must decide upon and invent it.

The locus of the problem—or more properly speaking, the mystery—is not imagination or its conflict with intellect or reason. Rather, it is will. And will is not a power of the mind but a free motion of the whole being, which is so united with the world that its initiative moves everything. I take will as best expressed by the image present in the range of words that includes “posture,” “attitude,” “tendency,” “pose,” “poise.” It is a way of holding itself performed by the total being that defines its manner of standing and moving in relationship to the world. It is the total being as it has formed itself as the basis of its present use of itself and its further and ongoing formation. Yes, its self-formation, but its formation in its dialogue with what is given and what it encounters.

Will remains a mystery, identified throughout the human centuries as the crux of the problem man presents to himself. Is there free will? To ask this question is to ask: Does man exist? Between materialism and absurdity, between mechanistic determinism and randomness, will is the tertium quid. Sleep and waking, dream and reflection, memory and intelligence, matter and being join, if anywhere, in it. Our ancient wisdom insists that the inadequate, self-destructive state of creation is actually due to an event of man’s will: the Fall. Which is a bad posture. Poetry is committed to and in fact rises from the identity of the moral and physical realms which this indicates. Physical realities, through man, have moral causes, and when we deal with man we engage a vertical dimension that enters time and matter to shape them at each instant.

What is this dimension? The impossibility of conceiving of a body in any but three physical dimensions only hints at the difficulty which this human dimension poses to thought. Yet every person lives it and can know it in himself/herself. Poetry is a manifestation of this buried potential which is simultaneously the full incarnation of all that can be.

In the will, human invention performs a creative act with what is given and received. The child of this act is poetry, because it incorporates images, concepts, language, emotions and demands within a living whole that fosters them without allowing one to dominate.

Ultimately, the poem is a human construct that yet achieves independent reality, joining the order of things. The poem emerges from our contact with the real to become a presence: like a person it mediates to us the real in which it shares. This status it has as a mediator unites the two paradoxical qualities of language: the dominant one of presence, the subordinate one of expression. Like a person, the poem expresses itself but is not reducible to expression; and it bears a mysterious, human-like relationship to its physical body, the configuration of spoken and written words, being both independent of this and nonexistent apart from it.

Poetry reminds us—because it is a participant in this fact—that we are persons confronting one another as such, and that the personhood of each individual existent is supreme. In the poem we meet a being which recommends us to the world and other men and women, not as a message does, but like the messenger who is both an individual and an evidence of all that lies beyond the door. Hence it is a bearer of the only “revolution” that is truly possible for man, the revolution that turns each to each and insists on the supremacy of personal love over all intellectual or functional imperatives. Human beings must be with another rather than sit before identical screens in the expectation that their neighbors are well trained to push the buttons properly in sequence. In poetry we deal always and entirely on the personal level and are reminded that we should move not toward any state, attitude, or accomplishment, but toward a full incarnation in the heart of the real, whatever it is: ashes, light, forest, community.

—A. F. Moritz

---

Author’s note: The above essay, entitled only “Afterword” in Black Orchid (1981), resulted from the complicated path of that book to publication. It eventually became part of a series, which never got very far, that Robert MacDonald, founder of Dreadnaught, wanted to create, with the books being mass-market-paperback size but with hand-printed covers, interior text photo-reproduced from hand-set and printed original pages, illustrations or designs throughout, an introduction, and a prose afterword by the poet. Only three of these ever appeared. Dreadnaught went through a lot of poverty, and as a result it took four years after Black Orchid’s acceptance for it to be produced and published. Years earlier, when it was accepted, I had written the essay under the stimulation of MacDonald’s idea. I probably made some changes over the four-year wait: I don’t remember. For this iteration, I’ve added about 100 words in two passages, and made a very few one-word additions and a few changes throughout. I’ve broken up the original very long paragraphs; the substantial additions I’ve made are the final two clauses in paragraph 8, some clarifying material in the centre of paragraph 13, and the second-to-last sentence of paragraph 16. The one-or-two-word changes are mainly to switch to inclusive language where I could without distorting the style, although this has meant usually leaving “man” as the word for humanity, humankind. The title I’ve assigned is a phrase from the poem “The Pauses” in Black Orchid. Looking back on this essay now, I think of many things I’d like to say about it, but it is already long! Maybe another time.

—AFM