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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780871563682 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Counterpoint Press |
| Publication date: | 08/29/1995 |
| Edition description: | First Trade Paper Edition |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.50(h) x (d) |
About the Author
As the editor of the magazine The Sixties (begun as The Fifties), Bly introduced many unknown European and South American poets to an American audience. He is also the editor of numerous collections including (Beacon Press, 2007); Mirabai: Ecstatic Poems (2004); The Soul Is Here for Its Own Joy: Sacred Poems from Many Cultures (1995); Leaping Poetry (1975); The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart: Poems for Men (1992); News of the Universe (1980); and A Poetry Reading Against the Vietnam War (1967). Among his many books of translations are Lorca and Jiminez: Selected Poems (Beacon Press, 1997); Machado's Times Alone: Selected Poems (1983); The Kabir Book (1977); Friends, You Drank Some Darkness: Three Swedish Poets—Martinson, Ekeloef, and Transtromer (1975); and Neruda and Vallejo: Selected Poems (1971).
Bly is also the author of a number of nonfiction books, including The Sibling Society (Addison–Wesley, 1996); The Spirit Boy and the Insatiable Soul (1994); Iron John: A Book about Men (1990); and Talking All Morning: Collected Conversations and Interviews (1980).
His honors include Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships as well as The Robert Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America. He lives on a farm in the western part of Minnesota with his wife and three children.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
THE OLD POSITION
The proper study of mankind is man.
— ALEXANDER POPE
When Descartes, on November 10, 1619, developed his famous sentence, "I think, therefore I am," he intended consciously to say something liberating: I think, therefore I am not merely a solipsist. But Europe wanted to hear something else. It wanted its pride in human reason to be given philosophical underpinning. Europe had for a long time felt inferior — first to Roman culture, then to Holy culture. What I've called the Old Position puts human reason, and so human beings, in the superior position. The Old Position may be summed up, or oversimplified, this way: Consciousness is human, and involves reason. A serious gap exists between us and the rest of nature. Nature is to be watched, pitied, and taken care of if it behaves.
I don't at all mean to say that this position began with Descartes. It probably has existed since conceptualization began, perhaps even earlier. But one feels that human beings' sense that they were superior to nature was no larger than a sliver in Stone Age times. In ancient Greece, the Eleusinian Mysteries embodied resistance to human domination of nature. What took place in the Mysteries remained secret, but it is known that the experience opened the human being to other worlds. The phrase, "As above, so below" declares that the terms superior and inferior are unreal. The Mysteries evoked an awe toward matter, a sense that we shared a consciousness with plants, animals, and stones, and that all of these shared a consciousness with the "soul of the world" or "soul of the globe." The longing to defeat nature no doubt grew rapidly as the city-state developed. Henry Corbin, in his books contrasting Greek and Arab thought, makes clear that Aristotle's thought presides over a reappearance of the Old Position in the ancient world, a sort of reemerging peak. Aristotle's Analytics, which Blake compared to a skeleton, pulls the "hard" out of nature, and isolates it.
The Church at the start of the Christian era didn't know whether to accept the ancient view that we share consciousness with nature, or to declare a new era. The Church Fathers were afraid to open the door to too many visions for fear the ancient world would simply flood the Church. As it happened, the Church rejected the Mysteries, smashed the temples, destroyed the relating texts and lost the doctrines. Later a few Christian geniuses and heretics fought hard, using the language of alchemy, to reassert the Mysteries vision. One, Jacob Boehme, founded his theology on the idea that there is a consciousness inside nature; he was driven out of his town by the local Protestant priest. The French priest Bossuet, writing at about the same time as Descartes, expressed in this passage one of the more prevalent Christian attitudes toward nature:
May the earth be cursed, may the earth be cursed, a thousand times be cursed because from it that heavy fog and those black vapors continually rise that ascend from the dark passions and hide heaven and its light from us and draw down the lightning of God's justice against the corruption of the human race.
This attitude was acceptable to the Church Fathers and to developing capitalism. When we deny there is consciousness in nature, we also deny consciousness to the worlds we find by going through nature; and we end with only one world, the world of MacDonald's, and that one is exploitable. On the whole, the Church encouraged this attitude, and by 1600 the boat of the Old Position was carrying many people.
Descartes added an internal combustion engine to the movement when he declared, "I think, therefore I am." Many Europeans interpreted this to mean that since thought was confined to human beings, objects and creatures in some important way were not. Europe then, by whatever means, for whatever reason, over the two hundred years following Descartes' sentence, began to let the cloak of unconsciousness descend over the "inferior orders." It was lowered first over the mute areas of nature, that is, stones, vegetation. Later the mechanists and dogmatists extended it to animals, which some ancient cultures found holy. (There is a suggestion in the manger story that early Christianity also did.) By 1750 or so animals are considered to be without consciousness. The people longing to do vivisection, barred by the ancient concept that an animal had a soul, which the Catholic Church, to its credit, carried throughout the Middle Ages, sighed with relief. Now they could get on with it.
I sense during the late Middle Ages a great struggle going on in relation to women. Where did women belong? With the beings of consciousness, men and angels, or with the animals? During the period of the Grail legends, centering around Parzival and the year 1200, and the era of the Provençal love-song, from about 1100 to 1250, women were often experienced as carriers of consciousness, and even as creators of it. But both movements were defeated, the second destroyed by the Albigensian Crusade, when thousands of people in Provence were burned to death in their cities. Women then began the long descent. It appears that in the male psyche, women, earth and the unconscious form a sort of constellation, or triangle. Usually the attitude a man has toward one extends without his being aware of it, by secret underground channels, to the others. Thus Swift's poem, "A Gentle Echo on Women," which flatly encourages men to beat women, clearly reflects his attitude toward nature.
The eighteenth-century attitude represents the culmination of a slow retreat from the open channels to nature taught by the Mysteries and by the ancient world in general. And in the eighteenth century there is a general disdaining of nature. Pope declared, "The proper study of mankind is man." Johnson jokingly asked why anyone would want to live out of London. Around 1815, Wordsworth wrote:
Now, it is remarkable that, excepting the nocturnal Reverie of Lady Winchelsea, and a passage or two in the Windsor Forest of Pope, the poetry of the period intervening between the publication of Paradise Lost and the Seasons does not contain a single new image of external nature; and scarcely presents a familiar one from which it can be inferred that the eye of the Poet had been steadily fixed upon his object, much less that his feelings had urged him to work upon it in the spirit of genuine imagination. To what a low state knowledge of the most obvious and important phenomena had sunk, is evident from the style in which Dryden has executed a description of Night in one of his Tragedies, and Pope his translation of the celebrated moonlight scene in the Iliad. A blind man, in the habit of attending accurately to descriptions casually dropped from the lips of those around him, might easily depict these appearances with more truth.
CORTES alone in a night gown:
All things are hush'd as Nature's self lay dead;
The mountains seem to nod their drowsy head.
The little birds in dreams their songs repeat,
And sleeping Flowers beneath the Night-dew sweat:
Even lust and Envy sleep; yet love denies Rest to my soul and slumber to my eyes.
— Dryden'sIndian Emperor
Dryden's lines are vague, bombastic, and senseless; those of Pope, though he had Homer to guide him, are throughout false and contradictory. The verses of Dryden, once highly celebrated, are forgotten; those of Pope still retain their hold upon public estimation, — nay, there is not a passage of descriptive poetry, which at this day finds so many and such ardent admirers. Strange to think of an enthusiast, as may have been the case with thousands, reciting these verses under the cope of a moonlight sky, without having his raptures in the least disturbed by a suspicion of their absurdity! If these two distinguished writers could habitually think that the visible universe was of so little consequence to a poet, that it was scarcely necessary for him to cast his eyes upon it, we may be assured that those passages of the elder poets which faithfully and poetically describe the phenomena of nature, were not at that time holden in much estimation, and that there was little accurate attention paid to those appearances.
If the details of nature were not worth observing closely, we can expect that the psyche of women will not receive much attention either. The cellar of consciousness opens to receive both. Then, with the rise of imperialism, Asians and Africans are put in to keep them company. The people of Asia and Africa, who lived in a closer union with nature than the Europeans, were perceived by them as living in some state of unconsciousness, as animals are imagined to do. As soon as the cellar is full, the work of Empire can seriously begin. Holland, Spain, England, Germany compete with each other in condescension toward Asian and African religions, and compliment each other on their invasions. I'm not saying that Cartesian ideas caused invasions; there were invasions long before Descartes; but that the formulation, "I think, therefore I am," has political meaning, and made things easier for King Leopold, General Custer, and the Boston Puritans who traded in slaves.
Because I have oversimplified the Old Position so far, it may appear that only stupid people could believe it. On the contrary, many intelligent men and women have held that view for centuries, and hold it still. Distinct intellectual viewpoints are possible within this position. The viewpoints share a certain lofty attitude toward nature, often expressed by imagining hierarchies inside nature, with man at the top. A favorite device among literary people is to regard nature as a storehouse of symbols. The person who does this does not experience the tree or the pelican first as a tree or a pelican, but forces it to labor right away as a symbol. The Church Fathers were good at it. Kenneth Rexroth a few years ago wrote a sort of joke poem for his daughter on that subject:
St. Thomas Aquinas thought That vultures were lesbians And fertilized by the wind.
If you seek the facts of life,
Papist intellectuals Can be very misleading.
I don't mean that the Catholic Church alone teaches this condescension: the Protestants teach it vigorously. Most high schools in the United States teach it without being aware of it. The Old Position has its own language, heavily dependent on the rational lobe, and involves abstraction, the use of true-false questions, sociological jargon, the search for symbols in poems and myths, and learning that takes place within rigid rules. Politicians use the language, as well as many ecologists. When an ecologist says, "The maximum input we can have of non-organic materials before the system reaches its saturation point is about 30%," he is using Old Position language. In such language the body is exiled, the soul evaporated, the mind given executive power.
I've begun this anthology with some poems from the eighteenth century, which represents a peak of Old Position power. By 1760, a hundred and fifty years after Descartes, the condescension has arrived even to the poets. We can notice it in "The Three Kingdoms of Nature," by Lessing, a German poet who was very popular in his day. In the poem, ego divides nature into horizontal layers. The poem is charming and the tone optimistic.
The poetry of this time has a persistent optimism, which extends even to tragedy. A German poet, Gellert, in a poem called "The Blind Man and the Cripple" written around 1755, discusses the problem of a man who is blind and angry meeting another whose legs are crippled and who also is angry. It turns out that neither need feel grief, nor will the disaster each has experienced bring them closer to wounded animals or to the poor. Gellert points out that the thing is solved if the crippled man climbs on the blind man's shoulders.
The gifts you have, the others don't;
What you don't have, some others do.
So from the world's imperfection The social good, then, springs.
If other people didn't find missing The gifts that Nature chose for me,
Then each person would be self-sufficient,
And what I need, no one would see.
Don't pester the gods with complaints!
The benefits which they deny to you And grant to others, in common should be.
All we need is sociability.
There is something chilling in the last sentence. It says that if the Africans are blind, that's all right. We'll just climb on their back. As Europeans, we may be crippled, but that's all right. "All we need is sociability." If the Africans will only be sociable with the Germans, and the Dutch and the English, then we needn't worry about consciousness. Their "blindness" will be good for all of us. And the Europeans will get a good ride. Schubart's "Song of the Cape of Good Hope," written as the Germans were just beginning to invade Africa is embarrassing to read now for its optimism, and it is now left out of most German anthologies. One laughs at the wrong places.
And when the officers and men Leap safe and sound on shore,
Then all of us will sing and shout
"At last we are in Africa!"
And we all will dance and sing.
Turning to England, we see the same mad optimism in Pope. To examine any object of nature intensely is absurd, a waste of time:
Why has not Man a microscopic eye?
For this plain reason, Man is not a Fly.
He is perfectly satisfied with the way seeing and blindness are distributed in the universe.
Without this just gradation, could they be Subjected, these to those, or all to thee?
One notices that the word "they" in the first line could apply to natives or women, as well as to still lower links in the chain of being. His lines of disdain for the American Indian ("Lo, the poor Indian") is interesting in that the main evidence of inferiority that Pope mentions in the Indian is that he sees the divine in clouds and wind. To Pope that is intolerable. Swift expresses a similar disdain for the consciousness of women.
What most moves women when we them address?
A dress.
Some women have revealed that it is a man's psyche that moves them; Swift says no, consciousness is not involved. To move a woman, buy her a dress. Woman can be bought; when bought she will be "a dear."
But deer have horns: how must I keep her under?
Keep her under.
He complains that women, no doubt from lack of consciousness, are inconstant.
If she be wind, what stills her when she blows?
Blows.
Milton's style, twisting English syntax until it resembles Latin, expresses a curiously arrogant attitude toward the English language, and toward the unconscious, which is never allowed to speak simply. Sandra Gilbert, in The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, has written brilliantly on Milton's half-conscious Satanizing of women; again we see the triangle concept working. In Book X of Paradise Lost, Milton adds something pathetic to Pope and Swift. Milton asks why women were created at all. We were doing so well with only men, he mumbles, and "this fair defect of Nature" has brought "innumerable disturbances on Earth." This is a standard complaint. Suddenly in the next few lines, all sorts of repressed material starts boiling out. It turns out that he knew a woman who refused to marry him "through her perverseness." Even worse, he found to his horror that a woman he met and liked late in life was married already to one of his enemies. These accidents of life or earth he blames all on women. Or is nature to be blamed? Or the unconscious?
As a final poem for this group, I've chosen "Dover Beach," which many readers already know and admire. I should say why I put it here. It was written a hundred years after Lessing, and to me it illustrates how long and firmly the Old Position hung on in Europe, especially in England. "Dover Beach" is marvelous in places, and its subject is precisely what we have been describing, the mental poverty and isolated sadness that comes when human beings deny consciousness to the ocean. (Once, consciousness, as Arnold sees, lay gleaming about the hills and shores precisely as the ocean now lies gleaming.) This is the poverty that comes when human beings claim all consciousness for themselves. And though Arnold has seen this state of poverty, isolation, retreat, and melancholic diminishing so clearly, the only solution he can see to it is more human contact. In Gellert's phrase, it is more "sociability" he wants.
Ah, love, let us be true To one another!
And he gives as the reason why two people should be true to each other:
for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
There is a lot of slander of the world here, and much self-pity the sort we have become used to in recent American poetry.
And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and fight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
We say to ourselves that this is true of the human world; yet once more by omission the entire non-human world has been denied consciousness, or given the muddled consciousness through which armies operate at night. Arnold means human armies, not insects or nature, and yet he implies that the human being lives surrounded by chaos. Lewis Thomas would say that this view of the world is not true. Protozoa don't clash by night. They have intricate harmonies worked out, which have already lasted for millions of years. The Old Position does not see that.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "News of the Universe"
by .
Copyright © 1995 Robert Bly.
Excerpted by permission of Counterpoint.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Title Page,
Copyright,
Dedication,
Preface to the 1995 Edition,
An Introductory Note,
PART ONE THE OLD POSITION,
PART TWO THE ATTACK ON THE OLD POSITION,
PART THREE POEMS OF TWOFOLD CONSCIOUSNESS, EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY,
PART FOUR POEMS OF TWOFOLD CONSCIOUSNESS, 1945–1979,
PART FIVE THE OBJECT POEM,
PART SIX LEAVING THE HOUSE,
TWO MEDITATIONS,
AS AN AFTERWORD,
Acknowledgments,
Index,