Microsoft Word - freedom_v13.doc

by David E. Schultz

  The next sentence provides a sequence of three bizarre plant images. The first—

  “the blooms / of bluish fungi” (91–92) conflates flowers and fungi, which come from opposite ends of a plant paradigm set of beauty and ugliness, they grow in “craters of the moon” (93) an inversion of paradisal gardens; and they take as modifier “freaked with mercury” (92) adding a non-organic seme in violation of the plants” organic seme; perhaps also poisonous, and magical, as mercury plays a great role in alchemy. The next,

  “clammy blossoms, blanched and cavern-grown, / Are proffered to their gods in

  Uranus / by mole-eyed peoples” (96–98) again inverting paradisal gardens, now with infernal caverns. The last involves a Saturnian “black fruit” (99) eaten by some king (Eden myth); from its seed grows a “hellish tree” (102) that takes over the king’s throne ( rebellion seme). The final segment of the paragraph involves corals that “usurp

  / some harbor of a million-masted sea” (106–7); they lift “up as crowns / the octiremes of perished emperors, / and galleys fraught with royal gems” (110–13). The metaphor makes explicit the rebellion matrix. This ends the second paragraph.

  116 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS

  The third paragraph begins with the statement that “Swifter and stranger grow

  / the visions” (113–14) and immediately plunges into descriptions of them. The

  first describes “a mighty city” (114) destroyed by a “plague of lichens” (124). Even though “whose hands / were sculptors of its doors, and columns wrought / To

  semblance of prodigious blooms of old, / No eremite hath lingered there to say, /

  And no man comes to learn” (118–22) the hashish-eater tells us the story of its destruction. Even in its denial the wording invokes the mystic attainment seme, with its use of the polarized “eremite” instead of the more common term “hermit.” The

  narrative freely mingles religious and political imagery. “Lichen” comes from a plant paradigm set and has the conquering seme from its covering trees and stones, both exemplars of hardness. There follows a group of “naked giants” recalling the classical theogony; they blunder into a forest composed of plants animated and endowed with various animal organs. Next he views a war of pygmies—the eternal

  war between the pygmies and the cranes represented a commonplace topos of

  classical literature. Many images here recall ones that have appeared earlier in the poem: “plains with no horizon” (147); “wreathèd light and fulgors” (149); “green, enormous moons” (150). So ends the third paragraph.

  The fourth paragraph includes many interesting features:

  Surveyed

  From this my throne as from a central sun,

  The pageantries of worlds and cycles pass;

  Forgotten splendors, dream by dream, unfold

  Like tapestry, and vanish; violet suns,

  Or suns of changeful iridescence, bring

  Their rays about me like the colored lights

  Imploring priests might lift to glorify

  The face of some averted god; the songs

  Of mystic poets in a purple world

  Ascend to me in music that is made

  From unconceivèd perfumes and the pulse

  Of love ineffable; the lute-players

  Whose lutes are strung with gold of the utmost moon,

  Call forth delicious languors, never known

  Save to their golden kings; the sorcerers

  Of hooded stars inscrutable to God,

  Surrender me their demon-wrested scrolls,

  Inscribed with lore of monstrous alchemies

  And awful transformations. (152–71)

  Note the reappearance of the sun and throne imagery; the spatialization of

  “cycles”; the terms drawn from art: “pageantries,” “unfold / Like tapestries”; and the “violet suns, / Or suns of changeful iridescence”—cf. the “million-colored

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  117

  sun” of the opening. The simile of the priests connects the passage to the mystic attainment matrix; the modifier “mystic” of the poets applies that passage to the same matrix; the “purple” plays off of a polysemy—it may mean “royal,” “highly

  ornate” (as in “purple patch”), or “blood red.” Note the recurrence of synaesthetic metaphor in the music’s description. The “lute-players” inspire in the hashish-eater

  “delicious languors, never known / Save to their golden kings” indicating his usurpation; the phrase “inscrutable to God” implies the narrator’s supersession of

  God’s powers. The passage as a whole has a sun—moon—star progression.

  In the fifth paragraph we encounter a commonplace paradox of mystical litera-

  ture. The hashish-eater says: “If I will, / I am at once the vision and the seer, / And mingle with my ever-streaming pomps, / And still abide their suzerain” (171–74).

  Note here the identity of the “vision and the seer,” the object and the subject of the action; note as well the term “seer” which may simply mean “one who sees” but

  could also mean “one who sees visions; diviner; prophet, etc.” A parallel example of such a paradox occurs in Algernon Charles Swinburne’s “Hertha”: “Love or unlove me, / Unknow me or know, / I am that which unloves me and loves; I am stricken

  and I am the blow” (18–20). Christian theology incorporates the paradox in the form of the simultaneous transcendence and immanence of God.

  In the first of these scenes in which he takes part, he describes an enormous

  fane with “Titan worshippers” (177) recalling classical theogony; the priests give their deity a “monthly hecatomb of gems” (183) “hecatomb” hyperbolizing the sacrifice; these gems come from “realms of hostile serpents” (186) combining political

  (“realm” = “kingdom”) and religious rebellion (“serpent” implies Satan, Eden, etc.) In the next vision he takes the role of a king whose kingdom “the snows / Of hyperborean winter, and their winds” (192–93) have taken over; he seeks “isles of timeless summer” (192). Note that he has “captive kings to urge his serried oars” (197).

  Next he takes the role of “hero of a quest Achernar lights” (202); the star’s etymological meaning of “end of the river” perhaps playing off of his “ever-streaming pomps”; in any case the name recalls the name of the infernal river Acheron, often used as a synecdoche for Hell. He seeks a desert where flames “lick the blenchèd heavens” (207). There, however, resides “A lonely flower by a placid well” (209) which is “Secure as in a garden walled from wind” (208)—the Eden/Paradise image.

  The flower holds “within / That grail the blossom lifts” (212–13) (note the term

  “grail” again) “One drop of an incomparable dew / Which heals the parchèd weariness of kings, / And cures the wound of wisdom” (214–16). The next segment in-

  verts his claimed omnipotence and omniscience, as he takes the role of “page / To an emperor who reigns ten-thousand years” (216–17), the polarization of the emperor here serving as polarizer of its negative corollary, page or servant. He seeks through this king’s “labyrinthine palace-rooms” (218), “Wherein immensity itself is mazed” (220)—note how this setting reflects upon his own claimed mastery over

  “immensity” and the “infinite”—for a “golden gorget” (221) which the emperor has lost but instead finds “A sealèd room whose nameless prisoner / Moans with a

  118 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS

  nameless torture, and would turn / to hell’s red rack as to a lilied couch” (232–34) and “Prostrate upon a lotus-painted floor, / The loveliest of all belovèd slaves / My emperor hath, and from her pulseless side / A serpent rises, whiter than the root /

  Of some venefic bloom in darkness grown” (236–40). Here “venefic” recalls its etymology from Venus as goddess of witches and poisoners.

  The sixth paragraph concerns the hashish-eater�
��s temporary overthrow as the

  emperor of dreams. It begins:

  Hark!

  What word was whispered in a tongue unknown,

  In crypts of some impenetrable world?

  Whose is the dark, dethroning secrecy

  I cannot share, though I am king of suns (242–46)

  The passage inverts various earlier assertions of the hashish-eater’s power: the

  “tongue unknown” connects to “The Babel of their visions” (55); the “impenetrable world” and “secrecy” contradict his claim of access to “secret worlds incredible”

  (3); the “dethroning” contrasts with the pervasive throne imagery of previous paragraphs. Now “all my dreams / Fall . . . and leave / Spirit and sense unthinkably alone / Above a universe of shrouded stars / And suns that wander, cowled with

  sullen gloom, / Like witches to a Sabbath” (252–58; ellipses mine). The reversal of former power-building again appears—the simile of “witches to a Sabbath” foregrounds the nature of (religious) rebellion as inversion, as the same term (“Sabbath”) refers to both the inverted form of worship and the inverting counter-

  worship—the “(Black) Sabbath,” comprised of parodic rituals; in addition, note the specifically religious sense of “cowled.” He continues: “Fear is born / Beneath the nadir, and hath crawled / Reaching the floor of space, and waits for wings / To lift it upward like a hellish worm / Fain for the flesh of cherubim” (258–62). Here “nadir” inverts the “zenith” the narrator claims as throne; “crawled” inverts the narrator’s “soaring”; and the “cherubim” provides, as angels, a “heavenly” inversion of the “hellish worm,” polarized as vulnerable and weak.

  Succeeding passages provide imagery drawn from a hell descriptive system; they culminate with a “Thing that crouches, worlds and years remote, / Whose

  horns a demon sharpens, rasping forth / A note to shatter the donjon-keeps of

  time, / Or crack the sphere of crystal” (271–74). The “worlds and years remote”

  again deny the narrator’s claim to “omniscience” and knowledge of the most far-

  flung worlds and epochs. The “Thing,” again denies his omniscience, as he must

  use the vaguest noun that exists to designate it; the capitalization valorizes the creature. After “ages” (275) the hashish-eater regains his powers, as “time / Is mine once more, and armies of its dreams / Rally to that insuperable throne / Firmed on the zenith” (280–83) but the text gives no hint that any action of his own contributed to this restoration to power.

  Despite his claim to restored power, the events of the seventh paragraph hardly

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  provide warrant for the alleged reclamation. He begins by searching for “The meads of shining moly I had found / In some anterior vision” (284–85) expanding on an Elysium/Paradise descriptive system; instead he finds a “corpse the ebbing water will not keep” (290) and “all the flowers / About me turn to hooded serpents, swayed /

  By flutes of devils in lascivious dance / Meet for the nod of Satan, when he reigns /

  Above the raging Sabbath, and is wooed / By sarabands of witches” (291–96). Note that Satan does not merely preside over the Sabbath but “reigns.” Once again the witches dancing at the Sabbath appear as a simile, just as in lines 257–58, with similar significance. The hashish-eater then seeks the rill’s source, but finds (hellish) flame instead of snow on the mountain’s peak. Looking below he sees “a silver python”

  (305) “Vast as a river that a fiend hath witched / And forced to flow reverted in its course / To fountains whence it issued” (306–8), another image of religious rebellion. The python surrounds the mountain, and “gapes with a fanged, unfathomable maw / Wherein Great Typhon and Enceladus / Were orts of daily glut” (313–15)

  recalling the Greek gigantomachy.

  To rescue him he summons a hippogriff, which has a number of symbolic

  meanings derived from its component animals. The horse provides an exemplary

  steed; the griffon, as combination of eagle and lion, combines the king end of bird and land animal paradigms. Most importantly in the context, the hashish-eater had formerly flown by his own power, “Throned on the mounting zenith” (5). On the

  other hand, crossbreeding a griffon and a horse—the means of creating a hippo-

  griff—served as a classical exemplar of impossibility (Borges 124). The hippogriff takes him to a planet where “Beauty hath found an avatar of flowers” (325)—again Paradise imagery and the term “avatar.”

  There he finds “A lonely castle, calm, and unbeset / Save by the purple spears

  of amaranth / And leafing iris tender-sworded” (329–31). Here the castle appears negativized, as it would normally serve a defensive purpose—we later learn that its

  “heavy-teethed portcullis hangs aloft / To grin a welcome” (336–37). The flowers, which both have otherworld connotations, appear likewise negativized with ironic

  “spears” and “swords.” He enters the castle’s courtyard where the “columns,

  carved / Of lazuli and amber, mock the palms / Of bright Aidennic forests” (341–

  43) in which “mock” has a double significance as “imitate” and “deride,” whereas

  “Aidennic” presents a distorted form of “Edenic” as the Garden of Paradise that derives from a specific intertextual source: Edgar Allan Poe. These columns have work that depicts “airy lace / Enfolding drupes that seem as tawny clusters / Of breasts of unknown houris; and convolved / With vines of shut and shadowy-leavèd flowers / Like the dropt lids of women that endure / Some loin-dissolving ecstasy” (344–349). Note here the Paradisal Garden motif imagery; the mention of houris, nymph-like spirits provided to men in the Islamic afterlife; and the double use of “ecstasy” in its sacred and profane meanings—though the latter very frequently appears as a metaphor for the former.

  Further details of this scene invert those of the poem’s opening. The hashish-

  120 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS

  eater finds himself “dazed and blinded with the sun” (351) and further “in gloom that changing colors cloud” (352) mocking the “million-colored sun.” The following details a room filled with animated sculptures of fantastic monsters and draws heavily on infernal imagery. As he enters a door he hears “A chuckle sharp as

  crepitating ice / Upheaved and cloven by shoulders of the damned / Who strive in Antenora” (353–55), referring to the frozen river of Dante’s Inferno, in which the souls of traitors stand neck-deep. Now he feels “a fear / That found no name in Babel” (368–69) and flees to a hall whose curtains “heavier than palls” (372) depict

  “a weary king / Who fain would cool his jewel-crusted hands / In lakes of emerald evening, or the field / Of dreamless poppies pure with rain” (374–77). Note here the contrast of the “dreamless poppies” (opium) with the dream-producing hashish that the narrator has taken. He moves onward to a room where “caryatides /

  Carved in the form of voluptuous Titan women” (382–83) recall the classical ti-

  tanomachy and also the common metaphor of sensual ecstasy for mystical ecstasy.

  Here, enthroned, he discovers “a wan, enormous Worm” (386) “Tumid with all the

  rottenness of kings” (387)—a somewhat unconventional use of a conventional

  metonymic image of death. With the mention of “phosphorescent slime” we may

  have a slight pun, Phosphor as well as Lucifer serving as a name for the morning star. He flees unnoticed to a balcony, and so ends the seventh paragraph.

  In the next paragraph, an enormous storm immediately arises “from beyond the

  horizon’s rim” (403) and comes sweeping onto the scene, where the hashish-eater recognizes it as “The Sabaoth of retribution, drawn / From all dread spheres that knew my trespassing, / And led by vengeful fiends and dire alastors / That owned my sway aforetime!” (416–19). The term “Sa
baoth” represents the Hebrew for

  “hosts” or “armies”; it serves as a title of God in the Bible, as the Lord of Hosts. The term “alastor” comes from the Greek, in which it served as an epithet for Zeus or another god as an avenging spirit; it could also mean the avenging spirit of one murdered. In mediaeval demonology, it came to represent a personification of Vengeance. Shelley used it in his poem of the title, as “The Spirit of Solitude.” Smith provides an impressive catalogue of monsters comprising these hosts:

  Cockatrice,

  Python, tragelaphus, leviathan,

  Chimera, martichoras, behemoth,

  Geryon, and sphinx, and hydra. (419–22)

  (For those interested in source-hunting, Donald Sidney-Fryer’s introduction to

  The Last Incantation cites a letter of Smith’s mentioning Herodotus, Sir John de Mandeville’s Travels, and Flaubert, presumably The Temptation of Saint Anthony, as sources for fabulous monsters which he had not found mentioned elsewhere.) These creatures come upon the narrator in a flash. He further describes: “huge and furnace-hearted beasts / Of hells beyond Rutilicus” (428–29) in which “furnace-hearted”

  might recall Blake’s “The Tyger” and its sources; “Rutilicus,” etymologically, may

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  121

  mean either “red” or refer to a sort of weapon. The placement of hells in outer space becomes interesting when compared to the traditional view that places heavenly or celestial regions in the starry spheres, and the hells beneath or inside the earth. The poem’s next section describes in great detail the onset of these monsters, adding many more to the list. These include “blue-faced wizards from the world of Saiph. / On whom Titanic scorpions fawn” (446–47); “Saiph” comes from the

  Arabic Saif al Jabbar, the “Sword of the Giant.” There also appear “Demogorgons of the outer dark” recalling mediaeval demonology, and Shelley’s use of the name in Prometheus Unbound as the overthrower and successor to Zeus in the gods’ generational war. The hashish-eater, feeling a “tenfold fear / A monstrous dread unnamed in any hell” (465–66) flees, but instead of rising to the zenith again, he falls “through the nadir-plungèd gloom, beyond the scope and vision of the sun, / To other skies and systems” (474–76), once again inverting the imagery of the opening lines.