If, as Pound began to see in The Spirit of Romance, “all ages are contemporaneous,” our time has always been, and the statement that the great drama of our time is the coming of all men into one fate is the statement of a crisis we may see as ever-present in Man wherever and whenever a man has awakened to the desire for wholeness in being. “The continuous present,” Gertrude Stein called this sense of time and history, and she saw the great drama as man’s engagement in a composition of the contemporary. Man is always in the process of this composition. “The composition is the thing seen by every one living in the living they are doing,” she writes in “Composition as Explanation”:
. . . they are the composing of the composition that at the time they are living is the composition of the time in which they are living. It is that that makes living a thing they are doing.
“Nothing changes from generation to generation,” she writes later in her lecture “Portraits and Repetition,” “except the composition in which we live and the composition in which we live makes the art which we see and hear . . . Once started expressing this thing, expressing any thing there can be no repetition because the essence of that expression is insistence. . . Each civilization insisted in its own way before it went away.” To enter into “our time,” she saw as “a thing that is very troublesome,” for life itself was a disturbance of all composition—“a fear a doubt and a judgment and a conviction,” troubling the waters toward some needed “quality of distribution and equilibration.”
The first person plural—the “we,” “our,” “us”—is a communal consciousness in which the “I” has entered into the company of imagined like minds, a dramatic voice in which the readers and the man writing are gathered into one composition, in which we may find kindred thought and feeling, an insistence, in Plutarch or Dante, Plato or D. H. Lawrence, closer to our inner insistence than the thought and feeling of parents or neighbors. The discovery of self, time, and world, is an entering into or tuning to possibilities of self, time, and world, that are given.
“The single experience lodges in an individual consciousness and is, strictly speaking, incommunicable,” Sapir writes in Language:
To be communicated it needs to be referred to a class which is tacitly accepted by the community as an identity. Thus, the single impression which I have of a particular house must be identified with all my other impressions of it. Further, my generalized memory or my ‘notion’ of this house must be merged with the notions that all other individuals who have seen the house have formed of it. The particular experience that we started with has now been widened so as to embrace all possible impressions or images that sentient beings have formed or may form of the house in question. In other words, the speech element ‘house’ is the symbol, first and foremost, not of a single perception, nor even of the notion of a particular object but of a ‘concept’, in other words, of a convenient capsule of thought that embraces thousands of distant experiences and that is ready to take in thousands more. If the single significant elements of speech are the symbols of concepts, the actual flow of speech may be interpreted as a record of the setting of these concepts into mutual relations.
There is no isolate experience of anything then, for to come into “house” or “dog,” “bread” or “wine,” is to come into a company. Eros and Logos are inextricably mixed, daemons of an initiation in each of our lives into a new being. Every baby is surrounded by elders of a mystery. The first words, the “da-da” and “ma-ma,” are keys given in a repeated ritual by parental priest and priestess to a locus for the child in his chaotic babbling, whereby from the oceanic and elemental psychic medium—warmth and cold, calm and storm, the moodiness previous to being—persons, Daddy and Mama, appear. But these very persons are not individual personalities but communal fictions of the family cultus, vicars of Father and Mother, as the Pope is a vicar of Christ. The Child, in the word child, is himself such a persona, inaccessible to the personality of the individual, as the language of adult personal affairs is inaccessible to the child. To have a child is always a threat to the would-be autonomous personality, for the parent must take leave of himself in order to enter an other impersonation, evoking the powers of Fatherhood or Motherhood, so that the infant may be brought up from the dark of his individuality into a new light, into his Childhood. For the transition to be made at all, to come into the life of the spirit, in which this Kindergarten is a recreated stage set of the mythic Garden, means a poetry then, the making up of an imaginary realm in which the individual parents and infant participate in a community that exists in a time larger than any individual lifetime, in a language. For “Father,” “Mother,” “Child,” are living words, deriving their meaning from thousands of distinct experiences, and the actual flow of family life, like the actual flow of speech, “may be interpreted as the setting of these concepts into mutual relations.” The toys of the nursery are not trivia but first given instruments of an extension in consciousness, our creative life. There is a travesty made of sacred objects when the building blocks that are also alphabet blocks, the animal and human dolls, the picture books, are rendered cute or babyish.
“The maturity of man—” Nietzsche writes in Beyond Good and Evil: “that means, to have reacquired the seriousness that one had as a child at play.”
In The Zohar of Moses of Leon, God Himself appears as Child-Creator-of-the-World:
When the Holy One, blessed be He, was about to make the world, all the letters of the Alphabet were still embryonic, and for two thousand years the Holy One blessed be He, had contemplated them and toyed with them. When He came to create the world, all the letters presented themselves before Him in, reversed order. The letter Tau advanced in front and pleaded: May it please Thee, O Lord of the world, to place me first in the creation of the world, seeing that I am the concluding letter of EMeTh (Truth) which is engraved upon Thy seal.
One by one the letters present themselves. At the last,
. . . the Beth then entered and said: O Lord of the world, may it please Thee to put me first in the creation of the world, since I represent the benedictions (Berakhoth) offered to Thee on high and below. The Holy One, blessed be He, said to her: Assuredly, with thee I will create the world, and thou shalt form the beginning in the creation of the world. The letter Aleph remained in her place without presenting herself. Said the Holy one, blessed be His name: Aleph, Aleph, wherefore comest thou not before Me like the rest of the letters? She answered: Because I saw all the other letters leaving Thy presence without any success. What, then, could I achieve there? And further, since Thou hast already bestowed on the letter Beth this great gift, it is not meet for the Supreme King to take away the gift which He has made to His servant and give it to another. The Lord said to her: Aleph, Aleph, although I will begin the creation of the world with the beth, thou wilt remain the first of letters. My unity shall not be expressed except through thee, on thee shall be based all calculations and operations of the world, and unity shall not be expressed save by the letter Aleph. Then the Holy One, blessed be His name, made higher-world letters of a large pattern and lower-world letters of a small pattern. It is therefore that we have here two words beginning with beth (Bereshith bara) ‘in-the-beginning He-created’ and then two words beginning with aleph (Elohim eth) ‘God the’.”
In this primal scene, before the beginning of the world that is also here before the beginning of a writing, the Self contemplates and toys in a rite of play until the letters present themselves and speak; as in another primal scene, in a drama or play of the family, the child contemplates and plays with the sounds of a language in order to enter a world in which Father and Mother present themselves and speak. So too in the fullness of the imagination, blocks and even made-up playmates present themselves. The teddy bear was once in the shaman world of the great northern forests Grandfather or Folk-Father. The figures we play with, the members of our play world, given as they are, like the Katchina dolls of the Zuni child, are spirit figures. “My unity shall not be expressed ex
cept through thee,” the Child-Creator promises. It is the first promise of love, “on thee shall be based all calculations and operations of the world.”
These powers, the ambience in which all things of our world speak to us and in which we in turn answer, the secret allegiances of the world of play, the psychic depth of time transformed into eternity in which the conceptual persons of Father and Mother, Child and Play Thing, exist—these are pre-rational. Brother and Sister have such an existence in the unreal that, where actual brother and sister do not exist or are unwilling to play the part, imaginary brother and sister may appear.
For men who declare themselves partisans of the rational mind at war with all other possibilities of being, the prerational or the irrational appears as an enemy within. It was not only the Poet, but Mother and Father also, that Plato would exclude from his Republic. In the extreme of the rationalist presumption, the nursery is not the nursery of an eternal child but of a grownup, a rational man. Common sense and good sense exist in an armed citadel surrounded by the threatening countryside of phantasy, childishness, madness, irrationality, irresponsibility—an exile and despised humanity. In that city where Reason has preserved itself by retreating from the totality of the self, infants must play not with the things of the imagination nor entertain the lies of the poets but play house, government, business, philosophy, or war. Before the guardians of this state the voices and persons of the Child-Creator stand condemned as auditory and visual hallucinations a dangerous non-sense.
In the world of The Zohar, dolls were not permitted. The Child plays with the letters of an alphabet and Logos is the creator of the world. Man is to take his reality from, to express his unity in, the letter. But this letter is, like the doll, alive to the mind. Tau presents herself and speaks, just as the bear in our nursery does. To the extent that once for us too alphabet blocks were animate, all future architectures and worlds are populated, and we are prepared to understand the world-experience of the Kabbalist.
In this world-experience, rationality does not exist apart from the whole, but the understanding searches ever to picture the self in the ununderstandable. The human spirit draws its life from a tree larger and more various than knowing, and reason stands in need of a gift, “the gift of the queen to them that wander with her in exile.”
There is a return in the imagination to the real, an ascent of the soul to its “root,” that Hayyim Vital describes in his life work, The Tree of Life:
The imaginative faculty will turn a man’s thoughts to imagine, and picture as if it ascended in the higher worlds up to the roots of his soul . . . until the imagined image reaches its highest source and there the images of the supernal lights are imprinted on his mind as if he imagined and saw them in the same way in which his imaginative faculty normally pictures in his mind mental contents deriving from the world.
We seem to be in the description of the process of a poem, for here too the mind imagines, but then enters a real it had not imagined, where the image becomes informed, from above or below, and takes over as an entity in itself, a messenger from a higher real. In his ascent the mystic is irradiated by the light of the tree and in his descent the light finds a medium through which to flow back into the daily world:
The thought of the prophet expands and rises from one level to another . . . until he arrives at the point where the root of his soul is. Next he concentrates on raising the light of the sefirah to En Sof and from there he draws the light down, from on high down to his rational soul, and from there, by means of the imaginative faculty, down to his animal soul, and there all things are pictured either by the inner senses of the imaginative faculty or by the outer senses.
Returning from En Sof, the unknowable, unimaginable God, from beyond sense, the imaginer, no longer imagining but realizing, carries a light from station to station, sefirah to sefirah, irradiating the imagined with reality, transforming the sense of the divine—the articulated Tree of Life—the cosmos, the rational soul and the animal soul, in light of a source that is a numinous non-sense or beyond sense.
This Tree, too, we saw each year, for at the birthday of the Child-Christos, we were as children presented with a tree from which or under which gifts appeared—wishes made real. This Christmas tree came, we know, from the tree cults of the German tribes, ancestral spirits. A burning tree. But it is also a tree of lights, and where, in the time of Jacob Boehme, in the early seventeenth century, the Jewish and the Germanic mystery ways are wedded in one, the Christmas tree may have also been the Divine Tree of The Zohar, lit with the lights of the Sefiroth.
In this ritual of the imagination of Hayyim Vital, there is not only the ascent by pretending, the “as if” of his text, the pretension then, but the mystic is pretender to a throne, a “source” or “root” in the Divine. In the descent a magic is worked and all the pretended way of the ascent is rendered “greater than Reality.” Not only the deep dream but the day dream enlightens or enlivens. “Occasionally,” Werblowsky relates from Vital, “the imaginative faculty may even externalize or project the effects of this ‘light’ so that the experience becomes one of external sense impressions such as of the apparition of angelic messengers, the hearing of voices.”
This Tree of Life is also the tree of generations, for its branches that are also roots are male and female, and the light or life is a mystery of the Shekinah, the ultimate Spirit-Mother of Israel as well as God’s Glory. The root or seed is a quickening source in the immortal or eternal womb, wherein each man is immortal.
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In The Eternal Ones of the Dream, the psychoanalyst Géza Roheim draws another configuration of source, dream, and transformation of reality, that may cast further light on our way toward a picture of what is involved in poetry when the images and personae of a dream greater than reality appear as active forces in the poet’s world:
Strehlow, who as a missionary living for decades among the Aranda was certainly an authority on their language, tells us that he cannot explain the meaning of the word altjira, but it seems that the natives connect to it the concept of something that has no beginning—erina itja arbmanakala, him none made. Spencer and Gillen, however, have given another interpretation of the word. In their glossary, we find ‘altjeringa: name applied by the Arunta, Kaitish, and Unmatjera tribes to the far past or dream times in which their mythical ancestors lived. The word altjeri means dream.’ Strehlow denies this; he says the word for dream is altjirerama: and gives the following etymology: altjira (god) rama (to see).
For one thing, it is clear that altjira means dream and not god or ancestor (as Strehlow indicates) for I found that a folktale, a narrative with a happy end, is also called altjira.
It is evident that Strehlow, from his preoccupation with Altjira (God) of the Aranda Bible, managed to miss the real meaning of the word. Altjira = dream, altjireramaa = to dream; altjirerinja = dreaming. This is as near as I could get to Spencer and Gillen’s altjeringa. Moses thought it must be a mistake for either altirerindja or altliranga. There was no name for any mythical period. The time when the ancestors wandered on earth was called altjiranga nakala, i.e. ‘ancestor was’, like ljata nama, i.e. ‘now is’. Other expressions were noted as equivalents of altjiranga nakala; these were imanka nakula, ‘long time ago was’, or kutata nakala, ‘eternally was’. This led us to the explanation and etymology of the word altjiranga mitjina. Mitjina is equivalent to kutata, ‘eternal’; nga is the ablative suffix from; therefore altjiranga mitjina = ‘the eternal ones from the dream’ or ‘the eternal people who come in dreams’. This is not my explanation, but that of the old men, Moses, Renana, and Jirramba. Another Aranda word for dream, ancestor, and story, is tnankara. It is not often used, and as far as I could see it means exactly the same as altjira. (Roheim, op. cit., pp. 210–11)
In story and tribal rite, the Australian native seeks to convert time and space into an expression of his unity, to create a language of acts and things, of devouring and being devoured, of giving birth and being
born, in which man and the world about him come into one body.
In an emu myth of the Aranda, Marakuja (Hands bad), the old man emu, takes his bones out and transforms them into a cave. . . . The kangaroo men take the mucus from their noses; it becomes a stone still visible now. The rocks become black where they urinate. (Ibid., pp. 211–12)
Here the altjiranga mitjina, the ones living in a dream of time more real than the mortality of the time past, invade the immediate scene. For the Australians as for Heraclitus, “Immortal mortals mortal immortals, their being dead is the other’s life.” The things lost in time return and are kept in the features of the place. “Environment is regarded as if it were derived from human beings,” Roheim observes.
In repeated acts—bleeding, pissing, casting mucus, spitting into the ground, or in turn, eating the totemic food and drinking the blood of the fathers—the boy is initiated into the real life of the tribe.
An old man sits beside him and whispers into his ear the totemic name. The boy then calls out the esoteric name as he swallows the food. The emphasis on the place name in myth and ritual can only mean one thing, that both myth and ritual are an attempt to cathect environment with libido . . . The knowledge of the esoteric name ‘aggregates’ unites the boy to the place or to the animal species or to anything that was strange before. (Ibid., p. 216)
The “breast, anus, semen, urine, leg, foot” in the Australian song, chant, or enchantment, that are also hill, hole, seed, stream, tree, or rock, where “in the Toara ceremony the men dance around the ring shouting the names of male and female genital organs, shady trees, hills, and some of the totems of their tribe,” are most familiar to the Freudian convert Roheim. He sees with a sympathy that rises from the analytic cult in which Freud has revived in our time a psychic universe in which dream has given a language where, by a “sexual obsession” (as Jung calls it), the body of man and the body of creation are united.
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