The Guy Davenport Reader

by Guy Davenport

  The apron is trimmed with rickrack ribbon, a machine-made substitute for lace. The curtains are bordered in a variant of the egg-and-dart design that comes from Nabataea, the Biblical Edom, in Syria, a design which the architect Hiram incorporated into the entablatures of Solomon’s temple — “and the chapiters upon the two pillars had pomegranates also above, over against the belly which was by the network: and the pomegranates were two hundred in rows round about” (1 Kings 7:20) and which formed the border of the high priest’s dress, a frieze of “pomegranates of blue, and of purple, and of scarlet, around about the hem thereof; and bells of gold between them round about” (Exodus 28:33).

  The brass button that secures the farmer’s collar is an unassertive, puritanical understatement of Matthew Boulton’s eighteenth-century cut-steel button made in the factory of James Watt. His shirt button is mother-of-pearl, made by James Boepple from Mississippi fresh-water mussel shell, and his jacket button is of South American vegetable ivory passing for horn.

  The farmer and his wife are attended by symbols, she by two plants on the porch, a potted geranium and sanseveria, both tropical and alien to Iowa; he by the three-tined American pitchfork whose triune shape is repeated throughout the painting, in the bib of the overalls, the windows, the faces, the siding of the house, to give it a formal organization of impeccable harmony.

  If this painting is primarily a statement about Protestant diligence on the American frontier, carrying in its style and subject a wealth of information about imported technology, psychology, and aesthetics, it still does not turn away from a pervasive cultural theme of Mediterranean origin — a tension between the growing and the ungrowing, between vegetable and mineral, organic and inorganic, wheat and iron.

  Transposed back into its native geography, this icon of the lord of metals with his iron sceptre, head wreathed with glass and silver, buckled in tin and brass, and a chaste bride who has already taken on the metallic thraldom of her plight in the gold ovals of her hair and brooch, are Dis and Persephone posed in a royal portrait among the attributes of the first Mediterranean trinity, Zeus in the blue sky and lightning rod, Poseidon in the trident of the pitchfork, Hades in the metals. It is a picture of a sheaf of golden grain, female and cyclical, perennial and the mother of civilization; and of metal shaped into scythe and hoe: nature and technology, earth and farmer, man and world, and their achievement together.

  1. Fiske Kimball, Domestic Architecture of the American Colonies and of the Early Republic (New York: Dover, 1966), p. 275.

  The Symbol of the Archaic

  FOUR YEARS AGOi THERE WAS DISCOVERED NEAR SARLAT IN THE Dordogne the rib of an ox on which some hunter engraved with a flint burin seventy lines depicting we know not what: some god, some animal schematically drawn, a map, the turning of the seasons, the mensurations of the moon.

  We have found in this lovely part of France many such prehistoric artifacts, carved bones, mysterious sceptres, rocks written over with lunar counts and seasonal notations and decorated with salmon, reindeer and seals, the lines of which are worn faint from being carried for ages in the hands of hunters.

  Many of these objects, the engraving of which is not in the least primitive or unsophisticated, are fifty millennia old.

  The ox rib found at Sarlat was published before a learned community in Toronto by Alexander Marshack (in a paper given to the American Anthropological Association in December 1972). Professor Hallam Movius, Professor Emeritus at the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology, Harvard, and a protege of L’Abbé Henri Breuil, the most distinguished of prehistorians, believes it to be 100,000 years old. Alexander Marshack whose reading of prehistoric notation (The Roots of Civilization) is as brilliant and surprising as that of Andre Leroi-Gourhan (Treasures of Prehistoric Art), dates the Sarlat ox rib at 135,000 years, and its discoverer, François Bordes, Director of the Laboratory of Prehistory at the University of Bordeaux, places it at 230,000.

  It is man’s oldest known work of art, or plat of hunting rights, tax receipt, star map, or whatever it is.

  Just a little over a century ago, John William Burgon, then an undergraduate at Worcester College, Oxford, wrote a poem about the desert city Petra, which the traveller Johann Ludwig Burckhardt had come upon thirty years before. Except for these magic lines, much anthologized, the poem has been forgotten, along with its poet:

  Not saintly grey, like many a minster fane

  That crowns the hill or sanctifies the plain:

  But rosy-red, as if the blush of dawn

  Which first beheld them were not yet withdrawn:

  The hues of youth upon a brow of woe,

  Which men called old two thousand years ago!

  Match me such marvel, save in Eastern clime,

  A rose-red city — half as old as time!

  Shelley had put Petra in a poem as soon as Burckhardt discovered it: it is one of the places the wandering youth visits in Alastor, the others are taken from Volney’s Les Ruines (1791), which had also inspired Queen Mab and The Daemon of the World. Burgon, stealing half a line from Samuel Rogers’ Italy, makes Petra “half as old as time,” for creation was still an event dated 4004 B.C.

  The eighteenth century taught us to look at ruins with a particular frisson, to thrill to the depths of years in which we can stand. Volney at Persepolis and Palmyra, Gibbon in the Colosseum, Champollion at Thebes, Schliemann at Hissarlik and Mycenae were as symbolic of the attention of their age as Command Pilot Neil Armstrong on the moon of ours. The discovery of the physical past generated a deep awe and Romantic melancholy, positing a new vocabulary of images for poetry. Petra, carved in red Nabataean stone, became an image resonant with meaning. Without its name, and with a sharper Angst than Romantic wonder, it can still move us in Eliot’s evocation in The Waste Land:

  . . . you know only

  A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

  And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

  And the dry stone no sound of water. Only

  There is shadow under this red rock

  (Come in under the shadow of this red rock).

  From the visits in 1678 and 1691 of English merchants to Palmyra, which they supposed to be the Biblical Tadmor, providing Gibbon with a sceptical footnote, Thomas Love Peacock with a fashion-setting poem, and the Romantic poetry of Europe with a new kind of image, to the present diligent science of archeology, a meditation on ruins has been a persistent theme. In our time we have Charles Olson’s “The Kingfishers,” the central poem in the Projectivist School of poets and a meditation on ruins, demonstrating that the form is far from exhausted. It is even Volneyesque, and, for all Olson’s stringent modernity, can be read as an inquiry into the rise and fall of civilizations that continues a subject taken up in the earliest days of Romanticism.

  Like his master Pound, Olson sees civilizations grow and perish against a continuum of nature, though he is modern enough to know that nature’s moments are not really eternal; they are simply much longer than those of civilizations. Nature herself has her ruins, deserts, and flooded lands. Olson was writing poems about the drift of continents when he died.

  Olson’s “The Kingfishers” was inspired in part by Pablo Neruda’s Alturas de Machu Picchu, a masterpiece among poems about ruins by a travelled poet who had been to Angkor Wat and the Athenian acropolis, Yucatan and Cuzco.

  At the heart of Olson’s poem is “the E on that oldest stone” meaning the epsilon on the omphalos stone at Delphi, which Plutarch puzzled over at the behest of Nero. We are still not certain whether it is part of the word, Gea, Earth, or part of a Greek citizen’s name; Plutarch, always willing to be Pythagorean, gives many symbolic explanations, but for Olson the import of that conical, ancient stone was precisely that it is so ancient that we have lost the meaning of the writing upon it. When we discover what it means, we will still be dissociated forever from the complex of ideas in which it occurs.

  And that is the center of Olson’s concern in this poem,
that culture is both historically and geographically discrete. “We are alien,” Olson said, “from everything that was most familiar.” This is a random statement from his late, inarticulate lectures, and like so many of the poet’s Delphic utterances lies unexplained in a tangle of non sequiturs. Perhaps he felt that it was already elaborated by poets as different as Keats and Rimbaud, who had intuitions of a deep past which we have sacrificed for a tawdry and impious present; by Neruda and Prescott, men appalled by the brutality with which the indigenous cultures of the Americas were murdered. Olson was writing his poem while Europe still lay in ruins from the Second World War.

  Olson was a poet with a frightening sense of where he was in time. He was one of the most original explicators of Melville, whose Clarel is among the great (and greatly neglected) meditations on ruins (of Christianity as well as of cultures which he suspected he might have found more congenial than his own, if mankind had allowed them to survive), and whose Moby-Dick was Olson’s model for his vision of the long continuum of nature, the majesty of which belittles the diminutive empires of man — man, whose bulk is one twelve hundred and fiftieth of that of a whale, whose lifespan is a third of that of a goose, and whose advantages over his fellow creatures are all mechanical and therefore dependent on the education of each generation: meaning that an intervening generation of barbarians destroys all that has been carefully accumulated for centuries.

  The unit of civilization is the city. The classical ages knew this so well that they scarcely alluded to it intellectually. Emotionally it was a fact which they honored with rites and a full regalia of symbols. The city appeared on their coins as a goddess crowned with battlements. She was the old grain goddess Cybele-Demeter, and it is clear that ancient men thought of the city as a culmination of a process that began among the cityless hunters who learned to pen cattle and live in the enclosure with them, who developed agriculture (the goddess’s second gift, after the bounty of the animals) and made the city a focus of farms and roads.

  About the time the Romantic poets were being most eloquent about ruined cities, the city itself was undergoing a profound change. The railroad was about to cancel the identity of each city, making them all into ports of trade, into warehouses and markets. Eliot’s Waste Land, Joyce’s Ulysses, Pound’s Cantos, Rely’s Petersburg, all epics of city, appear at the same time as the automobile, the machine that stole the city’s rationale for being, and made us all gypsies and barbarians camping in the ruins of the one unit of civilization which man has thus far evolved.

  The city lasted from Jericho, Harappa, and the Catal Hüyük to its ruin in Paterson, New Jersey (as one poet specified), from Troy to Dublin: Joyce’s long chord. Pound in the Cantos makes another chord of meaning with the beginning and end of Venice, Europe’s first outpost against the barbarians.

  All of this is part of what Olson meant by saying that we are alienated from all that was most familiar. Basically he meant that we no longer milk the cow, or shoot the game for our dinner, or make our clothes or houses or anything at all. Secondly, he meant that we have drained our symbols of meaning. We hang religious pictures in museums, honoring a residual meaning in them, at least. We have divorced poetry from music, language from concrete particulars. We have abandoned the rites de passage to casual neglect where once we marked them with trial and ceremony.

  Thirdly, he meant that modernity is a kind of stupidity, as it has no critical tools for analyzing reality such as the ancient cultures kept bright and sharp. We do not notice that we are ruled by the worst rather than the best of men: Olson took over a word coined by Pound, pejorocracy. Poetry and fiction have grieved for a century now over the loss of some vitality which they think they see in a past from which we are by now irrevocably alienated.

  Joyce found in Vico cause to believe that Western civilization is at an end. Olson felt with Mao Tze Tung that the new vitality will come from the East. Pound considered us to be in a blank hiatus between cultures. So did Yeats, and perhaps Eliot. D. H. Lawrence looked for restorative forces deep in blood and genitals, longing for the color and robustness of the Etruscans.

  All this pessimism and backward yearning has usually been counter-balanced and complemented by a kind of fulfillment: for in any characterization of the arts in our time we shall always want to say that if we have had a renaissance in the twentieth century, it has been a renaissance of the archaic.

  Every age has had its sense of archaic time, usually mythological, usually at variance with history. It is man’s worst ineptitude that he has not remembered his own past. Another way of saying this is that only at certain moments in cultures does man’s past have any significance to him.

  Go back to the Sarlat bone, possible 230,000 years old, with which we began. What would it have looked like to a seventeenth-century antiquarian? John Aubrey, we remember, thought Stonehenge to be the ruins of a Roman temple, and his patron Charles was satisfied with this information. When the Abbé Breuil petitioned UNESCO for funds after the Second World War to study the 20,000-year-old paintings in the Lascaux cave near Montignac (discovered in 1940 by Jacques Marsal’s dog Robot, who was chasing a rabbit), UNESCO refused, on the grounds that the paintings were obviously fraudulent.ii Breuil had encountered the same incredulity for forty years.

  There was, however, a silent believer from the beginning of his career, who saw prehistoric art with eyes which would influence all other eyes in our time. When Breuil was copying the ceiling of bulls in the Spanish cave Altamira, a young man from Barcelona crawled in beside him and marvelled at the beauty of the painting, at the energy of the designs. He would in a few years teach himself to draw with a similar energy and primal clarity, and would incorporate one of these enigmatic bulls into his largest painting, the Guernica. He was Pablo Picasso.

  If we say, as we can, that the archaic is one of the great inventions of the twentieth century, we mean that as the first European renaissance looked back to Hellenistic Rome for a range of models and symbols, the twentieth century has looked back to a deeper past in which it has imagined it sees the very beginnings of civilization. The Laocoön was Michelangelo’s touchstone; the red-stone Kouros from Sounion was Picasso’s.

  What is most modern in our time frequently turns out to be the most archaic. The sculpture of Brancusi belongs to the art of the Cyclades in the ninth century B.C. Corbusier’s buildings in their cubist phase look like the white clay houses of Anatolia and Malta. Plato and Aristotle somehow mislaid the tetrahedron from among Pythagoras’s basic geometric figures. Recovered by R. Buckminster Fuller, the tetrahedron turns out to be the basic building block of the universe. Pythagoras said that where two lines cross, the junction is two lines thick; Euclid said that lines can cross infinitely without any thickness at all. R. Buckminster Fuller constructs his tensegrities and geodesic domes with the firm notion that at their junction crossed lines are two lines thick.

  Fuller, then, is our Pythagoras. Niels Bohr is our Democritus. Ludwig Wittgenstein is our Heraclitus. There is nothing quite so modern as a page of any of the pre-Socratic physicists, where science and poetry are still the same thing and where the modern mind feels a kinship it no longer has with Aquinas or even Newton.

  Ethos anthropoi daimon, said Heraclitus, which may mean that our moral nature is a daimon, or guiding spirit from among the purified souls of the dead. Or it may be utterly primitive and mean that the weather is a god. Character, R. Buckminster Fuller seems to translate it, is prevailing wind. Pound: Time is the evil. Novalis: Character is fate. Wyndham Lewis: The Zeitgeist is a demon. Wittgenstein was paraphrasing it when he said (as if he were an Erewhonian): Character is physique.

  In Heraclitus our most representative writers discovered a spirit congenial to their predicament as modern men. The neo-Epicurean philosopher Gassendi revived him, Nietzsche admired the elemental transparency of his thought, and we can now find him as a genius loci everywhere, in Hopkins, Spengler, Pound, William Carlos Williams, Eliot, Olson, Gertrude Stein.

 
It is not entirely Heraclitus’s intuitive fusion of science and poetry that has made a modern philosopher of him. It is also his primacy in western thought. He has lasted.

  The heart of the modern taste for the archaic is precisely the opposite of the Romantic feeling for ruins. Heraclitus, like the paintings at Lascaux, like the eloquent fragments of Sappho and Archilochos, has survived and thus become timeless. Picasso liked to say that modern art is what we have kept. To his eyes Brancusi was Cycladic; Stravinsky in the Sacre du printemps was a primitive Russian. Conversely, the bisque-colored, black-maned prancing tarpan of Lascaux, the very definition of archaic painting, is one of the most characteristic works of twentieth-century art, for quite literally ours are the first eyes to see it ever. It was painted in the deep dark of a cave by torchlight, an uncertainty to the man or woman who painted it. The best way to see it has always been as a color reproduction in a book; and now this is the only way to see it; twenty years of tourists’ breaths caused bacteria to grow in the paint, and Lascaux, the most beautiful of the prehistoric caves, has been closed forever.

  It has taken half the century for modern eyes to see the archaic. Cocteau dated this aesthetic adjustment from the year 1910, when Guillaume Apollinaire placed a Benin mask on his wall. Suddenly an image both ugly and disturbing, still bearing the name fetish which the Portuguese exploiters of Africa had given it, became a work of art which could hang in a museum beside a Hogarth or Rembrandt.

  Apollinaire was not all that original. He was taking his cue from the German anthropologist Leo Frobenius, who had begun to argue that African art was neither primitive nor naive; it was simply the African style. Even before Apollinaire broadened his vision to see the sophistication and beauty of African art, the French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska had also read his Frobenius and was working in styles derived from Polynesia, Egypt, and ancient China. All he required of a style was that it be archaic; that is, in the primal stage of its formation, for Gaudier and his friend Pound had conceived the notion that cultures awake with a brilliant springtime and move through seasonal developments to a decadence. This is an idea from Frobenius, who had it from Spengler, who had it from Nietzsche, who had it from Goethe.