Being a Restorationist Writer, and the Quest for the Infinite—11

My Poems, Part 3

A turning point in my development as a writer was the composing of this:

LIKE A DEER HE COMES TO ME
Take, eat: this is my body
—Mark 14:22
Like a deer he comes to me,
parting the ferns,
like a deer with bright antlers.
I chase him across meadows,
beside streams I pursue him,
and he does not weary;
but in the thicket he surprises me,
he lets my arrow pierce him.
He gives me of his flesh at evening,
and in the bright morning
like a deer he comes to me.

It appeared first in Dialogue in 1980 and then was anthologized in Harvest, as “Take, Eat,” and Richard Cracroft told me once that he was using it regularly in his Mormon lit course. It has undergone some tinkering since it was first published in Dialogue, with title, epigraph, format, punctuation, and verb tense (I put it originally in past tense, later realized that it belonged in the present).

When I wrote that, I had been sitting at my desk in the Church Curriculum Editing Section looking at Joseph Campbell’s Mythologies of the Primitive Hunters and Gatherers, which was part 1 of Historical Atlas of World Mythology, Vol. I: The Way of the Animal Powers, and thinking about Christian parallels and about my canoe-Indian ancestors who had fished and hunted in the Pacific Northwest. The first line, “Like a deer he came to me” presented itself to me, and I opened the screen on my computer to see what came next. The whole poem, in its original form, presented itself to me within ten minutes.

I think it was the turning point because it was evidence that I was getting into some other archetypal pool (in the Jungian sense), other than that of the more obvious Latter-day Saint imagery with which I had been working.

From that point on, I found my imagination returning to the kind of poetry I had encountered in Rimbaud and Breton twenty years before. When I gave release to what was now pushing its way upward, the first product was the narrative “Adventures of a Young Man.” That was followed by “A Tale of Detection,” from which this riff is drawn:

“In the darkness just before dawn a young woman carrying a white plastic trash bag loaded with a heavy, bulky object approaches a gate in a wall. The wall is made of cinder blocks and is more than eight feet high. The gate is of iron. It has no handle on the outside, only a small square hole covered on the inside. The young woman approaches the gate across a deserted street, looking nervously from side to side.

“The gate is set inside the wall about two feet, and the entryway thus formed is darkly shadowed. The young woman steps into the darkness and raps three times on the gate with a small mallet she finds hanging there. The grated window opens immediately and a stern voice says, ‘What do you want?’ The face behind the grating is invisible in the darkness.

“ ‘I’m the babysitter,’ the young woman whispers. ‘I’ve come to deliver the package and get new instructions.’

“The window cover slams shut with a metallic clink, and the gate begins to open inward, slowly and silently.

“The young woman stands holding the white bag at her left side. She is very patient. Before the door has fully opened, the night, a day, and most of another night pass. Meanwhile, flowers from the gardens within the wall slip silently through the opening—hyacinth, iris, snapdragon, the entire order of Rubiales, one by one, like the notes of a lesser known étude of Chopin played very slowly, and join the procession passing on the street behind her.

“This procession has its origin in a distant part of the city, where the player’ costumes are manufactured in vile sweatshops situated at appropriate intervals on the banks of rivers, the confluence of which escapes the attention of most cartographers, however appreciative they may be of Chopin, of the craftsmanly murder of infants, of Rubiales, even of the more subtle varieties of alibi concocted by the most desperate criminals.

“The procession passes this point on the street at almost the exact same time each morning, though sometimes later. The young woman knows nothing of this, of course, and only considers herself fortunate to witness so artful a display, which she watches by a kind of second sight without having to turn away from the gate. She remains in her place until the last wagon has passed, and her left leg becomes indistinguishable from those of the ivory statues on display in the quarters of the tailors who made the costumes, and the ivy creeps furtively up her inner thigh. The liberties taken by the ivy signal the moment for her to enter the garden.”

I had been looking at a book that I had found at the City Lights Bookstore, in San Francisco, on a vacation trip with my wife and seven children, The Custom-House of Desire: A Half-Century of Surrealist Stories (J. H. Matthews, trans. and ed., University of California Press, 1975), and I was ready to experiment without restraint with Surrealist-like narrative and prose poem (I say “like” because I was not and am not a Surrealist; I am a Restorationist who has been experimenting with methods of composition similar to those of the Surrealists and producing texts that superficially resemble Surrealist works). Again, as with the composition of “A Daughter of Sarah” and of everything that had followed that, I was not forcing Restorationist or scriptural imagery or language into the work, but allowing it to present itself when it wanted to. I don’t remember exactly when I wrote “Adventures,” but I think it was between 1990 and 1995, when I was meeting at lunch time with a writer’s group, one member of which was Jack Lyon, who was later to become my publisher.

I wrote shorter pieces during that same period, like these:

LAST NIGHT’S EQUATIONS
Last night’s equations are inscribed on the eyes of morning
A woman holds in her teeth the moon
As delicately as Urim balanced on the tip of a salmon’s fin
The moon slips from the woman’s teeth
The eyes of morning take its place
The equations float
White feathers back into the night

A GIRL ON A BRIDGE BECKONS
A girl on a bridge beckons
A girl in a dress of broken glass
A girl with teeth of early snow
A girl whose legs are marble pillars on a distant hill
A girl with hair of ivy where small birds nest
A girl whose eyes are open doorways
A girl who knows what is written behind the mirror

My friend Jack was the only member of our writers’ group who “got it,” and he was quite enthusiastic about what I was doing; the others had no idea what to do with it and were put off by the gaminess of some of the pieces. I never submitted any of that kind of thing for publication, because the only literary community in which I seriously care to obtain recognition has always been the MoLit community, and there was nothing in the history of MoLit to give the editors of Sunstone or Dialogue a schema within which to place them (though I think now that I should have given more credit to Dennis Clark). It was under strong encouragement from Jack Lyon that I finally relented and allowed him to publish them in First Light, First Water (Waking Lion Press, 2014). It is a fearful thing to put out work that is so experimental and that has had practically no validation by one’s peers.

I began writing those things without a theory beyond the notion of simply letting the subconscious have its say and then refining a bit. The theory has crystallized since the publication of First Light. I presented it briefly in the “Author’s Note” to Glyphs, from which I quote here:

“Most of my likely readers will find the poems in the first part of this collection, approximately through ‘Outside the Longhouse,’ to be readily accessible, but those in the latter part of the book may seem puzzling and strange—‘surrealistic,’ though I am not a Surrealist (Neo-Romanticist influenced by Surrealism is closer to the mark). If the reader finds a beauty in those poems, despite their seeming irrationality, and though it be a mysterious beauty, then I call them successful. My method for composing them has been an exercise of something like what Keats called ‘negative capability,’ which I understand as a stepping back of the conscious, controlling mind with its categories and preconceptions to allow the poem to emerge from ‘somewhere else.’ It is similar to Mallarmé’s method, and also the Surrealists’, as described by Wallace Fowlie: ‘To give over all initiative to the words themselves’ (Mallarmé, Phoenix Books, 1962). I suggest that they be approached as dreams. Every reader will have had the experience of waking with a dream that seems important and meaningful, though the full meaning might remain elusive. Some of the imagery in these poems, in fact, came from sleeping dreams. Most of them, however, are more like waking dreams. I view dreams as messages from a deeper part of our being, the ‘unconscious,’ if you will, supplying insights to assist us in the conscious conduct of life. I entertain the possibility that such messages are revelatory in a certain sense, for they come from a place within us that, by God’s grace, is uncorrupted by the Fall. [Incidentally, I should have given credit for that idea to John A. Sanford, Dreams: God’s Forgotten Language, Harper & Row, 1968, 1989.] The unconscious always speaks the truth of its insights and evaluations about matters on which at the conscious level the “natural man,” as it is called in the Book of Mormon (Mosiah 3:19), is too willing to equivocate, rationalize, and deny. The ‘I’ of the mortal conscious mind wants to cheat, but the unconscious is unfailingly honest. Whether messages from my unconscious are of value to anyone but me, the reader will decide, but my sense is that my life’s tasks are not wholly unlike those of others, and I become more persuaded to the Jungian view that a common set of archetypal figures from a collective unconscious speaks in dreams to us all, and, because we share the ‘human condition,’ what is spoken to one might be of value to another. As Joseph Campbell has put it, ‘Myths are public dreams; dreams are private myths.’ I cannot “prove” any of that; I simply say that I go forward as a writer in that faith, and the reader must decide on the basis of the resulting poems themselves whether the faith is justified.”

In those “Author’s Notes,” I indicated another dimension of theory, one that connects with the metaphysic that is something like a Coleridgean Idealism that I believe I see in D&C 93; and I quote myself here: “To my mind, poems of this kind can be merest glimpses through a window on the infinite and eternal and marvelous and rationally, literally unspeakable mystery of being, of ‘that which is Spirit, even the Spirit of truth,’ in the words of Joseph Smith (Doctrine and Covenants 93:23); of the utter freedom—agency—of Being; of the erotic and convulsively beautiful ecstasy of Eternal Life and Creation.” I draw back from the attempt to explain that, other than to say that my sense of things is that ultimate reality, whatever it is to be called, is marvelous and essentially erotic, and that that ultimate reality is, for each of us, our own ultimate identity, from which we are presently alienated but which we can, through Christ, ultimately recover, and which is not to be fully captured in words but the unspeakable beauty of which can be indicated, in something that looks very like the Surrealism of an André Breton, who, I suspect, did not identify correctly something that he at moments touched. My sense is that the experiences of composing and of reading a certain kind of poem can bring us to the point that Marcel Raymond was attempting to identify in this passage: “I shall quote one single, but peremptory, sentence from André Breton’s Second Manifesto: ‘Everything suggests the belief that there is a certain point of the mind where life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the communicable and the incommunicable, the high and the low are no longer perceived as contradictions. It would be vain to look for any motive in surrealist activity other than the hope of determining that point.’… Does this point of mind, the determination of which is the goal of surrealism, really differ from God’s hypothetical position relative to the Creation?” (From Baudelaire to Surrealism, Wittenborn, Schultz, Inc. 1950).

For something with which to compare my experiments, I suggest starting with this link http://www.poemhunter.com/david-gascoyne/     Gascoyne introduced Surrealism to England and was more broadly associated with a movement known as the New Apocalypse, which was an aspect of an even broader movement known as Neo-Romanticism, with which Dylan Thomas was associated (and with which I think I would prefer to be associated, rather than directly with the Surrealists). That whole constellation of writers is represented in a Penguin anthology, Surrealist Poetry in English (1978). Gascoyne and his associates seem to have been influenced more by Jung than by Freud, from whom the French Surrealists took inspiration, and I myself find Jung’s account of the unconscious and its relationship to consciousness far more satisfactory than Freud’s.

I need to qualify that injunction “to give over all initiative to the words themselves.” I think the following statements quoted in The New Apocalypse: An Anthology of Poems, Stories and Criticism (ed. Dorian Cooke, Fortune, ca. 1939-1940; the only copy that I have located is in the Harold B. Lee Library, Special Collections) are on  point: “A human being drifts through time like an iceberg, only partly floating above the level of the consciousness. It is the aim of the Surrealists, whether as a painter or as a poet, to try and realize some of the dimensions and characteristics of his submerged being, and to do this he resorts to the significant imagery of dreams and dream-like states of mind” (from Herbert Read, Art Now, first published in 1933). So far so good, but here come qualifications:

“A poem by myself needs a host of images. I make one image, though ‘image’ is not the word; I let, perhaps an image be made emotionally in me and then apply to it what intellectual and critical forces I possess; let it breed another; let that image contradict the first, make, of the third image, bred out of the other two together, a fourth  contradictory image, and let them all, within my imposed formal limits, conflict” (Dylan Thomas, italics added).

“Is all material which presents itself to the writer by psychic automatism of an equal artistic value? It would seem that such material from the subconscious must of necessity be unequal in quality, and must need the control of a selective mind. It is this discipline of his raw material, this obedience to the dictates of his self-imposed form, which makes Dylan Thomas a superior craftsman to, and truer poet than, any of the surrealists. Complete absence of conscious control must, inevitably, result in an artistic anarchy and organic decay, against which all criticism will be powerless, and for which no development will be possible” (Henry Treece).

I understand (though I have not yet tracked down sources for this) that both Jung and the French Surrealists found that pure psychic automatism conducted for any length of time led to psychic disintegration and exposure to something that even they would call demonic. I have never given myself over to that, and will not, even though I claim some protection from the priesthood and the Holy Ghost, and the closest I have come to it has produced a good deal of trash (and yes, I know, some of my readers think that what I have allowed to get into print is trash). My own method, which is much like the method that Breton describes in his First Manifesto, has been to eliminate distraction as much as possible, cultivate a receptive meditative state, and then watch for words to rise, as it were, from the depths of a well, picking them off as they appear (and the words do present themselves visually; it is like reading). The next phrase is not given until the present one is recorded. The conscious mind is still on the job, though stepped back from “the well.” (Arthur Rimbaud describes a similar method: “For I is someone else….. This is obvious to me: I am present at this birth of my thought: I watch it and listen to it: I draw a stroke of the bow: the symphony makes its stir in the depths, or comes on to the stage in a leap.” (From letter to Paul Demeny, 15 May 1871, in Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters, trans. Wallace Fowlie, The University of  Chicago Press, 1966, p. 305)

My sense is that what emerges by that method comes from my own true depths, as do sleeping dreams, and for me it has a certain symbolic power that the products of pure and completely unfettered automatic writing do not have. I have not imposed any firm formalistic requirement on what emerges, not so much as what Dylan Thomas imposed, but I have been open to parallelism, which I think sometimes occurs in my published “oneiric poems,” and even when the lines are quite paratactic I find a free rhythm and a kind of parallelism in them that I recognize in the Doctrine and Covenants. What makes them poems in my estimation, by the definition to which I subscribe, which is Eliseo Vivas’, is the sense of an underlying thematic unity at a level somewhere below “common reality” consciousness and its logic. I sense in them a beginning, a middle, and an end, that some sort of deep psychic drama has been enacted, as in a sleeping dream, and I sense when the play that is the waking dream is over. I let the product “cool” and then tinker with it. To employ another metaphor, a Coleridgean “organic” one, it is as if one of these poems is a plant that springs complete from the ground; but though it is essentially complete it may have been slightly damaged in breaking out and picked up particles of dirt on the way, or it has suffered from a defect in its DNA, and it needs a little cleaning and repair and refinement. Sometimes I sense that passages that have come days or weeks apart belong together. Even in that repair work, however, I go more by what intuition tells me “works” or doesn’t “work,” rather than by any requirements of common-reality logic or any pre-imposed literary form. I basically trust the words as they have presented themselves. I also endeavor to avoid description. That is, I do not describe a picture that is present preconceived in my imagination, but rather allow the words to present themselves, to take the initiative, and watch the “vision” that they evoke come into being—I am, as it were, inside the walls of the Jerusalem of my imagination, led by the “spirit” of my imagination, not knowing beforehand the things which I should do.

I must say that the experience of composing one of these poems is not unlike that of giving a priesthood blessing. I learned long ago, long before I was writing poems as an adult, when giving a blessing, to meditate a bit on the concern of the person who has requested it, but then, as I lay on hands, to clear the mind of all preconceptions and wait for words to rise out of what I visualize as a very deep well. I have made it a principle not to speak until words emerge. When they do emerge, I give them a fraction of a moment of testing for an assurance that those words are to be spoken, and when the words stop emerging I end the blessing. The experience is not identical, however, for I “feel” that the words of a blessing and the words of a poem come from different “places,” and the words of a blessing are accompanied by that experience of the numinous that we call “the Spirit,” in both me and the recipient. I suppose that that is how Joseph Smith learned to receive revelation. I suppose that he learned to recognize when, as it were, the telephone was ringing and to pick it up; that he allowed his mind to be receptive to what was to come and did not impose preconceived content or structure on it, that he spoke to his scribe the phrases as they came and did not receive the next one until the present one had been spoken, and that he knew when the party on the other end of the line had terminated the call. What came to him took a certain rhythmic form, frequently in parallelism, and in some cases (such as the sections of the D&C that I have examined in ­Six Poems by Joseph Smith), the text as a whole exhibited a complex and impressive architecture that qualified it to be called a poem. I don’t believe Joseph consciously created that rhythm or architecture; rather they came into being deep in his being, below consciousness, springing like a plant full grown from the ground and afterward requiring but slight revision, if any.

I make absolutely no claim, however, that any of my poems are given by divine revelation, though I accept them as revelatory in the sense that I have explained above, but the process of receiving them seems to be similar to that by which Joseph received revelation and by which I do receive what I recognize as revelation in giving a blessing—and therein may lie a clue to something that is important to the Restorationist writer. The process of creation that I have described seems to me to make the poet open to divine revelation if it is waiting to be received, to establish conditions under which the poet may truly be a poet-prophet, in the sense that Elder Whitney, Merrill Bradshaw, and Clinton Larson intended (I am going to get to them in the next group of posts). The poet-prophet has no business claiming that what he has received has been given for the Church, but the Saints might come to recognize it as Spirit-given and in that sense as being prophetic, and in principle it could eventually find its way into the scriptural canon, as did portions of the Bible that were originally presented as “mere” poems and stories, like, I suppose, most of the Psalms, and the books of Jonah and of Job and others; but that is for others to judge, not the poet.

Here is a bonus, from my soon to be published Division by Zero (Waking Lion Press).

THE URIM OF A JEWELRY BOX WHISPERS ENDEARMENTS
The urim of a jewelry box whispers endearments to the thummim of a suspension
bridge in the throes of temporary dismemberment,
As hanging in air over a rising river of piano notes in high register they wonder
together at five things:
The way of a lark’s tongue with seven-cornered dice,
A promising kiss from Sacagawea contorting in a secret compartment of Meriwether
Lewis’s spy glass,
A flash of cannon fire held in secret and reluctant reserve from the Mexican War,
A way of looking at a blackbird dismissed by establishment critics as the final belated
cowardice of a maimed gun-runner
But recognized by frequenters of reptile zoos on Route 66 as a stroke of pure intelligence
from beyond the night where stones and violets exchange caresses.
Then beyond the penultimate ridge a final crescendo of piano notes tumbling up the face of
a heaving talus slide of cartridges full metal jacket specially engineered for full
automatic fire
And finding in the press of one more key apotheosis in a backward somersault by
the jewelry box and the suspension bridge into the violet-colored stars at the center
of the galaxy

Thoughts?