. . .
|
Chapter 4 (Part Two)
THE POEMS
Natural Numbers (1963)
The Collected Shorter Poems concludes with "New
Poems," written between 1957 and 1962, from the original 1963
edition of Natural Numbers, which had also included selections from
the previous books. Notably missing are poems of intricate
philosophizing and of extreme technical innovation, although a gentle
cubism is apparent in "Eight for Ornette's Music" (332-34). Nearly
all of the other "New Poems" are in the more natural direct statement
in syllabics, and the prevailing tone is elegiac instead of lyrical or
satirical.
In many of them the poet is hiking or fishing with his daughters;
listening to Mary, at seven, talk about "Homer in Basic" (317);
reminiscing about the time of revolutionary optimism ("Fish Peddler
and Cobbler," another of his perennial memorials for Sacco and
Vanzetti, 319); or remembering his father flipping poker chips that
three-year-old Katherine now plays with. A dozen poems of travelling
in France, Italy, and England resemble passages in The Dragon
and the Unicorn, but we find none of the harshness of the earlier
satires, for he has moved from polemics to tragic acceptance of the
human condition.
The book ends with a sequence called "Air and Angels," love
poems with the insistent, sad reminder of inevitable loss and
loneliness, as in Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach," which Rexroth
quotes in "Pacific Beach" (340-41). Nothing can save him from the
overriding sense of doom surrounding moments of ecstasy. The
quieter, resigned, more traditional side of his personality emerges as
he consolidates his lifework to date in a mood of solitary tenderness.
He explores such perennial themes as children, youth, love, and
community with elegiac equanimity, which in five years would be
enriched by the pervasive influence of his first visit to Japan. The
cool lyricism of the poems written for music, at the conclusion of
The Collected Shorter Poems, harmonizes in style and tone
with some of the poems in "Gödel's Proof" at its beginning: so
the whole collection is cyclic, like nature itself.
And like nature, multiple rhythms unite Rexroth's poetry from
beginning to end. His pioneering preoccupation with elemental
sounds of language, most evident in cubist poems that allied him, for
a time, with Zukofsky's experiments in verbal musicality, extends
throughout The Collected Shorter Poems, so lyrics in "natural
numbers" also display amazingly subtle rhythmic and melodic
qualities inherent in the duration, pitch, and stress of common speech.
Alternations of concrete and abstract diction, passages of pure vision
that resolve philosophical dialectics, are also rhythmic, as are
dramatic variations in tone from despair, agony, and indignation to
desire, affection, and ecstasy. The selection, arrangement, and
meaning of some poems, especially in the cubist mode, may trouble
readers, but there are more significant, interrelated patterns of sound,
syntax, imagery, tone, and theme, and more enduring wisdom, than
most readers can discover in a lifetime of close reading. The
Collected Shorter Poems is a work of heroic struggle, artistic and
intellectual, that deserves as much attention as the work of other
major modern poet.
The Collected Longer Poems (1968)
Rexroth thought of his long philosophical reveries in a tradition
that included Aiken's Symphonies, Eliot's The Waste
Land, Pound's The Cantos, Williams' Paterson,
Zukofsky's Poem Beginning "A", Lowenfels' Some
Deaths, and Tyler's Granite Butterfly. [8] He might
have added Whitman's long poems, and outside American literature
the prophetic poetry of Blake, Milton, Dante, Lao Tzu, and the Bible.
But his claim in the Introduction to The Collected Longer
Poems (1968) that the five poems are one poem does not quite
ring true, for the five are too stylistically diverse. Moreover, the long
delays before the first two poems were published in books, more than
three decades for Homestead and two decades for
Prolegomenon, indicate lingering artistic and intellectual
uncertainties about his youthful symbolist and cubist innovations.
Nevertheless, the three later long poems are major achievements, and
the five considered together impressively reveal the development of
the poet's artistry, worldview, and wisdom. Of these, The Phoenix
and the Tortoise and The Dragon and the Unicorn
expand the radical Christian Personalism of the first two poems,
whereas The Heart's Garden, The Garden's Heart initiates
the predominantly Buddhist outlook of the last thirteen years of his
life, although oriental influences had affected his work from its
inception.
Rexroth explains in the Introduction that the plot of the five
poems is "the interior and exterior adventures of two poles of a
personality," represented in Homestead by two brothers (with
a third figure, an anonymous observer-narrator commenting from
time to time). In dialogue, philosophies are contradicted dialectically
and resolved only in a transcendent experience. Male personae in the
poems and plays--the brothers in Homestead, Rexroth himself
undisguised in the other poems, and Greek heroes in Beyond the
Mountains--form a polarity with fertility figures such as the
Greek Artemis, Marichi (an Indian Goddess of the Dawn), and human
heroines who suggest an absolute community of love realized in "the
self unselfing itself" in "creative process."
The Homestead Called Damascus (1920-25; 1957)
The title of Rexroth's first long philosophical reverie reminds us
of St. Paul's conversion, and The Homestead Called
Damascus is rich in Christian imagery and the kind of religious
anthropology that Eliot, Frazer, and Cambridge classicists had been
promoting. Is the homestead domestic or monastic? And are the
heroes blood-brothers or religious brothers? Thomas is associated
with Doubting Thomas Didymus and the sacrificed god Tammus-
Osiris-Adonis-Dionysus, expressing the involuntary, reflective side of
Rexroth's personality; and Sabastian, paradoxically identified with
the Greek god Eros as well as with the saint shot with arrows, reflects
the active, willful side of the poet, who finally gravitates from action
to contemplation of the fertility-goddess-muses Marichi and a Negro
blues singer. Sebastian also compares himself in one of Rexroth's
earliest oriental allusions to Daruma (12), the Japanese name of
Bodhidharma, the monk who brought Zen Buddhism from India to
China, meditating so long that his legs rotted away.
Homestead is in four parts, in Rexroth's most musical,
symbolist style, in lines typically of nine syllables. He begins by
contrasting angels who never question the mysteries of the universe
with youths who search infinity for spiritual vocations as they
construct forms to make sense of their chaotic lives. The brothers live
on the Hudson River in the Catskills, in a rambling homestead that
embodies the bourgeois-Christian-Classical tradition from which they
try in vain to escape. Their parents might have been created by Henry
James or Proust, and their grandfather had stuffed the house with
reminders of imperialistic glories in India and China; while under the
church are pterodactyl bones and smoky paintings of libididous
primitivism repressed by civilization and superego. In a neighboring
mansion of bygone Renaissance glory, the brothers visit Leslie, who
lives like a fantastic princess.
Unsettled by artifice, domesticity, and decadence, the brothers
contemplate heroic quests and ancient fertility rites, the origins of
culture; but fearful of losing themselves in either sexual love or
martyrdom, they never find the grace that came to Saul on the road to
Damasus, to pagans in search of Atlantis, or to knights in quest of the
Holy Grail. They kid each other with myths, but the serious reveries
of Sebastian waver between enticements of domestic bliss with Leslie
and, at the other extreme, the martyrdom that befell his Christian
namesake of the third century. Thomas has nihilistic nightmares of
Lucifer and Modred (the nephew and murderer of King Arthur) who
could see only the potters' field, though Christ was always present.
In Part II, "The Autumn of Many Years," while Thomas goes
on an erotic quest to New York City, Sebastian sinks into a temporary
nirvana, but leaves it to ponder the waste land of the city and Maxine,
the black stripper and earth goddess whose promises he cannot
experience. Suddenly, the narrator breaks in like Eliot's Tiresias,
ranting of mad lotus-eaters, Adonis castrated, and evolutionary
mysteries of creative process, geological, biological, astronomical,
and human (13-14). This remarkable vision, informed by scientific
knowledge spurned by Eliot, is followed by a scene of the debased
union of Persephone and Adonis reminiscent of Eliot's "The Game of
Chess" (14-15). Part II ends on Good Friday as the brothers sink into
contemplation, but without receiving grace.
In Part III, "The Double Hellas" (Apollonian and Dionysian)
the universe is perceived in aesthetic forms: "Baroque forests,"
Bach's bust in a park, "sculpt and colored stones and shells" (20, 17,
23, and 29). The brothers are still paralyzed in the dilemma between
the promise of decadent domesticity with Leslie in a menage a trois,
and the dangers of sacrifice involving such fertility goddesses as
Persephone, Kore, Theano, and the living Maxine. While the brothers
fantasize, the narrator seems to be caressing an actual woman (25).
In the last part, "The Stigmata of Fact," during an
archaeological expedition that is a kind of grail quest, Thomas
concludes (13) that
"There is no self subsistent
Microcosm." He thinks a while of
Chuang Tzu fishing with a straight pin and
Says, "There is no self subsistent
Macrocosm either."
Here Thomas is echoing Shakyamuni who, under the Bo tree,
discovered that there is no absolute universal spirit (Brahman) and no
absolute personal self (Atman): experiencing universal
interdependence, he gave up striving for any absolute, finding nirvana
in change itself. Chuang Tzu, the Chinese sage popular in Taoism and
Zen, was so completely, unselfconsciously attuned to nature that he
needed no fish-hook. Sebastian agrees with his brother, quoting
Shakyamuni that "There is no self that suffers release," but without
attaining enlightenment (35); nor can Maxine's enticements save him
from sterility. Silence closing about Thomas, resignedly staring into a
fire.
Any reading of this astonishing poem discerns only some of the
many threads of meaning woven into the ambiguities of its
symbolism and ideas, making it at least as philosophically intricate as
Eliot's or Stevens' poetry. The Damascan brothers are adolescent
Prufrocks, inhibited from making a leap of faith into love or
martyrdom, but are more sensuous, humorous, and intellectual than
Eliot's anti-hero. No poem is more faithful to the frustrations and
speculations of precocious youth. The brothers are not dramatically
distinct, nor do they act in a definitive way, but symbolist personae
are not accustomed to do so. Unlike most symbolist literature,
Homestead contains abundant diction from mathematics and the
natural sciences--"galaxy, dark nebulae," "space--Euclidean, warped,
or otherwise," "rhomboids, nonagons" (3), and technical terms from
geology and the life sciences intertwining with mythological
language. Here we see the beginnings of Rexroth's organic
philosophy, uniting mystical experience with scientific observation
and theory, which led to a more direct and ecstatic contemplation of
nature in later poems. And the erotic mysteries that are pursued in
Homestead are later intimated if not realized in many lyrics.
"A Prolegomenon to a Theodicy" (1925-27: 1932)
How can God be omniscient, omnipotent, and supremely good
if evil exists? A theodicy, such as Leibniz's theory of pre-established
harmony, justifies God's perfection in relation to an imperfect
universe. Rexroth did not offer a solution to this problem, but his
second long poem concerns mystical experience without which no
theodicy is possible. Religiously and technically more mature than
Homestead, "A Prolegomenon to a Theodicy" is his most
famous cubist work, placing him securely in the international arena of
"The Revolution of the Word."
Metaphysical and moral despair is much harsher in this poem
than in Homestead, in which the Damascan brothers had the
luxury of witty dialogue, congenial sentiments, and sensuous
companions. In "Prolegomenon," communication seems hopeless as
the distraught poet speaks in extreme dissociation to a disembodied
"you" who seems not to understand him in Part I.
Part II suggests various ways of existing, in short, parallel lines
like those of a primitive chant, a style sustained and intensified in III
and IV, which ends with revelations of lamp and mirror. [9] In
V, voices praise the Lord in a hymn of peace. In VI the poet is
compared to a blissful Thomist angel who contemplates the Word and
all things in it. In VII the poet is tempted to evade his prophetic
responsibilities, but in VIII he is reminded that moral character
requires the choice of death rather than dishonor. In IX he imagines a
Dantean hell.
In these depths of misery, the poet hears from the sky that it is
blessed to die; and a visitor, apparently a Savior, is admitted by the
woman to whom the poet had addressed the opening part of the poem.
In the last part, the poet moves climactically towards a kind of
"Paradise Regained." First, he is assured by Aristotle that he will
reach his goal and then by Blake's greater wisdom (58). The angel
Gabriel defeats the evil spirit and the poet is blessed by the
Apocalyptic coming of God (60):
The ciborium of the abyss
The bread of light
The chalice of the byss
The wine of flaming light
The wheeling multitude
The rocking cry
In "Prolegomenon" Rexroth reaches out of the despair of
Homestead towards God Himself. But the Beatific Vision,
bursting through the radical dissociation of the rest of the poem,
strains belief, and nothing so blatant appears again in his work. The
fact that the work was not published in a book-length collection of his
poems until 1949, more than two decades after it had been written,
may indicate serious uncertainty about its outlook and effectiveness.
Although certain passages in it are powerful, it is the least satisfying
of the long reveries. Nevertheless, its prosody is extraordinary: for
instance, (46-47):
The throat of night
The plethora of wine
The fractured hour of light
The opaque lens
The climbing wheel
Here patterns of sound are subtly woven: t's in throat,
night, light (and rhyme also); i's in night, wine,
light, climbing; l's in plethora, light, lens, wheel; and
reverberations in throat and plethora. Also, the
cubism of this poem produces cadences closer to those of actual
speech than the symbolist mellifluences of Homestead; and
the Damascan brothers seem dilletantish in contrast to the rigorous
asceticism of the poet in "Prolegomenon." It prepared the way for
Rexroth's first book eight years later.
The Phoenix and the Tortoise (1940-44: 1944)
In the sacramental union of lovers Rexroth found a solution to
the problem of the one and the many in both moral and metaphysical
terms. His third long poem and his first extended masterpiece, The
Phoenix and the Tortoise, like "The Phoenix and the Turtle," the
mystical poem attributed to Shakespeare, celebrates the erotic union
of opposites. It also reveals a process from despair through erotic and
matrimonial mysticism to a consciousness of universal responsibility.
Rexroth's despair had festered from the loss of his parents
during World War I, the collapse of a humane way of life that he had
taken for granted as a child, the disillusionment of growing up in a
predatory society, the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927, the
rise of Fascism, the Depression, the Moscow Trials, the Spanish Civil
War, and the death of Andrée in 1940, at the outset of World War II.
Ecstatic experiences from time to time, however, had reaffirmed his
intuition that the universe is, after all, harmonious in some
inexplicable way, an intuition that seemed to be confirmed by
mystical writings that influenced his own. The personalism,
sacramentalism, and sense of responsibility in The Phoenix and
the Tortoise clearly come from Christianity, but Buddhism is
also, less obviously, a major source, shaping this poem far more than
it had affected Homestead and foreshadowing the preponderantly
Buddhist outlook of later work.
The true person, he argues, is not an isolated self, but a lover in
harmony with the universe. The idea, developed throughout the poem,
is familiar in Christianity; and though compassion is emphasized
more than love in Buddhism, the Bodhisattvah, like Christ, is a
sacrificial savior. Shakyamuni's idea of no-self appears in Rexroth's
allusion, for example, to a waka by the Japanese poet Kintsune: "The
flowers whirl away in the wind like snow./The thing that falls away is
myself." [10]
Rexroth acknowledged the central influence on The Phoenix
and the Tortoise of The Flower Wreath Sutra (Sanskrit
Avatamsaka or Japanese Kegon, after which one of his last
poems is entitled. [11] The ideas of this sutra were said to be so
obscure to Shakyamuni's followers that he soon gave up preaching
them, relying instead on the elementary Four Noble Truths (on the
cause and ending of suffering), the Eight Fold Path, and
Interdependent Origination. [12] In this sutra, the
ultimate reality of creation and destruction is revealed in a grain of
dust or anything else, just as William Blake saw "the world in a grain
of sand." [13] According to Kûkai (Kôbô
Daishi, Rexroth's favorite theorist of Japanese Buddhism), the
Buddha in this sutra preached that each moment is infinite, that
particulars are universal, and that everything is infinitely
interdependent, using images of lamps and Indra's Net. [14]
Over the castle of the god Indra hangs an immense net in which
countless jewels at the intersections reflect one another as well as the
whole, just as mirrors placed around lamps reflect them endlessly,
and just as everything in the universe reflects everything else and the
whole: so each impermanent, insubstantial thing in the phenomenal
world (samsara) reflects the transcendent realm (nirvana) and is
inseparable from it: form is void and void is form.
This theme of universal interaction permeates The Phoenix
and the Tortoise, extending the organic philosophy that Rexroth
had been developing for two decades. In fact, Buddhism
complemented Leibnitz's philosophy of pre-established harmony that
had strongly influenced Rexroth's organicism. [15] Rejecting
the alienating, destructive pressures of modern secular thought and
history, in which each person is reduced to an atomic individual in
perpetual conflict with other individuals, the poet comes to realize,
like a Bodhisattva, his ecological interdependence with all beings,
and his ethical responsibility for all persons, including each war
victim. He is not a lone individual, but participates in all nature and
history, wherever he is, nourished by the entire universe and changing
it with his every act.
Indra's net is behind such images as webs of misery and
accident that unite the poet with all suffering beings, such as the
drowned Japanese sailor lying among other dead creatures on the
Pacific shore, at the outset of the poem (63-65 and 85).
Contemplating geological strata and reading Plutarch, Rexroth
wonders what survives from the waste of history, concluding that
modern civilization is disintegrating in war just as classical
civilization did. Is there a way out? Like Socrates, he doubts each
answer that occurs to him. At one point in his speculations he seems
to agree with Aristotle that "Poetry is more philosophic/Than
history," but always breaks out of the circle of argumentation (65, 67,
68, and 70). Condemning theories of personality and history in which
reason, ego, and will are basic, he discovers the transcendent person
in preparing Passover supper on Easter Eve (66), after which he and
his wife Marthe make love. In half-sleep, he has a vision, inspired by
Jacob Boehme, of the universe as an hour glass in which gold and
silver sands fall and rise from God (72). Christian and Buddhist
images mix as Easter approaches (72-73):
The moonlight of the Resurrection,
The moon of Amida on the sea,
Glitters on the wings of the bombers,
Illuminates the darkened cities.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Amida,
Kwannon, turn from peace. As moonlight
Flows on the tides, innumerable
Dark worlds flow into splendor.
Here the full moon is the image of Dharmakaya (the Body of
Buddhist Truth) in the Flower Wreath Sutra. Amida (the
Japanese name for Amitabha in Sanskrit) means Infinite Light and is
the name of the Buddha of the Western Paradise or Pure Land, the
incarnation of Compassion. Kwannon (or Kannon, Japanese for
Avalokiteshvara in Sanskrit) is the Bodhisattva of Compassion. These
beings turn from the peace of their own enlightenment to save all
suffering beings.
In Part II Rexroth is indignantly anarchistic in the tradition of
Piotr Kropotkin, Mikhail Bakunin, and the Industrial Workers of the
World: "The State is the organization/Of the evil instincts of
mankind." And: "War is the health of the State? Indeed!/War in the
State" (74-75). Extreme shifts of style from exploding epigrams to
sensuous imagery, from ferocious rhetoric to sombre elegy, cohere in
the person of the poet in the poem, a passionate thinker and
contemplative actor. Nearing sleep in frosty moonlight, he remembers
heroes, martyrs, and poets such as Nicias, More, and Abelard who
transcend the waste of history (78).
Waking beside his wife at dawn, in Part III, Rexroth rages again
against the impersonality of history (80-81), in which I-It supplants
Buber's I-Thou. Berating intellectuals who sell themselves to the
State, he ironically contrasts the Sophist Hippias, with the most
salable skills, contending with the wiser Socrates, who sells nothing
(82-83). But why think at all? Dreams may be as true as reason (85).
Finally, in the last, the rising sun of Good Friday reminds
Rexroth of the purity of the universe (87), an idea from the Flower
Wreath Sutra, in which the Sun of Intelligence or Dharmakaya
rises on all indiscriminately, though some beings are in the dark
longer than others, just as plains lie longer in shadow than do peaks.
Buddhist and Christian themes fuse in the finale as the poet meditates
on Schweitzer, to whom the poem is dedicated, and other saintly
persons. Remembering a miraculous rainbow and crosses in the sky
reported by Whymper, the Matterhorn explorer, Rexroth feels the
rising sun focus through him to infinity (91):
Men drop dead in the ancient rubbish
Of the Acropolis, scholars fall
Into self-dug graves, Jews are smashed
Like heroic vermin in the Polish winter.
This is my fault, the horrible term
Of weakness, evasion, indulgence,
The total of my petty fault--
No other man's.
In a powerful affirmation of love and sacramental marriage in
which enlightenment comes erotically, Rexroth celebrates his wife as
a focus of the whole universe. As she comes towards him through the
breakers, nude and singing, the sun illuminates her, the moon, and the
sea, melting ancient ice (91).
The Phoenix and the Tortoise, a glorious contribution to
mystical literature, unites personal experience with the tragedy of
history and the ever-renewing interactivities of nature. Oriental
wisdom renews and expands the familiar Christian message of
selfless love. Rexroth's reply to war, and to human misery generally,
rises from an acute philosophical and spiritual struggle and
culminates in matrimonial bliss that sacramentalizes a profound
vision of the universe. The style ranges from lyrical sensuousness to
abstract argument, and from an elegiac sense of the tragedy of history
to ecstatic symbolism, rich in Japanese lore and allusions, all
sounding from a distinct and compelling voice. [16]
The Dragon and the Unicorn (1952)
Rexroth compared the tone of The Dragon and the
Unicorn, his longest poem, to that of Mark Twain's travel
writings17; but in Rexroth's poem, along with satirical passages
reminiscent of Innocents Abroad, there is more abstruse
philosophizing about the political and religious complexities of
European history, focussed on the meaning of love, than Twain would
find palatable. Rexroth's personality has grown more complex in this,
his fourth long reverie, than in his earlier work, in particularized
responses to the cold war and atomic terror in Europe and America as
well as in the comprehensive development of the worldview
delineated in The Phoenix and the Tortoise, which it closely
resembles also in the natural style of direct statement. The idea of
community, hitherto expressed abstractly for the most part, is
concretized in The Dragon and the Unicorn in encounters
with friends in Europe trying to recover from two world wars and
under the threat of a third. Rexroth is more active, and interactive, in
this poem than in any other of his entire career. Returning to
California mountains, he re-enters the wilderness to contemplate
organic forms as raccoons stare at him from a campfire. Man of
nature, sophisticated traveller, dialectical philosopher, anarchistic
polemicist, and visionary lover are fused in the person intimately
speaking to us.
The poem begins with the question of love, asked by Pilate as
he washes his hands. In Part I, as Rexroth crosses America by train
from San Francisco to New York, and then tours England, part of it
by foot--Liverpool, Wales, Shropshire, Tintern Abbey, Bath,
Somerset, Stonehenge, London--he searches for the answer that
would bring spiritual renewal to a world wrecked by two world wars
and preparing for another. Pilate's amorality characterizes those who
rule the world, denying the creative power of interpersonal love.
Recalling the Buddha's Fire Sermon (95), Rexroth suggests that the
way out of world catastrophe is an erotic path of enlightenment
familiar in Tantra, though it was considered heretical by other
Buddhists. He lists seductive women linked with Shakyamuni (98);
he suggests the union of the Buddha's compassion and Tara's wisdom
in a traditional image derived from Tantric mandala of
yabyum, or sexual yoga (214-15); and he lists additional
male/female polarities in major world religions: Kali and Shiva,
Artemis and Apollo, the Shekinah and Jehovah, Mary and God,
Magdalene and Christ (274).
From Nirvana of enlightened union to Samsara, illusory
experience that is usually taken for granted as the "real" world,
Rexroth's attention swings back and forth. Vacant lots in Chicago
remind him of Andrew Marvell's deserts of eternity (97), and when
he tours England, bombed-out shells of Liverpool remind him of the
fall of Rome (100). Poverty, war, the collapse of civilization are
consequences of the amoral use of human beings as means to an
abstract, impersonal end. They are not respected as persons but are
instead made to serve history under the illusion that time is abstractly
objective, linear and atomic, rather than an organic dimension of
human experience. When time is made to dominate life, extreme
dehumanization is represented by the logical positivist, who rejects
the truth of any experience that cannot be scientifically verified and
who denies the wholeness of organic process by categorically
separating fact from value. Modern science, technology, and politics
conspire to quantify persons.
Against this worldview, Rexroth's basis for renewal is the sense
of reality as communion among persons. The image of Indra's Net
from The Flower Wreath Sutra, introduced in The Phoenix
and the Tortoise, generates this remarkably intricate conception
of universal interpersonal mutuality (108):
Each moment of the universe
And all the universes
Are reflected in each other
And in all their parts and
Thence again in themselves
As a concourse of persons, all
Reflecting and self-reflecting
And the reflections and the
Reflective medium reflecting.
So the self or ego, as the Buddha taught, does not exist in itself but is
only a perspective on other perspectives; and the person, inseparable
from the creative process itself, is responsible for the universe (112-
13). Rexroth had arrived at this conclusion in The Phoenix and the
Tortoise, but here the idea is ontological: being is ethical. Reality
is responsibility because a person is the universe he or she creates: or
in terms of Vedanta, Atman is Brahman, Thou Art That! The
universal responsibility inherent in mutuality implies that all creatures
have Buddha-mind (118). Love turns out to be the act of creation and
evaluation itself (121), exemplified as this poem, a reply to Pilate's
cynicism.
In Part II, the poet feels an immense ethical burden from the
waste of human exploitation. Hearing the popular song "La Vie en
Rose" again and again as he travels through France, he suffers
memories of failed or broken love (123-24); and along with the pain
of his own loss, he feels the agony of history as he recalls the
Inquisition as well as the recent war (141). Wherever he goes, he is
reminded of repression and waste. How can a man of conscience
endure? Must he empathize with each individual sufferer as a
Bodhisattvah renounces Buddhahood for himself in order to help
humanity find enlightenment? In lieu of this extreme commitment,
Rexroth's alternative is to seek transcendence through the
contemplative practice of erotic love, which sacramentally
universalizes the person (154).
In Part III, as if in fulfillment of this idea of love, his third wife,
Marthe, conceives a child as they tour Italy together. As in previous
sections, philosophizing is interspersed with anecdotal passages
satirical of depersonalizing forces such as American capitalism, leftist
intellectuals, the Vatican, and all states (207). As the poet talks with
wealthy intellectuals and poor workers, epigrams become more
compressed. Love is defined as "mutual indwelling/Without
grasping" (158): "A Person is a lover" (160). He denounces the
perversions of modern marriage, based upon commodities (167-68),
and the antisexual repressiveness of the Catholic hierarchy (182). The
orgiastic communion of Tantric and ancient Hebrew religions was
based upon a community of lovers, which is Rexroth's idea of God
(170-75). And when he asserts that all experience is that of a
"Contemplative immersed in/Contemplation," he suggests that each
Person is intrinsically though unknowingly a Buddha (176).
Community is always threatened by "collectivity," reducing
persons to numbers as the state and prevailing economic systems,
both capitalistic and communistic, do. In a world of political and
military regimentation, technological coercion, and war, true love is
subversive, cultish, in perpetual opposition to the dehumanizing
illusion of collectivity (191). Believing in the lie of the state, people
allow themselves to be coerced, depersonalized, and destroyed. The
only alternative to despair is to love, conscious of the love of others
(222).
In Part IV, while passing through Switzerland, Rexroth
denounces the obscurantism of Karl Barth's theology and Jung's
psychotherapy (226); and in Paris, reflecting on failed revolutions as
communities destroyed by collectivities, he rejects the Marxist idea
that the proletariat as a collectivity can usher in the good society
(230-32). He finds radical workers of sensibility and talent who are
not, however, about to sacrifice themselves at the barricades for
remote, impersonal objectives (236-41). Their ideology is less
important than their respect and affection for one another.
In the final section, back in America, traveling alone from the
East Coast to California, he stops in Chicago and Kansas City long
enough to look up a couple of girl friends and to rail at the Protestant
ethic (253). Out West, beyond civilization founded upon the denial of
love, his thoughts travel "beyond the mountains" as he sits peacefully
in a mountain cottage where he and his first wife had been poor and
happy artists, lovers, and contemplatives (265).
Why the title? The dragon, symbolizing good fortune in the
world for the Chinese, and the unicorn, symbolizing the mystery of
erotic and spiritual love for European Christians, unite in the worldly
and otherworldly wisdom of the poem (104).
The Dragon and the Unicorn is a major effort to work
out a coherent worldview, an original fusion of insights from major
religions, but concludes like all of Rexroth's long poems in visionary
experience beyond abstract speculation. The sustained interior
monologue, which often becomes critical dialogue as every idea is
vigorously tested, reveals an uncompromisingly conscientious person
who lets nothing unexamined slip past. Debating other intellectuals or
making love to women in bombed out slums of Europe or in
unspoiled mountains of California, he articulates the universal in the
particular, the mutuality of existence in each observation. Christian
themes of communion, moral responsibility, holy matrimony, and the
universal community of love are realized more fully than in any of his
other poems, in the context of the creative process of nature,
imagined through Buddhist imagery: so transcendence is experienced
in immanence, and immanence is transcendent. He has expanded his
mastery of thought and language, here, generally, in 7-9 syllable
lines, even beyond the accomplishments of his preceding poems.
Epigrammatical, rhetorical, and philosophical passages are as
memorable as sensuously lyrical and elegiac lines.
Having fulfilled his aims in writing this kind of dialectical
poem, Rexroth then abandoned the western mode of philosophical
debate in his next long reverie, The Heart's Garden, The Garden's
Heart, producing his most sustained expression of pure visionary
experience.
Go to the conclusion of this chapter
Go to the contents page
Copyright © 2000 by Morgan Gibson
Light and Dust Anthology of Poetry
|
....
|