Since the title of our panel is “Gnostics, Mystics, and
Heretics of the Reagan Years,” I thought I might begin by proposing a kind of
parlor game, in which we take each of the three figures under discussion today—John
Taggart, John Matthias, and Laurie Anderson—and ask ourselves under which of
these categories they fall. I’m not sure
if my co-panelists will want to play, but I do.
And I’ve got it on good authority that the subject of my paper, John
Matthias, has heretical tendencies.
Here’s what Robert Duncan said about Matthias in an undated letter from
the early 1970s:
Matthias is a goliard—one of those
wandering souls out of a Dark Age in our own time… carrying with him as he goes
in his pack of cards certain key cards that come ever into his hand when he
plays: the juggler (as he was to be portrayed later in the Tarot), the scholar
whose head is filled with learning and of amorous women and the heretic
remembering witch-hunts yet to come.
A goliard! Already Matthias is in trouble, the goliards
being clerical students of the middle ages who affirmed the flesh and derided the
corruption of Mother Church. And not
just any goliard, but a goliard Duncan associates with the juggler of the Tarot
(in esoteric decks, a figure for the magus who masters dark arts) and with the
heretic seeing into a future of persecutions.
We may as well call in Torquemada’s inquisition and get this heretic
burning over with. But Duncan is talking
about the Matthias of the sixties and early seventies, and thinking of
Matthias’ political radicalism and of his early obsessions with alchemy and
witchcraft. What of the Matthias of the
1980s?
To ask
about the Matthias of the 1980s is really to ask about three long poems that
form a poetic suite: “An East Anglian Dyptich,” “Facts from an Apocryphal
Midwest,” and “A Compostella Diptych,” written between 1984 and 1990, and
published collectively as A Gathering of
Ways. The general project of the
poems indicates a turning away from the Matthias described by Duncan: they are
attempts of coming to terms with what Matthias called his “post-activist
consternation” and alienation from American life. “An East Anglian Dyptich” is Matthias’
attempt to make a psychological home for himself in England, and “Facts from an
Apocryphal Midwest” represents a similar home-making project in America. This is no longer the radical wanderer, but
the poet in search of stability. Indeed,
“A Compostella Diptych,” takes as its subject the ancient pilgrim routes across
France and Spain to Santiago de Compostella.
It’s an attempt by the post-activist Matthias to come to terms with, and
possibly make himself at home in, both the history of the West and the dominant
spiritual tradition of the West, Catholicism.
But to what
terms does he come? If I were to try to sum up them up, I’d say this: in “A
Compostella Diptych,” Matthias attempts
to present a totalized history of the West and of Catholicism. But he fails to find a happy totality, and
this drives him toward an otherworldly yearning, a yearning for a world beyond
history, an eternal world of free of violence. This is essentially a Gnostic yearning for
some eternal, infinite elsewhere of light, a yearning from which he only escapes at the very end of
the poem.
When I speak of a “totalized history”
in “A Compostella Diptych,” I want to use the term “totality” in a
vaguely Levinasian sense: as something finite, in which diverse elements are
reduced to “the violently pacified empire of Same” or “the counted-as-one” (to
use Dominic Fox’s glosses for Levinas’ “totality”). With regard to history, we
can think of totalization as the opposite of an unending series of discrete
events— the opposite, that is, of Henry Ford’s version of history as “one damn
thing after another”— or perhaps we can think of it as the hammering of such
discrete phenomena into something whole, in which apparently disparate parts
are in fact manifestations of a single force, or repetitions of a single
pattern. We’re on the same page about this if you’re thinking of one of the
most famous passages in the works of Walter Benjamin, which reads:
A [Paul] Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an
angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly
contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread.
This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the
past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which
keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The
angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been
smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings
with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly
propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris
before him grows skyward.
This
is a vision of history as total, and as total disaster. And this very much the vision of history that
Matthias gives us in “A Compostella Diptych.”
It doesn’t seem that way at first,
though. “A Compostella Diptych” begins
with what seems to be a happy of the many pilgrims who have trodden the various
routes through France and Spain to the cathedral at Santiago de Compostella. There’s a barrage of proper names of people
and places: some 41 different proper names in the first 45 lines of the poem. On the face of it, this doesn’t seem like the
writing of a man who would present history as a totality. Nothing, after all, insists on irreducible
specificity more than a proper name.
Indeed, proper names will be very significant at the end of the poem,
when Matthias shakes himself free of a totalized version of history—but I’m
getting ahead of myself. The point I
want to make here doesn’t have to do with proper names, but with a collective
pronoun, “they.” Unlike proper names,
collective pronouns reduce the many to the one, and what we see happen in the
opening of “A Compostella Diptych” is a reduction of the people of different
European nations and centuries into a single, collective, “they”—a
trans-historical subject for the people of Catholic Europe. Here we have the multitudes “counted-as-one.” It doesn’t seem, at first, to be anything but
a joyous affair, a holy journey uniting the many. But this all changes a few pages into the
poem. After Matthias gestures toward the
song of the pilgrims, he adds this:
And there was another song—song sung inwardly
to a percussion of the jangling
manacles
and fetters hanging on the branded
heretics
who crawled the roads
on
hands and knees and slept with lepers under
dark
facades of abbeys
the west portals of cathedrals…
There
is a dissonance in the happy totality of history: those who do not fit, those
who are expelled, despised, oppressed. This is a vision of the violence of the
totality, and soon the history his poem recounts becomes a history of crusade,
jihad, and inquisition, while a small minority yearns for an escape into
timeless peace. Indeed, history becomes
totalized in a new way—as Benjamin’s totality of “one single catastrophe which keeps
piling wreckage upon wreckage.”
Matthias creates a sense of this
catastrophic historical totality through four main techniques. I call them
coincidence in place; rhyming actions; musical refrain; and musical reprise.
Coincidence
in place presents history as total catastrophe by giving us a series of almost
archeological sections in which the same geography hosts similar events over
time. For example, Matthias shows us Charlemagne’s minions slaughtered
during a crusade in Spain. These events coincident in space with
later massacres of the Spanish Inquisition centuries later, and with still
later massacres perpetuated by Napoleon in the Peninsular War. We dig into the history of particular places,
and, like Benjamin’s angel, see only wreckage piling upon wreckage.
By “rhyming actions” I mean
historical events that Matthias presents as essentially parallel. Notable among these is the fate of the
cathedral bells of Santiago. Early in
the poem we see these hauled away by the conquering armies of Islamic Spain
under Almansor, who hangs them upside down in his great mosque and uses them as
candelabra. Much later in the poem, and
in history we see Alfonso VI of Castile sack the mosque and take the bells back
to Santiago, installing them in the cathedral for their original use. The
effect of these actions, which echo one another, is to remind the reader of
conflict, and of the hubris of conquerors, as the constants of history.
There are many refrains in “A
Compostella Diptych,” but among the most resonant refrains is the phrase
“darkness fell at noon.” We hear it at
many moments in the poem when political disaster falls. The refrain not only serves to unite these
moments—it also connects those moments to more modern disasters. Darkness
at Noon is, after all, the title of Arthur Koestler’s novel about the evils
of Stalinism.
Musical reprise is a technique quite
common in opera and musical drama, but unusual in poetry: the passing of the same
lyrical part from one voice to another in different contexts. A number of different passages get a reprise
in “A Compostella Diptych,” but the most insistent one is Charlemagne’s dream
of war, an 18-line passage lifted from the Chanson
de Roland. We’re first given it as a
prophetic dream in the mind of Charlemagne, but we hear it again, in whole or
in part, in the voices of other characters (notably Aimery Picaud, the chronicler
of the pilgrim routes, and John Moore, the English general killed while fighting
Napoleon’s armies at Corunna), or with reference to other conflicts, including
modern acts of terrorism by Basque separatists.
The effect of the reprise is to make all of history into Charlemagne’s
nightmare of war—a nightmare from which we seem unable to wake up.
Not that some characters in
Matthias’ poem don’t try. Accompanying
the long nightmare of history recounted in “A Compostella Diptych” is another
story, a story of Gnostics who long for a world beyond this broken, bruised,
and evil one in which we seem perpetually imprisoned. This group includes the historical Gnostics
and heretics of the times and places covered by the poem (Cathars, Albigensians,
and the like). But Matthias interprets
Gnosticism broadly, and includes in it the Eleusinian mysteries, the
practioners of the medieval Trobar Clus, and the Sufi mystics of Islamic
Spain. He even includs Ezra Pound,
wandering as a young man through the south of France, and dreaming of a light
beyond the nightmare and wreckage of history.
There is much in “A Compostella
Diptych” to indicate that Matthias would join with the Gnostic tradition,
especially in the poem’s final section.
Here, Matthias presents us with a moment where we seem to leave history,
and indeed this world, behind, in an intersection of the timeless with time. The occasion for the intersection is the
explosion of an enormous Spanish armory, an explosion that shakes foundations
and, from many miles away, creates shockwaves that ring the Santiago cathedral
bells, the same ones that had been hauled away by conquering Moors and hauled
back by crusaders. Now, we’re told
Men
whose
job it was to ring them stood
amazed
out in the square & wondered if this thunder
and
the ringing was in time for Vespers
or
Nones or if it was entirely out of time…
As it
turns out, it’s the latter: the explosion is followed by a stillness that
Matthias identifies with the silence before the existence of time. We are taken
to a place of stillness “As it was…in the silence that preceded silence” when “there
were neither rights nor hopes nor sadnesses to speak of,” where “in the high
and highest places everything was still.”
We’re outside of time, and certainly outside of the totalized,
catastrophic history with which the poem has presented. Indeed, inasmuch as we are in some boundless
place, we have escaped totality, and encountered the infinite.
Another kind of poet would end
things here. Indeed, a properly
modernist poet would end things here—gathered into the artifice of eternity (as
in “Sailing to Byzantium”), or purged of worldliness by fire (as in “Little
Gidding”). But Matthias doesn’t. Instead
of turning from the world of history, he returns to it—in fact, for the first
time in the poem, he enters history by name, appearing with his wife Diana on
the pilgrim trails. Here’s the passage:
Towards
Pamplona, long long after all Navarre
was
Spain, and after the end
of
the Kingdom of Aragon, & after the end of the end,
I,
John, walked with my wife Diana
down
the Somport Pass following the silence
that
invited and received my song
It
goes on, in prose saturated with more proper nouns—29 in 21 lines—to describe
John and Diana “blest and besotted” in Spain, and in their moment of history. Escape to a timeless realm would be the
Gnostic’s happy ending, but the true spiritual tradition informing “A Gathering
of Ways” turns out to be something rather different, the best analog for which
is the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. For
Levinas, the encounter with the unbounded or infinite is not an end in itself:
rather, it returns us to experience with a sense of both wonder, and an
invitation to enter into dialogue with the world. And this sort of return and invitation is
what we get in “A Compostella Diptych” when Matthias appears in the historical
terrain of his poem, and when the silence “invite[s] and receive[s]” his song.
It’s important to note the role of
proper names here, because it underlines a slight difference between Matthias
and Levinas. For Levinas, the encounter
with the infinite comes about through confronting a human face, in all its
particularity. For Matthias, though, the
encounter with the infinite is with something still and silent and beyond
us. But the effect of that encounter is
to return us to the world of specific people and places, the world of proper
names—and to show us that this world is not reducible to some totalized history
of catastrophe. Particularity trumps
totalization at the end of the poem, as a litany of proper names unassimilated
into a grand pattern of catastrophe leaves us blessed and besotted. In the end, it is this return that prevents
Matthias from being a Gnostic. As much
as he is fascinated with that tradition, he can’t join it: he is too much in
love with all of us who can be named.