This coming Friday I'll be speaking, along with Harvard's Patrick Pritchett, Xavier's Norman Finkelstein, and Duke's David Need, at a panel at The Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900 called "The New Gnostics—Vectors in Postmodern Poetry II." As the name implies, it's part of a Gnostic double bill, following the first "New Gnostics" panel given by Edward Foster, Joe Donahue, Mark Scroggins, and Peter O'Leary. It's a project Donahue, Pritchett, and I dreamed up while having a drink at the National Poetry Foundation's conference in Orono last year, and Pritchett has had the temerity to actually make it happen.
Since O'Leary's at the conference, and my paper is about his work, and since Peter's a great lover of letters, I've written it in the form of a letter to him. Here it is, still a hundred or so words too long for the official format.
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Dear Peter,
What has your
vocabulary done to you? To me? To
us? Or, to narrow it down a bit, to John
Latta, who wrote, a propos your book Depth Theology:
Dysthymia: thymos being Greek mind, and dys-
ascending out of Sanskrit dus- meaning bad, difficult, &c.
O’Leary’s an inveterate neologist: in notes to Depth Theology he points
to various “coinages from taxonomic roots: an apiologist (a word Emerson once
used) is one who studies bees; a parulidologist is one who studies warblers.”
Your
vocabulary also staggered Broc Rossell, who said in the Colorado Review that the lexical “register of Luminous
Epinoia might be the most elevated in American poetry since Hart
Crane.”
You make up a fair number of words,
Peter, and revive many more from the realm of the hapax legomenon, or the deeply buried Greco-cum-Latin-cum-Sanskrit
& Aramaic lexicon.
Of course there are strange words and
there are strange words. I once wrote something about the difference, and it went more or less like this:
Consider “kuboaa,” a word invented by
the great modern Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun, and put into the mouth of the
starving hero of his masterwork, the novel Hunger. For Hamsun's
delirious hero, the word was a pure sound, something outside, even above, the
realm of signifying language. Always aware of the absurd, and with a longing
after purity that led him into some dark corners of the psyche, Hamsun meant for
his “kuboaa” to be a word free from reference. To encounter it was to encounter
something alien, something of untainted otherness. You could say “kuboaa” was
to be the verbal equivalent of one of Kazimir Malevich's paintings of a red
square on a white background: everything familiar was to be left behind in the
encounter with the unassimilated and elemental. Kuboaa was the word of the
modern primitive, the word of regrounding, of beginning again, outside existing
language and away from the freight of civilization.
John Peck's “argura,” is another made-up word, and the
title of his fourth volume of poetry. But it is a creature altogether different
from kuboaa. As Peck writes in the notes to his Collected Shorter Poems,
argura “corresponds to no single Latin word, but rather to elements that derive
from roots shared among several terms.” This is not the neologism as
word-free-of-reference; this is the polysemous neologism, the word that bears
the trace of several meanings, and the weight of several etymologies, but that
remains, finally, elusive. Argentum (silver, or money), argumentum (argument
or evidence), and arguro (to make clear, but also to censure or reprove)
— are all words with relevance to Peck's poetry, and lurking in argura's
syllables. The point of a word like “argura” is not to lift the reader up above
the trails of signification, but to send the reader down those trails in
pursuit of historical and linguistic references. If kuboaa is the word of the
modern primitive, argura is the word of the modern classical, sending the
reader to the word-horde of Latin antiquity.
I take the difference between
a word like kuboaa and a word like argura as a cue on how to read your books,
Peter—and I need cues for your books.
They’re among the most challenging — and most rewarding – books of
poetry by an American poet of your generation (you can use that in a blurb if
you like). No primitive, you, Mr. O’Leary, no primitive, but a poet whose work
twines together classical references, history, and the present.
If this
sounds a bit like Ezra Pound, it should: you come late onto the stage of
modernism, but you belong there, I think — belong, in essence, to the same wing
of modernist poetry as does Ole Ez. His,
after all, is the wing of “make it new”—of the reclaiming of those elements of
the cultural past that lie fallow. It’s
certainly not Marinetti’s futurist wing of “the first dawn is now,” and the
shaking loose from a supposedly burdensome past—still less is it the
avant-garde of denotation-free word art like Zaum or Merz, or the Dada of Hugo
Ball chanting the syllables of “Karawane” at the Caberet Voltaire.
What
exactly do I mean by placing you in “the same wing” of modernism as those
guys? To understand, I suppose we have
to comment on the nature of the “it” in your version of “make it new.” My favorite description of the modernist, and
neo-modernist, project of making it new via ‘argura’ style vocabulary and the
revival of disused words comes from a comment Vincent Sherry made about the
poetry of John Matthias: “On the one hand, the pedagogue offers from
his word-hoard and reference trove the splendid alterity of unfamiliar speech;
on the other, this is our familial tongue, our own language in its deeper
memory and reference.”
What
Sherry says is right, I think, but in your case I would qualify it a bit,
marking out your particular space in the modernist wing of things. In your work you send us not just to
the past as an end in itself, as would a good liberal humanist professor of
literature, a believer in the power of cultural literacy. I mean, you’re a believer, alright, but you
and I both know it’s not some watery liberal humanism in which you believe. What your arcane vocabulary sends us to isn’t
the past in general, but, most frequently and insistently, a particular set of
spiritual traditions: the more heterodox branches of Catholicism, and the
Gnostic tradition, in both its ancient and its perennial manifestations. And in doing so, you’re not just out to
remind us of history, but to redeem time.
Here’s
what I mean. Your most consistent poetic
project, running from Watchfulness,
through Depth Theology and the more
recent Luminous Epinoia, has been
redemptive, and arcane vocabulary and neologistic invention have always had a
role in this project.
Of
course “redemption” is a loaded word,
and when I talk about the redemptive project of your poetry, I’m talking about
the Gnostic sense of the word. As Sean
Martin writes, “redemption”
for the Gnostic, “is not redemption from original sin, which does not exist in
Gnosticism, but is redemption from ignorance.”
Ignorance, specifically, of the divine nature, and its presence within
us. This can mean a deliverance from the
utterly fallen material world, but only for the more ascetic of Gnostics, and I
don’t think you’re one of them. While
some Gnostics emphasize the evil nature of material reality, others emphasize
how our world, which is at a far edge of the Pleroma, many removes from the
divine core of being, is nevertheless an emanation of the divine: an
unglamorous exurb, to be sure, but still a part of the greater metropolitan
area of divinity, if we could only see it as such. You seem more like that sort of Gnostic to
me, like the scribes of the Nag Hammadi texts, who lovingly copied that passage
from St. Paul’s epistle to the Ephesians in which he says “our struggle is not
against flesh and blood… but against the world rulers of this darkness and the
spirits of evil”—that is, against the forces that keep us from seeing the redemptive
light, (in Gnostic terms, the divine spark within us and, in some iterations, in our world).
We see this already in the first
poetic sequences of Watchfulness,
“Ikons” and its subordinate parts, “Ikons,” “The House of My Ikon,” and
“Midas.” Here, you give us first the
gold of Eastern Mediterranean Christian icons, which through an alchemy of
perception convert wooden blocks, egg yolk, and gold dust into the instruments
of spiritual transcendence. You then
give us the King Midas of Greek legend, whose transformative powers are altogether
less impressive, not converting matter into a pathway to spirit, but merely into
other matter, ending with the materiality of gold that is only the beginning of
the icon as instrument of spiritual transformation. The final image of Midas passing a golden
grail (“grail” — there’s a loaded word!) from hand to hand as he “changes it
unavailed/from gold to gold” is a wonderful underlining of the futility of the
merely material world, by the way, and a good exhibit in any case to be made
for you as a Gnostic who would free us from subservience to the rulers who
would keep us locked in the darkness of the merely historical and material.
Anyway. Neologism and linguistic transformation come
into play later in the book, in the three “Jerusalem” sections. Here, we’re amid a lexicon of technical Greek
and Latin, and verbs unknown to the OED.
And we get some important hints about your concern with the
transformation of vocabulary when you reference the word “shibboleth” and the
phrase “brightness fall from the air”—the first reminds us of how the inability
of the Ephraimites to pronounce the “sh” sound, and their consequent slaughter
by the Gileades when they inadvertently said “sibboleth”; the second refers to
one of the greatest typos in the history of English poetry, when Thomas Nashe’s
description of the effects of the plague, “brightness falls from the hair,” was
accidentally reset into a much more memorable line. Both remind us of the power of linguistic
transformation, whether political or literary—and in the “Ephphatha” section,
we see the spiritual power of linguistic transformation.
“Ephphatha,” as the contextualizing passage
from the Gospel of Mark you were kind enough to quote as an epigraph makes
plain, is the Aramaic word Christ used to mean “opening” or “be open,” or “be
thou open”— though in your quote it appears as “Ephpheta,” a variant translated spelling. And this is a hint of what is to follow, when
we delve into the possible etymologies of the word: a Greek transliteration
from Aramaic, a Greek transliteration of Hebrew, a Samaritan’s attempt to speak
a Hebrew word, and so forth. We read,
too, about St. Jerome’s idiosyncratic apprehension of the word, morphing
“eppheta” into “adapirire”—the inadvertent making of new words from old playing
into the opening and closing of spiritual possibilities.
And
here we come close to an understanding of the role of linguistic revival, argura-style
neologism, and raids on the Mediterranean word hoard in your Gnostic poetics. Let
me get at that role by describing a temptation I feel, and resist, when reading
your work.
I’m
tempted to say you believe in the imagination as a divine force. When you titled your book Luminous Epinoia, you were making an
obscure reference to The Apocryphon of
John, in which the ‘Luminous Epinoia’ is a term for an old Gnostic trope,
the “creative or inventive consciousness sent to Adam by God in the form of
Eve,” (Eve, in many Gnostic texts, is the seeker of knowledge, and her plucking
of the fruit from the tree a redemptive act, rather than a sin). Me, I’m immersed so thoroughly in Romanticism
that I can’t help seeing the idea of the luminous epinoia as similar to
Coleridge’s notion in the Biographia
Litteraria, when he defines the imagination as “a
repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I
AM” and the conscious poetic act as “an echo of the former.” But there’s something different. Coleridge speaks of creativity as an echo of
the divine. You do, too, I think—but
you do so in a vocabulary that specifically references the Gnostic spiritual
tradition. And this leads me to resist
the temptation to say you simply see the imagination as divine. Because, unlike Coleridge, you approach the
issue through an arcane vocabulary that refers back to spiritual traditions, I
think it’s better to say that you don’t see the individual imagination as
divine, so much as you see a specific-yet-perennial tradition of imaginative
acts as laying us open to the revelation of the divine. It’s not as if your work is telling us
“invent, and be like God!” — it’s more like your work is pointing us to a long,
wayward tradition, and saying, a propos
that tradition, “be thou open.”
*
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| Peter O'Leary, drawn by Tim Leeming, 2012 |
