Jake Berry, Species of Abandoned Light
(Pantograph, 1995)
Jack Foley
In an article exploring the tensions between "History and the Study of Literature," Lionel Gossman writes,
"To the philologist, the text is always, in some way, sacred....from the beginning philology has been the handmaid of humanists working on the authoritative writings of the ancients and of Reformers working on the sacred scriptures of the Jews and early Christians. To the philologist, historical knowledge was not an end in itself but a means of restoring authentic texts and gaining accesss to something that lay beyond history. The recovery of original texts and their elucidation by means of historical research were usually thought of not as an acquisition of positive or objective knowledge...but as a penetration of layers of mediation to obtain a kind of knowledge...through which the text's power directly to influence and transform the reader again became effective. The humanists and the Reformers... aimed not at a simple historical knowledge but, rather, at releasing a power inherent in the texts they revered. It was their expectation that the reader of those texts would be transformed by her or, more commonly, his reading.
For such readers the text was not a passive entity or an excuse for explication but 'a living, active power that demands a response'" (Profession 94: The Modern Language Association).
Place next to that quotation some remarks by Edwin Muir on the fifteenth-century Scottish poet, Robert Henryson:
"It was one of those ages when everything, in spite of the practical disorder of life, seems to have its place; the ranks and occupations of men; the hierarchy of animals; good and evil; the earth, heaven, and hell; and the life of man and of beasts turns naturally into a story because it is part of a greater story about which there is general consent. Henryson, like Chaucer, exists in that long calm of storytelling which ended with the Renaissance, when the agreement about the great story was broken...The virtue of the story while it lasted was that it made everything natural, even tragedy; so that while pity had a place, there was no place for those outcries against life which fill the tragic drama of the next age...The sense that all life, whether of the animals or of men, is a story and part of a greater story, is...one of the survivng virtues of Henryson's poetry, strong enough still, in spite of all that has happened since, to produce a composing effect on us and remind us of a standard of proportion which has been lost. It is the virtue of an age, not ours, and it required to embody it a particular form of art, not ours, and in the practice of that art Henryson was almost perfect." (Robert Henryson: Poems, edited by Charles Elliott)
Stories--narratives--abound in Jake Berry's remarkable new book, Species of Abandoned Light, but none of them is a "story" in the sense that Muir means it: "I remember my tail. And the foxman tribe gathered with us on the hillsides to harvest cherries"; "She established the frequencies & the architecture of their collision"; "Through the walls of the vessel I could see hovering in a blue twilight, two pale white bodies, in a funeral repose. Male and Female. She moved first, turning upright in the antigravity, white wings unfolding behind her."
None of these incidents, no matter what their individual "meanings" may be, could even remotely qualify as, in Muir's phrase "the great story." None of them contains or in any way explains the other stories. Though they are narratives, they might as well be individual words or phrases.
Berry's book begins:
serpent orchids
caterwauling zenith
BREAK
bottomless innocence of
despondency
her sex hung
in the next room
grotesquely
-
laughing wheel broken
amnesiac pleasure brimstone hail...bruise
rhythm neartrot
What do those words and phrases have to do with one another? An answer we should be prepared for is: nothing at all. Yet the text is not "nonsense." It is difficult, after centuries of monotheism, to keep those two thoughts simultaneously in mind. We tend to identify the value of a text with its "unity." Without unity, the text seems of little value. We don't mind if something "appears" chaotic so long as it "all eventually makes sense." Berry's text is not like that at all: It is deliberately and fundamentally incoherent--though it is not insane. Berry is not under the delusion that his text makes sense whereas in fact it does not. What he offers us is a momentary glimpse of the fundamental chaos-- the "idiot menagerie," to use the title of his second book--which he understands to be at the heart of the universe. Berry's text allows us to hold our minds, without danger,in the constant perception of a powerful disorder. The pain that perception gives us is indeed--as the passage goes on to say--"seed pain," something fundamental and, in many of its manifestations, terrifying. In Berry's passage, as Othello says, "Chaos is come again." But it is the seduction of this poet's work that he allows us to hold that perception in our minds with deep pleasure and interest rather than with fear. Berry's "chaos"--which he also refers to as "pandemonium" and "idiot managerie"--is the agent, not of despair, but of liberation. "The reader is seduced," he wrote to me once, "into the knowing participation in chaos."
To say this, however, is not to say that momentary states of order-- "stories"--don't exist in Berry's poems or that the poems do not contain powerful unifying elements. It is merely to say that there is no single element--no "great story"--which unifies everything. The title of the book, Species of Abandoned Light, suggests Fallen Angels, and there is much in the book, even in the first poem, to connect us with Hell and the diabolical: "serpent"; "innocence"; "despondency"; "brimstone"; "devil"; "prison." The title of Berry's first book was The Pandemonium Spirit-- "pandemonium," the place of all the demons. (Cf. Desdemona in Othello.) The point of these references is partly the assertion of Berry's identification with an alternative, esoteric tradition--something akin to Blake's "The Eternal Hell." (The Kaballah figures importantly in Berry's work.)
But, beyond this, there is the question of the desire to create a sacred text. (Berry's father is a minister.) In his introduction to The Pandemonium Spirit (BS Propaganda, 1986), Berry writes,
"In these writings and collages some 'other,' the 'rawspirit,' does the speaking. For that reason any attempt to understand this in a linear or logical context will be difficult or impossible. I see pandemonium as a break from the strictures of codified behavior into a liberated existence."
At the heart of Berry's perception of his own writing is the sense that imaginative experience is profoundly other, that it represents a "break"--and the word "BREAK" shows up prominently in the opening poem of Species of Abandoned Light-- "from the strictures of codified behavior." In that realm, the realm of "pandemonium," as he puts it in his brilliant book, Brambu Drezi (the Runaway Spoon Press, 1993), "I vanish and everything is everything / is everything." In dealing with Berry's poetry it is important to understand that the poet is not trying to "deconstruct" anything. Rather, he places himself in a position to receive a sacred text--a text which immediately calls into question his own everydayness: if this is true, then this is not true, or at least is seriously flawed. It is a position similar to Jack Spicer's conception of the poet as a "radio." What is important is not what the poet "knows"-- though he may know a great deal--but his receptivity, his openness: "alive in the dancer's mimicry / hands open / at the splendid / corruption of light."
Henryson's Selected Poems begins with an assertion of the "great story," an assertion of rationality and balance in which "man," as in Aesop's fables, is represented "be figure of ane uther thing":
Thocht feinyeit fabils of ald poetre
Be not al grunded upon truth, yit than
Thair polite terms of sweit rhetore
Richt plesand ar unto the eir of man;
And als the caus that thay first began
Wes to repreif the haill misleving
Off man be figure of ane uther thing.
In Berry's work "man" merges with absolutely everything: "I vanish and everything is everything / is everything." Both Berry and his reader are like the philologists of whom Gossman writes: "The recovery of original texts and their elucidation by means of historical research were...a penetration of layers of mediation to obtain a kind of knowledge...through which the text's power directly to influence and transform the reader again became effective."The point of both reading and writing is to release "a power." It is like the moment in Rilke in which the ancient god--another "abandoned" figure--says to both the poet and the reader (addressing them in the familiar, the way one would speak to a child), "Du mußt dein Leben ändern" ("you must change your life," "Archaic Torso of Apollo"). Again and again we are forced to accept Berry's work on its terms, which are not likely to be our own: "aleph coughs quicksilver sitar collision course / erebus lepton descends isolated rooms where / various orificial doors open and close by khamsin force / or disconsolate banshees walking low hot / gravel roads and fence rows howling...."
As Norman Mailer said once of--I believe--Robert Lowell, "There, head, you have felt a blow." Ishmael Reed has recently asserted that "American poetry has no center" (Airing Dirty Laundry). Poet/critic Bob Grumman echoes him in his discussions of the "manywhere" out of which so much of value has been emerging. Species of Abandoned Light comes from the South, from Florence, Alabama. But it is hardly a "regional" book. It is, literally, coming from everywhere. It is impossible to experience this book without at least partially experiencing the transformation of which it speaks. It is already, for many poets writing now, one of the sacred texts.
Jack Foley
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