Dove Sta Memoria:  Part 3

Jack Foley

Question:

There is an idea current that for the last 100 years poetry has been less spiritually self—aware? For instance, is the work of Williams less spiritual that the work of Dickinson? or is it just less obvious? Isn't spirituality what you do, not how you do it?

To what extent is your poetry about obsession?  How much of poetry in generally is about obsession? Is there any difference between obsession and possession in poetry? Does the poet become so obsessed that he becomes possessed, or is it the other way around, that possession drives the poet toward the other of his or her obsession?

What is the other? How essential is the existence of the other to your work? I'm not necessarily speaking about a potential audience, though that might be included.

Response:

I wrote in answer to the last question, “To judge a poem experientially is to move poetry towards religion—a space it may well have inhabited ‘originally.’ The Greek notion of the ‘maker’ is an esthetic notion; it removes the poet from the realm of religion and places him in the realm of the craftsman.” It seems to me that part of the struggle of poetry “for the last 100 years” has been to regain its relationship to the spiritual. This issue was raised but never resolved by the Romantic poets; we inherit the problem but are no closer to a resolution. I begin my poem, “Requiem,” with a question: “how does one name the holy?” However much an ideology of “individualism” may emphasize the unique experience of any given person, religion maintains a stubbornly public aspect. Are there, in a phrase Melville used in Billy Budd, “forms, measured forms” which make it possible to connect private experience with public? The issue of a poem’s “accessibility” is an aspect of this question. The simultaneous marginalization of poetry and imaginative deadness of available communal forms remains an issue for current poets as it was for Blake, Shelley, Yeats, and many others.

In his book, Spirit Matters Rabbi Michael Lerner tries to occupy the gap between individual experience and communal form—and to bring them into contact. “Spirit or God or Highest Reality,” he writes, “is the phenomenon that allows us to transcend the human tendency to act out on others the pain that has been acted upon us and thus to break the ‘repetition compulsion.’ To speak of that capacity to transcend and break the repetition compulsion and become embodiments of generosity and love and goodness is to talk about Spirit.” “God,” he asserts, “is the Force of healing and transformation. God is the Force that is the ultimate freedom of the universe, that which constantly allows us to transcend all that is.” He tells his reader “to leave behind all the visions of God or Spirit as patriarchal, authoritarian, judgmental, coercive, angry, spiteful, or anything of the sort”: “Why waste your time trying to argue against a ‘god’ that doesn’t exist?”

The issues Lerner raises are issues for poets as well as for others. But Lerner is aware that his formulations are little more than a first step. Rilke’s “Archaïscher Torso Apollos” is equally an attempt to regain a balance between public expression (Rilke is looking at a statue) and private response. But, as Rilke knows very well, Apollo is the god of a religion in which, at this point, no one believes: longing to produce words that have the transformational power of direct revelation, Rilke produces instead “merely” a great poem. Is the poet experiencing the god—or is he experiencing “merely” a work of art: a statue? That is a question the poem simultaneously raises and avoids.

There is an obsessive element to Rilke’s poem as the poet keeps coming back to the statue, questioning it, considering it. In “Further Remarks on the Defence Psycho-Neuroses,” Freud writes, “Obsessions are always reproaches re-emerging in a transmuted form under repression—reproaches which invariably relate to a sexual deed performed with pleasure in childhood.” In “An Outline of Psychoanalysis” he adds, “Two components are found in every obsession: (1) an idea that forces itself upon the patient; (2) an associated emotional state.” “A sharp distinction between ‘obsessive acts’ and ‘ceremonials’ is not to be expected,” he goes on in “Obsessive Acts and Religious Practices”: “as a rule an obsessive act develops from a ceremonial...A ceremonial begins as an act of defense or security—as a protective measure...The neurotic ceremonial consists of little prescriptions, performances, restrictions, and arrangements in certain activities of every-day life which have to be carried out always in the same or in a methodically varied way.”

All this is relevant both to poetry—with its repetitions and ceremonials—and, more specifically, to Rilke’s poem, which clearly contains an erotic (indeed, homoerotic) element: “into the bright groins where the genitals burned.”

Throughout the main action of William Burroughs’ novel,  Queer, the central character, Lee, is sexually obsessed with a man Burroughs names “Allerton.” The author himself experienced such an obsession (given Burroughs’ “junky” persona, one might call it an “addiction”) which furnished him with the material of the book. Yet the older Burroughs who writes an introduction to Queer forty years after the events with which it deals discovers that the book is not so much about sexual longing as it is about the making of a writer: “Allerton” represents Burroughs’ longed-for audience, and the writer’s “routines” are a kind of performance art addressed to that audience:

In Queer, Lee [Burroughs] addresses [his] routines to an actual audience. Later, as he develops as a writer, the audience becomes internalized. But the same mechanism that produced A.J. and Doctor Benway, the same creative impulse, is dedicated to Allerton, who is forced into the role of approving Muse, in which he feels understandably uncomfortable.

What Lee is looking for is contact or recognition, like a photon emerging from the haze of insubstantiality to leave an indelible recording in Allerton’s consciousness. Failing to find an adequate observer, he is threatened by painful dispersal, like an unobserved photon. Lee does not know that he is already committed to writing, since this is the only way he has of making an indelible record, whether Allerton is inclined to observe or not. Lee is being inexorably pressed into the world of fiction. He has already made the choice between his life and his work.

If the center of your work is transformation, you must have something to transform: thus the necessity of the “other,” the “audience.” “No one is ever really alone,” Lee remarks. “The difficulty is to convince someone else he is really part of you....” And then later: “‘If I had my way we’d sleep every night all wrapped around each other like hibernating rattlesnakes ...Wouldn’t it be booful if we should juth run together into one gweat big blob....” Allerton is given “the horrors” by Lee’s suggestion, but the point is clear enough: Lee is trying to transform Allerton into himself: he is trying to take something which exists outside himself, something “public”—Allerton—and turn it into an aspect of his own consciousness. He is telling Allerton, “Du mußt dein Leben ändern.”

If such a project suggests, as Burroughs puts it, that “Lee is being inexorably pressed into the world of fiction,” it also suggests Paul’s experience on the way to Damascus. (“Du mußt dein Leben ändern” = “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”) Burroughs’ book is a ceremonial, a “protective measure” (the potentially dangerous “other” becomes, reassuringly, an aspect of oneself), a ritual, a fiction: a myth. Becoming a book, the author’s experience becomes more or less  fixed, something equivalent to “performances, restrictions, and arrangements in certain activities of every-day life which have to be carried out always in the same...way.” “What happened” to Burroughs has been transformed into the artifice and repetition of myth: whatever the actual “facts” of the matter—and no matter how much Burroughs’ actual memory may be failing him—in the book, Burroughs and “Allerton” have merged into “one gweat big blob.” The obsessive impulse keeps a person who may not be there at all—or who is only partially there, like Rilke’s statue—in living, actual presence. Obsession is in this sense a mode of memory.

Jack Foley