No no, I replied, That
is the shape, what is the meaning.
You are the meaning, it said—

Whatever "suffering" may be, it means, precisely, us. The authenticity of language opens the poet to nothing but her own history, but it is not merely her personal history. "Awakened" language has to do with soul history, even universal history: "The world had been created to comprehend itself / as matter," she writes. Language does not "resolve" the poet's anxieties. Rather, it splits her in two: the personal ("I was ready for it; / he was sleeping") and the Other, the one (here called "it") who addresses Hillman as "You." That split, a reflection of the initial split of spirit and matter, radiates out into all the other "dualisms" of her work: "You are the meaning, it said."

Loose Sugar is an attempt, here involving not only Gnosticism but alchemy, to "get behind" the world—in part, to get "loose" from it. (Bright Existence has a poem called "Trapped Light": "I was called out of myself...and in place of the soul's deaf question, was a voice—.") The book opens with two quotations: one from Stephen Hawking on the meaning of "space-time" ("The four-dimensional space whose points are events") and the other from The Nag Hammadi Library, a collection of ancient Gnostic texts which Hillman says "emphasize an inward search for reality, a disjunction between spirit and matter and the soul's individual journey":

                   And what you see outside of you
you see inside of you...

"The Thunder: Perfect Mind"

The interplay between "outside" and "inside" is important in Loose Sugar and in alchemy generally, which, Diane di Prima writes, involves the "doctrine of the correspondence, indeed the identity, of the outer and inner worlds, of the events in the life of man and the changes of the seasons...It is the theory of what Jung calls ‘synchronicity,' presupposing ‘a peculiar inter- dependence of objective events among themselves as well as with the subjective state of the observer' at any given moment. It is, of course, the axiom on which astrology, as well as alchemy...—and all magic—is predicated" ("Paracelsus: An Appreciation," in Alchemy, ed. Richard Grossinger).

For di Prima, this "axiom" indicates "that man, in his most basic sense must be in harmony with the universe." For Hillman, however, man is anything but "in harmony with the universe." "Correspondences" exist, surely—"I looked up from my reading; / the mind is a limitless universe"—but they are as much a reminder of the poet's distance from the cosmos as they are of her connection to it. Gnosticism, writes Jonas, is not about "harmony"; it is about "the plight of the Soul in the labyrinth of the hostile world."

And Hillman's writing is anything but "harmonious." She talks of "the fragmented speaker" of her poems. Short pieces—she calls them "interruptions"—pop up from nowhere; there is an "unfinished" quality to many of her texts, most of which end in dashes. The opening poem of Loose Sugar, "The Spark"—cf. the Hans Jonas quote above—concludes with a powerful affirmation of "correspondence" which is also a kind of invocation of Hawking's cosmological speculations: "all love is representative / of the beginning of time." But the fifth section of the book quotes poet Beverly Dahlen: "A beginning may be imagined but it is not the real beginning." Indeed, the title poem, "Loose Sugar," is preceded by a poem called "Stuck"—not loose—"Tram." "I work a lot with hypnosis and self-hypnosis," Hillman told me, "and when I'm composing usually do some version of a trance to get the image that will inform the poem. That's why they're not altogether sensible or stock images."

George W. MacRae's commentary on the Nag Hammadi Library text Hillman quotes is of considerable interest here. As a "revelation discourse by a female figure," writes MacRae, "The Thunder: Perfect Mind" is "virtually unique in the Nag Hammadi library." Loose Sugar is of course also a "revelation discourse by a female figure," and a Gnostic to boot. But, even more significantly: "The title appears to be double," writes MacRae, "‘The Thunder' is not syntactically related to "perfect Mind' but is separated by a mark of punctuation (:)."

Something similar is going on in Loose Sugar, a book in which doubleness abounds. Each of the book's five sections is headed by two words separated by a long horizontal line. It is a kind of visual poem, with the line separating one "world" from another—as if one were the world of light ("Gnostic Heaven") and the other the world of darkness. These pairings include "space/time," "time/alchemy," "alchemy/problem," "problem/time," and, finally, "time/space." Each of the words resonates throughout Loose Sugar—"problem" includes both "Time Problem" and "No Problem"—but the doubleness does not end there. The titles of virtually all the books and poems Brenda Hillman has produced in the last several years—all the poems in Loose Sugar—are made up of two words: doubleness. (One poem in Loose Sugar transforms the single word "code" into "C ode"—two words.) In passages like this, from "Symmetry Breaking"—a particularly significant title—Hillman leaps dizzingly from one context to another:

         At the beginning of time, matter decided to form clumps to stop
        the symmetry. (Decided is what I believe.) Small groundhog-
        looking dinner roll. Was the Dairy Blend conceived in the
        original flame? The aluminum came off so easily.

                   Panic diagonals
their river-method duck's-head breath

You preferred the park
before the leaves came out

Later was too late for the river fronds
to unbraid the hair of the raven

The moon has two birthdays
you're the personal servant of taillights

                   Spectator of day's finest closing

At dusk you apologize

The colors forgive you because they change

The effects of these mental gymnastics are often brilliant, but they are hardly restful. On my radio show Hillman spoke of love poems "into the yearningness of the impossibility of unity." Despite her occasional moments of sentiment, affirmation and release ("and as he took my hand / I felt the split in nature mend," "Spare World," Bright Existence), Brenda Hillman's most characteristic work is a continual battleground between forces which are in total opposition to one another. And she does not write to "resolve" the opposition; rather, she is determined to demonstrate its universal validity:

                   The agony
that lives nowhere
but in a choice;

each action makes the next one 
more unbearable...

        ("spiral lullaby")

*

In the corner of the heart
reserved for action, a pig is eating
the poppies of hell....

In this sense her work—though at times painful, even an "agony"—is immensely subversive, since whatever it affirms it also tends to undercut. "Twelve Dawns" in Bright Existence is a sequence of eleven poems. "Blue Codices" in Loose Sugar represents the twelve stages of alchemy by a sequence of thirteen poems (each of which, however, has twelve lines). "Gnostic Heaven" in Bright Existence begins, "Impossible to know much, but it seems they thought / heaven was thick." The word "gnosis" means "knowledge." Here it is "impossible to know much." Note the qualification ("it seems"), the interesting line break, and the final, rather startling revelatory assertion: "heaven was thick." These lines veer on the edge of parody—yet we "know" from many assertions that Hillman really is a firm "believer" in Gnosticism.

In What Will Suffice: Contemporary American Poets on the Art of Poetry she refers to "gnostic ideas of inner light," and also suggests "the idea that meaning might yield itself from resistance." Resistance to what? I think the answer is, to just about anything. In a world of "absolute dualism," everything is "resisting" everything else: resisting is, precisely, such a world's mode of interconnection. Yet even resistance has its limitations. In one of the most beautiful poems of Loose Sugar, "Orion's Belt," Hillman writes of "the three mysteries at the start of time":

                   why it happened,
why we suffer,
and how love bothers at all...

When you think of those
you will not touch again
in this lifetime

you own a few points on the one body.
Some made you happy.
Everything else—

the pale sword of the hunter,
the uplifted sandal,

everything else mostly fades
in the folds of heaven—

The line, "you own a few points on the one body" seems slightly at odds with the elegiac tone—opposed to it, perhaps. And the passage ends with a dash, not a period. Furthermore, one shouldn't neglect the qualification offered by the word "mostly." But, all that said, surely the stance here is (momentarily) one of "beyond," to use a word of considerable importance to the book. Even resistance—even "absolute dualism"?—"mostly fades / in the folds of heaven."

Indeed, Hillman herself insists that her dualism, though "absolute," "is kind of mushy and loose": "although the vision in the work is predicated on dualities and oppositions, it is a vision that observes the flow between them rather than insists that the split is what we want. I see it as, you know, those little salt and peppers that are hitched together on airplane meals. They go together, that's how we use them, and because heaven is both here (in us) and also unavailably beyond, this situation is one of unutterable joy as well as agony."

The poems in Loose Sugar are brilliant, honest, touching, erotic, even comic. They give off a light one finds in few other poets. Given her fixation on Gnosticism, Hillman has discovered ways to allow her work to range widely—like loose sugar. Her mind is indeed "a limitless universe."

At the same time, however—and despite her "mushiness"—dualism is always present: every poem is shot through with it. The work she creates out of this dualistic vision is fascinating and often intensely dramatic, but—as I'm sure she would admit—violent polarity is by no means the only way to think about the world. Another Hillman, James, has called for an end to oppositional thinking: "No longer polarity but plurality," he writes in Healing Fiction, "psyche...released...into many worlds." A poetry founded on such an assumption would be very different from what one finds in Loose Sugar. The concluding line of the book is, "Others sang disarmingly among the stars" ("world/axis"). The line is perhaps slightly disingenuous. Brenda Hillman is certainly not singing "disarmingly"; her work is a record of fierce struggle. A few lines earlier, however, she has given us one of her many haunting, resonant phrases: "The feminine might bend the light." It is, I think, a tentative but powerful affirmation of something very strong in her. That same force of mind which brought her this far might well bring her farther. "Psyche...released...into many worlds": mightn't we think of that as "loose sugar"?

Jack Foley