The Orphic Voice, page 2
Steiner says, quite helpfully, that The Orphic Voice is “a book by a poet for poets . . . being itself a kind of sustained argumentative poetry.” Sewell would add that we are all poets (though not necessarily very good ones, she would inevitably put in, wickedly), because poetry is how the mind works. Indeed, going further with the Ovidian undercurrent, poetry is how the universe works. Neither we—nor perhaps Orpheus and his poets—have begun really to grasp the nature, the full capacity, the power of language.
And now for the promised organizational strategy: As an experiment in what Sewell came to call “cluster thinking,” take a blank sheet of paper, turn it sideways (landscape view) and write Bacon just above the middle of the page, Shakespeare just below that. Put Pico della Mirandola to the left and down, Ovid to the left and up; Hölderlin, Novalis, and Goethe to the right middle; Coleridge and Victor Hugo to the right and up, along with Edgar Allan Poe, and then drop Teilhard de Chardin with a dotted line down to the right and in parentheses. Go farther into the lower right and put D’Arcy Thompson and Ezra Pound. Now put Milton near Bacon and Shakespeare, to the right middle, and Giambattista Vico to Milton’s right. Over Bacon and Shakespeare, Sir Phillip Sydney and his foil Thomas Sprat; and under them George Puttenham and Henry Reynolds. Now stare at what you’ve done. This is how she is thinking. And all of this is unfolding Orpheus.
For the next cluster, out of The Orphic Voice Part Three, on a fresh sheet of paper begin with Erasmus Darwin and Goethe in the center, reach back left to Ovid once more, and forward right to Coleridge and Emerson, once more, and on to D’Arcy Thompson and Polanyi—and note the constants. Add in Charles Darwin and T. H. Huxley to the right and up, and Novalis and Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve below them. Go to the left and up for Bishop Warburton and Thomas Taylor, and left and down for Carolus Linnaeus and his critic Michel Adanson. Left middle for Swedenborg and Vico, and still farther to the left for Pico and Bacon. For Part Four, you have a simpler task, as this section is completely dominated by Wordsworth. But you will also want Rilke in the center, with Coleridge, Hugo, and Ernest Renan to the right. Again, reach back left to Ovid, and indeed Milton. Add in Shelley and Goethe, below left, and you’re done.
In sum, whenever you feel yourself getting lost in The Orphic Voice, stop and do a cluster diagram. Not on lined paper, however— and never, never on (Cartesian!) grid paper. You want an open page for the imagination; lines that loop are likewise encouraged.
But now, if you really want to challenge your mind, place your three cluster diagrams in a pile so that you have, in effect, a three-layered map. Then imagine that pile blown up into a three-dimensional space. This is the mental space of The Orphic Voice, and on any given page, Sewell is likely to jump to any given point within that space. This would be one definition of a maddening— and transformative—text.
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If, to close these reflections, we ask who is doing Orphic work today, I would answer that one of the most promising places to look is to the biologists—more specifically to those developing the discipline of biosemiotics. I think especially of the work of Jesper Hoffmeyer and Kalevi Kull, both of whom build on the Thomas Sebeok’s reading of Charles S. Peirce. This progression would have pleased Sewell greatly in one way and deeply distressed her in another. That semiotics and the investigation of language should become central for biology would have made total sense to her. That nature was itself language, and human language fully nature and biological, also would have made total sense to her. But that biology had gone to philosophy rather than to poetry for guidance—this she would have found distressing, in a curiously partisan fashion, almost as if she had found her friends cheering for the wrong soccer team. For in the quarrel between the poets and the philosophers she was, despite her love for Polanyi, always reflexively and passionately on the side of the poets.
Also deserving mention here is that cluster of disciplines investigating the Anthropocene, geographers and geologists in particular (geosemiotics). Which is especially interesting given that Orpheus returns to the elements at the last. And of course Ovid begins the Metamorphoses with the world emerging from the elements—a mythic symmetry here, as we will, by the end of The Orphic Voice, expect.
Before land was and sea—before air and sky
Arched over all, all Nature was all Chaos,
The rounded body of all things in one,
The living elements at war with lifelessness;
But then:
As God unlocked all elemental things,
Fire climbed celestial vaults, air followed it
To float in heavens below; and earth which carried
All heavier things with it dropped under air;
Water fell farthest, embracing shores and islands.
—Ovid, The Metamorphoses, Book 1,
translated by Horace Gregory
Orpheus is alive and stirring among the sciences; very well. But what about poetry? Where are the poets continuing the Orphic line of research in the twentieth century? We have D. H. Lawrence and H. D. quite literally captured by the Orpheus and Eurydice portion of the myth—and to a much more bitter end Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath as well. But it is hard to see a poet who has taken up after Rilke left off. In America, we have A. R. Ammons soaked in science, drawing imagery and frameworks from biology. We have our nature poets W. S. Merwin, Mary Oliver, and Wendell Berry; and we have a new wave associated with ecopoetics who are explicitly addressing the Anthropocene, Evelyn Reilly, Ed Roberson, Forrest Gander, Juliana Spahr, and Jorie Graham among them. But do we have any truly Orphic poets, in Sewell’s sense? I suggest this as an inquiry for the reader to take up after completing The Orphic Voice. For my part, I would say the answer to that question is “Not yet.”
If myth is in some sense, or any sense, shaping the development of our minds, then, it can be argued, as Sewell does, that it has a prophetic dimension—an anticipatory component. The Orphic poet is reading and rewriting or extending a pattern that is already there.
Let us take this up as an invitation, then, and ask what prophecy can be read in the next phase of Orphic unfoldment, if we follow Sewell and take Rilke as the last major Orphic voice, and look at the century that has passed since his final songs. Might we want to say that the Anthropocene is included in the prophetic dimension of the Orphic myth? Or maybe be more precise and note that “metamorphosis” might be a more fruitful mythic frame to approach this enormous shift in the geological record and viability of the biosphere than the term “Anthropocene.” For the inner structure of the Anthropocene is finally that of a myth of the fall. Not hard to imagine, really, that we would be better served by a myth of transformation, of metamorphosis.
Take the Orphic severed head as marking a crisis for our species, maybe even our endgame, but—according to the myth—not the end of Orpheus. How can we imagine such a metamorphosis? No Orphic poet has gone that far—or maybe, more chillingly, they have, and the music is so inhuman (and inhumane) as to be as yet unheard.
Maybe the next Orphic poet is the river itself. Or the wind. The clear truth, I would propose, is that Nature has always been the composer and Orpheus the musician. How does the song go on after the singer returns to the elements? Not hard to grasp, if Orpheus was simply their instrument from the beginning, elements singing through the human. And so the transformation— the emptying out—of Orpheus into the elements, and the return of the song to sky and cave, is actually the restoration of song to its origin point. Song, on loan to Orpheus, now back into the Cosmos: music of the spheres.
And if this is so, the trajectory of our inquiry must shift. We go from “How did human intellect arise from natural history?” to “How does nature use human intellect to express herself?” And perhaps the end of the myth means that nature will find new ways to express herself, once the human singer is gone. Which is surely true. Humanity is not the capstone song but one set of singers along the way. One way station in a series of Ovidian metamorphoses.
All the world—every bit and parcel, every planet and galaxy, every crustacean and ameba, every lichen and fungus—is open to, and communicating with, all that constitutes its umwelt. This communicating is the voicing of the universe that Orpheus taps into and manifests. This is why the trees and animals listen. Yet this much new and concentrated power is a dangerous thing— there is no more constant theme in all mythology than this. Has the sparagmós portion of the Orphic myth not as yet been fully addressed because it prefigured the unimaginable—prefigured the Anthropocene? Metamorphoses brought humans and Orpheus into being. And, as result of metamorphosis, nature will phase us out.
This is a deeper truth of the myth that Sewell’s poets, for the most part, did not move into, as she says, but of which biology and geology are making us most aware. There are clues to this in the apocalyptic mind of Milton. And in Rilke, and definitely Mallarmé. But perhaps Lawrence (an Orphic voice much of his life, I would argue) captures the truths of radical metamorphosis better than anyone else in the Orphic line in this totally amazing passage at the end of Women in Love:
Whatever the mystery which has brought forth man and the universe, it is a non-human mystery, it has its own great ends, man is not the criterion . . .
The fountain-head was incorruptible and unsearchable. It had no limits. It could bring forth miracles, create utter new races and new species, in its own hour, new forms of consciousness, new forms of body, new units of being. To be man was as nothing compared to the possibilities of the creative mystery. To have one’s pulse beating direct from the mystery, this was perfection, unutterable satisfaction.
Huge events we are witnessing: the recognition of Gaia and the Anthropocene, the acknowledgment of the biosphere and the climate emergency. One way to speak of them is to say that they mark the discovery that it is nature that is signing/singing, not Orpheus. And now we wait for next major Orphic poet to come forward, the one who will see/foresee the next metamorphosis! This would be the poet the Anthropocene calls for. The poet who grasps that song is now on the verge of being dispersed into the elements—to the air, water, earth, and fire—Orpheus’s breath going out of him, his head into the river, his limbs scattered across the earth, his lyre rising to join the fiery stars. Perhaps that poet is out there. Perhaps The Orphic Voice can encourage her to come forward.
Sewell closes The Orphic Voice with a set of working poems. In turn, I take the liberty of closing this introduction by offering the reader my figured image of this Orphic poet to hold on to while making your way into this maddening, intimidating, nourishing, enlivening book:
Set Again to the Wheel
Do you read time both ways, old woman,
Eyes fixed on the eternal round?
Show the single imaging power,
Memory and prophecy as one.
Raise before us the wall of fire.
—DAVID SCHENCK
THE ORPHIC VOICE
TO
MICHAEL POLANYI
PREFACE
I HAVE HAD financial help from three sources while writing this book, and it is with deep gratitude that I now acknowledge what I owe to each of them and say “thank you” for it. To take the latest first: the Department of English at the Ohio State University and its Chairman, Robert Estrich, who invited me to come and talk about the work as Mershon Lecturer for the spring quarter, 1958. Next, the Christian Gauss Seminar in Criticism at Princeton University, which I was invited to give by Richard Blackmur and E. B. O. Borgerhoff during the early part of 1957. Last and most of all, the University of Manchester, which gave me a Simon Fellowship for 1955–56 with which to begin the work and extended it most generously later; and my Chairman there, Dorothy Emmet, for her kindness and support. To Michael Polanyi, also of Manchester University, I owe a debt of a kind that does not go into words. To him, as a small enough return for his understanding, encouragement, help, and inspiration, my love and this book. If I were to begin naming here all the friends who have helped me with it by talking and listening about it, suggesting what to read, and arguing for and against the findings, the list would be impossibly long. They will know how much the book is indebted to them, and will, I hope, recognize their faces in it where and if they choose.
I want to say one word about the notes. I have put them at the end so that they will be out of the way, though the references are there if anyone wants them. I have put into them also a certain amount of indirect material and comment, and they can be skimmed through for that.
My grateful thanks are due to the Director of the Insel-Verlag for permission to quote the poems by Rilke and extracts from his correspondence; to Messrs. W. W. Norton for permission to quote from the translation of Rilke’s Letters by Jane Bannard Greene and M. D. Herter Norton; to Messrs. Faber and Faber for permission to use extracts from two works by G. R. Levy, The Gate of Horn and The Sword from the Rock; and to the Syndics of the Cambridge University Press for permission to quote a passage from Dover Wilson’s notes to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, New Shakespeare Edition. Full particulars are given in my Notes in every case.
E. S.
PART I
Introduction
1
For the misapprehensiveness of his age is exactly what a poet is sent to remedy
POETRY is a form of power. It fell to early thought to make that power visible and human, and the story of Orpheus is that vision and that mortality.
The story, as it will be taken here, falls into three parts. First, Orpheus makes rocks and trees move and subdues the beasts by his voice, music being wedded to language and poetry by natural right; next, after the death of his wife Eurydice he goes into the underworld to find her, gaining admittance and the granting of his request by his poetic powers but losing his prize by looking back at her at the mouth of hell, in disobedience of the conditions laid down; lastly, he is torn in pieces by the Maenads, his head floating down the river still singing, in Ovid’s cross-echoes,
flebile nescio quid queritur lyra, flebile lingua murmurat exanimis, respondent flebile ripae.
The head came to rest in a cave, where it prophesied day and night till Apollo himself bade it be silent. The lyre was taken up to heaven to become one of the constellations.
This story seems to say that poetry has power not merely over words and hence over thoughts, but also in some way over natural objects and their behavior, be they animate or inanimate; and to some extent, in conjunction with love, power over life and death as humans know and suffer them; that this power is almost indestructible and may turn, even in its own disaster, to something akin to prophecy. This is not a clear statement. It does not leave the mind resolved, it leaves it wondering: is the claim made by the story in any sense true? if so, in what way? what is the nature of the power and what are its limitations? Mythological statements lead to questions. Then follows something rather strange, for to these questions only the story itself can make an answer. The myth turns back upon itself because it is a question that figures its own reply, and it is that inner movement or dynamic which makes it feel obscure. This kind of unclearness is not muddle or mystification, however, but an indication of method. The myth of Orpheus is statement, question, and method, at one and the same time. This is true of every myth.
The challenge of the Orphic statement, question, and method has not yet been taken up. It seems possible that we may have now, in the context of twentieth-century thought and knowledge, an opportunity to let Orpheus speak. The conditions for this are as follows: first we are to think of myth and poetry, under the figure of Orpheus, as an instrument of knowledge and research. Next we have to formulate the question contained in the myth which that myth is to answer. This can be done in two ways:
What power and place has poetry in the living universe?
or
What is the biological function of poetry in the natural history of the human organism?
Third, we must believe that the Orpheus story has probably been directed this way from the beginning, its constant reappearance forming a tradition of inquiry into this very question, reaching from the time of mythological beginnings to where we are now. We shall not deal with very early times, nor, with one exception, with classical literature. For our own purposes we shall begin with the Renaissance in England and advance from there, following the line of those who mention Orpheus in a significant context. This will not be a catalogue of the myth’s appearances; it consists simply of the references to Orpheus I have happened upon, ranging from major works to a single pregnant sentence. These are the main people: Bacon, Shakespeare, Milton, Hooke, Vico, Linnaeus, Swedenborg, Erasmus Darwin, Goethe, Novalis, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Emerson, Renan, Hugo, Mallarmé, Rilke.
Language and mind, poetry and biology meet and bear on one another in the figure of Orpheus. This myth asks a great question about poetry in the natural world, the central area where language works with and on that most astonishing of biological phenomena, the human mind. The myth provides, in its narrative, a method by which to pursue the inquiry, and each of those great minds just mentioned is, in its relation to Orpheus, a stage in the history of this inquiry. The series consists, duly and properly, of poets and biologists, and it is this series, in their double discipline, that we shall try to follow.
2
Poetry agrees with science and not with logic
LANGUAGE is perhaps the greatest single gift and achievement of the human organism in the natural order. Consequently what we do with language—how we regard it and how we use it—is never indifferent. It shapes our thinking and our attitudes, powerfully and quietly. That is partly why I formulated the Orphic question in two ways, to draw attention to the fact that nowadays we have almost two languages on our hands. I shall call these for the present “language-as-poetry,” and “language-as-science.”
