The Orphic Voice, page 20
Science, myth, and poetry are never far apart. It is instructive to see how readily great scientists drop into poetry, especially when deeply moved by some idea which they have had—that is to say, by a great new field of unexplored relations to which they for the first time see an entry. One recalls Kepler in astronomy and his great outburst;36 Sir Ronald Ross in medicine; Alfred Russell Wallace, who appends a poem to the end of his chapter “Colours and Ornaments Characteristic of Sex” in Darwinism,37 a poem peculiarly interesting because it treats its subject, the marvelous adaptation and structure of a peacock’s feather, as a word in Nature’s poem—a poem on Nature as poetry, in fact. That the poems are not great poems does not matter in the slightest; the impulse is right and is immensely valuable evidence that science and poetry are potentially convertible disciplines, evidence which is supported by the lives and activities of so many of the men we are thinking about. The scientists speak to the point, but on the whole by, not of, their systems and methods. It is to the poets we must turn, and here there is an Orphic voice waiting. “Naturforscher und Dichter haben durch eine Sprache sich immer wie ein Volk gezeigt,” it says—researchers into nature, and poets, have always shown themselves to be one race of men through their one language. This is Novalis in 1798.
This young German who lived barely twenty-nine years, from 1772 to 1801, the ardent and holy Novalis as Emerson calls him, was a poet, lawyer, administrator, and something of an expert on mining, besides being a passionate student of mathematics, physics, chemistry, and philosophy. Novalis knew Bacon’s work, but it seems almost as if by divine accident that he completes it, as far as Orpheus is concerned. He perfects the great figure Bacon shadowed forth but could not fulfill, Orpheus as the fusion of poetry and philosophy. In Novalis, Orpheus stands explicitly for both. “Only then when the philosopher takes it upon himself to be Orpheus will the whole enterprise fall into order, into clearly-formed, regular, significant fields, hierarchically disposed,— into true branches of science.” But Orpheus is also poetry: “They [the poets] do not yet realize what powers they hold in sway, what worlds are bidden to obey them. Is it not indeed true that rocks and woods fall in with the music and, tamed by the poets, do their will as our tame animals do ours?” And what appears here in mythological form is repeated elsewhere as more sober theory. “The perfected form of every branch of knowledge must be poetic”; “poetry is the key to philosophy, its aim and its meaning.”38
The saying about scientists and poets having the same language comes from a narrative fragment called Die Lehrlinge zu Sais, the apprentices or novices at Sais. Sais is a place at which are gathered a number of apprentices, under the guidance of a remarkable teacher, learning to understand nature by collecting natural objects such as shells and birds’ feathers and pebbles, making patterns with them, and observing the inner workings of their minds, the whole thing set in a great metaphor of a hidden language to be found out.
This work is one of the great prophetic utterances of the eighteenth century, which bides its time. It is a myth upon taxonomy. Appropriately, we receive our chart or map to this science in poetic form. Because the work is little known here and because it is one of the links in the Orphic chain, I shall spend some time on it. It is in any case very beautiful.
It exhibits in itself the doubling and yet the unity of the Baconian Orpheus, for it has two parts, the one corresponding to philosophy and the other to poetry; there are also a few short notes added at the end which suggest what the completion of the work would have been. The bulk of Die Lehrlinge consists of Part II, which is called “Nature.” This is philosophy, a commentary on the nature of postlogical activity, sometimes in the form of simple exposition, sometimes in dialogue; beautiful in itself, but a commentary only—in short, philosophy. Part I, only about three pages long and entitled “The Apprentice,” is poetry, and to that we shall come after we have summarized what Part II has to say.
Language, Novalis says in the Fragmente,39 is itself a product of the historical processes of organic development. (So Herder had seen it also, fourteen years previously; so Vico too, earlier in the century; and to remind ourselves of this is not to attack anyone’s originality but merely to recall that it is the nature and the task of Orphic voices to say the same thing over and over again, each in his own way.) It is upon this profoundly evolutionary and scientific point of view that Part II is based. The poet first considers language as myth, seeing mythological thinking as an early, highly developed, and specialized instrument of inquiry and knowledge, concerned with the most important questions of all in man’s relationship to nature; he calls this Gestaltenerklärung, the explanation or interpretation of Gestalten (Goethe’s word) or forms (Bacon’s word) in nature. Poetry and folk tales tell of this, as Novalis says in one of his poems:
Und man in Marchen und Gedichten
Erkennt die wahren Weltgeschichten
(And recognize in tale and verse
True histories of the universe).
These show us gods, men and animals at work upon a world in process of being made, with analogy to human life as the best method of interpretation. There is a correspondence between man and nature, and this is seen most clearly in poetry, which is why that art holds a special position among those who want to understand nature. A discussion follows of the differing methods and functions of the natural scientist and poet, with emphasis on the varied ways in which nature can be approached and understood, of which technology is not the least. (Once again we find an Orphic poet asserting poetry and technology as kindred disciplines.) The true postlogician then, as we would call him, will be interested in everything and will go round observing the unconscious poetry that exists in all operations and occupations.
The qualities necessary for this kind of operative understanding of nature are described next: “Long and tireless practicing, a way of looking at things that is both untrammeled and ingenious, sharp eyes for slight indications and marks of significance, an inner poetic life, well-trained senses, a simple and god-fearing spirit.” Then comes a fairy story inserted into the philosophical discussion, a young man who sets off to find the veiled virgin who is the mother of all things, and when he lifts the veil discovers that the goddess is his beloved whom he had left behind, so that the story ends with a marriage and children, or with sex and fertility seen as a means of comprehension. The nature of attention is next examined, an absolute giving of the self to the subject matter and the watching of oneself thinking at the same time as thinking about something else, a marvelous definition which Coleridge would support.40 Out of this come systems, the raw material for all system-makers still to come, a line which has had a few great, indeed divine, voices but which has now lapsed so that we think of nature merely as a machine, a mechanical uniformity. What is needed is a reinstatement of the historical approach, and a realization that it is not only answers to questions that we are seeking, but the questions to which the knowledge we possess is the answer. Only the poets, it is suggested at this point, may have the necessary power. This is where Orpheus is mentioned, and then comes a passage about nature and the mind as the interpretation of each other which looks straight forward to Wordsworth and The Prelude, so we will not stop with it now. Life and living are put forward as the basis of the whole art of interpretation; this is once again expressed in sexual terms, as mating with nature and bringing forth the forms for understanding. And the whole ends with a statement by the Teacher of the Apprentices about what it means to be a true inquirer into, and a teacher of, the ways of nature.
This is the philosophy, and it is remarkable enough; but the brief First Part is better still, for it translates all the discussion into image and action. Here is the beginning:
Men go their several ways, each different from other. Whoever traces these ways out and compares them will find that marvelous figures rise to meet his gaze, figures which seem to belong to that grand cipher and script which is to be found all over the place,— on wings, on the shells of birds’ eggs, in clouds, in snow, in crystals and rock formations, on water freezing, in the inward and outward structuring of mountains, of plants, animals, human beings, in the lights of heaven, in the markings on smooth surfaces of pitchblende or glass, in the patterns of iron filings round a magnet, and in strange conjunctions of chance. In all of these the mind gropes after the key to that marvelous text, its essential grammar and syntax; but the groping will not take firm and reliable shape, and the key is not forthcoming.
We are admitted at once to the great Orphic and Baconian vision of nature as a language. (I have in the above passage borrowed the phrase “the grand cipher” from Emerson, who uses it in just this sense in his essay “Nature.”) The holy text needs no interpretation, a voice says; it is self-subsistent, and can only be interpreted by a living and speaking organism which analogizes it or chimes in with what is being said:
That must certainly have been the voice of our Teacher, for he knows how to gather up the hints which are scattered abroad everywhere. His glance kindles with a peculiar fire when the great runes lie spread out before us and he looks into our eyes to see if in us that star has yet risen which shall make the figures visible and comprehensible. If he finds us sad because there is no illumination in our darkness, he comforts us and promises better things to come for the true and persevering watcher. He has often told us how as a child his passion to exercise and employ and fulfill all his senses left him no rest. He looked at the stars and copied their courses and conjunctions in the sand. He was forever looking up into the sky, never weary of watching its airy expanse and the things that moved there, the clouds and lights. He collected for himself stones, flowers, beetles of all kinds, and laid them in rows, trying one pattern and then another. He paid close attention to animals and to men; he used to sit at the sea’s edge or look for shells. He kept himself always aware of his own feelings and thoughts. He did not know the end to which all this longing was driving him. When he grew older . . . he began to see connections everywhere, to notice meeting-points and coincidences. From now on he saw nothing in isolation. The lore he drew from his senses began to concentrate itself into immense coloured images: he heard, saw, touched, and thought all in one and the same action.
The same characteristics, though in a lesser degree, have brought the apprentices to Sais. Some are then described, particularly a child with a miraculous power of divination in these matters, and then another, an apparent failure.
This one always looked sad; he had been here for many years, but nothing went right for him; he was bad at finding things when we went out looking for crystals or flowers; he could not see far into the distance, had no gift for making striking patterns and rows of specimens. Everything fell to pieces in his hands. But none of us had so strong an impulse to the task, or so much passion for seeing and hearing. . . . One day he had gone off sadly, and then night began to fall and there was no sign of him. We were greatly troubled about him; then all at once, as morning began to dawn, we heard his voice in the glade of trees nearby. He was singing a high and happy song; we were all astonished, and the Teacher looked toward the sunrise, such a look as probably I shall never see again. He came among us before long, bringing with him, with a face full of unspeakable happiness, a little stone strangely shaped, nothing much to look at. The Teacher took it in his hand, kissed the boy dearly, looked at us with tears in his eyes and laid that stone in an empty space among the other stones laid out there, at the exact point where radius after radius of the pattern met and intersected.
Finally the apprentice-spokesman describes himself, one of the unskillful ones, whose especial vision it yet is to see the whole quest in terms of love between man and woman. This, too, is approved by the Teacher as one of the many approaches to the supreme task, the reason why all are gathered at Sais, the unveiling of the hidden goddess. Part I ends thus: “So I too shall describe my own figures, and if it is true, as that inscription up yonder says, that no mortal can lift the veil, then we must strive to become immortal. He who does not wish to lift the veil is no true apprentice of Sais.” As if for a postscript to this, the first of the fragmentary notes at the very end of the work runs as follows: “Someone succeeded in the attempt—he lifted the veil of the goddess of Sais—but what did he see? —He saw—wonder of wonders—himself.”
Novalis provides one other major imaginative clue to his Orphic kinsman Linnaeus. He left an unfinished novel, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, whose subject matter, among all the imaginary happenings, is the vocation of the poet.41 One of the main themes of the book, a famous one, is the quest for the blaue Blume, the blue flower which is also the face of a girl and which has clear and conscious sexual meanings. This is not merely an image of so-called “Romantic” Sehnsucht and emotionalism. To understand it better we have to range beside it Linnaeus’ systematics. He based his botanical classification upon the sexual characteristics of the flowers, their “vegetable loves” as Erasmus Darwin says in Canto 1 of The Loves of the Plants, line 10, to which he adds this footnote: “Linnaeus, the celebrated Swedish naturalist, has demonstrated, that all flowers contain families of males or females, or both; and on their marriages has constructed his invaluable system of Botany.” It is this in Linnaeus which Darwin primarily celebrates, moving on from there to celebrate sex itself in Phytologia as “the chef d’oeuvre, the masterpiece of nature.”
The Orphic mind is active at this point, and we begin to see what lies behind the shift in our prevailing Orpheus figure from that of the ordering of nature to that of the search for Eurydice. This Novalis gives us in the blaue Blume: Orpheus seeking Eurydice, trying to master the universe, life and death, by the power of poetry and in the name of love, which appears here as marriage and fertility. The idea runs all through the second part of Die Lehrlinge zu Sais. In such a form of thinking, sex becomes not merely an object of thought but in some sense an imaginative method of comprehension; one of the great answers, as Novalis says, which nature offers us, and to which we have to try to formulate the question: “die Frage zu dieser unendlichen Antwort” (“Natur,” in Die Lehrlinge zu Sais,)— “The organs of thought are the world’s reproductive system, the sexual parts of nature as a whole.” Elsewhere, as if to complete the circle, he says, “Poetry is generation,” a full and perfect use of all our organs, and thinking is probably very much the same.42
It is difficult for us in this day and age to think freely about sex. In the last fifty years we have exchanged one bondage for another, emancipated from prudery only to be caught in dogmatism. Much of Freudianism in particular has claimed, like Swedenborg, to be the Interpreter, which is disastrous. But if we keep to our own terms of postlogic, we shall realize that what Novalis and Linnaeus have to say is something we have come upon already. They emphasize it newly, but we have already found sex and fertility as part of the working method of postlogic, in our discussion of the Midsummer Night’s Dream and of Bacon’s “generations.” And although we could not deal with this aspect of King Lear, the immense struggle in that work to formulate and free the operation of postlogic may have a great deal to do with the part played there by fertility and sex.
When Linnaeus chose sex as the basis for his taxonomic system, he was moving directly along the Orphic line. He came, like Swedenborg, upon one of the great hieroglyphic keys to the natural universe, and like Swedenborg he has to struggle to make use of it, for to wield an Orphic instrument is no small matter. It is always—and sex is no exception—a method of operation, a myth inseparable from the working mind; not a logic but a postlogic.
5
The poet is not only the man made to solve the riddle of the universe, but he is also the man who feels where it is not solved
LINNAEUS at Adam’s task of naming the living creatures is an endearing figure. He tells us in flashes, as he sees it himself, what he is about; his language has a certain splendor and pride of its own; and he does not consider the task as accomplished once and for all.
