The Orphic Voice, page 38
Figures of the mind may be thought of as being the terminus of one end of the scale of nature. The stars, those infinitely remote elemental fiery powers, are at the other. Between the two lies the whole range of form, in the energy of matter and the energies of mind. Interpretation is given this for its task. So the Orpheus myth ends with two things: the affirmation of the unity of all the forms in nature, between the galaxies and the mythological lyre —the power of the human mind figuring in its own characteristic function of language—which joins them; and there is also the floating, singing head, which is poetry and thinking, prophetic and unquenchable.
9
The world is young: the former great men call to us affectionately
THE ORPHIC VOICE attests a tradition and a method of thinking. The tradition is constant. What is important about it is that it is not history, cold and embalmed, but a living invitation. If the tradition means anything, it means that here is a marvelously adapted instrument for ordinary people to use in understanding their universe and themselves. It can and should enliven every situation in which thinking in words is going on—literature, criticism, education, many more. Indeed they need enlivening. It is not a matter for specialists, but for people, as the voices themselves insist. That is why they have felt their task to be so important.
The method, the postlogic, is a way of using mind and body to build up dynamic structures (never fixed or abstract patterns) by which the human organism sets itself in relation to the universe and allows each side to interpret the other. The mind’s relation to its structure or myth is inclusive and reflexive. It is not detached; the working mind is part of the dynamic of the system, and is united, by its forms, with whatever in the universe it is inquiring into. The process of making the interpretative myths is carried on in language, and the structure of language in its dynamic with the mind both conditions and is conditioned by the mutual interpretation. The body is an essential part of the method. The method bears a close relation to sex and fertility. Love is a necessary part of its working. Its aim is the discovery of the world, and it is this which gives it all the beauty it has.
I have used the word “postlogic” in this study, but it is time now to return to the true term, which is “poetry,” though I hope by now a little filled out, or cleared of the misunderstandings we have allowed to grow up around it. It has come into this study as drama, as epic, as didactic verse, as lyric. You can use it in any form, since this is its deep purpose, and according to whatever level of achievement you can reach. There is no need to think that only superlative poetry has any right to survive or that lesser work is not good and useful in our common explorations. It lies to everyone’s hand and we have to return to it, not as a vague ornament of life but as one of the great living disciplines of the mind, friendly to all other disciplines, and offering them and accepting from them new resources of power.
On this the Orphic voices have made a beginning for us.
PART V
Working Poems for The Orphic Voice
IT HAS BEEN all along the theme of this work that poetry is a form of thought. Once this is accepted it need not be surprising that, in the course of the thinking, poems presented themselves from time to time as working instruments in the inquiry. Anyone trying this method of research will probably find, as I did, that the mind knows, in poems, a little more than it knows it knows, so that a poem will often tell the thinking mind where to look next. These hints, clues, and statements are what follow. They appear here in the order in which they, and the book, were written.
1
Poet to Scientist
Yours the intensity of perfect mind,
The virgin light no prism can dispart,
The lattice where true tenses are declined.
Your instruments are crystals and cold beams,
And the integrities of head and heart
Solemnize marriage at their last extremes.
Loving’s our work, it seems; but where’s the nerve
To conjugate your white near-infinite speed
With my wet rainbow’s broken-colored curve?
Yet by your light I find: Idea’s bed,
Where at full stretch of soul our thoughts may breed,
Is ultra-violet and infra-red.
2
Orpheus I
To sightlessness is love consigned,
And if it love, the thinking mind
Consents no less to being blind;
So the musician at the strings,
Withdrawn from all surrounding things,
Attends to what the music sings:
Orpheus descends, as he was taught,
Toward his dear remembered thought,
But lost in seeing what he sought.
Intensity surpassing sight,
Shadows of sensing hands invite
The concentration of delight
In all whose thought and love, compact,
Feel with a long and fingering tact
For outline of an artifact:
Orpheus in minds undoes the curse
That splits us into prose or verse;
And, shaping, finds the universe.
3
Orpheus II
There is a long music.
It comes from a severed head
Clutched in the tree roots.
The voyage down-river
Was traced by the mouth that bled
Its undrowned singing.
Mysterious if that skull,
All its dark sayings are said
For innocent people.
Should you ask understanding,
Go living, my soul, to the dead,
And see what happens.
4
Data
Poem is something that is made,
The ruined house under the rain
Whose sky-bound staircase balustrade
Ends in the infinite inane;
With everything five wits contain,
Poem is something that is made,
Gaslight through foul or shattered pane,
When heart begins to be afraid;
No smallest fact but must be laid
Along the grain the nerves provide;
Poem is something that is made,
Together with the world outside;
Tables and chairs and cold and pain,
So still and shapely, have obeyed;
Sense is the senses’ one refrain:
They neither falter nor explain:
That is the burden of the brain:
Poem is something that is made.
5
Words and Stars
If God had spoken stars in the beginning,
Man’s mind no less obeyed its tendencies,
Astronomers soon busy underpinning
Grammar and syntax of those sentences;
Astrology could offer only fancy,
The incantation and the sophist’s trick;
Poets divined, in place of necromancy,
Superlative sidereal rhetoric.
To logic, metaphor is mere annoyance;
Lone image is anarchical and shoddy;
Their dialectic offers no advance.
What speculation in that high flamboyance?
What wedding heavenly mind to heavenly body,
The figure in the discourse and the dance?
6
Ways and Means
Only angelic thoughts may climb that ladder,
Dancing to God, through skies of milk and madder,
Logic’s ascension.
Others must greenly grow, sprung tendrils hoping
Trellis of air, Jack’s beanstalk slowly groping
Its own extension.
Far off I see Heaven’s ultimate arbors shine,
Where line and leaf geometries combine,
Metamorphosis
Of metaphor’s and dialectic’s loss:
Chaste frame of silver squares, and all across,
Passion of roses.
7
Thinking
Whatever thinks the crystal, has been taught
Perfected plan,
Can flawlessly rehearse
Much of the universe.
This is a harder thought:
To be a man.
Plant-thought designed
The intricated mesh,
Giving itself the power
To realize leaf and flower.
Man only feels his mind
In-fibrilled in the flesh.
Beast-thoughts have grace,
Whose body is their brain.
Man-thought lies buried deep
Where dumb the organs sleep.
Gleams struggle to his face;
Then blind again.
Mind—fluted gem,
Flushed trumpet-vines where dart
Exquisite long-tongued words,
Hawkmoths and hummingbirds—
O choose, rather than them,
Man’s heavy heart.
8
The Two Methods
I have sat down with the Entities at table,
Eaten with them the meal of ceremony,
And they were stamped with jewels, and intuned
God’s ordered praises.
But now the Activities hand me to the dancing,
Brown naked bodies lithe and crimson-necklaced,
And tambourines besiege the darkened altars,
In what God’s honor?
9
Bud and Trivium
Never again lay ear against a shell:
Already something stirs, or so it seems.
Listen only to stones who cannot tell,
They sleep so fast, their stiff inaudible dreams,
Whispered through walls of bone into your skull.
For yesterday a bud began to speak.
(So young? but offshoot of a classic line
Half-infinite to our poor Latin and Greek,
Each plant a slip of immemorial vine,
And even more than we, both young and old.)
Conservative in what it had to teach,
The mode Socratic and the theme Scholastic,
Actions and figures as implicit speech,
From which organic Trivium green and plastic
As its own substance it deduced ourselves.
Showed three relations: first that of survival,
The Dialectic in the thorn and claw,
Bodily argument with every rival
As the inflexible ruling of the law.
Here Darwin stopped—but there are two to come:
For Rhetoric plays with natural selection,
Hyperbole swims and flies in red and gold;
Ingenious living similes for protection,
Beauty’s unnecessary manifold;
And Grammar is the dance of living form.
Was this once known and framed to education,
High ancient code, we fools have lost the clues?
Master-vision or mere hallucination,
Organon bedded crackling like a fuse
In the damp innocence of a crinkled bud?
Suppose it opens as we wait before it,
A huge gold circle with a face and eyes,
Would it begin to speak? best to implore it,
“Moon, make no mouth whose monstrous prophecies
Blow like God’s horns as we go down to dust”?
Or would it simply show, in slow dilating,
Plato and Aristotle closely curled
Inside a yellow roseleaf, speculating
That language is the nature of the world,
And all philosophy a flowering thought?
Fierce, honey-throated, formalized, prolific,
Anticipate in our most human powers,
The poet but a speaking hieroglyphic
In one whole universe of continual flowers,
Shall we run weeping, throw away our life?
Or gather little children in a ring,
And blossom into oracles and sing
That mind and word is every living thing?
10
Ideas
The coming of new forms
Is priestly and war-like; doubled they campaign,
Ringing, besiege the head with holy storms,
Till shouts and trumpets crack
The glassy air; fortifications spill,
And we lie open, to fury and to sack,
And then to all the expanses of the plain,
The world’s wide landscape suddenly appears,
And nine huge stars waiting above the hill
Will march through walls of clay-dust to the brain
And camp there, silent, leaning on their spears.
11
Orpheus III
He sees over his shoulder
Flowers, not her;
Scarcely a second older,
For still they stir;
Not asphodel but colder,
And sharp as myrrh.
Half-roused from holy sleeping
Their pallor flames
To urge upon his keeping
A lover’s claims.
Sunlit he stumbles, weeping,
To give them names.
12
Orpheus IV
Let him chord up the stars,
Sweeten the salt sea,
Answer with his heartstrings
For our sterility—
So the wild women cried,
And Orpheus died.
Stars were strung to sound,
Waves turned red,
And the wild women appeased
Went home to supper and bed.
Far out, what echoes brood
One ravished head?
13
Genesis
Poet by poet launched upon that sea.
This was before the moon was, or the land.
Everything in a moving patience waited
To be created—
Solitary were they borne
On those immense waters
Breathing and profound
(How many drowned),
The mind, the Mind,
Under this presence contemplated—
In darkness but for stars
That crowded, jostled, stabbed and showered and rang,
The tideless ocean tingled and pulsated,
A million working surfaces for light,
And by those influences impregnated—
Of World and Mind
Poet by poet said
No thing is only dead
And nothing unrelated.
NOTES
SOURCES OF SECTION HEADINGS:
PART I
1. Robert Browning, Essay on Percy Bysshe Shelley.
2. Fenollosa, quoted by Donald Davie in Articulate Energy, Appendix.
3. Lucian on “The Dance.” Quoted by E. Louis Backman in his work on Religious Dances, London, 1952. (The ascription of this piece of writing to Lucian is doubtful.)
4. The Phaedrus in the Jowett translation.
5. Vico, Scienza nuova, in the Michelet version, Bk. IV, chap. 7.
6. Teilhard de Chardin, Le Phénomène humain, Pt. IV, chap. 3.
7. John Middleton Murry, GOD: An Essay in Metabiology, Pt. I.
PART II
1. Schelling, quoted by Sir Herbert Read, The True Voice of Feeling, Pt. II, Essay 1.
2. Middleton Murry, Keats and Shakespeare, chap. 10.
3. Sir John Harington, A Briefe Apologie of Poetrie, prefaced to his translation of the Orlando Furioso, 1591.
4. Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, Bk. II.
5. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V, Scene I.
6. Robert Hooke, A Discourse of Earthquakes, in the Posthumous Works.
7. Hooke again.
8. Carlyle, Heroes and Hero-Worship, “The Poet as Hero.”
9. Coleridge, Lectures on Shakespeare.
PART III
1. Dryden, Preface to the Fables.
2. D’Arcy Thompson, On Growth and Form, chap. 1.
3. A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, chap. 9.
4. Emerson’s essay “Intellect” in the first series of Essays.
5. Coleridge, Lectures on Shakespeare.
6. Emerson’s essay on Goethe in Representative Men.
7. Erasmus Darwin, Interlude 3 in The Loves of the Plants.
8. Ruskin, preface to the second edition of Modern Painters.
9. Taine, La Fontaine et ses fables, Pt. II, chap. 2.
PART IV
1. Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, Act III, Scene 3.
2. Blake’s Milton, Bk. II.
3. Milton, Areopagitica.
4. Friedrich Schlegel, Gespräch über die Poesie.
5. Coleridge, from Inquiring Spirit, ed. Kathleen Coburn.
6. Emerson, The Natural History of Intellect.
7. C. Kerenyi, Prolegomena to Jung and Kerenyi, Introduction to a Science of Mythology.
8. Lucian, The Dance, trans. A. W. Harmon. (See note to Pt. I, Sec. 3, above.)
9. Emerson, essay on Goethe in Representative Men.
Part I
1. Werke, ed. Schröter, Munich, 1927 (Einleitung in die Philosophie der Mythologie), Vorlesung 3, Hauptband 6, p. 54.
2. Classic statements of this view can be found in Comte, Renan, and Lévy-Bruhl.
3. The Botanic Garden (London, 1791), “Advertisement,” p. 5.
4. Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life? (Cambridge, 1951), p. 79; Agnes Arber, The Mind and the Eye (Cambridge, 1954), p. 41; C. Lloyd Morgan, Mind at the Crossways (London, Williams and Norgate, 1929), pp. 1 ff.; J. H. Woodger, Biology and Language (Cambridge, 1952), p. 8; K. Koffka, Principles of Gestalt Psychology (London, Kegan Paul, 1935), p. 64.
