Wallace Stevens, Getting Older...and The Voice Before The World Was Made

    I realized the other day, after reading something that now escapes me, it has been much too long since I shared anything truly meaningful...like great poetry and/or great literature, etc. Well, maybe not long enough for some of you...which is why I shared that wonderful, haunting poem the other day. But as I dive head-long into my mid-60s today, (and don’t get me wrong…the world around us has been a part of me since I took “International Relations” in high school from a wonderful teacher whose name, embarrassingly, escapes me), I am reminded of the ideas and essays which got me here since I started this thing, that I would like to again, share, if that is okay with everyone (hopefully, without too many repetitions of essays long passed). And to be fair, I am reminded of the promise I made to myself when my father died 26 years ago last month, at the much too young age of 64. That promise was to do my very best to outlive him...if for no other reason than 64 years of age, again, is much too young to depart for Hamlet’s Undiscovered Country. And since this 6th day of June is my birthday (a Gemini if you’re keeping score), this essay will probably get a little strange and all over the place. But...my birthday…my rules! The gods save us! Sancho! I might even mention you. Please don’t. 

    Having said all of that and arriving at 64, I am aware that while not being in the elegy season just yet, I know I am on the back nine of life, if you will excuse the golf metaphor. Sadly, too many friends and acquaintances from my youth and adulthood have departed; and I am haunted by many passages from my favorite poet Wallace Stevens. There is one section that I keep hearing in my addled brain that centers his extraordinary poem, “The Course of a Particular”:

And though one says that one is part of everything,

There is a conflict, there is a resistance involved;

And being part is an exertion that declines:

One feels the life of that which gives life as it is.

    Throughout his final poems, Stevens listens for the voice he heard before the world was made. And he hears those voices: Falling leaves cry out, houses laugh, syllables are spoken without speech, the wind breathes a motion, thoughts howl in the mind, the colossal sun sounds a scrawny cry, and the phoenix, mounted on a visionary palm tree, sings a foreign song. This last one is from my FAVORITE Wallace Stevens poem, Of Mere Being. As I have gotten older, and the sleepless nights increase, I too, dream of what Stevens calls a heavy difference:

A little while of Terra Paradise

I dreamed, of autumn rivers, silvas green,

Of sanctimonious mountains high in snow,

But in that dream a heavy difference

Kept waking and a mournful sense sought out,

In vain, life’s season or death’s element.

    When that saddens me too much, something in my spirit turns to a more intimate Stevens:

The cry is part. My solitaria

Are the meditations of a central mind.

I hear the motions of the spirit and the sound

Of what is secret becomes, for me, a voice

That is my own voice speaking in my ear.

    Frequently at dawn, when I am a little chilly and sit on the side of my bed, knowing it is not safe for me to go downstairs for my OJ and English muffin just yet, because I probably overdid things the previous day (golfing, walking, biking, and gym all in the same day…because I’m an idiot), I find deep peace in Stevens at his strongest:

To say more than human things with human voice,

That cannot be; to say human things with more

Than human voice, that, also, cannot be;

To speak humanly from the height or from the depth

Of human things, that is acutest speech.

    Can human things be said with more than human voice? Stevens was a kind of Lucretian skeptic, just like Percy Bysshe Shelley, Walt Whitman, and Walter Pater had been before him. Yet, of those three, only Pater would have agreed with Stevens as to whether we could hear some kind of primordial utterance. Even as grounded as Stevens usually was, he did, however, have his openings to a transcendental freedom:

Upon my top he breathed the pointed dark.

He was not man yet he was nothing else.

If in the mind, he vanished, taking there

The mind’s own limits, like a tragic thing

Without existence, existing everywhere.

    William Butler Yeats, D. H. Lawrence, and, rather more skeptically, Hart Crane all were informed by the ancient tradition called Hermetism, the Greco-Egyptian speculation from which the Renaissance Hermeticism developed. In that original speculation, which was inaugurated by a small group of pagan intellectuals in Hellenistic Alexandria during the first century of the Common Era, a story is told of how the first Adam, called Anthropos, is exalted as a divine being. Here is a crucial passage from the Hermetic discourse titled “The Key”:

For the human is a godlike living thing, not comparable to the other living things of the earth but to those in heaven above, who are called gods. Or better—if one dare tell the truth—the one who is really human is above these gods as well, or at least they are wholly equal in power to one another.

For none of the heavenly gods will go down to earth, leaving behind the bounds of heaven, yet the human rises up to heaven and takes its measure and knows what is in its heights and its depths, and he understands all else exactly and—greater than all of this—he comes to be on high without leaving earth behind, so enormous is his range. Therefore, we must dare to say that the human on earth is a mortal god but that god in heaven is an immortal human. Through these two, then, cosmos and human, all things exist, but they all exist by action of the one.

- Translated by Brian P. Copenhaver

    That is Hermetism at its most exalted. Darker is the account that brings together the Fall and the Creation as one event. I offer here the most famous text of Hermetism, “Poimandres,” where our primal catastrophe is elegantly chronicled:

Having all authority over the cosmos of mortals and unreasoning animals, the man broke through the vault and stooped to look through the cosmic framework, thus displaying to lower nature the fair form of god. Nature smiled for love when she saw him whose fairness brings no surfeit (and) who holds in himself all the energy of the governors and the form of god, for in the water she saw the shape of the man’s fairest form and upon the earth its shadow. When the man saw in the water the form like himself as it was in nature, he loved it and wished to inhabit it; wish and action came in the same moment, and he inhabited the unreasoning form. Nature took hold of her beloved, hugged him all about and embraced him, for they were lovers.

Because of this, unlike any other living thing on earth, mankind is twofold—in the body mortal but immortal in the essential man. Even though he is immortal and has authority over all things, mankind is affected by mortality because he is subject to fate; thus, although man is above the cosmic framework, he became a slave within it. He is androgyne because he comes from an androgyne father, and he never sleeps because he comes from one who is sleepless. Yet love and sleep are his masters.

- Translated by Brian P. Copenhaver

    When I was very young, I was so fortunate to have been read poems and stories incessantly by my mother and father. As I got a little older and could do the reading on my own, I read to myself constantly. Looking back I think it was because we moved around so much that it was tough for me at times, believe it or not, to make friends. I believed, somehow, that these great characters could become people for me, which they did. And many times still do. 

    In Hart Crane’s incredible poem, “Voyages II” there is a paean to “sleep, death, desire,” a celebration of the great erotic relationship of the poet’s life. Nevertheless, “Voyages V” admits that the truth of this love is a matter of instants and must end in separation:

But now,

Draw in your head, alone and too tall here.

Your eyes already in the slant of drifting foam;

Your breath sealed by the ghosts I do not know:

Draw in your head and sleep the long way home.

    There is a kind of gentle resignation in Hart Crane as he confronts romantic and erotic loss. Ultimately I think that stems from the Hermetist version of the Fall as a narcissistic reverie that concludes in a catastrophe. Many of us, remembering the now remote erotic attachments of our youth, scores of years back in time, find that involuntarily we remain haunted by a voice we heard emanating from the beloved that seemed timeless and therefore permanent. There is some link that binds together the making of a poem, the illusions of recall, and the tenuous expectation that somehow we will hear again the voice that preceded the restoring or renewing a cosmos forlorn and vagrant through which we blankly wander unable to distinguish what was and what we strain to find again.

    Our experience of a lost voice may come to us in solitude or in the presence of others, whether or not they are related to our past sorrows. That idea rarely survived maturation, yet the quest persisted for a voice I had heard before I knew my own alienation. Over the decades I learned to listen closely to friends and fellow classmates…even some golfing partners, for some murmurs of those evanescent voices. I did not then, nor do I today seek in their tonalities my own nostalgias. Yet I believe that the reading of Shakespeare’s plays, Moby-Dick or Leaves of Grass, can be an awakening to the ancient Gnostic call that proclaims a resurrection preceding our deaths.

    In my experience, there are a few visions or surging voices that break through the rock of the self and free something that is both spark and breath, in a momentary knowing that “seems to be known even as it knows” (and you can thank my father for that phrase!). When I ask myself who is the knower, I have intimations that a primal sound, cast out of our cosmos and wandering in exile through the interstellar spaces, may be calling to me. There is nothing unique in my experience, as was particularly clear to me after my college years when I did so much reading about other Protestant denominations and Catholicism, as well as a number of Eastern religions, when I seemed all but endlessly in motion, making sure that I was comfortable in my head-long dive into Gnosticism. I recall vividly, as I type these words so many years later, how many Southern Baptists that I read about saying they had already been resurrected, and knew they had walked and talked with a Jesus that is scarcely recognizable in The New Testament, who is said to have passed 40 days with his faithful after the Ascension.

    At that time in my life, I both respected and was baffled by so many urgent confessions of women and of men that they had touched the flesh of a living Jesus, who walked with them and spoke of everyday matters. Now, as I turn 64, I understand better what was so dark to me 30, or even 40 years ago.

    Maybe, in the here and now, as I try to outlive David Frederick Hall, I hope I honor him in a small way all these years later, as I listen for a primordial silence as well as voices coming down from a sphere within and beyond the rock of the self. When Hamlet concludes by murmuring, “The rest is silence,” he intends both an acceptance of oblivion and a longing for what Hermetists call the Pleroma or Fullness. Valentinus the Gnostic sage concluded his incredible “Gospel of Truth” by telling his congregation that it did not suit him, having been in the place of rest, to say anything more. For him too, the rest was silence. 

    As for me, hoping there are still more than a few birthdays left, I trust the journey that I have briefly, and hopefully not too incoherently touched upon above, will enable me to say, without too many regrets… “The rest is silence.”

Write to Peter: magtour@icloud.com