The Image Cult in Modern Poets
The prologues are over. It is a question now,
Of final belief. So, say that final belief
Must be in a fiction. It is time to choose. [1]
Thus the West’s anchor of Judaic sobriety gave another sign of letting go. Grand arbitrary gestures, a rhetoric of the egotistical sublime by which the magus sweeps away the past with his fictions triumphs: one must choose ‘counter-factual history’ or the grand cynicism of postmodern dogma, life as artifice, as assemblage and construct. This is the madness toward which the art-cult rushes, the simulations of an “insatiable actor” seeking his identity that Macbeth, disenchanted at last but only to despair, identified as “a poor player who struts and frets… and then is heard no more.” The “tale told by an idiot,” a curse of life aimed, glancingly at the Creator, pinions the modern masters of de-personalization who reach back for the original pagan magic and, wishing to “jump the life to come” with their “vaulting ambition” find G-d only in involutions and terror.
“We live in a period of anxiety, uncertainty and lack of trust” intones the new President of the EU, whose tenure, he said is “a step toward the global government of our planet” and “fulfillment of the European project” [2]: the latter phrase explains the former. The creation of a global oligarchy by players who formulate dogmas to be spun and woven by media magic creates terror and lack of trust. The world in which words lose all reference to truth, in which “lying is a universal principle” is a hall of mirrors which echoes with the sound of apparitions as well as their ghostly, virtual form: in which words become works of art, shadows of desired identity, i.e. fictions. The uglier side of this magike tekne is what remains, — in terms of language – “mere lumps of sound” after the artful identity is detached and projected from it: Caliban and Miranda, the cynosure of admiration, the glorious reflection, detached from the pop cultural residue; Orpheus from women who become maenads that separate his image-making faculty from his body leaving the residue of magic, the waste land. It is from this waste land, the result of commitment to the representation rather than the living of life, that the ship of death departs with the hero in custody of the “three Queens” of Fate, a pan-cultural project of all but one civilization, a culture ultimately as sterile as the elves of Middle Earth since it all is based on images, on weaving spells.
Wallace Stevens expresses this declamatory madness often; his manner with language is masterful and intriguing. The mind, a construct, a concept, like the soul, does not simply think; it finds pleasure gratuitously, “in a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman combing” like Circe, like the Lady of Shalott, like all the West’s images of the ultimate magike teknistes, witches and sorceries. The particular image or description is irrelevant, subordinate to “the mind at play” for thinking is not simply an inner human activity or faculty but “the poem of the act of the mind” [3]. The mind is a thing created “in the act of finding what will suffice” for its own purposes, for the creative act or fiction, a shadow to suit the moment and its obsessions, no more true than any other. This reversal, the poem constituting the mind is the last stage of the image cult in the act of turning in upon itself, cutting itself off from “the complexities of mire and blood” which are its Orphic scorn for lives that predominantly live rather than spin mazes like the vipers on the head of the Medusa, an image of toxic self-absorption in “unending involutions” [4]. He begs his maternal Muse, “the one of fictive music…that which sees and names an image that is sure” that she, although “unreal” and crowned like Medea with “fatal stones” “give back to us what once you gave: the imagination that we spurned…” [5].
Yet Stevens also is the spinner who wished that “be be the finale of seem”; he sought to evoke the clarity of “the roller of big cigars” among “wenches [who] dawdle in such dress as they are used to wear.” Here it would seem is imagist precision in service of the everyday and non-poetic: of the fact not the magical weaving. Stevens does not simply celebrate the image; his poetry is an arena in which “the poem of the mind” struggles to know and represent or say things just as they are, “the first white wall of the village, the fruit trees…” in which vivid direct impression seeks to articulate itself without philosophical context or metaphor (“change bearers”) [6]. The exclusion of metaphors from “Metaphors of a Magnifico” alludes to the great Florentine patron of the art-cult loses itself in an attempt to portray the particular. Without paradoxes like those of Heraclitus (or perhaps, by excluding them), without the imitation’s eloquence of likeness, shadow, statue, apparition, semblance and echo even immediate response to the everyday leads to collapse of meaning: “of what was it I was thinking? So the meaning escapes” like Lucky losing the thread of his discourse in Godot. It is notable that the attempt by the Magnifico-poet, the mage, to eschew metaphor and symbolic frames of reference (the collective mind, the pattern of experience; the radical subjectivity of stepping always into a ‘new’ river) occurs under the rubric of the essential Renaissance patron of imagery. Poetry, “the making” of images reveals itself as magic with all its terrible elusiveness and disorganization of mind.
The conflicts of image-making as the celebrant and carrier of meaning were expressed with terse Dantesque terror and distaste in Shelley’s last poem a century before. There, the triumph of the “cold bright car” of imagination and its “stunning music” the defeats hearing and “obscure tenor” that defeats sight and understanding is seen as a self-destroying expression of desire as shadows that rise through their self-generated mist of tears and phantoms to extinguish the hope of those inspired by “the car’s creative ray,” an imperial triumph of death in and over life [7]. Yet every age within a civilization of the image-cult must play out the conflict in its own terms and from its own perspective. The struggle of Stevens to present the everyday freed from metaphysical veils is a striking example. From “the Emperor of Ice Cream” to the intellectual turmoil of “the Idea of Order at Key West” he strains to disentangle the interplay of mimesis, truth and artifice. The effects are gloriously intriguing and the results confounding. He, the confirmed image maker create phantoms and describes echoes in which nature is both “veritable” and “mimic” as are those humans in dialog with it. As a poet he had no way to simply say, ‘we interpret and partly make the world and it influences and partly makes us’; such statements are for sages not for poets. For him there is nothing but beautiful phantoms, “theatrical distances” and “ghostlier demarcations” presided over, of course by a goddess, “the single artificer of the world in which she sang.” The “blessed rage for order” must be presented as a form of poetic madness /inspiration and human magic projected, like “the words of the sea” to the ineffable Creator who, demeaned becomes a poet. The Creator becomes just another one of “the gods that Boucher killed in an empty land,” the mythic wastes by the phantom Lethe or Acheron; or the glorious “babbling” of divers heads of Orpheus, poets who attempt to avoid “fury in transcendent forms” only to be an “actual candle blazing with artifice” [8]. Like his great precursor, Stevens saw that “we had come to the end of the imagination, Inanimate as an inert savior” [9]. In an old New England house sagging under decades of weather he saw the failure of “a fantastic project” and found himself “a spirit storming in blank walls” beneath “the literate despair” of poetic breath, of the human desire to weave and re-weave creation. As if in Roethke, “the poem of the mind in the act of finding” becomes a rat emerging in dark autumn to look into a pond’s reflective surface. The failure of the Hellenic project of metamorphosis ends in phantoms, shadows and terror. We will discover this repeatedly as we delve into our cultural substrate [10].
In the intellectual games of Stevens, radical formulator of a postmodern aesthetics and his successors, the mind is like a geopolitical grand-master, always in the act of finding some useful fiction, “a metaphysician in the dark twanging an instrument”; the music is memory looking into the pool of the underworld, as in the Mnemosyne myth or weaving, the reflection of a fiction whose shadows memorialize the magical intercourse and poein or fiction of Zeus and the mother of memory. In Stevens, two and a half millennia later, music is in process of becoming a joke, a twang, the trend of modern forgetting, and the mind is a fiction finding itself in arbitrary noises. The magical, irrational ambition of the past remains but its grace devolves to facetiae [11]. Acknowledging itself as a thing of arbitrary and interchangeable shadows, the mathematical perfection of Hellenic features woven of desire becomes a smirk for a more ‘practical’ age disillusioned at last with its fictions. The “tempestuous loveliness of terror” and projection of image-making furies who sculpt in flesh are exposed as artifice, “a dirty house in a gutted world,” the “literate despair” of “a spirit storming in blank walls” of the mind-poem, the fiction weaving itself and heading for a fall [12]. At the end game of the cult of the image, by the brick wall at the dark end of its street, the daughters of memory twang and snicker for postmodern Hesiod… The body is left behind, leaving “a tatter of shadows peaked to white,” returned to bone by the end of poem in the mind in its insatiable act of constructing new stages… “The audience listens not to the play but to itself” as shadows gather and life becomes a painting by Ensor; light dims from the eyes; the human disappears in a hall of mirrors. Emotions merge into one in a reprise of the Bacchae and other communions, the generic smirk and confusion of the postmodern Lyonesse is the mindscape replacing landscape and life while the ‘environmentalists’ scream their paeans [13]. The fictional Aryan king, wounded by the artifice he embodies and creates, “a poem of the mind in the act of finding” is borne away by black-robed Queens to the never land of the West and virtual parades to virtual cheering in virtual cities [14].
The final belief must be in a fiction, a shadow, phantom, ghost and apparition as the terrors of the modern-postmodern world increasingly indicate. The pattern was laid down by the Romantics and especially by Symbolists of the Victorian age like that master influence, Poe.
For the purposes of this study this chapter uses “poet” and “poetry” as a synonym of image-maker, a maker of representations particularly as relating to identity or mental processes. This section of the study will focus on the poems of Eliot, Stevens, Lawrence and Roethke much of which shows the image-madness, celebratory or despairing of the West. Stevens particularly focuses on the antithesis between “the plain sense of things” and “the imagination” which is coming “to an end” as magike tekne consumes itself in fictions [15]. I prelude examining their weaving with a prominent fiction of Poe, a story of phantoms displacing life and sanity, of the ‘return of the repressed” by an artist much concerned with influence and the explosion of furies, the mad goddess within men in the culture of image-magic, of the weaving of simulations, webs of shadow…
1. Wallace Stevens, “Asides on the Oboe” (1942), 1-3 passim
2. Herman van Rompuy, President-designate of the European Union, 11-21-09; for “the European project” see speech by Winston Churchill to the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, 8-17-1949: “the process of creating a European unit in the world organization…a subordinate but essential element in its ultimate structure.” The words on its “subordinate” role were spin for 1949; the decades-long, multi-faceted take-down of America, rebuilding Europe, no-win wars of attrition, open immigration, gender war, relentless hammering in world media have shown this.
3. Stevens, “On Modern Poetry” (1942)
4. Yeats, “Byzantium”; Shelley, “On the Medusa of Leonardo” (1819), 21
5. Stevens, “To the One of Fictive Music” (1923, Harmonium)
6. “Metaphors of a Magnifico”; “the Emperor of Ice Cream” (from Harmonium 1923)
7. Shelley, “the Triumph of Life” (1822), 380-545 inter alia;
8. Stevens, “the Idea of Order at Key West” (1936); “Asides on the Oboe” op. cit. “Metaphors of a… op. cit. “The Emperor of Ice Cream”; “A Quiet Normal Life”
9. Stevens, “The Plan Sense of Things” (1954), 1-4 passim
10. Stevens, ibid. “A Postcard from the Volcano”; Roethke, “In a Dark Time”
11. “Of Modern Poetry” (1942), 19-20; cf. Milan Kundera’s vividly elegant description of the collapse of music into primeval “idiocy” in Part 6 of the Book of Laughter & Forgetting (1975; revised English translation, Aaron Asher 1996)
12. Shelley, “On the Medusa, 33, Stevens, “a Postcard from the Volcano,” 22, 13, 21
13. Stevens, op. cit. 23, 16-19
14. Tennyson, Idylls, “the Passing of Arthur” 360-464
15. Stevens, “The Plain Sense of Things” (1954)