This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry

That origin which is act . . . that riddle which is awe

38 T H I S C O M P O S T Where shall the scream stick? What shall it dent? Won't the deafness becracked? Won't the molecules be loosened? Are you listening?We need the scream to leave its mark . . . In a grammar of "let" recalling Christopher Smart's madhouse poem Jubilate Agno—along with the propositional logic of the calculus (that vectorial afterimage ofNazi "experiments" on human subjects)—Rothenberg summons aprofound sense of the utmost brutality as all too familiar, uncannilyso. Let a great pain come up into your legs (feel it moving like the earth moving beneath you) Let the earth drop away inside your belly falling falling until you're left in space Let his scream follow you across the millennia back to your table Let a worm the size of a small coin come out of the table where you're sitting Let it be covered with the red mucus falling from his nose (but only you will see it) Let the holes in his body drop open let his excretions pour out across the room Write this. We have burned all their villages Write this. We have burned all the villages and the people in them Write this. We have adopted their customs and their manner of dress Write this. A word may be shaped like a bed, a basket or tears or an X That origin which isact. .. that riddle which is awe The final measure of the "Chiasma" lectures for the New Sciences of Man is the outcome of Olson's concern with materialized humanity,something like tin or coal to be tuned or used up or burned off.Rexroth sawthis as"the pure form / Of the cutting edge ofpower— / Man reduced to an entelechy." ForOlson, "manhimself T H A T O R I G I N W H I C H I S A C T 3 9 is the universe the materials and motions of which call for primary investigation, that he is the unknown—and no longer allowably unknown" ("Chiasma," 68). At midpoint of the century, which in 1953 Olson clearly felt astride, the dead heaped in the pathway,* in plain view, imposed the equation: The dead in via in vita nuova in the way You shall lament who know they are as tender as the horse is. You, do not you speak who know not. "I will die about April ist..." going off "I weigh, I think, 80 Ibs . .." scratch "My name is NO RACE" address Buchenwald new Altamiracave With a nail they drew the object of the hunt. There are two images here to ponder: the hunt and the sacrifice. Since the domestication of plants and animals (and urbanized humans), hunting has become one of the great unconsidered constants of human instinct, to the point that now, post 1945, we have doubts about the ultimate identity of the victim: man or animal ? After citing Jane Harrison on the link between Greek drama and animal sacrifice, Olson says, "the dance was both mask and twin to the paintings under which they were performed, that the men who danced were costumed literally in the animal's features (again, the literal)" ("Chiasma," 54). We have, between the routinized genocide of Buchenwald, and the carefully prescribed assault on larger mammals on Altamiracave wall, a midpoint, neither dance nor image, but ritual: the Aztecs, when sacrificing prisoners, would cut and peel the skin of the victim's head away so carefully that it was fitted over the celebrant's head literally like a mask and worn for days until it stank. From the mute bodies of exhumed bog people (victims by hanging) to the ceremonial transit in a death barge, D.H. Lawrence's "Ship of Death," "Bavarian Gentians ," and the rest of his LastPoems, or Whitman's late "little tags and fringe-dots (maybe specks, stains)" and Dickinson's "Goblin—on the Bloom" (no. 646), there * For Mackey,they are signs of "gnostic import, known, / it was ours to infer, by none if / not by / those who no longer spoke . . . / Inductees into a school of scramble"(Mackey's ellipses). 4 0 T H I S C O M P O S T is a fitful alliance of writing with mortuary circumstance, at once commemoration and indictment, celebration and dispatch. There is a sense with the exhumed bodies of Egyptian kings—in vaults filled with trunks of books...