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186 T H I S C O M P O S T leap and twist whirl and prance "The vision of exuberance requires identification with the exuberant life of the whole," wrote Norman O. Brown after the fall of the Berlin wall (Apocalypse and'/or Metamorphosis, 198). But the whole, being full of energy, is strife and discord. "The science of enjoyment is also a science of death," for "it is a universal principle of biological life that growth leads to excess: and excess leads to laceration and loss" (194). But loss is also passing on; it is the extravagant abandonment of the torch bearer's race commemorated byJeffers. Transmission is a conflagration, and "The book sets the reader on fire. The meaning is the fresh creation, the eruption of poetry; meaning is always surplus meaning, an excess extracted" (193). "Burning up myself, I would leave fire behind me" (Blaser,"The Fire," 236). The empty house Jorie Graham poses a question in the form of a delicately hanging mobile: Is the house empty? Is the emptiness housed? Paleolithic cave art represents approximately twenty thousand years of applied human perception. Hunting-gathering cultures made this graffiti panorama in the form of outlines, stains, dots, and meanders, in abstract and cryptic as well as recognizably mimetic figures. This was all produced well after hominid evolution had resulted in people like us, but with slightly larger cranial capacity. A relatively undocumented period followed, probably linked to deglaciation. This time—between the Gravettian, Solutrean, and Magdalenian cultures of the late Paleolithic, 14,000 B.C., and the early food-producing Mesolithic communities of 9000 B.C.—is a psychic blank. We know little of what went on, but it is during this period that humans became sedentary, developing a new relation to food resources. With animals domesticated for their meat and other products as well asfor sacrificial ritual, and plants domesticated for fruit, seeds, and leaves, "food" became an expedient generalizationfor what had formerly been utterly specific: every animal taken in the hunt is explicitly singular. It is an auspiciously mortal drama. T H E E M P T Y H O U S E 187 Domestication breeds animalsexempt from the existential drama of the hunt, and men lose contact with the dramatic privilege of their skill ashunters. In the sedentary state, the world isbroken up into anthropocentric spaces, understood less and less in terms of animal partners, biospheric conditions, weather, migration routes, and the old star lore. However, with the stimulation of energies in social congregation on a metropolitan scale, a tremendous flowering of human capability occurs. In the space of about four thousand years: an agricultural urban-based trading and shipping economy develops, with utilization and transportation of a prodigious variety of materials, sophisticated tools and boats, "status kit" prestige burials, mining of copper around 5500 B.C., and a fuller metallurgy by 4600 B.C. In the foothills of the Zagros Mountains and along the Mesopotamian flood plain, all those forces finally concretize into the first megalopolis, from which emanate the earliest myths, lore, laws, and social customs of which there is evidence . And from there—the Sumerians down to the early Minoans—we have a full two thousand years, out of which we retain Mediterranean civilization as our self-declared origin. Charles Olson took Americans to be "the last 'first' people," meaning the last to feel themselves—however presumptuously—first-comers.* In the same way we can regard the Greeks as "the first last people": the earliest crisis-cult hubristic civilization, and earliest battleground of cultural syncretism. Mesopotamian civilizations, like Rome much later, simply adopted or colonized alien myth and lore. The Greek tension (fantasized as a "synthesis" in eighteenthcentury neoclassicism) is described by Weston LaBarre: Greek religion was a compost of shamanistic nature gods of people from the north and the old fertility rituals of the native country folk. Despite the differences , however, the two were rooted in the same animistic world view, with no intrinsic factor impeding a tolerable amalgamation. But the fusion was never quite successful because, to a degree, the two traditions ran side by side on different social levels. On one, that of Ionian philosophy, the nature gods were subjectedto increasingly refined and rationalized statements of the nature of reality, and the man-likewasgraduallydriven out of nature—an intellectual movement toward science imperfect only in certain limitations of * "An American, properly speaking, is an exception," writes Robert Pogue Harrison on Thoreau. "Perhaps it is in...

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