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O N T H E E X T R E M E S T V E R G E JI human heart is the openness to an otherness that cuts both ways. Our inspiration is also our peril, a risk of inflation whose would-be rise can take us down into hell" (Mackey, "From Gassire's Lute," zn). The lost world is unrecoverable, and this entails the difficult realization of the alchemicalnigredo: the fertilizing dark of the white whale's plummet in Moby-Dick, or the dissolution of entire cultures— extinction implicated in the larger creative adventure. Darkness is another kind of light, and stones are sweet as air to breathe. The Anasazi,the old people, knew. In the depths of canyons for a thousand years, they unlocked the rocks themselves and slipped inside like bones fit into skin. what history itself is longing for to demonstrate, not with names and not with dates, but these, our inter-interventions for solitude and grieving are also instruments of vision shall we not shout and stomp to tell deep grief, and wild fandango celebrate the being able to, to be at all On the extremest verge Culture is said to live, while its makers die. The unsettling terms of this respiratory system have a long history, in which themes of truth and beauty (all you know and all you need to know, the Grecian urn tells humbledJohn Keats) emerge as consolations in the face of unyielding laws of organic life. In the Western world this has fostered a psychological legacy of perennial inadequacy: surrounded on all sides by "classics," we're overburdened not only with the malady of belatedness , but with the constant beguilements of consumerism. The apparatus of cultural life increasingly stands between the organism and the broad prospect of an integrated existence in the cosmos. In the culture cocoon, the central facts of the 52 T H I S C O M P O S T biodegradable energy web are concealed, compromised, or simply forgotten. "The tools we have invented for communicating our ideas and carrying information have actually impaired our memories" (Shepard, Coming Home, 6).To be civilized, then, meansbeing dispossessed of allthe discriminations and instincts of an animal birthright. Our legacy of psychological dispossession attests to the fact that we inhabit a culture we can't keep up with; our adaptive resources, prosthetically shared out in the artifactual realm, are subject to misalignment and asynchronous alliances. Having generously extended our cybernetic capacities to the servo-mechanisms of daily life, the culture now appears to be outthinking us. Endocolonization, the "boarding of metabolic vehicles" in the regimes of techno-acceleration—as Paul Virilio describes it in Speed and Politics—is accompanied by an aesthetic transfiguration . "We have gone from the esthetics of appearance, stable forms, to the esthetics of disappearance, unstable forms" (Virilio and Lotringer, 84). Not only are we ineptly engaged withpsyche, we can't even operate all the equipment, whichis constantly changing out from under us by market-driven obsolescence. The dilemma is not unique to us of the late twentieth century. Tribes, cities, states, and entire civilizations haveinvariablyreached that point at which problems are not matched by any collective resolve to address them. Weston LaBarre chronicles numerous instances in The Ghost Dance, amounting to a surrogate history of maladaptive cultures . Edward Hyams's Soil and Civilization recounts a similar story. Hyams offers a simple but valuableindex: the artists and poets of the balanced phase of any civilization have aprofound feeling for the grain of life. Poetry which runs against this grain, and is a product of the failure of the poet's community to retain their faculty of tact as members of life, may still be profoundlyimpressive:but so may any clever, bitter act of perversity and destruction (n). American literature, as if to illustrate Hyams's thesis, offers two exemplary cases: Poe and Whitman. For Poe, the thought of death is such a delectable stimulation that his work is preordained to macabre hallucinations. For Whitman, on the other hand, death is the supreme organic event, the measure of all creaturely striving. No one would argue that Whitman's work embodies anything less than a "profound feeling for the grain of life"—making him, in Hyams's terms, a poet of the balanced phase. Whitman wasindisputably intent on reminding his fellows of their "faculty oftact asmembersof life." But in the wake ofthe Civil War his poetic focus became increasingly compliant with that booster spirit that made...

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