This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry

From Saturn to Demeter

F R O M S A T U R N TO D E M E T E R 97 From Saturn to Demeter From emptiness or blank, a scene arises; there is alwaysa scene, a presentiment of knowing, the viewer's gnosis in the prehensile grasp of the elements. But prior to the scene there is a mood, a predisposition, whether expectation or aversion. The mood is black bile; whatever its temperamental coloring, it does dark work,work in the dark. The black bile "obliges thought to penetrate and explore the center of its objects,because the black bile is itself akin to the center ofthe earth" (Ficino, in Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl, 2/9). Each object is fruit, a fleshy covering over the treasure ofthe pit or pith, the myth or meat ofit. Saturnian bile is Ficino's name for the sovereign esoteric genius of melancholy:"by withdrawal from earthly things, by leisure, solitude, constancy, esoteric theology and philosophy, by superstition, magic, agriculture, and grief, we come under the influence of Saturn" (261).* The Hermetic function of Saturn is division, making many out of one, these from that. But in astrology and in the humours there are baleful associations: paralysis,fixation , obsession—countertrends to the more positive features, motion, flexibility, and vivacity. So melancholy is a mood of dark breaks, segues of blue notes and duende. The scene, then: Boulders blunted like an old bear's teeth break up from the headland; below them All the soil is thick with shells, the tide-rock feasts of a dead people. Here the granite flanks are scarred with ancient fire, the ghosts of the tribe Crouch in the nights beside the ghost of a fire, they try to remember the sunlight, Light has died out of their skies —light has died out of their skins, I'm prone to read. "Apology for Bad Dreams" names a mood of despondence and dread. The Saturnian gloom that rekindles * Ficino's strange medley bears some resemblance to the zany catalog of Borges quoted by Foucault: "Animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,(1) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies" (Order of Things, xv). The original passage can be found in "John Wilkins' Analytical Language" (Borges, Selected Non-Fictions, 231). 9 8 T H I S C O M P O S T by virtue of sheer intensity a black explicitness. It is a masculine severity Jeffers practices, in which breakdown extends to the whole tissue of human affairs in a communal narcosis of grief. He brays humanity in a mortar to bring the savor From the bruised root: a man having bad dreams, who invents victims, is only the ape of that God. He washes it out with tears and many waters, calcines it with fire in the red crucible, Deforms it, makes it horrible to itself: the spirit flies out and stands naked, he sees the spirit, He takes it in the naked ecstasy; it breaks in his hand, the atom is broken, the power that massed it Cries to the power that moves the stars, "I have come home to myself, behold me. I bruised myself in the flint mortar and burnt me In the red shell, I tortured myself, I flew forth, Stood naked of myself and broke me in fragments, And here am I moving the stars that are me." Only at the end does Jeffers come to any abatement of rage, let alone tranquil acceptance . He isthe Saturnian seismologist of harsh times gleaned from the rugged visage of ocean and sky,rocky shores and headlands—the cruelty sometimes generalized (a symptom of melancholia) as the given condition of things. A conceptual and temperamental alternative to Saturn is Demeter, the corn goddess. Hers is an instruction about black descent as germination. Her perspective construes division differently than Saturnian collapse. In the voice of Mina Loy, writing as one of "The Dead": We have flowed out of ourselves Beginning on the outside That shrivable skin Where you leave off Of infinite elastic Walking the ceiling Our eyelashes polish stars. F R O M S A T U R N T O D...