This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry

The starry horizon

112 T H I S C O M P O S T Or is the tomb forever so much part of its story it carries it with it wherever it goes? Zukofsky makes ear a bier and wonders whether this is abstract or concrete, All or "A." When I am dead in the empty ear you might ask .. . what if the song preserves us? Asyou said stone sculpture's still and moves and to intrigue us further the mobilemoves with its sustaining current the space is still: which is less abstract solid or more sensed? Tell us of excess. What wasthe sign that limited? The starry horizon Every planet conforms to a celestial orbit in which the cosmic order repositions itself, one by one:a planet is a hunter of times. This language is a horizon terraced into a ladder that spins into a blade of light, and drugs the darkness with its brilliant stem. Desire smiles in all directions at once. In The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram recounts a memorable experience. Stepping out of a hut in Bali built on stilts above rice paddies,he finds himself acutely T H E S T A R R Y H O R I Z O N 113 disoriented, with "no ground in front of my feet, only the abyss of star-studded space falling away forever": I was no longer simply beneath the night sky, but also above it—the immediate impression was of weightlessness. I might have been able to reorient myself, to regain some sense of ground and gravity, were it not for a fact that confounded my senses entirely: between the constellations below and the constellations above drifted countless fireflies, their lights flickeringlike the stars, some drifting up to join the clusters of stars overhead, others, like graceful meteors, slipping down from above to join the constellations underfoot , and all these paths of light upward and downward were mirrored, as well, in the still surface of the paddies (4). I went out on my cabin porch, And looked up through the black forest At the swaying islands of stars. Suddenly I saw at my feet, Spread on the floor of night, ingots Of quivering phosphorescence, And all about were scattered chips Of pale cold light that was alive. 'the shape of heaven is asconfused as the heart when you place your feet on your head, you will stand on the stars,' these words whisper as the sea folds a thousand forms The vast onion of the actual: History seeping from capsule To capsule, from periphery To center, and outward again ... The sparklingquanta of events, The pulsing wave motion of value . 114 T H I S C O M P O S T Among its other labors,the old lore facilitated imaginalplacement as a coordination of mind and map, psychodynamics and geophysics posing together in astronomical apparel. In the account by Giorgio de Santillanaand Hertha von Dechend in Hamlet's Mill, star lore of the pole as it guides the equinoctial routes around the four corners of the circulating earth is regionally encoded in myths around the world. C. G.Jung recognized this in his consideration of Naassene creed: The Original Man in his latentstate—so we would interpret the term axarakteristos —is named Aipolos... because he is aepolos, the Pole that turns the cosmos round. This recalls the parallel ideas of the alchemists... about Mercurius, who is found at the North Pole. Similarly the Naassenes named Aipolos—in the language ofthe Odyssey—Proteus ..."who owes allegiance to Poseidon and knowsthe sea in all its depths." (Aim, 216) Through such burrowings in the compost library we begin to glimpse an ecological import in mythic lore, which makes a point of recalling and imagining a world of profundities exceeding comprehension. Gods are the humanized manifestation of the unknowable, even as their behavior makes sounds audible to humans like that "wise tomcat" who tells tales when climbing the equinoctial pole and sings songs when he slides down it. The Archanthropos is the Logos, whom the souls follow "twittering," as the bats follow Hermes in the nekyia. He leads them to Oceanus and—in the immortal words of Homer—to "the doors of Helios and the land of dreams." "He (Hermes) is Oceanus, the begetter of gods and men, ever ebbing and flowing, now forth, now back."Men are born from the ebb, and gods from the flow...