This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry

Superfluity

182 T H I S C O M P O S T Conveniently, a poet coined the wordpsychosm, conjoining psyche and cosmos.* A psychosm would be a plexus of energy by which the universe is pivoted in mind, and psyche integrates a material world extending to cosmos— that, through us, the hazel might ripen, and the stars into their fall quadrants drift. Superfluity Myth arises, reputedly, as participatory response: the interjected mu of onlookers in a circle around a performanceor recitation. The mu of myth is the oracle of circularity : myth is psyche affirming a circulation and is as innate to the individual as the distinctive whorl of fingerprint by which we are identified: an implicating fold, a personal labyrinth, a diagram of detritus pathways.The very notions of psyche and myth are unambiguously concentric in their bias. Jacques Derrida's critique of logocentrism couples the image of centrality with the logos, that traditional antithesis of myth. In Of Grammatokgy Derrida covertly addresses the collapsed legacy of the ouroboros in terms of the infinite regression of the signifier, which is a variant of the perpetuum mobile of Zeno's paradox. The lapse of outer circumference , fatigued beyond repair, boomerangs as binding indecision in the slippage of "difference"—that syncopation ofdistressthat, from another perspective, becomes the sound of a startled pounding heart. Myth—the nigredo of artifact, smelted into tale or image—has long been the "content" of art, and art attests to a profusion of life exceeding any single time * In NeoLogos, a mimeo circular (1975), Charles Stein defined psycosm as: "i. A soul-world or soul's world. 2. The world specified within any consensual realm. There would be a 'psycosm' for any group or persons participating in a common system of reality. 3. Any representation of a soul's world, asin a poem or other work of art. 4. Abreath world:the field of consciousness arising and vanishing with the duration of any specified unit of temporal consciousness." My altered spelling adds a psychological torque, a nudge in the direction of inner ecology. S U P E R F L U I T Y 183 or place. "The transformations of culture do not take place in history, they take place in myth. It is because the individual cannot perceive in the limits of his own lifetime such transformations as the Neolithic or Industrial revolutions that we have need of myth" (William Irwin Thompson, Falling Bodies, 135). To reiterate Robert Duncan's point from The Truth and Life of Myth, "To inherit or to evolve is to enter mythic existence" (59). Myth is amorphous and protean because it so freely changes hands or mouths. Myth is the legacy of biodegradable thought, compost rumination. Myth comes to mouth to make apparent what the eye can't see. It is a means of giving scope to idiosyncrasy and gratuitous bounty—the bounty of gratuity. The preponderance of indirection in poetry acknowledges drift—as does Thoreau's "saunter" (from, he says, sans terre), the Situationist derive, and the clinamen of Lucretius. "God said, 'Let meanings move,' and there was poetry." It is RobinsonJeffers's "Divinely superfluousbeauty"; the "high superfluousness" by which we "know / Our God." ... to fling Rainbows over the rain And beauty above the moon, and secret rainbows On the domes of deep sea-shells, And make the necessary embrace of breeding Beautiful also as fire, There is the great humaneness at the heart of things, The extravagant kindness, the fountain . . . The great Mind passes by its own fine-honed thoughts, going eachway. Rainbow hanging steady only slightly wavering with the swing of the whole spill, between the rising and the falling, stands still. I stand drenched in crashingspray and mist, and pray. Superfluity sharpensthe edge of awareness. The prayer combineswonder and danger ; the gist of any prayer is a poet's question. Muriel Rukeyser asks, "Do I move 184 T H I S C O M P O S T toward form, do I use all my fears?" This is a presentiment of duende, the Spanish uncanny that (playing off the German sense of unheimlich as unhomely) Federico Garcia Lorca found in New York, sensing himself"not a man,not a poet, not a leaf, / only a wounded pulse that probes the things of the other side." "Acertain arch and/or ache and/or ark of duress, the frazzled edge of what remains 'unsung,'"as Nathaniel Mackey puts...