This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry

The times promised

l88 T H I S C O M P O S T method that were in essence socio-political. On the other level, folk religion continued to dramatize,by analogy and symbol,recurrent seasonal events in nature that, misconstrued as "immortality" when applied to man, came into violent contradiction with the other tradition. The Ghost Dance catastrophe of this unstable acculturation wasin the end as much socio-political as it was philosophico-religious. (Ghost Dance,477) To LaBarre's account here we might add Hyams, in Soil and Civilization, addressing the social and religious disintegration of Greek culture through soil abuse,as much our legacy as democracy and Ionianphilosophy. LaBarre finds in Plato an imprint of the Ghost Dance: Plato, he writes, "has polytheized the One into an indefinite number of noetic Ideas, each Idea being the pattern for the appropriate species of particulars" (546). "Like every metaphysical system it is an unwitting statement of the misunderstood facts of life; it confounds the communication of organic pattern with the communication of patterns in speech" (547). Abandoning the cyclic vitality inherent in traditional chthonic worship, anthropocentrism referred all authority to humanprestige; and once the polis becomes the measure of all things, politics emerges as the measure of affairs, commodifyingnature as the standing reserve of man'sbidding. For twenty-five hundred years Hellenistic legacy has been accepted asthe "seed" from which civilization grew. But as the modern Greek poet George Seferis put it,"We are the seed that dies. And I went into my empty house." The timespromised Facing American derelictions of surplus meaning becoming global fate, Olson laments: The individual has become divided from the Absolute, it is the times promised by the poets. I've seen it all go in other directions and heard a man say why not stop ocean's tides T H E T I M E S P R O M I S E D 189 and not even more than the slow loss of a small piece of time, not any more vibration than the normal wobble of the earth on its present axis . .. He is only valuable to himself—ugh, a species acquiring distaste for itself. ... One even, at this date begins to look on manas a pure decline from Paleolithic, so animal—or as birds make love—is the human eye, when, inside, it does not know any more than what it can express by living& that sight be in this man's eye is the expression we call love ... The following poem is quoted in full: Same day, Later Contemplating my Neolithic neighbors, Mother and Son, while Son mows noisily, with power mower the grass & Ma hangs over the fence simply watching—and Maiden, or Unmarried Sister comes around the corner to see him, too & if you let the ape-side out the eyes have died or become so evolutionary and not cosmological (vertical not the eyes any longer of the distinctness of species but of their connections And then Nature is a pig-pen or swill, and any improvement or increase [including the population] of goods—things, in the genetic sense, plural, and probable, in that lottery—are then what humanbeings 190 T H I S C O M P O S T get included in, by themselves as well as by any administrative or service conditions such as contemporary States find the only answer,the ticketing or studying of —or selling of—family relations among contemporary Americans and not Africans but of the baboons as a kin group in Africa: I prefer my boundary of land literally adjacent & adjoining mid Mesozoic at the place of the parting of the seams of all the Earth. These passages of late Maximus Poems recapitulate most of my themes. From his early formulation "polis is / eyes," Charles Olson comes twenty years later to "if you let the ape-side out the eyes / have died"; we are a species acquiring a distaste for itself, and our eyes no longer register the omnivorousness with which we devour the biological and ecological basis of our condition. "The universe is filld with eyes then, intensities ... / benemaledictions ofthe dead." It's only within a framework like that of Maximus—proposed as the enlarged image of human capability—that Olson manages to pinpoint homosapiens as transhistorical fatality. The wars and brutalities ofthe twentieth century areunique, but still characteristic of a much longer time span in which the degradation of the human is...