Metaphysical Shivers: Reading Ed Roberson

"Our nature is Meteorique"

—John Donne, "To All My Friends"

A Way in Air

Long before the triangle trade, the theme of enslavement was tightly woven into the spiritual language of the West. Christianity and its Gnostic rivals found in the slavery of the classical world a powerful metaphor. Exegetes from St. Paul to Antonin Artaud have patiently elucidated how and to what we seem to be bound. Turning from our language of the spirit to the historical fact of modern slavery, considering the blackening Atlantic, the triangle trade, examining the forces that made the modern world in the era of the Enlightenment, it could almost seem to Americans in the twentieth century that the bleakest turns of some long forgotten Gnostic phrase had been prophetic. The word had been truly made flesh, but it turned out to be the word slave.

So what is a contemporary African American poet to do, especially one steeped in the figurative traditions of English poetry, one drawn to metaphysics, one who sets out to write an epic suite "by the light" of slaves "escaping" (The Aerialist Narratives 77)? What inspiration might he draw from, say, this famous fourth century formulation: "What liberates is the knowledge of who we were, what we became; where we were, whereinto we have been thrown; whereto we speed, wherefrom we are redeemed; what birth is, and what rebirth" (Jonas 45).

Captive here, the poet might conclude, we seek "a way in air" (The Aerialist Narratives 79). We might even be of the air, or of a realm beyond the air. We might see the image of our longing in the birds, ghosts, ecstatics, clouds, fish, helicopters, or in any of the many things floating through Ed Roberson's The Aerialist Narratives. We would be of the air again, we would return to "where we were." But first, our ignorance must end. First we must see and feel where we are. Exactly, the poet might say, "where we at." Then we must learn to walk through this world like a stone skipping across water.

First, that is, we must receive the call. This awakening, one of the essential motifs of Gnostic literature, may come with a shout, or it may come quietly. One question that seems unavoidable as we take the measure of this revelation is how deeply the method of the poem reflects the call that would abolish it. In one contemporary depiction, a Gnostic messenger simply sits next to the speaker at a bar and says "so." The occasion of the syllable "so" in Nathaniel Mackey's Song of the Andoumboulou suits the world where both exegesis and narrative—in many places indistinguishable in Mackey's work—are sharply provoked by such an ambivalent bit of logos. For Roberson, the awakening is set equally deep within the method of the text. No messenger speaks, however. We come to knowledge of our condition through our own words. (This seems apt enough. Gnosticism, it's been said, signaled the advent in the West of a text-based spirituality.) But the place we must look for is not in narrative—the outward sign, for Mackey, of a state of continuous transformation—but in metaphor: "suppose to read is as to study divination" (Lucid Interval 62).

If the divine will at work in history had utterly disclosed itself in the previous books, we would not feel the urgency, in The Aerialist Narratives, that seems a direct response to some stray lines of the tenth century. The spiritual ache behind each line of this book-length sequence would have found itself either robbed or rewarded in regard to hope. The desire for and fear of this gnosis imagined a world away would not require the poet to fly through the known world for analogy. Resolution would have been reached as to "whereinto we have been thrown," and "whereto we speed." But while Roberson has long courted the divinatory power of language, he has in each book recast the drama of initiation, until finally we are ready to read by the light of slaves escaping, to fly from the plantation of our...