Clayton ESHLEMAN
Riff
Torrid July with its mottled shadow dazzlings,
the center is out there—
the circumference this daily mail of silk-sack clouds,
clouds like meal drift, moulded over, melted,
sheep flock clouds, worlds of wool,
torn tufts, tossed pillows, clouds that flaunt forth, chevy on an air-built
thoroughfare,
"Parisian Thoroughfare"
paideuma of Hopkins and Powell,
under bop paws the modal floor
"Wreck of the Deutschland" "Un Poco Loco"
sprung projective verse, sprung bop,
dear tinny piano against
the stadium of the inscape,
chain mail play gale
—upon what do poets improvise?
A via negativa octopodal in its outreach,
speech fiber sled
dragged by Hades' huskies toward auroral rage,
the rage to in rising not lose infernal coals,
improvisational aurora, to live in a rarified gondola,
to be fully touched, to feel the summer extend through yes, Kosovo,
rape—body poisoned wells
rewiring Hopkins' windpuff bonnets.
Stanza by stanza gloss of HC's Lachrymae Christi
1] Whitely (that is, purely, and blankly, and voidly) the moon cleanses the world of human industry—almost, even though the building (the mill) is dissolved, the lower part of the window still smiles evilly at the speaker—a smile that will not yield to "the benzine rinsings of the moon"
2] While this process is going on, spring comes forth, yet it is under the control of "whitely" (suggesting that an unknowable blankness, or abyss, enfolds everything, including the moon)—the purification and void implied in stanza one are picked up in ''immaculate venom" —the fox is not evil, but from the lamb's viewpoint it is deadly, "nature red in tooth and claw" as flowers burst forth, so does the blood of carnivorous consumption, life feeding on life. There seems to be something perfidious (treacherous) about this, or let's say betrayal is sewn into the nature of things
3] but spring and night continue to open, expand, and the speaker can see through all the way back to Egypt, to the pyramids—the night makes him feel innocent again, it cleanses his eyes of the perjuries imposed on him (thus the night is effecting the speaker as the moon was said to effect the mills)
he is also aware of worms, evoking aereated earth, as well as the transience of the flesh—the worms are whistle-shaped, their tunneling is a kind of singing, and what their action implies is not repentance or moral remorse, but celebration—the proper response to death and betrayal is transformation, renewal—
the perjury that galvanizes must become a perpetual fountain , the adopting of a viewpoint in which all is sensed as flowing, in which destruction, immolation, is, at the same time, rebirth, life and death are dyadic, a kind of circular causation,
4] thus Christ on the cross is to be transformed into Dionysus, the tears (remorse, sorrow, sufferings) of Christ are to be consumed in the livingdying god of poetry and wine, Dionysus; the inventor of vine culture; "Dionysus, known like Shiva as the Cosmic Dancer, is both the bull torn apart and the lion tearing" (J Campbell); both Dionysus and Christ are killed and eaten yet resurrected gods of bread and wine; considerable resemblance between the fate of Dionysus and Osiris links Dionysus in the poem to pyramids and sphinxes; Dionysus is also, besides vines, a god of trees in general; while he dies a violent death (cut to pieces by knives, torn apart by frenzied hands as a bull etc), no evidence that Dionysus was burned at the stake or on a pyre (as was Hercules)—he was dismembered, but not burned, so Crane's vision of him as being burned at the stake is his own invention, it would seem.
Thus the Nazarene is implicitly converted to Dionysus in the single line of the 5th stanza: his tender eyes are tinder eye, inflammable, kindling in effect.
6] While the 6th stanza takes place, the Nazarene is set on fire, and begins to transform into a blazing Dionysus (who does not fully appear until the last stanza).
Let or unrestrained, unbound, released sphinxes.
ripe borage of death = death envisioned as medicinally fertile (did the Egyptians have borage?)—the hybrid (man animal) sphinx emerges from a demulcent (capable of soothing an inflamed membrane) herb, which I understand is also used in the preparation of a cordial.vermin (related to the worms above) and rod (flagellation associated with the penitence above?) no longer bind—plays off the venom that binds the fox's teeth in stanza 2.
now instead of worms a cloud of tears (the tears of Christ gone underground?) flocks (relating to the sheep implied in the earlier "flanks unfended") through the tendoned or now human loam or earth. How were the stones "betrayed?" Perhaps by the fact that the earth has been transformed into a realm of human spirit and sorrow?
7] Back to the god's eyes, which are now peeling/pealing, as bells peal, with names (Adonis, Attis, Dionysus, Christ etc) —each name carries its own undimming lattice of flame (relating the burning to viniculture, and creeping vines, etc). These names spell out in palm (the spiked palms of the Nazarene, also the palm, as a tree, thus Dionysus-associated) and pain "Compulsion of the year" = the driven cycling of nature, relentless, without freedom to deviate, that all living thing suffer, Dionysus and Nazarene here as man.
8] sable, like swart, means black; the boughs that the burning figure leans from are blackened from past burnings, and like the moon with its rinsings/cleansings this figure is now aflow (with fire?), that is, he is not stanched (not checked, and he is luminous, light giving. The nights that previously opened to pyramids now strike an ethereal harmony (Pythagoras vision, produced by planetary motion (harmony of the spheres I assume is being alluded to here), also note play on PERfect, after perfidies, perjuries, and perpetual, implying that the word is also undergoing transformation.
Then the breath of the earth, embodied in the blazing god, is proposed to consist of lilacs and emeralds (plants and gems); the grail is no longer associated with Christ (from which he ate the Last Supper, in which his blood was collected, or in other versions, from which he drank wine at the Last Supper—the grail now belongs to Dionysus, a god of the fruition of the earth. Here there is the implication that in another time the grail of earth was lifted up, for here the god is asked to do this "again"—the god thus is blessing the fruitfulness of the earth as he burns, with the lifting up of the grail a trope for resurrection/trans formation
9] The 0 Nazarene from stanza 7 is now 0 Dionysus, as if the god now looks up at the speaker (though his eyes have been acknowledged twice before)—the lack of a verb here is probably significant. After Thy face I think we are to pause, as if the verb missing is covered by such a pause, for the next line presents the god—note also "0" is set by itself at the end of the second line of the stanza. 0 / Dionysus—with the 0 by itself punning on zero as well as the roundness of the target to appear two lines later. Note also break after Thy. The last line presents us with a god whose face is filled with arrows but who is still smiling. This unmangled smile is set against the unyielding sill smile in stanza 1. The twanged red perfidies (stanza 2) may play into the target also, as a twang is the sharp release of a bowstring, and to twang is to release an arrow (a minor point perhaps but twanged is so odd that one seeks to account for it).
The general drive of the poem seems to be one in which the negative suffering-for-others qualities of what we might call "the Christ complex" are to be not substituted but subsumed, assimilated into the positive celebratory qualities of the "Dionysus complex." If I am to be torn apart, the poet seems to be saying, I want to sing as I break or burn; I do not want to go down in penitence. This transformation is synchronized with the appearance of spring, tho it should be pointed out that spring is seen as one aspect of a venombound natural cycle. Since HC prays for this transformation (in the command Lift up...) we can assume that the poem is self-reflective of his own creative problems and concerns. There is a strong implication running through the text that his own tendency was to take as personal, as directed at him, the venom, perfidies, perjuries, and betrayals that were part of the havoc of his life. By casting his speaking self against the great cycles of natural life and mythological imagination, it is as if he would depersonalize these negative forces and transform them into the compulsive pain of being part of life at large. The extraordinary last line we should note does not present a Dionysus made whole, or a figure who has been simply purified by fire—rather in "target" are gathered all the arrows, all the agonies evoked at various points in the poem, so that the smile we encounter is one that carries in its surrounding flesh the cruel and horrifying contradictions of life. In a sense, one could say that this is an honest smile because it is offered not in evasion or simplistic transformation of the speaker's multiple sufferings.
28 February 1999