VAN ARGÜELLES, MADONNA: A POEM (THE RUNAWAY SPOON PRESS)
My thesis is that the language of poetic myth anciently current in the
Mediterranean and Northern Europe was a magical language bound up with popular
religious ceremonies in honour of the Moon-goddess, or Muse, some of them
dating from the Old Stone Age, and that this remains the language of true
poetry...[T]he early Greek philosophers...were strongly opposed to magical
poetry as threatening their new religion of logic, and under their influence a
rational poetic language (now called the Classical) was elaborated...[I am
concerned with] the rediscovery of the lost rudiments of poetry..."the
question of what survives of the beloved."
—Robert Graves, The White Goddess
if I could enter the sky
being without concern
if I could join wave to wave
with the fur of my fingers
and sing as the blood sings
in its urgency to reach the light
even in death there is too little fire
—Ivan Argüelles, "story of the spanish nun," The Invention of Spain
Heaven is within us and all around us, even though we seem to be living in
hell.
—Thomas Merton, Bread in the Wilderness
One of the problems of writing poetry in an Age of Prose is the fact that no
one knows who you are. The number of "famous poets"—unlike the number of
famous movie stars or famous singers—seems to be severely limited. Even worse
is the fact that people don't know how to read what you write. What passes for
poetry is often nothing more than short prose with line breaks.
Ivan Argüelles has been publishing superb poetry for over twenty years. His
first book, Instamatic Reconditioning, appeared in 1978, when the author was
in his late thirties. I want to begin with a poem from his second book, The
Invention of Spain, also published in 1978. Its title is "para el soldado
desconocido," "for the unknown soldier":
one day you will wake
and see your joy was a prison
all that furious galloping
without getting past the door
did the warden share his bread with you?
hours and hours you spent
reading the good book in the dark
who explained there was no key?
the immortal ox died beside you
the invincible horse wept in your shadow
the bride was allowed to look only
when they set you on fire
you called out the names of the lord
and the statue's hands fell off
what did it mean when the judge
gave you life?
every crumb was a blessing
you were happy to go barefoot
and when the war broke out
it was a stick they gave you
with which to kill!
teresa lies naked on the straw
were it not for her eyes in which
the sky's cold rubric slowly shifts
you'd think she were as dead as you
whisper your name in her ear
and watch her mouth devour the light
I doubt that the poem is well known even among those people who wish to know
about poetry, but it is masterful. Many of Argüelles' early poems are dramatic
monologues, somewhat in the tradition of early Pound or early Eliot. This is
not quite a dramatic monologue, but it deliberately focuses on a single
figure. The soldier is dead, but "one day you will wake" only to discover a
life which was nothing less than a living death: "your joy was a prison." The
poem is extraordinarily vivid not because it hews to the "facts" about the
soldier's life—no one knows what the facts are, he is the "unknown
soldier"—but because it "invents" so much and so freely. Fictional "events" of
the soldier's life—little narratives—occur almost line by line, and the
language remains open, enigmatic. Does "key" in "who explained there was no
key" refer back to the prison or to the "good book"? The speaker asks, "what
did it mean when the judge / gave you life?"— but the soldier is dead. (In
what sense can a judge "give life"?) The "bride" too is a mysterious figure.
She is named "Teresa"—undoubtedly after the saint. (Again, the book is called
The Invention of Spain.) Her "nakedness" seems momentarily erotic, but her
eyes reflect "the sky's cold rubric" and by the concluding lines she has
become a "devourer"—something approximating a vagina dentata. The poem is full
of fear and darkness, "close," as Argüelles once said, "to the apocalyptic
vision." It has considerable interest in sound: "eyes" / "sky's," "which" /
"shifts":
were it not for her eyes in which
the sky's cold rubric slowly shifts...
Ivan and his twin brother Joe ("José") were conceived in Mexico but born in
their mother's home town, Rochester, Minnesota. They spent their first five
years in Mexico City. Their father Enrique was Mexican, their mother Ethel was
American. Both Ivan and José read and speak fluent Spanish. A Classicist and a
polyglot, Ivan is also familiar with Latin, Greek, German, Italian, French,
Portuguese, Romanian, and several other languages. Enrique was a
policeman—which perhaps has something to do with the sense of imprisonment in
"para el soldado desconocido"—as well as a talented, though, finally, a failed
painter and a pianist. A "comunista," he was acquainted with Trotsky and
Rivera and was one of those summoned to the scene when Trotsky was
assassinated. "I never saw so many brains in my life," he commented
afterwards. He could be cruel to his sons—he once kicked Ivan down the
stairs—but he encouraged them to be artists, painters like himself. Ivan's
choice of poetry as a vocation evidently displeased him, and he was never
responsive to his son's work, though he continued to encourage Joe. A sense of
displacement, even a desire to please, haunts Ivan's poetry.
When the family returned to the United States, they settled in Minnesota. The
twins, along with their older sister Laurita, were brought up in Rochester,
the small town which houses the Mayo Clinic. Their mother was diagnosed with
TB—"the AIDS of the day," Ivan comments—and removed to a "sanitorium" (which
Ivan heard as "cemetary"). Eventually she was able to return to the family,
but the sense of loss never left Ivan. He discusses his early life in a
beautifully-written memoir published in Gale Research's Contemporary Authors
Autobiography Series, volume 24. "What a shock!," he writes, "This bitter cold
snowy Minnesota winter. How did we get here, lodged in a sterile bedroom in
our grandparents' large white-box boarding house? Everything was an ineffable
and painful mystery."
Predictably, the children did not fare well socially in their Eisenhower-era
home town: "Our first day at Lincoln School, the kids told my brother and me
that we were not Americans but Indians." Ivan took refuge in literature—he
continues to read voraciously—drugs, and what was then called "kicks." He was
fascinated by all modes of music—he believes this to be an inheritance from
his father—but he became especially interested in rhythm and blues and
devoured all he could find of it. He likes to point out that he was reading
Finnegans Wake and listening to Elvis Presley at more or less the same time.
"Dislocated or uprooted while growing up," he says, "I became by nature a
nonconformist. Never sure whether I was being accepted or rejected, usually
for the same reasons, I always felt like ‘a stranger in my own home town....'"
All these factors—the strict, demanding, frightening, and at times unloving
father, the mother who is out of reach, the twin or double, the inhospitable
environment, even the Mayo Clinic—find their way into Ivan's poetry, though
often in an oblique, enigmatic way.
Argüelles lived in a variety of places before settling with his wife Marilla
in Berkeley, California in 1978. It was also in 1978 that his son Max
tragically contracted encephalitis. Max's invalid statis has been a constant
fact of life for Ivan and Marilla, who continue to care for him at home.
Argüelles dates the beginning of his mature style to his third collection,
Captive of the Vision of Paradise, which appeared in 1983. "The title of the
collection reflects how I felt being in California," he writes. "The poems I
chose for this set exhibited a greater variety of topics and styles than the
two previous books. The surrealism was more intense. The mystical eroticism,
the unrequited nostalgia, and the great cosmic lesson of randomness which
Max's illness had taught me also informed the collection."
Here are two poems from that period, "The Need for Ignition" from Nailed to
the Coffin of Life (1984) and "Saint Erection Day" from The Structure of Hell
(1986):
THE NEED FOR IGNITION
my hapless dreams need kindling the days of my youth
gone into the shade of a neatly defined arcadia
that's not my idea of arcadia the mountains the volcanos
the consuls-general rambling in the pseudo-glade
the insects devouring the pestilence of their conscience
just a reminder of life devouring life in absentia
my love inside a metal box trying to restore her breath
or her lungs or her ovaries or her red blood
replaced by the white blood of a premature oblivion
I read the alphabet primers to her in sleep
I address the cattle of a southern promontory
with syllabic decadence I forget which language they speak
in Patagonia or Tierra del Fuego it is cold
I reach into the purse for her heart it is gone
MY HEART I cry reciting the lost verse of the grass-tribes
their drums sound in my hair my ears burn with shame
of their secrets I am naked as they are on an island
in the middle of a vast muddy river the tributary
of the great water Ocean the harpies swoop to pick
out my eyes or my finger-nails I am hungry
the cities pass before me in a gallant vision of feasting
skyscrapers of meat and typewriters where they swindle
the gifts of god with guarantees in old french
the horn of Roland blasts its final note shattering
my skin and what it stands for I am blind MY LOVE I am blind
*
SAINT ERECTION DAY
what is this monstrous affliction in my head?
PERJURY the woman I loved dead a fossil
dust turning in the eye of a hangover
rumors of cinzano and wars so many distant wars
the soul is a prize in the dark shrubbery
where the turkish onanist sleeps unguarded
but my head today is a nation of doubting tombs
I climb the spire of saint erection day
and the woman I loved I see her next to the stilts
which reason uses to enter the sea
great transparent fish consume her
they leave her fossil on a crimson rune
there are too many thoughts about what has happened
I fix my horse with tickets of spleen and oblivion
I wire the next port that the dream is on its way
"you have to be selective about the foreign capitals you visit"
this monstrous affliction which is my head!
The "I" in these poems is as anguished as the dead soldier in "para el
soldado desconocido," and there is no suggestion that the poet is in any way
distanced from it. Both poems plunge towards their conclusions with
considerable intensity. Both are deeply involved with the experience of loss,
and both involve a woman who is lost or dead. As in "para el soldado," life is
seen as an experience of "devouring": "life devouring life." Despite the use
of the personal pronoun—and despite the presence of autobiographical
elements—neither of these poems seems very "personal." The "I" becomes the
"site" in which loss registers, and language becomes the means by which it is
made visible. Again, "invention"—the mind's capacity to create—is extremely
important.
In a sense, everything in "The Need for Ignition" means exactly the same
thing: "the insects devouring the pestilence of their conscience" means loss;
"my love inside a metal box trying to restore her breath" means loss; "I am
blind MY LOVE I am blind" means loss. Indeed, the "horn of Roland" here has
the quality of the last Trumpet: total loss. Yet the inventiveness of the poem
is constant—one thinks of a jazz musician improvising around a given melody or
chord structure—and the amount of material in it is absolutely extraordinary:
arcadia, mountains, insects, a "metal box," the alphabet, cattle, Patagonia,
drums, the "great water Ocean," harpies, skyscrapers, typewriters, the horn of
Roland. The power of the poem resides in the tension between the mind's
capacity to explore absolutely anything—its intense creativity and freedom—and
the fact that everything brings the mind back to its inescapable condition: "I
am blind MY LOVE I am blind."
Argüelles mentions "mystical eroticism" in his comments on Captive of the
Vision of Paradise. The opening words of the second poem's title, "Saint
Erection Day," suggest precisely that. Again biography is relevant but does
not exhaust the meaning of the poem. Argüelles has an earlier poem,
"Encephalitis" in Manicomio (1984), which deals with both the poet's own
feelings and what he imagines his stricken son to be experiencing.
Here—heartbreakingly—he seems momentarily to take on his son's condition:
"what is this monstrous affliction in my head?" The enigmatic, capitalized
word, "PERJURY," moves us violently in another direction, however, and the
poem is suddenly about a dead lover: "the woman I loved dead a fossil." Both
events—the death of the woman, the affliction of the child—are horrifically
linked. That would be enough for most poets, but for Argüelles there is more.
The poem is shot through with sexuality—"erection," "onanist," even "my
horse"—so that "head" suggests the head of a penis. The poet is indeed plagued
by an "erection" since his lover is dead and cannot satisfy him. She is not
only dead but a "fossil," something in a museum, so his relationship with her
appears to be an aspect of the long- gone past. Indeed, on this "Saint
Erection Day," two "saints"—his son and the woman—are being "erected,"
created: their suffering has in effect canonized them! (Though we should
remember that the poet says he lives in a nation not of believers but of
"doubting tombs"—or "Toms.") By the conclusion of the poem, the "affliction"
is no longer in the poet's head, it is the poet's head—the very burden of his
life. Indeed, his "affliction" makes him, ironically, a kind of "saint"
himself, a martyr. There is a sense of comedy here as well as tragedy.
(Argüelles' humor is rarely pointed out but it is fiercely present in most of
his poems.) Given all this—and there is more: the phrase "distant wars" is of
considerable importance, for example—the poet is nonetheless able to fashion
out of th
Argüelles is in the habit of writing his poems during the lunch
break from his
job as university librarian at UC Berkeley. In 1989, his Looking for Mary Lou:
Illegal Syntax, a collaboration with the late photographer Craig Stockfleth,
won the Poetry Society of America's William Carlos Williams Award for best
poetry book published by a non-commercial press, edging out Gregory Corso's
selected poems, Mindfields. Argüelles writes, "I was saying goodbye to the
daily lunch poem with this collection." In 1990, "in a white heat of two
months," he wrote the opening section of his long poem, Pantograph. The
section was published in 1992 as "THAT" Goddess.
Argüelles' title is a reference to "The Death of Stalin," from Pieces of the
Bone Text Still There (1987). These are the concluding lines of the poem,
which, incidentally, includes references to both Trotsky and the Mayo Clinic:
You are dead the Mayo Clinic tells me
no more sports
no more swimming backwards through the documents of the river Lethe
You are one with Achilles & Hector heroes of Byzantium!
with what philosophy to reproach these assertions?
the paralytic president the claustrophobic dictator the Holy Roman Emperor
are dead without salvation
Mecca Transylvania the Third Rome the Ideal City the Genetic Map
through what grassy banks do my knees wavering buckle?
are these doctors communists? which of the three doors shall I choose?
is this chemical thaumaturgy in reverse? and then there is that Idea
about that woman that Goddess
if I can begin to
follow her
The "I" of Argüelles' poems is always problematical. Stalin is Stalin, but he
is also Argüelles to some extent as well as his "communist" father, to say
nothing of the Homeric heroes Achilles and Hector. (Dante and Virgil, who,
like Homer, wrote epics featuring a visit to the land of the dead, haunt
Argüelles' poetry.)
But the concluding couplet names a personage who is equally important in the
poet's work and who will merge with the various mother/lovers who occupy so
much of his poetry. "It was THAT Goddess who informed [Pantograph]," writes
Argüelles, "the White Goddess of Robert Graves, the muses of poetical
convention, both the erotic and the sacred...."
Pantograph, not all of which has yet been published, would require a
separate essay. The sections which have made their way into print—"THAT"
Goddess, Momus, Hapax Legomenon (a grammarian's term meaning "a word or phrase
occurring only once") and Enigma & Variations: Paradise is Persian for
Park—are remarkable. Argüelles describes the entire project as an attempt to
"touch on all the major themes of Western history, myth, death, and the
archaic, from Gilgamesh to Teotihuacan":
I filled up a dozen or so spiral-bound notebooks in a
little over two years, typically noting in the surroundings that gave me the
most anonymity: pizza joints, with large-screen TVs playing All My Children,
and hi-amped jukeboxes roaring out punk music. This apparent cacophony allowed
me to immerse myself in the poem. The atmosphere was designed to be as
opposite to that of a librarian cataloging works of German intellectual
history for the Library of Congress [his occupation] as possible. In this
environment all my senses were attuned to contemporary speech, subculture
styles and music, which directly contributed to the mosaic composition of my
work. Writing outside of such a "living" atmosphere, writing, for example,
only on a PC, is unthinkable for me. Not only do I need Homer, but I also need
Sid Vicious.
The subject of this review, Madonna: A Poem, is a much shorter work than
Pantograph. But little has been written about Argüelles' work, and I felt that
some sort of overview of his career and methods would be of use in introducing
this complex, fascinating, and compelling poem. Argüelles' work is nothing if
not self-referential, and as it moves forward it constantly looks back.
I quoted from Graves' White Goddess at the beginning of this paper. Here is
another quotation from that book:
The Theme, briefly, is the antique story, which falls
into thirteen chapters and an epilogue, of the birth, life, death and
resurrection of the God of the Waxing Year; the central chapters concern the
God's losing battle with the God of the Waning Year for love of the capricious
and all-powerful Threefold Goddess, their mother, bride and layer-out. The
poet identifies himself with the God of the Waxing Year and his Muse with the
Goddess; the rival is his blood-brother, his other self, his weird.
In reading Argüelles' poetry, it is important to realize that though there are
often autobiographical elements, autobiography is constantly being turned into
myth, and particularly into the myth of the White Goddess, with its "mother,
bride and layer-out" and its "blood-brother, his other self, his weird." For
Madonna: A Poem the Goddess's aspect as "Night Mare" is most important. "The
Night Mare," writes Graves, "is one of the cruellest aspects of the White
Goddess. Her nests, when one comes across them in dreams, lodged in rock-
clefts or the branches of enormous hollow yews, are built of carefully chosen
twigs, lined with white horse-hair and the plumage of prophetic birds and
littered with the jaw-bones and entrails of poets."
In Saint James—a book on which Argüelles and I collaborated—Argüelles writes,
mesmerized I listen to Madonna's new song
FROZEN
as we all are at this Vedic Distance
from our former selves
those duplicitous errant beings
clamoring like hungry ghosts
for that bit of flame
called "fame"
Madonna: A Poem begins with two quotations from Madonna the pop star: "life
is a mystery, / everyone must stand alone" and "mmm if I could melt your
heart." The latter is from her song, "Frozen"—a word which echoes throughout
Argüelles' poem. These are the opening lines:
it was painful for her to evidence the pain
her spared and bared breast her eye on the
what was that dark her woof of mentality
a scorn for other goals her sex was the source
not her mind not the spool between her thought
her dark hole that prism in the key of Delta
as if she could sing what was frozen in the roof
of her mouth in the candid light of what passed
a day in the virgins with white smash to boot
her venice afloat in the cancerous century
if you call her what is her name but the Pain
at the root of the sleep of the she cannot
come back but as that dolorous enigma
Runaway Spoon's publication is only the opening section of a projected longer
book, but, like "THAT" Goddess, the section is complete in itself. The
opening passages of Madonna: A Poem are dense, even for Argüelles. Lines
frequently break off into fragments or break off and are continued several
lines later. It helps to know a little about the Upanishads and Hindu
literature. This quotation from Indian Mythology suggests something of the
connection Argüelles is making between the pop star—whose name has deeply
religious overtones but who is blatantly sexual—and ancient deities:
[T]he Brahmanic period and its aftermath was a time of religious
confusion. New systems were constantly evolved while the old were retained,
and myths had to be elaborated...Dravidian trends can be discerned in the rise
to importance of female deities as powers in their own
right rather than as passive consorts to their divine husbands, and behind
this the growing concern with sacrifice and fertility cults. Most important of
all was the appearance of Shiva and the rise of Vishnu. While Shiva is partly
a development from Rudra, he is equally reminiscent of the pre- Aryan, yogic
Lord of the Beasts deity, while his consorts resemble the sacrifice-exacting
mother-goddess of the same period.
At one point in the poem the female figure is explicitly identified with
"Durga," the name given to the fierce, murderous form of Devi or Mahadevi
(Great Goddess). One of the poem's motifs is stated early on: the Goddess's
mouth will "swallow the god that created her": "to swallow the god his sperm
that all created"; "she swallowed the god and all that he in- / corporated the
fantastic libido of the numinous." "Sex," writes Argüelles, "was her truth";
"sex her cunt." We are again in the realm of the "devouring" vagina/mouth,
just as we were in "para el soldado desconocido," though the conceit has been
considerably elaborated in this poem. These days, even the newspapers talk
casually of "oral sex." Here the relationship has cosmic consequences which
are enormously disturbing: "the way she took the god in her mouth / as if it
were just a bottle of coca cola." The woman is "Lady Death ringing her worm
around the rosey hold...and ShivJi shudders." "So who are the saints we rever
[sic]," asks Argüelles, "I mean the women." (Later he refers to "the women we
rever abhor adore.") We are not in the world of Henry Miller or even of Philip
Roth but in something closer to William Burroughs. (Argüelles' Masters thesis
was a bibliography of Burrough's work, "including his gallery shows,
collaborations, and so forth.")
But if Mahadevi is relevant to Madonna: A Poem, so is the film Fatal
Attraction, which is also referred to during the course of the poem.
Argüelles' language is constantly shifting. If he is capable of a mythological
density worthy of Hart Crane, he is also capable of passages like this:
I swear on a Bible I never did No
what is it we want of Her?
You tell Me Officer I just dunno
looking for her in the malt-liquor
looking for her in the dead letter box
looking for her in the broken toilet
waking up with her in the county Morgue
I spent a fortune on her Honest I did
there was no guarantee the sex would be good
the way she looked at me from the magazine
I felt I was gonna just die
Madonna: A Poem is about an intense obsession ("Obsession tears me apart," "I
lost all self-respect"). But obsession is not merely the subject of the poem:
it is the poem, driving it relentlessly forward with its unstoppable energy.
Argüelles told me the poem nearly knocked him unconscious. (Possibly into the
unconscious.) In Saint James he asks,
what is poetry
if not the other
eternally trying to name the Other...
other than naming the Other
what is there
to say
There are undoubtedly autobiographical resonances to Madonna: A Poem, but one
can ask, What actual person, what "Other" could possibly bear the weight of
all that venom, all that metaphor? (Argüelles himself asks, "to whom am I
addressing this?") The poem is haunted by "pain"—a word which returns often.
What is the nature of that pain? Partly, it is the poem's central realization
that the very sources of one's creativity are inextricably linked to the
sources of death:
pourquoi ecrit-on?
de quoi meurt-on?
[why does one write?
from what does one die?]
But there is more to it than that.
I mentioned earlier that Argüelles' "ego," the "I" of his poems, tends to
shift. In "para el soldado desconocido" he is both the person observing and
the person observed, the "I" and the "you" of the poem. I think the same is
true here, though the mode of identification is vastly more complex than in
the earlier work. "Madonna" is certainly the object of the poet's lust but she
is also his "shakti," his female aspect. Jung would have said his "anima."
>From this point of view, the poem is about the "anima" manifesting as loss, as
separation. That is the source of its pain. Yet the poem's technique, its
relentlessly inventive creativity, is also a manifestation of the anima. "The
character of a man's anima," writes the Jungian analyst Marie-Louise von Franz
in Man and His Symbols, "is as a rule shaped by his mother":
If he feels that his mother had a negative influence on
him, his anima will often express itself in irritable, depressed moods,
uncertainty, insecurity, and touchiness...These "anima moods" cause a sort of
dullness, a fear of disease, of impotence, or of accidents. The whole of life
takes on a sad and oppressive aspect. Such dark moods can even lure a man to
suicide, in which case the anima becomes a death demon. She appears in this
role in Cocteau's film Orpheé.
The anima is capable of taking on a positive role as well. Von Franz writes,
This positive function occurs when a man takes seriously
the feelings, moods, expectations, and fantasies sent by his anima and when he
fixes them in some form—for example, in writing, painting, sculpture, musical
composition, or dancing...And it is essential to regard it as being absolutely
real; there must be no lurking doubt that this is "only a fantasy"...Often the
urge toward individuation appears in a veiled form, hidden in the overwhelming
passion one may feel for another person...Passion that goes beyond the natural
measure of love ultimately aims at the mystery of becoming whole, and this is
why one feels, when one has fallen passionately in love, that becoming one
with the other person is the only worthwhile goal of one's life.
It is into some such realm of "the mystery of becoming whole" that Argüelles'
poetry projects us. The poet gives us ample evidence that the world he creates
in his books is the world of hell. There are references to Dante's Inferno in
Madonna: A Poem, and one of Argüelles' books is called The Structure of Hell.
Yet his work reminds me of Thomas Merton's remark, "Heaven is within us and
all around us, even though we seem to be living in hell." The epigraph to
Madonna: A Poem is taken from Dante: it is the ecstatic concluding line of the
Paradiso: "l'amore che move il sole e l'altre stelle," "the love which moves
the sun and the other stars." One can take that as ironic, but I think it is
simplifying the poem to do so. If the "structure" of Argüelles' work is
negative, its essential energy and vitality is overwhelmingly positive. Love
is shot through with death, but death is equally shot through with love. Life
is not simple, it involves much loss, but, like Robert Graves, Argüelles is
ultimately and obsessively concerned with "the rediscovery of the lost
rudiments of poetry...‘the question of what survives of the beloved'":
that woman that Goddess
i
f I can begin to follow her
