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 Arg�elles' 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 Arg�elles and I
collaborated�Arg�elles 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 Arg�elles' 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 Arg�elles. 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 Arg�elles 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 Arg�elles,
"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
Arg�elles, "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.
(Arg�elles' 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. Arg�elles' 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. Arg�elles 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? (Arg�elles 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 Arg�elles' "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 Orphe�.
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 Arg�elles' 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 Arg�elles' 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 Arg�elles' 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,
Arg�elles 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
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