Norman Finkelstein
Nathaniel Mackey: Poetry Terminable and Interminable
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Freud’s aetiology informs the gnosticism of a poetics of illness in that Freud was always looking for a repressed emotional catastrophe that organized the neuroses of his patients.
In the clinical process of working through neuroses by way of the transference, Freud sought not to rid his patients of their complexes but to make them something his patients could live with, without undue anxiety. As important as the “myth” of catastrophe, admission, and healing is in the Freudian milieu, so too is the analysis—the interpretation—of this "myth." It is perhaps analysis that is Freud’s most ingenious legacy. Analysis allows the patient to enter into an initiatic condition, in which he or she finds a potential for self-regeneration…The point is not merely that analysis facilitates this creative state; analysis in fact creates it. Analysis—whether the psychoanalysis of H.D., the poetic metaanlysis of Duncan in his correspondence with H.D., or the poetic-analytical paraphrase of Mackey’s poetry—is a deeply creative act. (O’Leary 26)
1.
Gnostic Contagion, Peter O’Leary’s groundbreaking study of Robert Duncan (which includes a crucial chapter on the poetry of Nathaniel Mackey) is a book to which I return frequently. My first reading of it inspired me to write On Mount Vision; it gave me the necessary theoretical tools for my own exploration of sacred traditions and modern poetry, and just as importantly, it gave me permission, in a precisely Duncanian sense, to write the kind of literary criticism (part close reading, part psychoanalysis, part historicism, and one hundred per cent mystical commentary) toward which I had been unconsciously moving for many years. O’Leary’s interpretation of Duncan, with H.D. placed before him, and Mackey following him, draws freely on psychoanalysis, myth criticism, ethnography, and comparative religious studies, in order to produce a theory of poetic illness and cure that is both structured by gnosticism and is in itself an instance of gnosis. In this regard, I am reminded of what Lévi-Strauss observes in “The Structural Study of Myth”: “we define the myth as consisting of all its versions; or to put it otherwise, a myth remains the same as long as it is felt as such. A striking example is offered by the fact that our interpretation may take into account the Freudian use of the Oedipus myth and is certainly applicable to it…. not only Sophocles, but Freud himself, should be included among the recorded versions of the Oedipus myth on a par with earlier or seemingly more ‘authentic’ versions” (217). O’Leary, an ecstatic visionary poet in the tradition of Duncan and Mackey, does not only give us an analysis of the gnostic myth as treated by the poets in his study, but also, as in the case of Freud and Oedipus, gives us a new version of that myth. O’Leary’s gnosis extends through the poets he treats, and through his own poetry, but also, as my epigraph from Gnostic Contagion indicates, to Freud himself.
In regard to poetics, the most important question posed by O’Leary is “Does the poem heal?” At the risk of oversimplifying the matter, we may say that poetry is a disease and the poem is the cure. This notion is at the heart of O’Leary’s reading of H.D., Duncan, and Mackey, as well as his understanding of poetry as intimately related to both shamanism and psychoanalysis. Following O’Leary’s cues, my chapter on Mackey in On Mount Vision focuses on Mackey as a shaman, a cured sick man (or a revived dead man) whose magical powers and initiation into gnosis are represented in his poetry through the endless spiritual travels of the band of pilgrims described in the twinned serial poems, Song of the Andoumboulou and “Mu”. Seriality in poetry is predicated on finding verbal structures which successfully embody ongoingness—the writing keeps going, keeps moving, much like Mackey’s restless band. In the course of the poems, we encounter an endless set of psychic crises and psychic resolutions, endless traumas, endless cures. For Mackey, serial form, as he notes in the preface to Splay Anthem, produces “the draft unassured extension knows itself to be. Provisional, ongoing, the serial poem moves forward and backward both, repeatedly ‘back / at / some beginning’, repeatedly circling or cycling back, doing so with such adamance as to call forward and backward into question…” (xi). Seriality involves “recursive form, a net of echoes” (xii). This recursive form in turn is related to “ongoing myth, an impuse toward signature, self-elaboration, finding and losing itself. The word for this is ythm (clipped rhythm, anagrammatic myth)” (xiii). The endless language play that Mackey calls ythm is what the work is about, as much as it is about the search for hermetic knowledge, the endless reaching for erotic fulfillment, the historical and political struggle against forces of injustice, the longing for a utopian place at the far horizon that is also a return to a lost, original paradise. One of the many ironies in Mackey’s work is that however much it constitutes what he calls a “discrepant engagement,” it is also one of the most seamless bodies of contemporary poetry, where form is never more than an extension of content, but content is never more than an extension of form.
O’Leary refers to Mackey’s relation to Duncan as a “poetic-analytical paraphrase,” but we can also say that in and of itself, Mackey’s poetry is a mythopoeic self-analysis, both inspired by and dependent upon the interminability of the serial form. Freud famously analyzed himself by attending closely to his dreams and simultaneously inventing a technique of dream interpretation that became a cornerstone for the psychoanalytic method. For him, the dream is a fulfillment of a wish, however cunningly disguised by the censorious functions of the mind. It addresses real desires, but those desire are encrypted, and must be uncovered through the analyst’s knowledge of the dreamwork. But for Mackey, the dream “ is a way of challenging reality, a sense in which to dream is not to dream but to replace waking with realization, an ongoing process of testing or contesting reality, subjecting it to change or a demand for change” (xiii). This statement aligns with a more contemporary psychoanalytic understanding of dreaming, in which dreams are seen as “the expression of multiple forms of thinking in which we struggle and experiment with a plethora of ways of gaining a sense of truth of our lived experience, of who we are in relation to other people, and of the knowable and unknowable world” (Ogden and Ogden 24).
Mackey’s poetry presents us with a sustained and endlessly unfolding dream-state. He cites Géza Róheim’s The Eternal Ones of the Dream, in which the Aranda of Australia “actively seek to remain in the dream, to be in more than one place at a time” (Splay Anthem xiii). Altjeringa, the revelatory dreamtime of the Australian tribes, is, as Mackey mentions, of great significance to Duncan in The H.D. Book. In Chapter 6, “Rites of Participation,” Duncan synthesizes Roheim’s psychoanalytic anthropology with Gertrude Stein’s “Composition as Explanation” and Gershom Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, in order to present a vision of the magically totalizing power of the mythic imagination, especially as it manifests itself in dream. For Duncan, “What we experience in dreaming is not a content of ourselves but the track of an inner composition of ourselves….The endless repetitions of rituals and wanderings and hunting as the pattern of life for the Australian is a living inside the Composition” (166). Likewise, in Mackey’s serial poems, however nightmarish the circumstances he describes may become, the desire remains to move through and beyond those circumstances, to continually move forward in dreamtime toward the unreachable utopian horizon signified by that mythic place or condition the poet calls “mu.” The poems, in Duncan’s terms, constitute “the track of an inner composition of ourselves.” Each episode, however resolved (or not), takes on the quality of an initiatory ritual, one more in an endless sequence offering up its own particular take on gnosis. Arguably, this has become more explicit in Mackey’s poetry of the last decade. One thinks of the violence and sociopolitical disasters described in “Nub,” the last section of Splay Anthem, and throughout the most recent volume, Nod House. Yet even the title—Nod as in the Land of Nod, dreamland—indicates the need and the desire to keep dreaming, and to keep interpreting the dream.
2.
Poetry, religion, anthropology, and psychoanalysis all intersect at the point labelled “myth.” The epigraph to “Song of the Andoumboulou: 79” is an extraordinary quotation from the 19th-century philologist Max Müller: “Mythology is inevitable, it is natural, it is an inherent necessity of language…it is, in fact, the dark shadow which language throws on thought, and which can never disappear till language becomes altogether commensurate with thought, which it never will” (Nod House106). It makes a great deal of sense that Mackey would find this quote useful. As Duncan, his mentor, once said, “So I immediately turn away if someone says, ‘I'm going to spiritually improve you, here's a little enlightenment.’ I say, ‘No, no, I'll take a little endarkenment and in my poetry you find me’” (A Little Endarkenment 29). Like Duncan, Mackey prefers endarkenment, and his dark gnosis can only be found in and through the poetry itself. Thus, in “Song of the Andoumboulou 79,” “It wasn’t religion we were / feeling”; rather, “What we felt / could’ve been said to be myth / but we said ythm, first would / be last we thought…” (106). Mackey recognizes that his poetry is not religious per se, however much it borrows from various religious traditions. But it is unquestionably mythic (or ythmic), and indeed, in his case, it could even be said that poetry, every bit as much as myth, is the dark shadow, the endarkenment, that language throws on thought. Both poetry and myth come into being because language can never be commensurate with thought. Indeed, from a psychoanalytic perspective, thought itself can never be commensurate with thought; there remains an unbridgeable divide between our conscious mental operations and the unconscious.
Poetry, myth, and dream—all of which are languages, systems of signification—provide some access to the unconscious, but only through interpretation. In “Song of the Andoumboulou: 79,” we encounter the following scenario:
No sooner did we think than what
we thought faded, wordless what we
thought we saw… A new member
known
as Huff joined our group. Strange
Brother he was known as by some… (107)
Without language, thought fades. But “Huff / pointed into the blur, claimed he’d / come from it” (108). Like a shaman (or an analyst), Huff guides the group into the blur of the unconscious and, in effect, makes it comprehensible. Feeling is given structure and significance; it becomes organized, and in effect, speaks:
In Huff’s domain we saw waves
come in, swells an emotional debit,
light’s
dilated slide…Symphonic sway,
more feeling than any of us could’ve
said we felt… (108)
Huff, we learn, “wore wingtips, argyle socks. / He had a way of dancing standing / still” (109). This dancing through the blur leads the group to pose the most basic of psychic questions of themselves: “Were we dead or / yet to be born we couldn’t say…” The poet makes a point of noting that “It wasn’t that / Huff had wings on his feet. Wingtips / were a type of shoe. Huff’s way had / it both ways.” In other words, Huff both is and is not an avatar of Hermes, the messenger god, leading the soul through the realms of being by the power of his hermeneutics. Part con artist, part sage, Huff leads the group to discover “the underside rising, soon- / come counsel of souls in absentia.” Bringing knowledge up from the depths, Huff prepares the way so that the previously absent voices within may speak. “As a child,” the poet tells us, “his first words had been / ‘other side’, some inkling even / then he’d come from elsewhere” (110). Huff’s origins are appropriately mythic; he comes from the “other side” and it is to the other side that he takes us. At the end of the poem, the group appears to be in a library where in “the upper stacks one found a / book entitled My Friend Huff” (111). The title sounds like a children’s book version of a volume from the Corpus Hermeticum. Huff is a friend, a mysterious guide promising gnosis. In reading his book, “Blur blended with lamplight” (111).
3.
What counsel might the “souls in absentia” bring to us? Fundamental to Song of the Andoumboulou, as Mackey explains on a number of occasions, are the Dogon funeral rites which include the singing of the original song, intended to propitiate “the dead who have not yet been properly laid to rest by their surviving kin” (Splay Anthem xiv). The Andoumboulou themselves are “an earlier form of human beings who were flawed and failed to maintain themselves…an earlier draft of human being that didn’t work out” (Paracritical Hinge 293). Mackey surmises that the Andoumboulou are invoked at a Dogon funeral because it is “a ritual that is marking death and mortality, the failure of human life to sustain itself indefinitely, because they are figures of frailty and failure. Mortality is a reminder of frailty and failure. But the song is also a song of the spirit of the person who has died and is moving on to another realm. It’s a song of lament and rebirth” (293). Access to this other realm, the realm of the dead, is crucial to shamanic healing, and that access may come to the shaman in dream: “Dream too is a school of ancestors, one of the altered states in which the dead reappear, one of such states the we in these pages [ofSplay Anthem] pursue” (Splay Anthem xiii). Without the performance of the proper rites, the ancestors who would school us in our dreams remain troublesome, restless ghosts. In the case of the Dogon, the dead enter the beer that the elders drink, who then wander the streets abusing members of the community, declaring “The dead are dying of thirst” (xiv). As is so often the case in poetry and ritual, we find illness, diagnosis, and cure.
In his great essay “Therapeutic Action in Psychoanalysis,” Hans Loewald, describing the therapeutic power of the transference neurosis in the analytic process, explains that this power
is due to the blood of recognition, which the patient’s unconscious is given to taste so that the old ghosts may reawaken to life. Those who know ghosts
tell us that they long to be released from their ghost life and led to rest as ancestors. As ancestors they live forth in the present generation, while as ghosts
they are compelled to haunt the present with their shadow life. Transference is pathological in so far as the unconscious is a crowd of ghosts, and this is
the beginning of the transference neurosis in analysis: ghosts of the unconscious, imprisoned by defenses but haunting the patient in the dark of his defenses
and symptoms, are allowed to taste blood, are let loose. In the daylight of analysis the ghosts of the unconscious are laid and led to rest as ancestors
whose power is taken over and transformed into the newer intensity of present life… (248-249)
At this crucial moment in Loewald’s essay, it is revealing that, as is so often the case in psychoanalytic writing, the author turns to myth and literature (in this case, the episode in Book XI of the Odyssey, in which Odysseus descends into the underworld) in order to describe psychic phenomena. The mythic bond between psychoanalysis and poetry, including Mackey’s poetry, is to be seen in Loewald’s assertion that the ghosts “long to be released from their ghost life and led to rest as ancestors”: a longing that leads in turn to ritualized action occurring again and again in Mackey’s work. It seems to me that if the poem can heal—both the poet and the reader—then that healing involves an awareness of “the newer intensity of present life.” Such recognition is there even in Nod House, Mackey’s darkest book, as in the poem “Lone Coast Periplus”: “Wished for remedy, dreamt-of / return, / awake less alive than asleep it seemed / of late, each the other’s dream had only / dreaming…” (97).
4.
Let us return to the matter of seriality in Mackey’s poetry. The continuous and ceaselessly provisional nature of the writing, its salient quality of “unassured extension,” indicates that seriality is far more than a technique, though it certainly entails a mastery of technique. Mackey’s poetry registers an exceptionally high level of self-consciousness in regard to form. In the preface to Splay Anthem, he notes how “statement backtracks or breaks off, ellipses abound, assertion and retraction volley, assertion and supplementation: addition, subtraction, revision, conundrum, nuance, amendment, tweak” (xi)—to which I would add his use of call and response, anagrams, multilinguistic (or sometimes, pseudo-multilinguistic) puns, repetitions, reversals, sliding transformations of phrases, words, syllables, even single vowels and consonants, as well as a precise compositional use of the page space, the stanza, the enjambed line, to achieve a highly syncopated recursive rhythm and cadence that is all his own. If, as I noted earlier, seriality seeks to embody ongoingness, seriality achieves this end through the total mobilization of technique.
But what exactly are we talking about when we talk about technique?
“A technique, after all, is a means devised by someone to get what they want. It makes wanting make sense. A technique is not supposed to have an unconscious. The [poet’s] technique should tell us what the [poet] wants, and what the [poet] wants from [poetry].” As the reader can no doubt tell, this is a fake quote. In the original, from Adam Phillips’ Introduction (ix-x) to Wild Analysis, a retranslation of Freud’s papers on technique, the word “poet” is actually “analyst” and “poetry” is actually “psychoanalysis.” Be that as it may, I think Phillips’ remark can shed a great deal of light on The Song of the Andoumboulou and “Mu”. For if Mackey is, as I believe, one of our most important “technicians of the sacred,” then the technique he develops in his poetry certainly “makes wanting make sense”: it structures desire—for healing, for wholeness, for greater psychic knowledge in a broken world—and in so doing, it does indeed reveal itself to have an unconscious, an unconscious that is endlessly tapped as the poems unfold. Later in his Introduction (and this is the real quotation), Phillips observes that “If the unconscious is amenable to technique—and the whole practice, if not the theorizing of psychoanalysis depends upon it being so—this, in itself, would change our sense of what the unconscious is like. The idea of technique implies that someone knows what they are doing. After the invention of psychoanalysis, the idea of knowing what you are doing, the idea of a person as an agent of intentions that are transparent to himself, never quite makes sense” (xiv-xv).
As much as I concur with Phillips’ perspective here, I must also point out that poets, in effect, have always known that the idea of a person as an agent of intentions that are transparent to himself never quite makes sense—one thinks of Keats’ “negative capability” or Rimbaud’s “je est un autre.” This psychopoetic awareness has predicated a range of compositional procedures, which is to say that in poetry, there is no doubt that the unconscious is amenable to technique. Mackey’s serial poetry, given all that its form entails, is one of our best contemporary instances of this enduring truth. Technically speaking, Mackey knows what he’s doing, but what he’s doing entails a deep working with and within the unconscious, an intentionality that thwarts intention. This becomes even more the case if we consider recent, post-Freudian revisions of the unconscious. Drawing on Wilfred Bion’s theories, Thomas and Benjamin Ogden describe the unconscious less as a structure or place of repressed drives and desires, and more as an aspect of mind in which “the individual simultaneously views his experience from the standpoint of rational, cause-and-effect reasoning and from the vantage point of omnipotent, magical causation…from the perspective of an impatient need to find the safety of closures, conclusions, judgments and understandings, and from the perspective of an equally forceful need to dissolve closures in order to open up the possibility of fresh understandings…” (23).
This is an apt description of the kind of poetic thinking that is to be found in Mackey’s serial poems. There is a certain calm, seemingly rational expository tone in many passages, produced by such phrases as “It was…,” “It wasn’t…,” “Insofar as…,” “Notwithstanding…,” etc.—as if the poet were presenting a logical, cause-and-effect explanation for what is happening to the group at any given moment. And yet what is happening is irrational, magical, the stuff of dreams. Likewise, the poet will often seek longingly for “the safety of closures, conclusions, judgments and understandings,” even as closure continuously dissolves in the never-ending, episodic pilgrimage, the insistent journeying that constitutes the very substance of the work. This, as Mackey declares in “Song of the Andoumboulou: 75,” is “A dream of endlessness, what could be said / to’ve / just begun, muttered while asleep / letting / go” (Nod House 88).
5.
“Here I have the feeling,” writes Freud in “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” “that I ought to be embarrassed about making all these ponderous observations, since what I am saying has been known for a long time and is self-evident. We have really always behaved as though we knew all this; it just that our theoretical account has neglected to give the same weight to the aspect of the ‘economy’ of the psyche as we have to its dynamic and its local aspects. So that my excuse is that I am drawing attention to this neglect” (Wild Analysis 182-183). Once again, I am tempted to make a substitution, replacing “psyche” with “Mackey’s poetry,” or perhaps simply, “poetry.” By this I mean a number of things. One of the reasons Mackey’s poetry has received the attention it has, not only in terms of awards, but in terms of devoted study, especially by other poets, is that it accords so fully with both ancient and modern poetic and psychic paradigms. Even readers who may know little about gnosticism, shamanism, psychoanalysis, anthropology, ethnomusicology, etc. sense this in the work, and recognize the way that it takes them into a dream that is saturated with mystery, beauty, suffering, desire—and an ineluctable sense of the real. At any given point in the work, in any one poem, we see this in the text’s “dynamic and its local aspects.” But given the comprehensive and syncretic nature of this poetry, its participation in what Duncan famously calls the “symposium of the whole” (however Mackey’s contributions to this symposium may “creak” against each other), we also feel that some theoretical attention must be paid to the “economy” of the work.
It is my understanding of this “economy” that I have tried to engage in this essay, specifically its interminable quality, bound, as it is, to dream and myth, psychic illness and psychic cure. Throughout Nod House, there is the recurring motif of a lost or hidden album that comes to light. “Song of the Andoumboulou: 66” begins
In an obscure bin or in an under-
ground vault they found it, The
Namoratunga Double Xtet
Plays for Lovers, the album
they’d been dreaming of… (26)
Much later in the volume, in “Sound and Severance,” “The book bit its tail and became a / disc.” The result is “Antiphonal spin toward what tore / loose, / prolegomena, epilogue and prologue / both…The book as it turned acoustic became / a disc,The Namoratunga Nextet / Live at the Nod House” (114-115). The book biting its tail invokes the image of Ouroboros, the serpent biting its tail, ancient figure of eternity and of the eternal return. The interminable text, the book that has no end, is also, magically, a circular “disc,” a recording of a music that has no end. That music, played by the “ Namoratunga Double Xtet, is for lovers; hence it doubleness, made eternally for two in the endlessness of erotic desire. But the band is also the “Namoratunga Nextet,” always playing what’s next, what’s moving on into the future. And where is playing? Live at the Nod House. Live in the dream.
Works Cited
Duncan, Robert. A Little Endarkenment and In My Poetry You Find Me. Buffalo, NY: Poetry/Rare Books Collection; Chicago: Rodent Press; Boulder, CO:
Erudite Fangs, 1997. Print.
___. The H.D. Book. Ed. Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman. Berkeley: U of California P, 2011. Print.
Freud, Sigmund. “Analysis Terminable and Interminable.” Wild Analysis. Trans. Alan Bance. London: Penguin Books, 2002. 171-208. Print.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. “The Structural Study of Myth.” Structural Anthropology. Trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf. Garden City, NY:
Doubleday, 1967. 206-231. Print.
Loewald, Hans W. “On the Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis.” The Essential Lowewald: Collected Papers and Monographs. Hagerstown, MD:
University Publishing Group. 221-256. Print.
Mackey, Nathaniel. Nod House. New York: New Directions, 2011. Print.
___. Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews. Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin P, 2005. Print.
___. Splay Anthem. New York: New Directions, 2006.
Ogden, Benjamin H., and Thomas H. Ogden. The Analyst’s Ear and the Critic’s Eye: Rethinking Psychoanalysis and Literature. London: Routledge,
2013. Print.
O’Leary, Peter. Gnostic Contagion: Robert Duncan and the Poetry of Illness. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2002. Print.
Phillips, Adam. Introduction. Wild Analysis. By Sigmund Freud. Trans. Alan Bance. London: Penguin Books, 2002. vii-xxv. Print.
Nathaniel Mackey: Poetry Terminable and Interminable
--
Freud’s aetiology informs the gnosticism of a poetics of illness in that Freud was always looking for a repressed emotional catastrophe that organized the neuroses of his patients.
In the clinical process of working through neuroses by way of the transference, Freud sought not to rid his patients of their complexes but to make them something his patients could live with, without undue anxiety. As important as the “myth” of catastrophe, admission, and healing is in the Freudian milieu, so too is the analysis—the interpretation—of this "myth." It is perhaps analysis that is Freud’s most ingenious legacy. Analysis allows the patient to enter into an initiatic condition, in which he or she finds a potential for self-regeneration…The point is not merely that analysis facilitates this creative state; analysis in fact creates it. Analysis—whether the psychoanalysis of H.D., the poetic metaanlysis of Duncan in his correspondence with H.D., or the poetic-analytical paraphrase of Mackey’s poetry—is a deeply creative act. (O’Leary 26)
1.
Gnostic Contagion, Peter O’Leary’s groundbreaking study of Robert Duncan (which includes a crucial chapter on the poetry of Nathaniel Mackey) is a book to which I return frequently. My first reading of it inspired me to write On Mount Vision; it gave me the necessary theoretical tools for my own exploration of sacred traditions and modern poetry, and just as importantly, it gave me permission, in a precisely Duncanian sense, to write the kind of literary criticism (part close reading, part psychoanalysis, part historicism, and one hundred per cent mystical commentary) toward which I had been unconsciously moving for many years. O’Leary’s interpretation of Duncan, with H.D. placed before him, and Mackey following him, draws freely on psychoanalysis, myth criticism, ethnography, and comparative religious studies, in order to produce a theory of poetic illness and cure that is both structured by gnosticism and is in itself an instance of gnosis. In this regard, I am reminded of what Lévi-Strauss observes in “The Structural Study of Myth”: “we define the myth as consisting of all its versions; or to put it otherwise, a myth remains the same as long as it is felt as such. A striking example is offered by the fact that our interpretation may take into account the Freudian use of the Oedipus myth and is certainly applicable to it…. not only Sophocles, but Freud himself, should be included among the recorded versions of the Oedipus myth on a par with earlier or seemingly more ‘authentic’ versions” (217). O’Leary, an ecstatic visionary poet in the tradition of Duncan and Mackey, does not only give us an analysis of the gnostic myth as treated by the poets in his study, but also, as in the case of Freud and Oedipus, gives us a new version of that myth. O’Leary’s gnosis extends through the poets he treats, and through his own poetry, but also, as my epigraph from Gnostic Contagion indicates, to Freud himself.
In regard to poetics, the most important question posed by O’Leary is “Does the poem heal?” At the risk of oversimplifying the matter, we may say that poetry is a disease and the poem is the cure. This notion is at the heart of O’Leary’s reading of H.D., Duncan, and Mackey, as well as his understanding of poetry as intimately related to both shamanism and psychoanalysis. Following O’Leary’s cues, my chapter on Mackey in On Mount Vision focuses on Mackey as a shaman, a cured sick man (or a revived dead man) whose magical powers and initiation into gnosis are represented in his poetry through the endless spiritual travels of the band of pilgrims described in the twinned serial poems, Song of the Andoumboulou and “Mu”. Seriality in poetry is predicated on finding verbal structures which successfully embody ongoingness—the writing keeps going, keeps moving, much like Mackey’s restless band. In the course of the poems, we encounter an endless set of psychic crises and psychic resolutions, endless traumas, endless cures. For Mackey, serial form, as he notes in the preface to Splay Anthem, produces “the draft unassured extension knows itself to be. Provisional, ongoing, the serial poem moves forward and backward both, repeatedly ‘back / at / some beginning’, repeatedly circling or cycling back, doing so with such adamance as to call forward and backward into question…” (xi). Seriality involves “recursive form, a net of echoes” (xii). This recursive form in turn is related to “ongoing myth, an impuse toward signature, self-elaboration, finding and losing itself. The word for this is ythm (clipped rhythm, anagrammatic myth)” (xiii). The endless language play that Mackey calls ythm is what the work is about, as much as it is about the search for hermetic knowledge, the endless reaching for erotic fulfillment, the historical and political struggle against forces of injustice, the longing for a utopian place at the far horizon that is also a return to a lost, original paradise. One of the many ironies in Mackey’s work is that however much it constitutes what he calls a “discrepant engagement,” it is also one of the most seamless bodies of contemporary poetry, where form is never more than an extension of content, but content is never more than an extension of form.
O’Leary refers to Mackey’s relation to Duncan as a “poetic-analytical paraphrase,” but we can also say that in and of itself, Mackey’s poetry is a mythopoeic self-analysis, both inspired by and dependent upon the interminability of the serial form. Freud famously analyzed himself by attending closely to his dreams and simultaneously inventing a technique of dream interpretation that became a cornerstone for the psychoanalytic method. For him, the dream is a fulfillment of a wish, however cunningly disguised by the censorious functions of the mind. It addresses real desires, but those desire are encrypted, and must be uncovered through the analyst’s knowledge of the dreamwork. But for Mackey, the dream “ is a way of challenging reality, a sense in which to dream is not to dream but to replace waking with realization, an ongoing process of testing or contesting reality, subjecting it to change or a demand for change” (xiii). This statement aligns with a more contemporary psychoanalytic understanding of dreaming, in which dreams are seen as “the expression of multiple forms of thinking in which we struggle and experiment with a plethora of ways of gaining a sense of truth of our lived experience, of who we are in relation to other people, and of the knowable and unknowable world” (Ogden and Ogden 24).
Mackey’s poetry presents us with a sustained and endlessly unfolding dream-state. He cites Géza Róheim’s The Eternal Ones of the Dream, in which the Aranda of Australia “actively seek to remain in the dream, to be in more than one place at a time” (Splay Anthem xiii). Altjeringa, the revelatory dreamtime of the Australian tribes, is, as Mackey mentions, of great significance to Duncan in The H.D. Book. In Chapter 6, “Rites of Participation,” Duncan synthesizes Roheim’s psychoanalytic anthropology with Gertrude Stein’s “Composition as Explanation” and Gershom Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, in order to present a vision of the magically totalizing power of the mythic imagination, especially as it manifests itself in dream. For Duncan, “What we experience in dreaming is not a content of ourselves but the track of an inner composition of ourselves….The endless repetitions of rituals and wanderings and hunting as the pattern of life for the Australian is a living inside the Composition” (166). Likewise, in Mackey’s serial poems, however nightmarish the circumstances he describes may become, the desire remains to move through and beyond those circumstances, to continually move forward in dreamtime toward the unreachable utopian horizon signified by that mythic place or condition the poet calls “mu.” The poems, in Duncan’s terms, constitute “the track of an inner composition of ourselves.” Each episode, however resolved (or not), takes on the quality of an initiatory ritual, one more in an endless sequence offering up its own particular take on gnosis. Arguably, this has become more explicit in Mackey’s poetry of the last decade. One thinks of the violence and sociopolitical disasters described in “Nub,” the last section of Splay Anthem, and throughout the most recent volume, Nod House. Yet even the title—Nod as in the Land of Nod, dreamland—indicates the need and the desire to keep dreaming, and to keep interpreting the dream.
2.
Poetry, religion, anthropology, and psychoanalysis all intersect at the point labelled “myth.” The epigraph to “Song of the Andoumboulou: 79” is an extraordinary quotation from the 19th-century philologist Max Müller: “Mythology is inevitable, it is natural, it is an inherent necessity of language…it is, in fact, the dark shadow which language throws on thought, and which can never disappear till language becomes altogether commensurate with thought, which it never will” (Nod House106). It makes a great deal of sense that Mackey would find this quote useful. As Duncan, his mentor, once said, “So I immediately turn away if someone says, ‘I'm going to spiritually improve you, here's a little enlightenment.’ I say, ‘No, no, I'll take a little endarkenment and in my poetry you find me’” (A Little Endarkenment 29). Like Duncan, Mackey prefers endarkenment, and his dark gnosis can only be found in and through the poetry itself. Thus, in “Song of the Andoumboulou 79,” “It wasn’t religion we were / feeling”; rather, “What we felt / could’ve been said to be myth / but we said ythm, first would / be last we thought…” (106). Mackey recognizes that his poetry is not religious per se, however much it borrows from various religious traditions. But it is unquestionably mythic (or ythmic), and indeed, in his case, it could even be said that poetry, every bit as much as myth, is the dark shadow, the endarkenment, that language throws on thought. Both poetry and myth come into being because language can never be commensurate with thought. Indeed, from a psychoanalytic perspective, thought itself can never be commensurate with thought; there remains an unbridgeable divide between our conscious mental operations and the unconscious.
Poetry, myth, and dream—all of which are languages, systems of signification—provide some access to the unconscious, but only through interpretation. In “Song of the Andoumboulou: 79,” we encounter the following scenario:
No sooner did we think than what
we thought faded, wordless what we
thought we saw… A new member
known
as Huff joined our group. Strange
Brother he was known as by some… (107)
Without language, thought fades. But “Huff / pointed into the blur, claimed he’d / come from it” (108). Like a shaman (or an analyst), Huff guides the group into the blur of the unconscious and, in effect, makes it comprehensible. Feeling is given structure and significance; it becomes organized, and in effect, speaks:
In Huff’s domain we saw waves
come in, swells an emotional debit,
light’s
dilated slide…Symphonic sway,
more feeling than any of us could’ve
said we felt… (108)
Huff, we learn, “wore wingtips, argyle socks. / He had a way of dancing standing / still” (109). This dancing through the blur leads the group to pose the most basic of psychic questions of themselves: “Were we dead or / yet to be born we couldn’t say…” The poet makes a point of noting that “It wasn’t that / Huff had wings on his feet. Wingtips / were a type of shoe. Huff’s way had / it both ways.” In other words, Huff both is and is not an avatar of Hermes, the messenger god, leading the soul through the realms of being by the power of his hermeneutics. Part con artist, part sage, Huff leads the group to discover “the underside rising, soon- / come counsel of souls in absentia.” Bringing knowledge up from the depths, Huff prepares the way so that the previously absent voices within may speak. “As a child,” the poet tells us, “his first words had been / ‘other side’, some inkling even / then he’d come from elsewhere” (110). Huff’s origins are appropriately mythic; he comes from the “other side” and it is to the other side that he takes us. At the end of the poem, the group appears to be in a library where in “the upper stacks one found a / book entitled My Friend Huff” (111). The title sounds like a children’s book version of a volume from the Corpus Hermeticum. Huff is a friend, a mysterious guide promising gnosis. In reading his book, “Blur blended with lamplight” (111).
3.
What counsel might the “souls in absentia” bring to us? Fundamental to Song of the Andoumboulou, as Mackey explains on a number of occasions, are the Dogon funeral rites which include the singing of the original song, intended to propitiate “the dead who have not yet been properly laid to rest by their surviving kin” (Splay Anthem xiv). The Andoumboulou themselves are “an earlier form of human beings who were flawed and failed to maintain themselves…an earlier draft of human being that didn’t work out” (Paracritical Hinge 293). Mackey surmises that the Andoumboulou are invoked at a Dogon funeral because it is “a ritual that is marking death and mortality, the failure of human life to sustain itself indefinitely, because they are figures of frailty and failure. Mortality is a reminder of frailty and failure. But the song is also a song of the spirit of the person who has died and is moving on to another realm. It’s a song of lament and rebirth” (293). Access to this other realm, the realm of the dead, is crucial to shamanic healing, and that access may come to the shaman in dream: “Dream too is a school of ancestors, one of the altered states in which the dead reappear, one of such states the we in these pages [ofSplay Anthem] pursue” (Splay Anthem xiii). Without the performance of the proper rites, the ancestors who would school us in our dreams remain troublesome, restless ghosts. In the case of the Dogon, the dead enter the beer that the elders drink, who then wander the streets abusing members of the community, declaring “The dead are dying of thirst” (xiv). As is so often the case in poetry and ritual, we find illness, diagnosis, and cure.
In his great essay “Therapeutic Action in Psychoanalysis,” Hans Loewald, describing the therapeutic power of the transference neurosis in the analytic process, explains that this power
is due to the blood of recognition, which the patient’s unconscious is given to taste so that the old ghosts may reawaken to life. Those who know ghosts
tell us that they long to be released from their ghost life and led to rest as ancestors. As ancestors they live forth in the present generation, while as ghosts
they are compelled to haunt the present with their shadow life. Transference is pathological in so far as the unconscious is a crowd of ghosts, and this is
the beginning of the transference neurosis in analysis: ghosts of the unconscious, imprisoned by defenses but haunting the patient in the dark of his defenses
and symptoms, are allowed to taste blood, are let loose. In the daylight of analysis the ghosts of the unconscious are laid and led to rest as ancestors
whose power is taken over and transformed into the newer intensity of present life… (248-249)
At this crucial moment in Loewald’s essay, it is revealing that, as is so often the case in psychoanalytic writing, the author turns to myth and literature (in this case, the episode in Book XI of the Odyssey, in which Odysseus descends into the underworld) in order to describe psychic phenomena. The mythic bond between psychoanalysis and poetry, including Mackey’s poetry, is to be seen in Loewald’s assertion that the ghosts “long to be released from their ghost life and led to rest as ancestors”: a longing that leads in turn to ritualized action occurring again and again in Mackey’s work. It seems to me that if the poem can heal—both the poet and the reader—then that healing involves an awareness of “the newer intensity of present life.” Such recognition is there even in Nod House, Mackey’s darkest book, as in the poem “Lone Coast Periplus”: “Wished for remedy, dreamt-of / return, / awake less alive than asleep it seemed / of late, each the other’s dream had only / dreaming…” (97).
4.
Let us return to the matter of seriality in Mackey’s poetry. The continuous and ceaselessly provisional nature of the writing, its salient quality of “unassured extension,” indicates that seriality is far more than a technique, though it certainly entails a mastery of technique. Mackey’s poetry registers an exceptionally high level of self-consciousness in regard to form. In the preface to Splay Anthem, he notes how “statement backtracks or breaks off, ellipses abound, assertion and retraction volley, assertion and supplementation: addition, subtraction, revision, conundrum, nuance, amendment, tweak” (xi)—to which I would add his use of call and response, anagrams, multilinguistic (or sometimes, pseudo-multilinguistic) puns, repetitions, reversals, sliding transformations of phrases, words, syllables, even single vowels and consonants, as well as a precise compositional use of the page space, the stanza, the enjambed line, to achieve a highly syncopated recursive rhythm and cadence that is all his own. If, as I noted earlier, seriality seeks to embody ongoingness, seriality achieves this end through the total mobilization of technique.
But what exactly are we talking about when we talk about technique?
“A technique, after all, is a means devised by someone to get what they want. It makes wanting make sense. A technique is not supposed to have an unconscious. The [poet’s] technique should tell us what the [poet] wants, and what the [poet] wants from [poetry].” As the reader can no doubt tell, this is a fake quote. In the original, from Adam Phillips’ Introduction (ix-x) to Wild Analysis, a retranslation of Freud’s papers on technique, the word “poet” is actually “analyst” and “poetry” is actually “psychoanalysis.” Be that as it may, I think Phillips’ remark can shed a great deal of light on The Song of the Andoumboulou and “Mu”. For if Mackey is, as I believe, one of our most important “technicians of the sacred,” then the technique he develops in his poetry certainly “makes wanting make sense”: it structures desire—for healing, for wholeness, for greater psychic knowledge in a broken world—and in so doing, it does indeed reveal itself to have an unconscious, an unconscious that is endlessly tapped as the poems unfold. Later in his Introduction (and this is the real quotation), Phillips observes that “If the unconscious is amenable to technique—and the whole practice, if not the theorizing of psychoanalysis depends upon it being so—this, in itself, would change our sense of what the unconscious is like. The idea of technique implies that someone knows what they are doing. After the invention of psychoanalysis, the idea of knowing what you are doing, the idea of a person as an agent of intentions that are transparent to himself, never quite makes sense” (xiv-xv).
As much as I concur with Phillips’ perspective here, I must also point out that poets, in effect, have always known that the idea of a person as an agent of intentions that are transparent to himself never quite makes sense—one thinks of Keats’ “negative capability” or Rimbaud’s “je est un autre.” This psychopoetic awareness has predicated a range of compositional procedures, which is to say that in poetry, there is no doubt that the unconscious is amenable to technique. Mackey’s serial poetry, given all that its form entails, is one of our best contemporary instances of this enduring truth. Technically speaking, Mackey knows what he’s doing, but what he’s doing entails a deep working with and within the unconscious, an intentionality that thwarts intention. This becomes even more the case if we consider recent, post-Freudian revisions of the unconscious. Drawing on Wilfred Bion’s theories, Thomas and Benjamin Ogden describe the unconscious less as a structure or place of repressed drives and desires, and more as an aspect of mind in which “the individual simultaneously views his experience from the standpoint of rational, cause-and-effect reasoning and from the vantage point of omnipotent, magical causation…from the perspective of an impatient need to find the safety of closures, conclusions, judgments and understandings, and from the perspective of an equally forceful need to dissolve closures in order to open up the possibility of fresh understandings…” (23).
This is an apt description of the kind of poetic thinking that is to be found in Mackey’s serial poems. There is a certain calm, seemingly rational expository tone in many passages, produced by such phrases as “It was…,” “It wasn’t…,” “Insofar as…,” “Notwithstanding…,” etc.—as if the poet were presenting a logical, cause-and-effect explanation for what is happening to the group at any given moment. And yet what is happening is irrational, magical, the stuff of dreams. Likewise, the poet will often seek longingly for “the safety of closures, conclusions, judgments and understandings,” even as closure continuously dissolves in the never-ending, episodic pilgrimage, the insistent journeying that constitutes the very substance of the work. This, as Mackey declares in “Song of the Andoumboulou: 75,” is “A dream of endlessness, what could be said / to’ve / just begun, muttered while asleep / letting / go” (Nod House 88).
5.
“Here I have the feeling,” writes Freud in “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” “that I ought to be embarrassed about making all these ponderous observations, since what I am saying has been known for a long time and is self-evident. We have really always behaved as though we knew all this; it just that our theoretical account has neglected to give the same weight to the aspect of the ‘economy’ of the psyche as we have to its dynamic and its local aspects. So that my excuse is that I am drawing attention to this neglect” (Wild Analysis 182-183). Once again, I am tempted to make a substitution, replacing “psyche” with “Mackey’s poetry,” or perhaps simply, “poetry.” By this I mean a number of things. One of the reasons Mackey’s poetry has received the attention it has, not only in terms of awards, but in terms of devoted study, especially by other poets, is that it accords so fully with both ancient and modern poetic and psychic paradigms. Even readers who may know little about gnosticism, shamanism, psychoanalysis, anthropology, ethnomusicology, etc. sense this in the work, and recognize the way that it takes them into a dream that is saturated with mystery, beauty, suffering, desire—and an ineluctable sense of the real. At any given point in the work, in any one poem, we see this in the text’s “dynamic and its local aspects.” But given the comprehensive and syncretic nature of this poetry, its participation in what Duncan famously calls the “symposium of the whole” (however Mackey’s contributions to this symposium may “creak” against each other), we also feel that some theoretical attention must be paid to the “economy” of the work.
It is my understanding of this “economy” that I have tried to engage in this essay, specifically its interminable quality, bound, as it is, to dream and myth, psychic illness and psychic cure. Throughout Nod House, there is the recurring motif of a lost or hidden album that comes to light. “Song of the Andoumboulou: 66” begins
In an obscure bin or in an under-
ground vault they found it, The
Namoratunga Double Xtet
Plays for Lovers, the album
they’d been dreaming of… (26)
Much later in the volume, in “Sound and Severance,” “The book bit its tail and became a / disc.” The result is “Antiphonal spin toward what tore / loose, / prolegomena, epilogue and prologue / both…The book as it turned acoustic became / a disc,The Namoratunga Nextet / Live at the Nod House” (114-115). The book biting its tail invokes the image of Ouroboros, the serpent biting its tail, ancient figure of eternity and of the eternal return. The interminable text, the book that has no end, is also, magically, a circular “disc,” a recording of a music that has no end. That music, played by the “ Namoratunga Double Xtet, is for lovers; hence it doubleness, made eternally for two in the endlessness of erotic desire. But the band is also the “Namoratunga Nextet,” always playing what’s next, what’s moving on into the future. And where is playing? Live at the Nod House. Live in the dream.
Works Cited
Duncan, Robert. A Little Endarkenment and In My Poetry You Find Me. Buffalo, NY: Poetry/Rare Books Collection; Chicago: Rodent Press; Boulder, CO:
Erudite Fangs, 1997. Print.
___. The H.D. Book. Ed. Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman. Berkeley: U of California P, 2011. Print.
Freud, Sigmund. “Analysis Terminable and Interminable.” Wild Analysis. Trans. Alan Bance. London: Penguin Books, 2002. 171-208. Print.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. “The Structural Study of Myth.” Structural Anthropology. Trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf. Garden City, NY:
Doubleday, 1967. 206-231. Print.
Loewald, Hans W. “On the Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis.” The Essential Lowewald: Collected Papers and Monographs. Hagerstown, MD:
University Publishing Group. 221-256. Print.
Mackey, Nathaniel. Nod House. New York: New Directions, 2011. Print.
___. Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews. Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin P, 2005. Print.
___. Splay Anthem. New York: New Directions, 2006.
Ogden, Benjamin H., and Thomas H. Ogden. The Analyst’s Ear and the Critic’s Eye: Rethinking Psychoanalysis and Literature. London: Routledge,
2013. Print.
O’Leary, Peter. Gnostic Contagion: Robert Duncan and the Poetry of Illness. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2002. Print.
Phillips, Adam. Introduction. Wild Analysis. By Sigmund Freud. Trans. Alan Bance. London: Penguin Books, 2002. vii-xxv. Print.