Joseph Donahue
Salvation under the Sign of Reagan:
Poetry, Gnosis, and New York
Departure dying doom delight
in the knowing and unknowing
--John Yau, The Fallacies of Enoch
Those angels of estrangement The Talking Heads, put a question in the middle of their 1980 song “Once in a Lifetime.” The song, produced by Brian Eno, was properly postmodern, as befits a band with an art-school past, but the question was as old as epic, as myth, as narrative itself, as old as any curiosity about origins, as old and perhaps identical to the first religious thought. “Well,” David Byrne asks, existential and incredulous, “how did I get here?” The question was already well worn in the second century, when the Gnostics picked up permutations of it and made it the center of their drama of redemption. Gnostics were known by the questions they asked, a list of which come down to us from Clement of Alexandria:
Who were we? What have we become? Where were we? Whither have we been cast? Whither do we hasten? From what have
we been set free? [i]
“Once in a Lifetime” would not be the last time ancient speculation blew through a modern work. What is notable here is not merely that the question is old, but the form of the song itself seems to slip from pomo to primordial. The song arrives in its moment in the tatters of some outmoded model of the universe, from before the continents rose, perhaps from Atlantis, “under the water, more water.” Perhaps from the African materials Byrne was reading in at the time of the song’s composition. The song brings with it thoughts about the nature of time: “time isn’t holding up/time isn’t after us.” It is forthright in depicting our dire enslavement to this world: “Under the water, carry the water/remove the water/ from the bottom of the ocean.” For at least as long as the song is playing it seems the spiritual life of the late capitalist moment uncannily mirrors that of a far earlier stage of Western Empire. The Talking Heads seem to confirm one scholar’s belief that Gnosticism is not an event in the history of religion, but a mode of thinking that springs up everywhere.
Further, their song means to call us, as the question does the asker within the song, out of the everydayness of car and house and significant other, to awaken us to our unawareness of what we are. Truly heard, as an inquiry into first things, as a cry to orders beyond the apparent, David Byrne’s question can only unleash orders of lesser questions, it can't help but awaken the classical rhetorician within: “how,” by what chain of cause and effect? “Did I,” and who is that “I” suddenly so curious, did I the singer even until this moment know it was there to be asking? “Get here?” So, we are from elsewhere, and where is this here this hell of fallen matter, this here in the universe ruled, as it was then, in the 1980s, by a monstrosity, an idiot monstrosity from the state of California, in fact its former governor.
Reagan
By pure coincidence it was Reagan’s decade that saw flickers of Gnostic thought emerging in popular art forms. While this does not in and of itself vouchsafe some revival of second century cultic beliefs in the entertainment industry, it could be argued that the disbelief and loathing Reagan inspired might undo the unbelief of the most steadfast secularist, might suggest that the Gnostic cosmos were still in effect, and the vilest of archons was indeed in charge. The proof that Reagan was of a second and inferior order of creation was there to be seen, and not simply in the paintings of Leon Golub: Remember the Gipper in Mississippi announcing his candidacy in a town legendary for its lynchings? Remember the Gipper at Bitberg, laying a wreath on a Nazi tomb? Remember the Gipper confirming a universal dualism in the guise of Cold War ideology? Remember the Gipper coming not from the sky but the earth, arising from the very borax of Death Valley? Yet the Gipper seemed beyond the conventions of embodiment. After all, the poet John Hinkley tried to kill him, and failed. Death and malevolence loved the Gipper. Occultist of the time might well have believed Reagan was the beginning of a last and dire time cycle. American presidents seemed keyed to the forces that run the lower world, and as Whitman saw, rarely came bearing a light from the beyond. They seem to be long foreseen participants in the history of the world. Nostradamus after all had predicted the death of Kennedy, as had, for that matter, Reagan’s own astrologer, Jeanne Dixon. Literary folk need not look so far back as Nostradamus in the history of French prophetic modes for comprehension of what had happened with the election of 1980. Poets such as Leonard Schwartz needed only a bit of Artaud and Bataille to see Reagan’s part in the ongoing tradition of fascist magic. Stephen-Paul Martin, a master of the Gnostic practice of “inverse exegesis” savagely cut up Reagan’s speeches in his book length poem “Invading Reagan” to reveal the depravity of the Gipper. In “Late Night Movies” In a reading inspired by the New Historicism, John Yau offered an historical analysis of how Reagan came to be, and revealed the source of his power:
In a small underground laboratory the brain of a
Movie actor is replaced by semi-precious stones,
Each one thought to have once resided in heaven. [ii]
The 80s
As in earlier moments in modernism, in the 1980s the past was yet again new. Moreover, not only was there evidence that the past was not what it was thought to be, but that the truth of the past was being kept from us. The New York Times reported from the depths of the Holy Land how scholars warred over The Dead Sea Scrolls, establishing their own hierarchies of knowledge, keeping the scraps of papyrus uncovered in 1947 from the public. Could the story of how Christianity “got here” differ from what had been supposed? Gnosticism as well, itself already long embedded in Western literary culture, in fact in the very origins of literary criticism, was particularly of the moment. Nineteen seventy-seven had seen the publication of the Nag Hammadi trove in English. Paperback editions appeared in nineteen eighty one and nineteen eighty four and 1984. Bentley Layton included in his own edition other Gnostic related material, and collections such as Willis Barnstone’s The Other Bible opened the door to alternative versions of once canonical texts. Works known only through their refutation by heresy-hunters could now be read in full, and the question of what gnosis itself might mean within a postmodern world be asked with a liberated sense of what it once might have meant. Wisdom was selling by the pound in the marketplace, and Albert Mobilio canvassed the experience that William Blake once said was its price. Mobilio’s extraordinary phrase-making, his propulsive syntax whirls through worlds where the quotidian and the transcendent incessantly intertwine, sever, knot and unravel. The interleaving of discourses, narratives, lexical registers and voices on display in “The Geographics” are the places where some gnosis might yet lurk, though in Mobilio’s world any word of salvation comes only partly intelligible through the white noise of the way we live now. Older narratives of the holy haunt Mobilio’s figuration, but they are also the source of his Gnostic comedy: “Their rebbe is paralyzed, yet somehow rises from his bed, straight razor in hand, and runs down the hospital corridor shouting Go speed racer, go.“[iii]
With the election of Reagan, Christian fundamentalism poured into the public sphere. Looking deep into the face of the television evangelist Pat Robertson, one might accept that no kind of progressive spirituality could even be possible.Considering Heritage USA, the evangelical theme park built by Jim and Tammy Baker in South Carolina, one might well conclude there was no place left for religious experience in the life of the mind. For poets and artists not yet ready to abandoned the category of the spiritual, the language and imagery associated with religious thought seemed bankrupt. And the mythic as a mode of imagining? What could be said to survive the outing of Hiedegger as a Nazi? What truth won by the visionaries of Modernism was not rescinded by their problematic politics? The new Gnostic material offered certain possibilities. The pre-millennial dissemination of excavated wisdoms was propitious. Mythologist manque Elaine Pagels refashioned Gnostic materials in the light of contemporary need to think out forms of spirituality more suited to the sexuality and gender preoccupations of our time. The literary critic turned culture prophet Harold Bloom argued the fundamental temper of American culture and religion was gnostically inclined. The romance of the recovery of the lost truths of earlier eras was already a deeply worked vein of American narrative art, from spiritualism and west coast sightings of descendants of the lost continent of Lamia on or around Mt Shasta, to the new Jersey theosophist who assembled the Tibetan Book of the Dead, not to mention a staple of high modernist writing and of popular entertainment. The alien in Brother from Another Planet was one in a series of faux Gnostic messengers, while the quest for the underlying structure of all religions was spoofed in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Blade Runner, at whatever degree of separation from the occult divinations of Philip K. Dick, reminded us that science fiction, was contemporary cosmological post-Miltonic myth-making: who among us can say for sure, even right now, that he or she is not a replicant, a being fashioned by a deranged toy-maker? The evolving phenomenon of alien abduction narratives, -- stripped for parts in Clark Coolidge’s Alien Tatters, offered horrifying and transfixing permutations of acosmical mythological speculation and shamanic torment. (In the world of books the brink of the millennium would provide the solace of The Left Behind novels, which readied desperate Christians beyond the beltway for life after the apocalypse.) While through the eighties and nineties, far from America, on the enchanted isle of Manhattan, art adepts and runaways could thumb through Apocalypse Culture, Hollywood Babylon 2, Bataille’s “the Solar Anus,” or Michael Palmer’s Sun, and dream of a violence so sacred that the world would be renewed.
“It’s Giuliani time!”
Indeed, for poets in New York in the nineteen eighties, the world with a world of the city within the nation, found the spirit of Reagan permeating their terrain and temporality, reaching into the next decade. These pre-millennial decades the eighties and the nineties, would be a rich apocalyptic tableaux, a burning island city where gathered on the river bank the attentive viewer could make out the faces of Bernard Goetz, Tawana Brawley, Elinor Bumpers, Robert Chambers, Meir Kahane, Jack Abbot, Mark
David Chapman, Michael Stewart, Hedda Nussbaum, wilding wilders in Central Park, all gathered perhaps in a yet to be released out take from Do The Right Thing, and police interrogators said to be intent on anal violation could brandish a toilet plunger before Abner Louima crying out in joy, “Its Giuliani time!” The world within a world of Manhattan was its own narrative of the fall. How could poets not notice? Over in New Jersey Ed Roberson called up the uprising at Attica, and theologized the Middle Passage, and felt his way toward what a black gnosis might mean. In Homer’s Art, Alice Notley began the deep recalibration of her imagination, addressing the epic ambition of Reagan’s ideological minions, not to mention the movie industry, to rewrite Vietnam. With “Descent of Alette” she revealed that an obscene tyrant, an emanation of Reagan, controlled all, almost all, knowledge. Out of office, Reagan ruled from beneath the subway system, and abiding within him, might be Richard Nixon as well, might be Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz in nuncio. The millennium, impatient to close, unveiled the hidden structure of the world more than ten years early:
“The tyrant” “is a mild-“ “looking man” “He does not show”
“his decay” “He had no such grace,” “you might say” “His sense of “
“his own knowledge” “presumed rightness” “preserves him” “forever”
“He could have never” “have never” “been that wrong:” “That thousands”
“upon thousands” “of years” “of enslavements” “so many different kinds”
“be integral to” “the solid” “& beautiful” “structures” “cathedrals”
“museums” “& mansions” “& temples” “he has built” “above the ground”[iv]
Scholars at odds
As if to encourage poets in their appropriations, scholars of Gnosticism made sure no immediate clarity was forthcoming in regard to what Gnosticism was, where it came from, or what it might mean now. In fact the very discovery of certifiably Gnostic texts at Nag Hammadi – texts, that is, quoted by hiersologists but until now known only through their repudiations – simply made the category of Gnostic all the more controversial. Well, we might ask, how did it get here? Some maintained that the origins and practices of a Gnostic religion could now at last be discerned. Some argued that such determinants were illusory, that Gnosticism never existed, that it is a projection of the modern age, and the very term Gnosticism should be dropped. Still others argued for the continued value of a typological approach, finding similar motifs and tendencies among certain groups, though these groups would hardly recognize each other as sharing beliefs. One, alluded to at the start, John Couliano, a man found assassinated in a divinity school lavatory, argued we should dispense with the attempt to reconstruct origins and track the dissemination of ideas altogether. In a fit of structuralist clarity, he insisted in the Tree of Gnosis that Gnosticism is a way the mind shapes experience, a form of radical dualism that appearing independently throughout the ancient world, in the Renaissance, and in Romanticism. (And so preserving for literary culture the fabled links between Gnostics, Manicheans, Cathars. Baudilaire, comic books, the X Files, and points beyond.) What threads through pre-millennial poets in New York and elsewhere who found themselves given to a vernacular Gnostic speculations, is a preoccupation with dualism, if not flat out apocalypticsism; this becomes quickly apparent when such poets take up the gnostic practice of spinning out alternate, pointedly antithetical mythologies.
A particularly striking example of this would be the work of Geoffrey O’Brien, who mingled movies, world religions, and a keen grasp of the relation of ritual thought and practice to knowledge of the beyond, O’Brien is obsessed with the compelling failures of conventional ritual to reaffirm the worth of the world. O’Brien stages vast dramas of salvation, the failures of which are the basis for his gnosis. It is a negative mythopoesis, proceeding towards a telling of the fundamental Gnostic condition of radical unknowing through the enacting of what no longer works. In “Ancients,” O’Brien spins out a précis of world creation myths. The poem draws upon the long tradition of cosmogonic narratives gathered and collated by mythographers in the Enlightenment project of determining the underlying structures of culture. For O’Brien who replays the optimism and excitement of moments or origin throughout his work, his attention never fails to locate the seeds of insufficiency in any vision of life outside the pleroma. In “John of Lyden” he renders a historical tableaux drawn from the history of heresy, showing the dark turns messianism tends to take in emerging modernity. (The narrative of utopian promise turned demonic animates his depiction of the 1960s and 1970’s in such works as Dreamtime.) In “Haruspex,” O’Brien precisely imagines the process of divination as that of good ritual gone bad. He sees in it a moment of poesis, where dead signs might seem to come to life, might seem still capable of cosmological mapping, of performing the traditional function of delineating sacred space. The attempt to reenact this outmoded magic is the initiation into a mode of knowing that still seems possible in the distopic landscape the poem has set before us, though it is a knowing, a new sentence somewhat other that what Ron Silliman proposes, one that asserts an inaccessible interiority, yet also one that asserts a degraded material vision of the Gnostic spark, of which it can only be said, that it doesn’t rust:
The sign went dead. It used to announce the alley
Where they sold the juice. She took its letters in her hands
And pointed them north, south, east, west.
Afterwards she felt as if she had swallowed the letters
And that they made a new sentence which was inside her
And which was her. But when they asked her she said
“I can’t read it, nobody will ever read it,
Its only trying to tell me it doesn’t rust.” [v]
An epistle delivered at Saint Mark’s of the Bowery
The surge of Gnostic notions through the broader culture suggested the time was right to the reimagining of the relation between poetry and knowing, a knowing that might include social and historical forces, but was tuned to mythological, cosmological and soteriological frequencies as well. The poetics of this salvational knowing was worked out in the writings of a variety of pre-millennial poets, though no poet of these decades addressed the complexities of a contemporary Gnostic poetics as fully and productively as Ed Foster. In his essay/poem “Poetry has Nothing To Do With Politics” Foster saw in the act of writing the establishment of a highly prized knowing in which the poem transmits its own origins to the poet and the poet finds in his reception of the knowledge of origins, a revelation leading or so it is reasonable to infer, of a truer self abiding within. This essay, really an ars poetica and manifesto, drew on the hermeneutic drama at the center of Gnosticism: devotees disputed the meanings said to be securely bound within Old Testament tales -- or within the yet to be codified texts that would eventually compose the New Testament -- by producing an “inverse exegesis. ” Fosters’ dispute is not with an emerging theological orthodoxy, but an academic one. The critics, a triumvirate composed of Stanley Fish, Cary Nelson and the Russian theorist V.N.Volosinov, who himself may have been a disguised Mikhail Bakhtin, and appear here to be a covert Charles Bertstein, argue that the text is nothing, the critical community decides what the poem is and what it means. Foster counters: critics are nothing. Not even readers are needed. Readers die, but the text lives on. The poem is an otherworldly presence, an icon, discernable to the senses but ultimately unknowable. In encountering this unknowability, we experience our true origin.
What electrifies Fosters’ own poetry in this period is this: the narrative of awakening to the fundamental Gnostic situation is also a coming out narrative, a threefold coming out: as poet, as queer, and as gnostic. Foster had published poems pseudonominously for years, now was stepping out as a poet; he was awakening to his homosexuality and professing it; and after a career as an historically minded culture critic, he was making an argument that the poetic act constituted a refutation of our sense of ourselves as historically and culturally determined, that to know ourselves was to know our unknowability. At the conclusion of this talk, Ed Foster was awarded a distinction relatively rare in modern American letters, he was publically denounced as a “Gnostic” by an audience member. This modern day hiersologist was none other than Charles Bernstein appearing not so much as Hugo Ball dressed in a parody of a cardinal, but as the momentary re-embodiment of great heresy hunter himself, Iraneus. Who, listening close to Fosters bearing witness to the ineluctable power of art, detected doctrinal impurities and deciding in that instance, or so I speculate, that Foster would not be appearing in the volume entitled Poetry and Public Policy that would soon appear. Instead, and more fittingly, Foster’s epistle was published abroad, in Turkey, where poets such as Lale Muldur were also rethinking the question of the origins and ends of poetic utterance, especially in regard to discourses of the secular.
Corpse and mirror
At the moment that religious studies in American universities was disassembling the comparativist project, and asserting the historically bounded determinants, the social construction of “religious experience,” poets in diverse locals and circumstances were working through the what deconstruction had laid to rest and what it again made possible. Certain New York based poets responding at least in part to the spiritual drama of Manhattan in the era and of course to their own personal hopes and desperations and rages, worked to articulate a faith in the possibility of poetry that could imagine the relation between self, world and the beyond, a beyond that often seemed an extravagantly reconfigured version of a Gnostic cosmos, as it turned up in pieces on the New York of Koch and Dinkins and Guilliani, where newspapers with headlines like the famous “Headless Body Found in Topless Bar” marked how far the New York of the eighties was from that of the fifties, when O’Hara glimpsed the face of Lady Day on the front page of an earlier iteration of the New YorkPost. We were at a later moment in the Orphic myth, not the evocation of an overwhelming music, but the severing of mind and heart.
No poet of the pre-millennial decades took up the implications of the critique of the category of the religious, and the circulation of the newly disseminated Gnostic texts more forcefully or imaginatively that John Yau. The work of the early eighties gathered in Corpse and Mirror, brings us immediately to the first challenge of thinking through what a twentieth century Gnostic poesis might mean: what truth of our true condition can an image have if when accept the fundamental premise of a Gnostic cosmogony: that the universe made by an evil or ignorant demiurge? If the world is now more than ever, as the Gnostics would say, a “bejeweled corpse,” what might those glittering jewels reveal? If making is a matter of mirrors, if, as Yau tells us, when two corpses meet there is always a mirror between them, what can the mirror show, what can mimesis render, how can we see in what we make that which has?
Yau’s poem “Corpse and Mirror” is an extraordinary rendering of such a Gnostic supreme fiction, though it might appear to us at first as no more than an anthropologist’s nightmare. The poem brings to the fore the question of whether or not we feel of what we are among, and the role ritual serves in helping us feel at home in this translated world. Ritual both maintains the social world, upholds the rule of the archons, of Reagan and his minions, but it also offers the possibility of transformation, especially, as the martyrs of the art-world have shown him, when adapted by isolated adepts of self-fashioned religiosity. “Corpse and Mirror” is the Book of the Dead for a culture that has no vested interest in assisting the dead to reach heaven or the living to find wisdom in grief, but it also serves as a book of liberation. “Corpse and Mirror” begins with a burial. A citizen is interred, and his horses with him, though still alive, buried up to their necks. This is, as one might guess, the beginning of a process to determine the fate of the soul. It can head toward the setting sun, though it seems more likely it will be condemned to linger on earth. Yet out attention is not on the dead citizen but on the gravediggers who have performed their duty, but in returning to their lives they are touched by transcendental longing. They would rather be back, it seems, with the dead buried in his chariot, hoping as well to be hauled into the sun, than be enjoying dinner with their families. The chariot in which the corpse is buried is some late model of that which the soul once drove across the sky in the Phaedrus. But the poem draws us always deeper into the conflicted condition of the living, who may find themselves tricked into companionship with the dead soul, condemned to wander this earth “like a vulture without wings.”[vi]
The larger question of the relation of gnosis to ritual in the context of historical Gnosticism and in regard symbolist and modernist poetics needs greater attention than I can give it here, but it is evident that ritual is clearly a component of the poetry of Gnostic speculation that emerged among American poets in the pre-millennial decades. The question is how gnosis stands in relation to ritual, is it brought about or occasioned by ritual observation or practice, or does it originate from beyond our rituals, which develop and function within a world created by a demiurge. American poets of the pre-millennial decades construe this question in a variety of ways. For the moment let me just observe that Yau is an anatomist of ritual failure, and that the failure of ritual seems to be a part of transcendental longing. In the second version of the funeral ritual imagined in “Corpse and Mirror,” the dead citizen’s head is cut off and placed in a mirrored box, where as Yau wickedly remarks: ‘If no one has a grievance that is not subsumed by death the head can be buried beside the body in two weeks. But should you still be angry at the departed, ritual permits you to burn the boxed head, and kick its ashes joyfully in the river.” Yet in both versions of the interment ritual the dead are not free of the living, and the living are almost cruelly bound to the dead. Ritual practice, as imagined by Yau, exist to regiment and punish. Rituals are self-governing systems that allow freedom or reprieve only to the technically proficient and slavishly obedient. At times one feels reading Yau that the Marquis De Sade has been welcomed into Oulipo. Constraints, primarily involving repetition, bring with them all the promise of shamanic initiation, but the initiation is often parodic or inverted. The Gnostic awakening made available here is to the ever-deeper logic of the demiurge, which is why in other works of Yau’s the theme of the counterfeit, the knock off copy, the twin, the brother, has speculative resonance. Or liberation is often partial, and frees us from our oppressors but does not ready us for salvation, for our return to the pleroma: "Then one is awakened by a comet passing overhead, and once again the light echoing in our eyes reminds us that we are meant to wander from one day to the next, like dogs without masters." [vii]
Spirits in the material world
A later work, “Angel Atrapado.” is less concerned with the failure of ritual than with the feel of living in a state of Gnostic distress. This suite most immediately evokes the twentieth century’s premier angelologist Rilke, who is explicitly addressed in the last section. Rilke’s situation at the intersection of aesthetic and spiritual discourses reminds us of the concern with gnosis that runs through symbolist and expressionist tradition, and with the long literary involvement with the 19th century’s with an historical understanding of Gnostic heresy and the place of Gnostic heresy in the imagination of alternatives to orthodox practice and belief. Yau breaks apart the argument of the “Duino Elegies.” He scatters Rilkean motifs throughout his sequence. Yet Yau’s ironies and his comic extravagance never have as their goal the disciplining of the reader for naïve hopes and desires. Rilke appears both as the annunciate of a transfiguring lyricism, a lyricism that must be reinvented through parody, disfigurement and doubling. Yau explores the situation not of an earnest suppliant calling on supranuminous beings who might
descend and touch the human, but that of humans trapped in a state of awakened contemplation of their conditions as sparks of spirit trapped in matter, humans who might well be extras in Wim Wenders and Peter Hanke’s 1987 Wings of Desire: “We were wearing tin wings painted silver, and standing on either side of the broken bed. To be an angel is to shed the body, to float above the clouds gathering inside the names you use when you leave the room. To be an angel is to announce the things to come, sentences passing through altars of water, emptying into the alleys between us, between us and the sky, between the sky we cannot reach and the earth we never visited.” [viii]
For Yau, our homelessness is not so much on the earth as it is within our consciousness of our bodies. “I don’t want to live inside my head, I want to live out of my body, live out of what my body wants” “ES 155) The particular anguish that underlies “Angel Atrapado” is the intensification of transcendental longing in a world where matter both provides images of liberation of the soul and ascent to the realm of the angelic is replaced by the act of hovering just outside the body, in a kind of psychic space. The Rilkean cosmos of height and depth is replaced by the play of inside and outside that is the governing logic of “Angel Atrapado.” As an historian of the imagination as well as its poet, Yau brings the entire era of Expressionist work to elaborate his inverse exegesis of Rilke, especially in regard to the high regard for lovers and the language of lovers as exhibited in the “Duino Elegies.” Throughout Edificio Sayonara Yau draws in the darker side of German angelology by way of “The Blue Angel,” as well as Trakl, and the pathetic grandeur of Peter Lorre. Yet for all the isolation and cruel comedy that finds its way into Yau’s work, Rilke’s high ambition for love is not repudiated. One can still feel throughout “Angel Atrapado” Rilke’s exaltation of lovers, though Yau does not overlook Rilke’s ambivalence toward the loving couple as hierophants of an erotisized spirituality:
Lovers, if the beloved were not there
Blocking the view, are close to it, and marvel
As if by some mistake, it opens for them
Behind each other but neither can
Move past each other and it changes back into the world [ix]
Yau intensifies this conundrum. He complicates it through the play of inside and outside. The lovers relation to each other are obscured by the fluctuating status of their relation to themselves. He follows Rilke in attending to the relation between poetry and lover’s speech. For Rilke this is primarily a matter of wooing. For Rilke, the consummate poet of beseeching and seduction, the matter of how one is to address angels, angels who retain the terrifying grandeur of Islamic tradition, is where we see the poet inquiring into the limit of language. Wooing involves both praise and lament, and in that it seeks favor, is a form of magic. Yau’s focus on language, on the communication of angelic lover’s, is explicit throughout “Angel Atrapado.” This poem too is an inquiry into the nature and power of words and their relation to our understanding of desire though for Yau, the category of wooing includes, jokes, puns, commands, snarky remarks, asides. His communications are fully interpersonal, whatever the ontological status of the personal is among trapped angels. As in The “Duino Elegies,” there is in “Angel Atrapado” a deep interrelation between saying and being. But whereas in Rilke we are here in order to say, in Yau saying brings us into being; further, beings become what they say.
Yau follows Rilke in being a poet consecrated to transformation. One might readily take the avowed goal, the creedal core of Rilkean poetics, as something Yau would love to believe. Every where his body of work aches to come to rest in a Rilkean dispensation. In some ways his work constitutes a continuous celebration of a world governed by metempsychosis. Yet Yau is too curious about what is going on in the basement of Duino Castle. He wants to stand in the storm on the parapets where the angel spoke, but is this possible in Manhattan? Castles are also home to De Sade, and Yau’s cosmological vision would not be complete without a place for cruelty and rules. (It is worth noting that the Gnostic twin appears as a brother who is into bondage.) In Ediaficio Sayonara Yau extends the relation of rules to rituals that he elaborated in “Corpse and Mirror.” All relationships are now an interdependency of constraint and liberation. His poetry must propose forms that are almost too difficult to write, and then write them. This demiurgic formalism is embedded within a larger world of rules, the underlying principals of the social (ritual), the psychological (love) and the aesthetic (poetry, painting and sculpture and photography). The paradoxical result of all this seemingly deadening restraint is a world of an almost animate materiality. “Angel Aptrapado” follows out the alchemical implications of the formalism we see throughout his work, particularly as it takes us to the edge of the perceptible, beyond which may be the domain of higher laws. This may be Yau’s deepest connection to Rilke; both establish links between the form of the poem and the form of the universe. It is also where Yau most clearly dramatizes the downside of aspiring to a life of Rilkean intensities, which is expressionism. “Angel Atrapado” aspires to the condition of Rilke, but winds up in a world closer to that of Gottfried Benn, or perhaps more exactly, Joseph Von Sternberg. The last poem in the sequence addresses Rilke directly, and offers a retort of sorts to the “Duino Elegies,” where things are free to rise and fall. Yau’s sequence ends where Rilke’s began. (Recall the audience gathered to see a film in “Corpse and Mirror,” where the film begins again, this time in pieces). The last section playfully deforms the famous opening line: “Who among the many I am would answer me if I stalled out?” Yau continues to riff on the first elegy. He raising the question of the redemptive hope Rilke places on the voice, and the nature of the our sense of belonging, or not belonging, in the world we are in.
That’s why I tried to pave the voice of my stolen elf,
Later,
After we told ourselves and each other
There was a document declaring
We had never been there, in the room
With the bed of mud and leather,
Tattooed stowaways on a swiveled saddle,
Facing away from the stars pinned to the wall . . . [x]
Having begun where Rilke ends, Yau concludes his exegesis of Rilke with a willful twisting of Rilke’s style. Yau’s homophonic puns, his ghost rhymes display the symbolist agonies of Rilke, but don’t allow us to feel them too directly. So “called out” becomes “stalled out” in the first line, which alerts us to the spiritual life of substitution that Yau has made central to his Gnostic imaginings. So, I believe, we are meant to hear “save” behind “pave” and possibly “self” behind “elf”. This is not parody or pure play. It is the acoustic version of the doubleness he has explored throughout all his poetic work, always setting before us the matter of the relation of the copy to the original, a relation that is the source of both extravagant comedy and severe tragedy. The perverse, whimsical, and at times quite haunting expositions of Rilkean images and concerns throughout “Angel Atrapado” are too many to enumerate here. It should be noted that the ultimate outcome is less a critique of Rilke than a summoning, than a recasting of the Rilkean condition within the terms of Yau’s pre-millennial idiom. Yau in fact ends by asserting the power of transformation, of metempsychosis and discomfort within materiality by artfully calling up the Rilkean window. In the first Duino Elegy, the window is a place of confirmation: of one’s own vocation, of the power of art, of one’s relation to the universe and points beyond. (“A wave rolled toward you/ out of the distant past, or as you walked/ under an open
window, a violin/yielded itself to your hearing. All this was mission. But could you accomplish it?” p151) The last lines of “Angel Atrapado” offer Yau’s own relation to the Rilkean motifs of place and voice:
I prefer to be left where I am,
But I do not know the name of this place,
Only that it sails through me.
I am a window through which you see a landscape--
Green blue flames rising toward the wind’s coiled throat. [xi]
But we must also say, the suite as a whole confirms Yau’s relation to that Rilkean word mission, the awakening to the depth of the moment.
Yellow gnosis
“I think I’m turning Japanese, I really think so” --the Vapors
For Yau, there seems to be virtually no aspect of human activity that is if not governed by rules, free of the temptation to establish rules. His poetry wild desire is to set in order, to arrange, to dream of arrangements, and then to dream of an escape from arrangement. Family, ethnicity, history, sexuality, codes of comportment, taste, forms of art, the effectiveness of comedy, the behavior of children and animals, this poetry is ever alert to underlying laws, to the play of prohibition and liberty that seems a single law of art, society, and the universe. Yau’s fate is to recognize these rules, to participate in them, to subvert them, to pose amendments to the rules, and to continually imagine a world where the rules don’t apply, though even the imagination relies on rules. The rules are the shape of the material world into which we have fallen, and they are also the bonds of our entrapment, which we perceive as beauty. The orders of art hold us in thrall with the beauty of this world, and simultaneously direct us to a higher, purer, truer world that is awaiting our return, a double bind already intuited in one of his earliest poems:
you feel removed from the surrounding scenery
though if you were asked
you would not deny you have a place
In this circumstance
and partake of events, though they rarely
if ever
seem connected as the streets do
angles of one block
joined to another, the buildings jammed together,
with a child playing on the stoop
or covering her eyes while her friends
run into the darkness
the game takes into account [xii]
This rule-bound world is associated with being Chinese, as is the aestheticism that is integral to Yau’s salvational drama, which is something akin to Ed Roberson’s “black gnosis.” Both poets find that the experience of being racially different in the America of the post Vietnam era is the beginning of the soul’s awakening to its condition. Both poets gnostisize the racial body. They perform an inverse exegesis on a range of aspects of minority culture, and find in their poetics an improvisational soteriology. To be Chinese in America, or at least, to be the son of a particular Chinese mother in America, herself the daughter of a lost empire, is to know a very particular form of exile, one from which is no return. As Roberson reworked the middle passage until in revealed an imaginative truth, Yau transformed the historical fact of population displacement. Both poets are historical, and both are allegorists of the soul. Race is a part of the entrapment of being here. But it is also the means by which one awakens. One is from elsewhere, moving, for Yau, among Americans like the last Emperor among the recently liberated, in Bertolucci’s memorable 1987 film.
Yau’s yellow gnosis derives from a specifically Chinese-American experience, but it incorporates the life of being read as simply “Asian.” This creates its own form of double consciousness, call it knock-off consciousness. To be of Chinese origin in this period is to be associated with mimetic mastery of a certain powerful but limited order. It is to be associated with both the hallmark of the modern age, mass-production, (Made in China) and with the quaint, outmoded social order embodied by kitch: fortune cookies and satin brocade and marketed in the form of Charlie Chan. Or should one be taken as Japanese, quite possibly an indignity given the bitter history between the two cultures, should one, in the words of a hit song of those years, feel oneself in the eyes of white or black or brown or red America, turning Japanese, this to be suddenly associated with the takeover of Rockefeller Center, and technological superiority, and high-end sado-masochism,as displayed in the 1992 film, Tokyo Decadence. The question of style is always, for him, in this period, a question of salvation, and if that sounds too theologically minded for so gloriously nihilistic an aesthete, then let’s just say rather than salvation, an assurance that as Breton asserted, existence is elsewhere. For Yau, how one writes is how one is in the world, is what the nature of the world is, is what sets the terms for whatever gnosis, yellow or not, might be. Within the larger concerns of style, the question central to all of Yau is, simply put,” Am I freed by this, or am I trapped by this?”
All the ladders
“All the ladders have been lifted through the clouds
And there is neither a where nor a what on which to land.”[xiii]
Both in New York and the Bay Area the poets of this pre-millennial vernacular Gnostic speculation (Andrew Joron, Aaron Shurin, Mary Margaret Sloan, and others) found a compelling metaphysical drama at the heart of their poetics, a drama that turns on an ever deepening sense of the power of questions. We should not presume that these poets are all esotericists or divinity school dropouts or that they dream each night of archeological developments in the holy land. Gnosticism has long been a part of western literary culture, and it received sustained attention by influential poets of the previous generation, most notably Allen Ginsberg and Robert Duncan, and though it deserves more elaboration than I will give it here, John Ashbery, whose relation to hermetic and theological speculation are rarely the focus of literary analysis, but whose threnody “A Wave” is one of the great works of gnostic speculation in this period. We are as of yet too early in our historical grasp of this period to say definitively which of these poets liked the Talking Heads. What can be said at this point is merely that each poet ask what David Byrne once asked. And not just: “Well, how did I get here?” but, “How did here get here?” And, “Is there a way away from here?” And, “Is there an ‘I’ in me that can get there?” And, “How should whatever ‘I’ I am act in this world, al least for as long as I am condemned to be in it?”
__________
[i] Kurt Rudolph, Gnosis: The Nature and History of Gnosticism (HarperOne 1987), 7.
[ii] John Yau, Radiant Silhouette (Black Sparrow Press, 1989), 97.
[iii] Albert Mobilio, Geographics, (Hard Press Editions, 1995), 62.
[iv] Alice Notley, The Descent of Allette, (Penguin Books, 1996), 32.
[v] Geoffrey O’Brien, Floating City, Talisman House p.83
[vi] Yau, RS, p126.
[vii] ibid, p. 131
[viii] John Yau, Edificio Sayonara (Black Sparrow Books, 1992), 161.
[ix] Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke trans, Mitchell (Random House, 1982), 193.
[x] John Yau, Forbidden Entries (Black Sparrow Press, 1996), 136.
[xi] ibid, 137.
[xii] John Yau, RS , 17.
[xiii] John Yau, FE, 134.
Salvation under the Sign of Reagan:
Poetry, Gnosis, and New York
Departure dying doom delight
in the knowing and unknowing
--John Yau, The Fallacies of Enoch
Those angels of estrangement The Talking Heads, put a question in the middle of their 1980 song “Once in a Lifetime.” The song, produced by Brian Eno, was properly postmodern, as befits a band with an art-school past, but the question was as old as epic, as myth, as narrative itself, as old as any curiosity about origins, as old and perhaps identical to the first religious thought. “Well,” David Byrne asks, existential and incredulous, “how did I get here?” The question was already well worn in the second century, when the Gnostics picked up permutations of it and made it the center of their drama of redemption. Gnostics were known by the questions they asked, a list of which come down to us from Clement of Alexandria:
Who were we? What have we become? Where were we? Whither have we been cast? Whither do we hasten? From what have
we been set free? [i]
“Once in a Lifetime” would not be the last time ancient speculation blew through a modern work. What is notable here is not merely that the question is old, but the form of the song itself seems to slip from pomo to primordial. The song arrives in its moment in the tatters of some outmoded model of the universe, from before the continents rose, perhaps from Atlantis, “under the water, more water.” Perhaps from the African materials Byrne was reading in at the time of the song’s composition. The song brings with it thoughts about the nature of time: “time isn’t holding up/time isn’t after us.” It is forthright in depicting our dire enslavement to this world: “Under the water, carry the water/remove the water/ from the bottom of the ocean.” For at least as long as the song is playing it seems the spiritual life of the late capitalist moment uncannily mirrors that of a far earlier stage of Western Empire. The Talking Heads seem to confirm one scholar’s belief that Gnosticism is not an event in the history of religion, but a mode of thinking that springs up everywhere.
Further, their song means to call us, as the question does the asker within the song, out of the everydayness of car and house and significant other, to awaken us to our unawareness of what we are. Truly heard, as an inquiry into first things, as a cry to orders beyond the apparent, David Byrne’s question can only unleash orders of lesser questions, it can't help but awaken the classical rhetorician within: “how,” by what chain of cause and effect? “Did I,” and who is that “I” suddenly so curious, did I the singer even until this moment know it was there to be asking? “Get here?” So, we are from elsewhere, and where is this here this hell of fallen matter, this here in the universe ruled, as it was then, in the 1980s, by a monstrosity, an idiot monstrosity from the state of California, in fact its former governor.
Reagan
By pure coincidence it was Reagan’s decade that saw flickers of Gnostic thought emerging in popular art forms. While this does not in and of itself vouchsafe some revival of second century cultic beliefs in the entertainment industry, it could be argued that the disbelief and loathing Reagan inspired might undo the unbelief of the most steadfast secularist, might suggest that the Gnostic cosmos were still in effect, and the vilest of archons was indeed in charge. The proof that Reagan was of a second and inferior order of creation was there to be seen, and not simply in the paintings of Leon Golub: Remember the Gipper in Mississippi announcing his candidacy in a town legendary for its lynchings? Remember the Gipper at Bitberg, laying a wreath on a Nazi tomb? Remember the Gipper confirming a universal dualism in the guise of Cold War ideology? Remember the Gipper coming not from the sky but the earth, arising from the very borax of Death Valley? Yet the Gipper seemed beyond the conventions of embodiment. After all, the poet John Hinkley tried to kill him, and failed. Death and malevolence loved the Gipper. Occultist of the time might well have believed Reagan was the beginning of a last and dire time cycle. American presidents seemed keyed to the forces that run the lower world, and as Whitman saw, rarely came bearing a light from the beyond. They seem to be long foreseen participants in the history of the world. Nostradamus after all had predicted the death of Kennedy, as had, for that matter, Reagan’s own astrologer, Jeanne Dixon. Literary folk need not look so far back as Nostradamus in the history of French prophetic modes for comprehension of what had happened with the election of 1980. Poets such as Leonard Schwartz needed only a bit of Artaud and Bataille to see Reagan’s part in the ongoing tradition of fascist magic. Stephen-Paul Martin, a master of the Gnostic practice of “inverse exegesis” savagely cut up Reagan’s speeches in his book length poem “Invading Reagan” to reveal the depravity of the Gipper. In “Late Night Movies” In a reading inspired by the New Historicism, John Yau offered an historical analysis of how Reagan came to be, and revealed the source of his power:
In a small underground laboratory the brain of a
Movie actor is replaced by semi-precious stones,
Each one thought to have once resided in heaven. [ii]
The 80s
As in earlier moments in modernism, in the 1980s the past was yet again new. Moreover, not only was there evidence that the past was not what it was thought to be, but that the truth of the past was being kept from us. The New York Times reported from the depths of the Holy Land how scholars warred over The Dead Sea Scrolls, establishing their own hierarchies of knowledge, keeping the scraps of papyrus uncovered in 1947 from the public. Could the story of how Christianity “got here” differ from what had been supposed? Gnosticism as well, itself already long embedded in Western literary culture, in fact in the very origins of literary criticism, was particularly of the moment. Nineteen seventy-seven had seen the publication of the Nag Hammadi trove in English. Paperback editions appeared in nineteen eighty one and nineteen eighty four and 1984. Bentley Layton included in his own edition other Gnostic related material, and collections such as Willis Barnstone’s The Other Bible opened the door to alternative versions of once canonical texts. Works known only through their refutation by heresy-hunters could now be read in full, and the question of what gnosis itself might mean within a postmodern world be asked with a liberated sense of what it once might have meant. Wisdom was selling by the pound in the marketplace, and Albert Mobilio canvassed the experience that William Blake once said was its price. Mobilio’s extraordinary phrase-making, his propulsive syntax whirls through worlds where the quotidian and the transcendent incessantly intertwine, sever, knot and unravel. The interleaving of discourses, narratives, lexical registers and voices on display in “The Geographics” are the places where some gnosis might yet lurk, though in Mobilio’s world any word of salvation comes only partly intelligible through the white noise of the way we live now. Older narratives of the holy haunt Mobilio’s figuration, but they are also the source of his Gnostic comedy: “Their rebbe is paralyzed, yet somehow rises from his bed, straight razor in hand, and runs down the hospital corridor shouting Go speed racer, go.“[iii]
With the election of Reagan, Christian fundamentalism poured into the public sphere. Looking deep into the face of the television evangelist Pat Robertson, one might accept that no kind of progressive spirituality could even be possible.Considering Heritage USA, the evangelical theme park built by Jim and Tammy Baker in South Carolina, one might well conclude there was no place left for religious experience in the life of the mind. For poets and artists not yet ready to abandoned the category of the spiritual, the language and imagery associated with religious thought seemed bankrupt. And the mythic as a mode of imagining? What could be said to survive the outing of Hiedegger as a Nazi? What truth won by the visionaries of Modernism was not rescinded by their problematic politics? The new Gnostic material offered certain possibilities. The pre-millennial dissemination of excavated wisdoms was propitious. Mythologist manque Elaine Pagels refashioned Gnostic materials in the light of contemporary need to think out forms of spirituality more suited to the sexuality and gender preoccupations of our time. The literary critic turned culture prophet Harold Bloom argued the fundamental temper of American culture and religion was gnostically inclined. The romance of the recovery of the lost truths of earlier eras was already a deeply worked vein of American narrative art, from spiritualism and west coast sightings of descendants of the lost continent of Lamia on or around Mt Shasta, to the new Jersey theosophist who assembled the Tibetan Book of the Dead, not to mention a staple of high modernist writing and of popular entertainment. The alien in Brother from Another Planet was one in a series of faux Gnostic messengers, while the quest for the underlying structure of all religions was spoofed in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Blade Runner, at whatever degree of separation from the occult divinations of Philip K. Dick, reminded us that science fiction, was contemporary cosmological post-Miltonic myth-making: who among us can say for sure, even right now, that he or she is not a replicant, a being fashioned by a deranged toy-maker? The evolving phenomenon of alien abduction narratives, -- stripped for parts in Clark Coolidge’s Alien Tatters, offered horrifying and transfixing permutations of acosmical mythological speculation and shamanic torment. (In the world of books the brink of the millennium would provide the solace of The Left Behind novels, which readied desperate Christians beyond the beltway for life after the apocalypse.) While through the eighties and nineties, far from America, on the enchanted isle of Manhattan, art adepts and runaways could thumb through Apocalypse Culture, Hollywood Babylon 2, Bataille’s “the Solar Anus,” or Michael Palmer’s Sun, and dream of a violence so sacred that the world would be renewed.
“It’s Giuliani time!”
Indeed, for poets in New York in the nineteen eighties, the world with a world of the city within the nation, found the spirit of Reagan permeating their terrain and temporality, reaching into the next decade. These pre-millennial decades the eighties and the nineties, would be a rich apocalyptic tableaux, a burning island city where gathered on the river bank the attentive viewer could make out the faces of Bernard Goetz, Tawana Brawley, Elinor Bumpers, Robert Chambers, Meir Kahane, Jack Abbot, Mark
David Chapman, Michael Stewart, Hedda Nussbaum, wilding wilders in Central Park, all gathered perhaps in a yet to be released out take from Do The Right Thing, and police interrogators said to be intent on anal violation could brandish a toilet plunger before Abner Louima crying out in joy, “Its Giuliani time!” The world within a world of Manhattan was its own narrative of the fall. How could poets not notice? Over in New Jersey Ed Roberson called up the uprising at Attica, and theologized the Middle Passage, and felt his way toward what a black gnosis might mean. In Homer’s Art, Alice Notley began the deep recalibration of her imagination, addressing the epic ambition of Reagan’s ideological minions, not to mention the movie industry, to rewrite Vietnam. With “Descent of Alette” she revealed that an obscene tyrant, an emanation of Reagan, controlled all, almost all, knowledge. Out of office, Reagan ruled from beneath the subway system, and abiding within him, might be Richard Nixon as well, might be Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz in nuncio. The millennium, impatient to close, unveiled the hidden structure of the world more than ten years early:
“The tyrant” “is a mild-“ “looking man” “He does not show”
“his decay” “He had no such grace,” “you might say” “His sense of “
“his own knowledge” “presumed rightness” “preserves him” “forever”
“He could have never” “have never” “been that wrong:” “That thousands”
“upon thousands” “of years” “of enslavements” “so many different kinds”
“be integral to” “the solid” “& beautiful” “structures” “cathedrals”
“museums” “& mansions” “& temples” “he has built” “above the ground”[iv]
Scholars at odds
As if to encourage poets in their appropriations, scholars of Gnosticism made sure no immediate clarity was forthcoming in regard to what Gnosticism was, where it came from, or what it might mean now. In fact the very discovery of certifiably Gnostic texts at Nag Hammadi – texts, that is, quoted by hiersologists but until now known only through their repudiations – simply made the category of Gnostic all the more controversial. Well, we might ask, how did it get here? Some maintained that the origins and practices of a Gnostic religion could now at last be discerned. Some argued that such determinants were illusory, that Gnosticism never existed, that it is a projection of the modern age, and the very term Gnosticism should be dropped. Still others argued for the continued value of a typological approach, finding similar motifs and tendencies among certain groups, though these groups would hardly recognize each other as sharing beliefs. One, alluded to at the start, John Couliano, a man found assassinated in a divinity school lavatory, argued we should dispense with the attempt to reconstruct origins and track the dissemination of ideas altogether. In a fit of structuralist clarity, he insisted in the Tree of Gnosis that Gnosticism is a way the mind shapes experience, a form of radical dualism that appearing independently throughout the ancient world, in the Renaissance, and in Romanticism. (And so preserving for literary culture the fabled links between Gnostics, Manicheans, Cathars. Baudilaire, comic books, the X Files, and points beyond.) What threads through pre-millennial poets in New York and elsewhere who found themselves given to a vernacular Gnostic speculations, is a preoccupation with dualism, if not flat out apocalypticsism; this becomes quickly apparent when such poets take up the gnostic practice of spinning out alternate, pointedly antithetical mythologies.
A particularly striking example of this would be the work of Geoffrey O’Brien, who mingled movies, world religions, and a keen grasp of the relation of ritual thought and practice to knowledge of the beyond, O’Brien is obsessed with the compelling failures of conventional ritual to reaffirm the worth of the world. O’Brien stages vast dramas of salvation, the failures of which are the basis for his gnosis. It is a negative mythopoesis, proceeding towards a telling of the fundamental Gnostic condition of radical unknowing through the enacting of what no longer works. In “Ancients,” O’Brien spins out a précis of world creation myths. The poem draws upon the long tradition of cosmogonic narratives gathered and collated by mythographers in the Enlightenment project of determining the underlying structures of culture. For O’Brien who replays the optimism and excitement of moments or origin throughout his work, his attention never fails to locate the seeds of insufficiency in any vision of life outside the pleroma. In “John of Lyden” he renders a historical tableaux drawn from the history of heresy, showing the dark turns messianism tends to take in emerging modernity. (The narrative of utopian promise turned demonic animates his depiction of the 1960s and 1970’s in such works as Dreamtime.) In “Haruspex,” O’Brien precisely imagines the process of divination as that of good ritual gone bad. He sees in it a moment of poesis, where dead signs might seem to come to life, might seem still capable of cosmological mapping, of performing the traditional function of delineating sacred space. The attempt to reenact this outmoded magic is the initiation into a mode of knowing that still seems possible in the distopic landscape the poem has set before us, though it is a knowing, a new sentence somewhat other that what Ron Silliman proposes, one that asserts an inaccessible interiority, yet also one that asserts a degraded material vision of the Gnostic spark, of which it can only be said, that it doesn’t rust:
The sign went dead. It used to announce the alley
Where they sold the juice. She took its letters in her hands
And pointed them north, south, east, west.
Afterwards she felt as if she had swallowed the letters
And that they made a new sentence which was inside her
And which was her. But when they asked her she said
“I can’t read it, nobody will ever read it,
Its only trying to tell me it doesn’t rust.” [v]
An epistle delivered at Saint Mark’s of the Bowery
The surge of Gnostic notions through the broader culture suggested the time was right to the reimagining of the relation between poetry and knowing, a knowing that might include social and historical forces, but was tuned to mythological, cosmological and soteriological frequencies as well. The poetics of this salvational knowing was worked out in the writings of a variety of pre-millennial poets, though no poet of these decades addressed the complexities of a contemporary Gnostic poetics as fully and productively as Ed Foster. In his essay/poem “Poetry has Nothing To Do With Politics” Foster saw in the act of writing the establishment of a highly prized knowing in which the poem transmits its own origins to the poet and the poet finds in his reception of the knowledge of origins, a revelation leading or so it is reasonable to infer, of a truer self abiding within. This essay, really an ars poetica and manifesto, drew on the hermeneutic drama at the center of Gnosticism: devotees disputed the meanings said to be securely bound within Old Testament tales -- or within the yet to be codified texts that would eventually compose the New Testament -- by producing an “inverse exegesis. ” Fosters’ dispute is not with an emerging theological orthodoxy, but an academic one. The critics, a triumvirate composed of Stanley Fish, Cary Nelson and the Russian theorist V.N.Volosinov, who himself may have been a disguised Mikhail Bakhtin, and appear here to be a covert Charles Bertstein, argue that the text is nothing, the critical community decides what the poem is and what it means. Foster counters: critics are nothing. Not even readers are needed. Readers die, but the text lives on. The poem is an otherworldly presence, an icon, discernable to the senses but ultimately unknowable. In encountering this unknowability, we experience our true origin.
What electrifies Fosters’ own poetry in this period is this: the narrative of awakening to the fundamental Gnostic situation is also a coming out narrative, a threefold coming out: as poet, as queer, and as gnostic. Foster had published poems pseudonominously for years, now was stepping out as a poet; he was awakening to his homosexuality and professing it; and after a career as an historically minded culture critic, he was making an argument that the poetic act constituted a refutation of our sense of ourselves as historically and culturally determined, that to know ourselves was to know our unknowability. At the conclusion of this talk, Ed Foster was awarded a distinction relatively rare in modern American letters, he was publically denounced as a “Gnostic” by an audience member. This modern day hiersologist was none other than Charles Bernstein appearing not so much as Hugo Ball dressed in a parody of a cardinal, but as the momentary re-embodiment of great heresy hunter himself, Iraneus. Who, listening close to Fosters bearing witness to the ineluctable power of art, detected doctrinal impurities and deciding in that instance, or so I speculate, that Foster would not be appearing in the volume entitled Poetry and Public Policy that would soon appear. Instead, and more fittingly, Foster’s epistle was published abroad, in Turkey, where poets such as Lale Muldur were also rethinking the question of the origins and ends of poetic utterance, especially in regard to discourses of the secular.
Corpse and mirror
At the moment that religious studies in American universities was disassembling the comparativist project, and asserting the historically bounded determinants, the social construction of “religious experience,” poets in diverse locals and circumstances were working through the what deconstruction had laid to rest and what it again made possible. Certain New York based poets responding at least in part to the spiritual drama of Manhattan in the era and of course to their own personal hopes and desperations and rages, worked to articulate a faith in the possibility of poetry that could imagine the relation between self, world and the beyond, a beyond that often seemed an extravagantly reconfigured version of a Gnostic cosmos, as it turned up in pieces on the New York of Koch and Dinkins and Guilliani, where newspapers with headlines like the famous “Headless Body Found in Topless Bar” marked how far the New York of the eighties was from that of the fifties, when O’Hara glimpsed the face of Lady Day on the front page of an earlier iteration of the New YorkPost. We were at a later moment in the Orphic myth, not the evocation of an overwhelming music, but the severing of mind and heart.
No poet of the pre-millennial decades took up the implications of the critique of the category of the religious, and the circulation of the newly disseminated Gnostic texts more forcefully or imaginatively that John Yau. The work of the early eighties gathered in Corpse and Mirror, brings us immediately to the first challenge of thinking through what a twentieth century Gnostic poesis might mean: what truth of our true condition can an image have if when accept the fundamental premise of a Gnostic cosmogony: that the universe made by an evil or ignorant demiurge? If the world is now more than ever, as the Gnostics would say, a “bejeweled corpse,” what might those glittering jewels reveal? If making is a matter of mirrors, if, as Yau tells us, when two corpses meet there is always a mirror between them, what can the mirror show, what can mimesis render, how can we see in what we make that which has?
Yau’s poem “Corpse and Mirror” is an extraordinary rendering of such a Gnostic supreme fiction, though it might appear to us at first as no more than an anthropologist’s nightmare. The poem brings to the fore the question of whether or not we feel of what we are among, and the role ritual serves in helping us feel at home in this translated world. Ritual both maintains the social world, upholds the rule of the archons, of Reagan and his minions, but it also offers the possibility of transformation, especially, as the martyrs of the art-world have shown him, when adapted by isolated adepts of self-fashioned religiosity. “Corpse and Mirror” is the Book of the Dead for a culture that has no vested interest in assisting the dead to reach heaven or the living to find wisdom in grief, but it also serves as a book of liberation. “Corpse and Mirror” begins with a burial. A citizen is interred, and his horses with him, though still alive, buried up to their necks. This is, as one might guess, the beginning of a process to determine the fate of the soul. It can head toward the setting sun, though it seems more likely it will be condemned to linger on earth. Yet out attention is not on the dead citizen but on the gravediggers who have performed their duty, but in returning to their lives they are touched by transcendental longing. They would rather be back, it seems, with the dead buried in his chariot, hoping as well to be hauled into the sun, than be enjoying dinner with their families. The chariot in which the corpse is buried is some late model of that which the soul once drove across the sky in the Phaedrus. But the poem draws us always deeper into the conflicted condition of the living, who may find themselves tricked into companionship with the dead soul, condemned to wander this earth “like a vulture without wings.”[vi]
The larger question of the relation of gnosis to ritual in the context of historical Gnosticism and in regard symbolist and modernist poetics needs greater attention than I can give it here, but it is evident that ritual is clearly a component of the poetry of Gnostic speculation that emerged among American poets in the pre-millennial decades. The question is how gnosis stands in relation to ritual, is it brought about or occasioned by ritual observation or practice, or does it originate from beyond our rituals, which develop and function within a world created by a demiurge. American poets of the pre-millennial decades construe this question in a variety of ways. For the moment let me just observe that Yau is an anatomist of ritual failure, and that the failure of ritual seems to be a part of transcendental longing. In the second version of the funeral ritual imagined in “Corpse and Mirror,” the dead citizen’s head is cut off and placed in a mirrored box, where as Yau wickedly remarks: ‘If no one has a grievance that is not subsumed by death the head can be buried beside the body in two weeks. But should you still be angry at the departed, ritual permits you to burn the boxed head, and kick its ashes joyfully in the river.” Yet in both versions of the interment ritual the dead are not free of the living, and the living are almost cruelly bound to the dead. Ritual practice, as imagined by Yau, exist to regiment and punish. Rituals are self-governing systems that allow freedom or reprieve only to the technically proficient and slavishly obedient. At times one feels reading Yau that the Marquis De Sade has been welcomed into Oulipo. Constraints, primarily involving repetition, bring with them all the promise of shamanic initiation, but the initiation is often parodic or inverted. The Gnostic awakening made available here is to the ever-deeper logic of the demiurge, which is why in other works of Yau’s the theme of the counterfeit, the knock off copy, the twin, the brother, has speculative resonance. Or liberation is often partial, and frees us from our oppressors but does not ready us for salvation, for our return to the pleroma: "Then one is awakened by a comet passing overhead, and once again the light echoing in our eyes reminds us that we are meant to wander from one day to the next, like dogs without masters." [vii]
Spirits in the material world
A later work, “Angel Atrapado.” is less concerned with the failure of ritual than with the feel of living in a state of Gnostic distress. This suite most immediately evokes the twentieth century’s premier angelologist Rilke, who is explicitly addressed in the last section. Rilke’s situation at the intersection of aesthetic and spiritual discourses reminds us of the concern with gnosis that runs through symbolist and expressionist tradition, and with the long literary involvement with the 19th century’s with an historical understanding of Gnostic heresy and the place of Gnostic heresy in the imagination of alternatives to orthodox practice and belief. Yau breaks apart the argument of the “Duino Elegies.” He scatters Rilkean motifs throughout his sequence. Yet Yau’s ironies and his comic extravagance never have as their goal the disciplining of the reader for naïve hopes and desires. Rilke appears both as the annunciate of a transfiguring lyricism, a lyricism that must be reinvented through parody, disfigurement and doubling. Yau explores the situation not of an earnest suppliant calling on supranuminous beings who might
descend and touch the human, but that of humans trapped in a state of awakened contemplation of their conditions as sparks of spirit trapped in matter, humans who might well be extras in Wim Wenders and Peter Hanke’s 1987 Wings of Desire: “We were wearing tin wings painted silver, and standing on either side of the broken bed. To be an angel is to shed the body, to float above the clouds gathering inside the names you use when you leave the room. To be an angel is to announce the things to come, sentences passing through altars of water, emptying into the alleys between us, between us and the sky, between the sky we cannot reach and the earth we never visited.” [viii]
For Yau, our homelessness is not so much on the earth as it is within our consciousness of our bodies. “I don’t want to live inside my head, I want to live out of my body, live out of what my body wants” “ES 155) The particular anguish that underlies “Angel Atrapado” is the intensification of transcendental longing in a world where matter both provides images of liberation of the soul and ascent to the realm of the angelic is replaced by the act of hovering just outside the body, in a kind of psychic space. The Rilkean cosmos of height and depth is replaced by the play of inside and outside that is the governing logic of “Angel Atrapado.” As an historian of the imagination as well as its poet, Yau brings the entire era of Expressionist work to elaborate his inverse exegesis of Rilke, especially in regard to the high regard for lovers and the language of lovers as exhibited in the “Duino Elegies.” Throughout Edificio Sayonara Yau draws in the darker side of German angelology by way of “The Blue Angel,” as well as Trakl, and the pathetic grandeur of Peter Lorre. Yet for all the isolation and cruel comedy that finds its way into Yau’s work, Rilke’s high ambition for love is not repudiated. One can still feel throughout “Angel Atrapado” Rilke’s exaltation of lovers, though Yau does not overlook Rilke’s ambivalence toward the loving couple as hierophants of an erotisized spirituality:
Lovers, if the beloved were not there
Blocking the view, are close to it, and marvel
As if by some mistake, it opens for them
Behind each other but neither can
Move past each other and it changes back into the world [ix]
Yau intensifies this conundrum. He complicates it through the play of inside and outside. The lovers relation to each other are obscured by the fluctuating status of their relation to themselves. He follows Rilke in attending to the relation between poetry and lover’s speech. For Rilke this is primarily a matter of wooing. For Rilke, the consummate poet of beseeching and seduction, the matter of how one is to address angels, angels who retain the terrifying grandeur of Islamic tradition, is where we see the poet inquiring into the limit of language. Wooing involves both praise and lament, and in that it seeks favor, is a form of magic. Yau’s focus on language, on the communication of angelic lover’s, is explicit throughout “Angel Atrapado.” This poem too is an inquiry into the nature and power of words and their relation to our understanding of desire though for Yau, the category of wooing includes, jokes, puns, commands, snarky remarks, asides. His communications are fully interpersonal, whatever the ontological status of the personal is among trapped angels. As in The “Duino Elegies,” there is in “Angel Atrapado” a deep interrelation between saying and being. But whereas in Rilke we are here in order to say, in Yau saying brings us into being; further, beings become what they say.
Yau follows Rilke in being a poet consecrated to transformation. One might readily take the avowed goal, the creedal core of Rilkean poetics, as something Yau would love to believe. Every where his body of work aches to come to rest in a Rilkean dispensation. In some ways his work constitutes a continuous celebration of a world governed by metempsychosis. Yet Yau is too curious about what is going on in the basement of Duino Castle. He wants to stand in the storm on the parapets where the angel spoke, but is this possible in Manhattan? Castles are also home to De Sade, and Yau’s cosmological vision would not be complete without a place for cruelty and rules. (It is worth noting that the Gnostic twin appears as a brother who is into bondage.) In Ediaficio Sayonara Yau extends the relation of rules to rituals that he elaborated in “Corpse and Mirror.” All relationships are now an interdependency of constraint and liberation. His poetry must propose forms that are almost too difficult to write, and then write them. This demiurgic formalism is embedded within a larger world of rules, the underlying principals of the social (ritual), the psychological (love) and the aesthetic (poetry, painting and sculpture and photography). The paradoxical result of all this seemingly deadening restraint is a world of an almost animate materiality. “Angel Aptrapado” follows out the alchemical implications of the formalism we see throughout his work, particularly as it takes us to the edge of the perceptible, beyond which may be the domain of higher laws. This may be Yau’s deepest connection to Rilke; both establish links between the form of the poem and the form of the universe. It is also where Yau most clearly dramatizes the downside of aspiring to a life of Rilkean intensities, which is expressionism. “Angel Atrapado” aspires to the condition of Rilke, but winds up in a world closer to that of Gottfried Benn, or perhaps more exactly, Joseph Von Sternberg. The last poem in the sequence addresses Rilke directly, and offers a retort of sorts to the “Duino Elegies,” where things are free to rise and fall. Yau’s sequence ends where Rilke’s began. (Recall the audience gathered to see a film in “Corpse and Mirror,” where the film begins again, this time in pieces). The last section playfully deforms the famous opening line: “Who among the many I am would answer me if I stalled out?” Yau continues to riff on the first elegy. He raising the question of the redemptive hope Rilke places on the voice, and the nature of the our sense of belonging, or not belonging, in the world we are in.
That’s why I tried to pave the voice of my stolen elf,
Later,
After we told ourselves and each other
There was a document declaring
We had never been there, in the room
With the bed of mud and leather,
Tattooed stowaways on a swiveled saddle,
Facing away from the stars pinned to the wall . . . [x]
Having begun where Rilke ends, Yau concludes his exegesis of Rilke with a willful twisting of Rilke’s style. Yau’s homophonic puns, his ghost rhymes display the symbolist agonies of Rilke, but don’t allow us to feel them too directly. So “called out” becomes “stalled out” in the first line, which alerts us to the spiritual life of substitution that Yau has made central to his Gnostic imaginings. So, I believe, we are meant to hear “save” behind “pave” and possibly “self” behind “elf”. This is not parody or pure play. It is the acoustic version of the doubleness he has explored throughout all his poetic work, always setting before us the matter of the relation of the copy to the original, a relation that is the source of both extravagant comedy and severe tragedy. The perverse, whimsical, and at times quite haunting expositions of Rilkean images and concerns throughout “Angel Atrapado” are too many to enumerate here. It should be noted that the ultimate outcome is less a critique of Rilke than a summoning, than a recasting of the Rilkean condition within the terms of Yau’s pre-millennial idiom. Yau in fact ends by asserting the power of transformation, of metempsychosis and discomfort within materiality by artfully calling up the Rilkean window. In the first Duino Elegy, the window is a place of confirmation: of one’s own vocation, of the power of art, of one’s relation to the universe and points beyond. (“A wave rolled toward you/ out of the distant past, or as you walked/ under an open
window, a violin/yielded itself to your hearing. All this was mission. But could you accomplish it?” p151) The last lines of “Angel Atrapado” offer Yau’s own relation to the Rilkean motifs of place and voice:
I prefer to be left where I am,
But I do not know the name of this place,
Only that it sails through me.
I am a window through which you see a landscape--
Green blue flames rising toward the wind’s coiled throat. [xi]
But we must also say, the suite as a whole confirms Yau’s relation to that Rilkean word mission, the awakening to the depth of the moment.
Yellow gnosis
“I think I’m turning Japanese, I really think so” --the Vapors
For Yau, there seems to be virtually no aspect of human activity that is if not governed by rules, free of the temptation to establish rules. His poetry wild desire is to set in order, to arrange, to dream of arrangements, and then to dream of an escape from arrangement. Family, ethnicity, history, sexuality, codes of comportment, taste, forms of art, the effectiveness of comedy, the behavior of children and animals, this poetry is ever alert to underlying laws, to the play of prohibition and liberty that seems a single law of art, society, and the universe. Yau’s fate is to recognize these rules, to participate in them, to subvert them, to pose amendments to the rules, and to continually imagine a world where the rules don’t apply, though even the imagination relies on rules. The rules are the shape of the material world into which we have fallen, and they are also the bonds of our entrapment, which we perceive as beauty. The orders of art hold us in thrall with the beauty of this world, and simultaneously direct us to a higher, purer, truer world that is awaiting our return, a double bind already intuited in one of his earliest poems:
you feel removed from the surrounding scenery
though if you were asked
you would not deny you have a place
In this circumstance
and partake of events, though they rarely
if ever
seem connected as the streets do
angles of one block
joined to another, the buildings jammed together,
with a child playing on the stoop
or covering her eyes while her friends
run into the darkness
the game takes into account [xii]
This rule-bound world is associated with being Chinese, as is the aestheticism that is integral to Yau’s salvational drama, which is something akin to Ed Roberson’s “black gnosis.” Both poets find that the experience of being racially different in the America of the post Vietnam era is the beginning of the soul’s awakening to its condition. Both poets gnostisize the racial body. They perform an inverse exegesis on a range of aspects of minority culture, and find in their poetics an improvisational soteriology. To be Chinese in America, or at least, to be the son of a particular Chinese mother in America, herself the daughter of a lost empire, is to know a very particular form of exile, one from which is no return. As Roberson reworked the middle passage until in revealed an imaginative truth, Yau transformed the historical fact of population displacement. Both poets are historical, and both are allegorists of the soul. Race is a part of the entrapment of being here. But it is also the means by which one awakens. One is from elsewhere, moving, for Yau, among Americans like the last Emperor among the recently liberated, in Bertolucci’s memorable 1987 film.
Yau’s yellow gnosis derives from a specifically Chinese-American experience, but it incorporates the life of being read as simply “Asian.” This creates its own form of double consciousness, call it knock-off consciousness. To be of Chinese origin in this period is to be associated with mimetic mastery of a certain powerful but limited order. It is to be associated with both the hallmark of the modern age, mass-production, (Made in China) and with the quaint, outmoded social order embodied by kitch: fortune cookies and satin brocade and marketed in the form of Charlie Chan. Or should one be taken as Japanese, quite possibly an indignity given the bitter history between the two cultures, should one, in the words of a hit song of those years, feel oneself in the eyes of white or black or brown or red America, turning Japanese, this to be suddenly associated with the takeover of Rockefeller Center, and technological superiority, and high-end sado-masochism,as displayed in the 1992 film, Tokyo Decadence. The question of style is always, for him, in this period, a question of salvation, and if that sounds too theologically minded for so gloriously nihilistic an aesthete, then let’s just say rather than salvation, an assurance that as Breton asserted, existence is elsewhere. For Yau, how one writes is how one is in the world, is what the nature of the world is, is what sets the terms for whatever gnosis, yellow or not, might be. Within the larger concerns of style, the question central to all of Yau is, simply put,” Am I freed by this, or am I trapped by this?”
All the ladders
“All the ladders have been lifted through the clouds
And there is neither a where nor a what on which to land.”[xiii]
Both in New York and the Bay Area the poets of this pre-millennial vernacular Gnostic speculation (Andrew Joron, Aaron Shurin, Mary Margaret Sloan, and others) found a compelling metaphysical drama at the heart of their poetics, a drama that turns on an ever deepening sense of the power of questions. We should not presume that these poets are all esotericists or divinity school dropouts or that they dream each night of archeological developments in the holy land. Gnosticism has long been a part of western literary culture, and it received sustained attention by influential poets of the previous generation, most notably Allen Ginsberg and Robert Duncan, and though it deserves more elaboration than I will give it here, John Ashbery, whose relation to hermetic and theological speculation are rarely the focus of literary analysis, but whose threnody “A Wave” is one of the great works of gnostic speculation in this period. We are as of yet too early in our historical grasp of this period to say definitively which of these poets liked the Talking Heads. What can be said at this point is merely that each poet ask what David Byrne once asked. And not just: “Well, how did I get here?” but, “How did here get here?” And, “Is there a way away from here?” And, “Is there an ‘I’ in me that can get there?” And, “How should whatever ‘I’ I am act in this world, al least for as long as I am condemned to be in it?”
__________
[i] Kurt Rudolph, Gnosis: The Nature and History of Gnosticism (HarperOne 1987), 7.
[ii] John Yau, Radiant Silhouette (Black Sparrow Press, 1989), 97.
[iii] Albert Mobilio, Geographics, (Hard Press Editions, 1995), 62.
[iv] Alice Notley, The Descent of Allette, (Penguin Books, 1996), 32.
[v] Geoffrey O’Brien, Floating City, Talisman House p.83
[vi] Yau, RS, p126.
[vii] ibid, p. 131
[viii] John Yau, Edificio Sayonara (Black Sparrow Books, 1992), 161.
[ix] Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke trans, Mitchell (Random House, 1982), 193.
[x] John Yau, Forbidden Entries (Black Sparrow Press, 1996), 136.
[xi] ibid, 137.
[xii] John Yau, RS , 17.
[xiii] John Yau, FE, 134.