Not this, Not That

C-Span brought a program titled “Religious Freedom and Public Policy” yesterday, sponsored by the Ethics and Public Policy Center. EPPC is “dedicated to applying the Judeo-Christian moral tradition to critical issues in public policy.” Watching it, I got to thinking about Robert Graves, the poet—whose lead I follow when it comes to the conflict discussed by EPPC’s panel.

The shrouded theme of this conference was what might be called a divide based on different views of sexuality broadly viewed. I call it a shrouded theme because the overt discussion centered on rights, particularly the rights of religious communities; but beneath that loomed two issues that are non-negotiable on either the hard left or the hard right: gay rights and abortion rights.

I thought of Graves, the poet of the White Goddess, because this conflict really centers on the Patriarchal Order, which the category “Judeo-Christian” reduces to a single phrase, and which the modernist rights movement challenges by its initiatives. The Matriarchal Order seems to have been overcome at least four thousand years ago. Therefore, for all practical purposes, it has virtually no resonance at all—except to poets; and there is also that brief flash of courtesy and courtly love in medieval times. Now my views on Modernism are probably known to be negative—but of one of its aspects I highly approve. It is the overt and energetic assertion that females are actually fully human.

If they were—in the Judeo-Christian moral tradition—we would have female priests, bishops, and popes, say; female rabbis; and, among the patriarchs of the Orthodox Churches, the occasional matriarch. But in all of these traditions, the female is subordinated—even when she achieves extraordinary rank. Modernity gives women genuine equality—de jure, anyway if not in meaningful practice. But this impulse in Modernity does not go far enough. Graves and I at minimum wouldn’t stop at equality. We’d go a whole lot further. Therefore, overflying this scene, as I was doing yesterday, and looking for a place to land and rest, I couldn’t find a perch either on the left or on the right. Not this, not that.

Separation of Poetry and State

The appointment of a poet laureate happens every year. Every year I have the same reaction. If there is such a thing as a poetical party, I would adhere to the one founded by Robert Graves. In that school poets make their own weather as best as they are able—and serve only the White Goddess if she even deigns to notice them. The position of poet laureate—the official title is (please get the little bag out of the seat pocket in front of you) Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress—is a creation of Crongress. The laureate serves from October to May. The short term seems to indicate that the United States needs a “poetry-free” period in summer to recover from the hardships of the colder season. I object to all of this. I want true separation of poetry and state. I might acquiesce to an institution entirely outside of government which might, every decade or so, bestow such an honor on the top pop-music lyricist or, better yet, song-writer. John Denver. Now there’s a name I would accept.

Graves and the Goddess

One of the strangest books I’ve ever read—perhaps the strangest published in the twentieth century—is The White Goddess by Robert Graves. He himself describes it as “a historical grammar of the language of poetic myth.” Indeed those words appear on the cover of my latest copy of the book (1997). The first copy, which I got in the 1950s, eventually fell apart. I still have it, in four pieces. I keep returning to this book—and must have read it at least five times, all five hundred pages of it.

The use of the word “grammar” has a scholarly odor. Another strange book I once perused was Kenneth Burke’s A Grammar of Motives. Lots of people write “Grammars of ….” The meaning in these cases, to cite Webster’s, is “The elements or principles of any science or art.” So there you are: the elements and principles of the language of poetic myth. What makes The White Goddess memorable, fascinating, and indeed sometimes maddening is that Graves avoids intellectual reduction and uses the language of poetic myth itself to weave his subject. It becomes accessible, therefore, only, as it were through absorption. You have to be adequate to it. Not surprisingly, Graves felt ignored. In the Foreword to the revised edition he acknowledges all those who helped him assemble the vast material he used. Then he complains: “Yet since the first edition appeared in 1946, no expert in ancient Irish or Welsh has offered me the least help in refining my argument, or pointed out any of the errors which are bound to have crept into the text, or even acknowledge my letters. I am disappointed, though not really surprised.” Nor am I. If you step off the trodden path and go in search for strange flowers or beasties, you will be on your own. And those you meet are likely to be as wild and strange as you are.

The organizing principle behind the poetic myth, as Graves saw reality, was the Goddess herself—and poetry is ultimately the relationship of soul to the divine. But to say this much is to say nothing at all. The book must be experienced. To enter Graves’ forest of myths it is best to jettison orthodox structures of how, why, and where the divine will manifest. The heart will learn something even though the intellect will rage at times like a chained dog sensing shadows in the night.

Graves was a prolific writer. He wrote a two-volume work on The Greek Myths, he wrote a war-memoir (Good-bye to All That), novels, and his “grammar.” He once said of these activities: “I raise dogs to keep a cat.” The cat was his poetry. I always liked that as a good program for the writer: make your money the ordinary way and thus preserve your sovereignty. For Graves prose was the “ordinary way.”

I owe Graves for introducing me to Sufism. Once, anciently, I chanced across a book by Idries Shah entitled The Sufis. I picked it up to see what it might be about. I opened it, saw that Robert Graves had written the introduction. Not checking further I bought the book. Thus stood, stands, my relationship to this poet.

Graves like all poets was open at the top of his skull and had strange experiences and—because of them—strange beliefs. He thought he could journey into the past and experience it as if he were there. Time for him was reversible at least. Mad—like Swedenborg, like Boehme. One of the more memorable snippets of this book, to which I return at times, is a short poem of his, published in Collected Poems (London, 1975), entitled “On Portents.” Graves introduces the poem thus (p. 343 of Goddess):

Time, though a most useful convention of thought, has no greater intrinsic value than, say, money. To think in temporal terms is a very complicated and unnatural way of thinking too; many children master foreign languages and mathematic theory long before they have developed any sense of time or accepted the easily disproved thesis that cause precedes effect.

I wrote about the Muse some years ago in a poem:

If strange things happen where she is
So that men say that graves open
And the dead walk, or that futurity
Becomes a womb, and the unborn are shed—
Such portents are not to be wondered at
Being tourbillions in Time made
By the strong pulling of her bladed mind
Through that ever-reluctant element.

This gives a glimpse into this forest. For more, you need to wander in…