Iconotropy

The subject arose—these things happen seemingly by chance, like seeing a cardinal appear on a snow-covered branch in January—why it was that God forbade the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge to a certain pair in Paradise…and how come it was the woman who reached for the fruit and not the man—whereas it is only too well known that in such cases the woman would have been more passively cautious whereas the man, typically of  men, would have grabbed the apple first, even priding himself of able to climb the tree if so required.

Well, never mind. The discussion, as it evolved, brought back memories of Robert Graves’ call it essentially unreadable book, unreadable to an amateur, like me, who knows no Latin and even less Greek really—The White Goddess. In that book Graves coins the word used in my title, a word that the Wiktionary (here) defines as follows:

The accidental or deliberate misinterpretation by one culture of the icons or myths of an earlier one, especially so as to bring them into accord with those of the later one.

Graves held that images, usually carved or rendered as mosaics, created in the Age of Matriarchy were later reinterpreted in such a manner as to conform to the ideology of the Age of Patriarchy that rose to dominance later. Literally, the word means “image-turning” in English.

Graves provides many examples of such reinterpretation, but one of these will do. Take the tale of Paris, the Trojan, who, given an apple by Hermes at Zeus’ institagion, was to decide which of three goddesses (Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite) was the most beautiful. Paris chose Aphrodite and, by this decision, caused the later eruption of the Trojan war as the slighted goddesses decided to retaliate. This tale, of course, is an extreme abbreviation.

Graves argued that the tale was formed from icon created in the matriarchal age in which the Tripple Goddess is shown; and one of them is handing an apple, sacred to the Goddess, to a shepherd. Graves emphasizes that the three are not competitors but persons of a single being. Obviously the image shows the hand-off of an apple: a man’s hand, a woman’s, both touching the apple in the act—but nothing showing who is giving to whom. In one tradition the power of blessing—with the sacred apple—is that of the feminine. In the other, the power is with the male.

Similarly, the same icon is the source of the tale in Genesis in which woman (Graves calls Eve “the Mother of all Living”) gives an apple to Adam. But here the female’s action is interpreted as disobedience of the male figure of God the Father. And Graves saw this as an instance of iconotropy.

Quite amazing things turn up when the rare bird lands. And sometimes the answer is very obscure indeed if one’s rather random walk through literature, sacred and heretical, produces words no one ever uses anymore.

Stumbling Over that E

Brigitte shared an article the other day indicating that failing gait in the aging is now thought by some to be an early omen of the approach of Alzheimer’s disease. We’re both stumblers. But I also stumble over letters. A very common case is the E in Vergil; there it was again on Laudator this morning (link), immediately followed by Virgil because Borges, quoted in that post, used Virgil in the title of one of his books. So which is it? I prefer Virgil myself. It has to do with the balanced look of that name, not with historical truth. The poet was called Vergilius in his own time. The rather lame-sounding explanation I find on the Internet (but no deep search here) is that Vergilius was so abstemious sexually (or perhaps only compared to his contemporaries) that an “I” got borrowed from virgin.

No deep search, as I say. But I do have an authority on my shelves here. Robert Graves knows his Latin and the ancient times better than I would have—even if I’d lived in Augustus’ own time. So I trust his usage. To be sure, Graves was no fan of the chaste Vergilius. In his monumental The White Goddess, there is a single reference to the poet in the index. Here is what Graves has to say. The context is Latin poets.

His contemporary, Virgil, is to be read for qualities that are not poetic in the sense that they invoke the presence of the Muse. The musical and rhetorical skill, the fine-sounding periphrases, and the rolling periods, are admired by classicists, but the Aeneid is designed to dazzle and overpower, and true poets do not find it consistent with their integrity to follow Virgil’s example. They honour Catullus more, because he never seems to be calling upon them, as posterity, to applaud a demonstration of immortal genius; rather, he appeals to them as a contemporary: ‘Is this not so?’

Now, mind you, Graves could not have consulted Google’s Ngram Viewer in his time. What Google shows is that Virgil was vastly more used in Graves’ times than in mine—but is still by far the more popular usage. In my 1956 Encyclopedia Britannica, the only E found in the name is in a parenthetical Vergilius; my 1989 World Book Encyclopedia echoes the rising usage of Vergil by hooking that name to Virgil in an “or Vergil” annotation to the title. Neither encyclopedia explains the differences in spelling. My own guess is that if Vergilius had celebrated the White Goddess in his poetry—rather than worshipped the collective power of Rome—Graves would have stoutly used Vergil. He knew what he admired; and I’m certain that he knew how Vergilius was spelled.

War Memoirs

I mentioned a memoir of the Great War (later renamed World War I) by David Jones: In Parenthesis. That appeared quite late, in 1937. Robert Graves wrote Good-Bye to All That in 1929, the same year in which Erich Maria Remarque published All Quiet on the Western Front. Arnold Zweig wrote six novels about the conflict, collectively known as Der große Krieg der weißen Männer (The Great War of the White Men); of that collection I’ve only read The Case of Sergeant Grischa (1927). My own reading took place in my youth, thus in the 1950s. A little later I also read some of the World War II books, thus Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948) James Jones’ From Here to Eternity (1953), and Pierre Boulle’s The Bridge Over the River Kwai (1954). Even later I tried to read Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), but it just didn’t hold me. And after that? Korea, Vietnam, the current era? Nothing. I’d passed beyond “all that.”

Which made me wonder this morning if, say in the 1940s and 1950s, people who were then well into their sixties and beyond had bothered reading the Great War memoirs and novels? Is the reading of such books part of a person’s relatively early orientation of what this realm is all about? And once that’s known revulsion sort of gets the upper hand? Another book produced in 1974, Joe Haldeman’s science fiction work, The Forever War, succeeds in producing the perfect title for this genre. I was just 38 when it appeared—but it already failed to tempt me. Or was Joe’s book, as it were, an introduction to something altogether new? Has war—no longer the collective effort of the entire citizenry—sunk below the radar? Surfacing only when some unfortunate specialist, on a third or fourth deployment, goes altogether mad and lashes out insanely against innocent civilians? And the literature of war has consequently sunk to mere shock journalism?

The Month of Juno

Did She who made ameba squirt you, oh Milky Way, from an overfull breast? [Tiara in In Search of Anna Magna]

On this the first day of June it may be appropriate to celebrate the Goddess, Mother Nature, from whom this central month, the month of the summer solstice, takes its name. She is Juno. I was born a contrarian, I’m sure; I’m decidedly not a “born again” contrarian. Hence it delighted me to discover quite early in my growing up, thanks to the helpful labors of that indefatigable defender of Woman, the poet Robert Graves, that humanity had once been matriarchal to the core. The shift to a patriarchal order began in Antiquity, with the consequence that the once ruling Eternal Feminine became a mere hand-maiden and helper of the Male Divine.

My quote above refers to the Great Goddess Rhea; her milk squirted up into the heavens and became the Milky Way (hence the name, of course) when she gave birth to little Zeus. The Roman mythographer, Gaius Julius Hyginus (64 BC-17 AD) once wondered if Rhea, a Cretan goddess, should be called Juno by the Romans—suggesting that Juno is another name for the Great Goddess. But in the transition to patriarchy, subordination is the general rule. Hence in Hyginus’ own time, already, Juno had long been relegated to mean Nature as Matter, whereas Jupiter was elevated to Nature as Creative Impulse. I find the same pattern everywhere. Athena, once also the name of the Great Goddess, now suddenly issues from bloody Zeus’ rather low forehead. Sophia, yet another exalted name, turns into a fallen woman in Gnosticism. No way, José, says this contrarian. And in the Kabala’s schema Shekina is at the very bottom whereas in my scheme She’s at the very top.

The origin of June’s naming in honor of the Goddess is justified (by such as the Encyclopedia Britannica) by quoting Ovid, but Ovid (43 BC - 18 AD) also helpfully points out, to the sour pleasure of all of those of us who carry or carried the word Junior or Jr. behind their name (like me) that the name of the month also derives from iuniores—as May derives from maiores. The majors and the minors, you might say, or age in May and youth in June…

The lovely graphic I reproduce, courtesy of Wikipedia commons here, is Les Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry, Juin. There she is, in the center, and the boys appropriately subordinated in the background. Such pleases one who’s cyclic in the Age of Progress and drawn to spirit in the Age of Matter.

The Urge To Explain

Herewith some further notes on yesterday’s perhaps too-dense riff on Graves. Staring at the darkness before sleep rescued me last night, I wondered why some delight in the most obscure discoveries and bring them to the world still mostly shrouded in mystery—while others bend themselves into tortured pretzels to make even the simplest things as intelligible as possible. Graves delighted in his discoveries but also complained, with some bitterness, when specialist scholars, undoubtedly as deeply versed as he was, ignored him—this especially regarding his discoveries of Celtic roots in The White Goddess. Paradoxically Graves also greatly admired other ancient riddlers among the Celtic poets who hid secret wisdom unfit for those who hadn’t penetrated the deepest mysteries—and never might.

One no doubt facile explanation waiting for me as I woke up this morning was that the urge to explain, to make things plain, may be the consequence of birth order—always assuming that the first-born is not an only child and that younger siblings are therefore present to instruct. Putting on my sweater, still in the dark, I thought: “I’ll bet you money that Graves was not a first-born child.” And, indeed, he wasn’t. He was the third of five children, significantly, I think, of a school inspector and Gaelic scholar Alfred Perceval Graves. And his mother, A.P.’s second wife, Amalie von Ranke, was a great-niece of a famous German historian, Leopold von Ranke. Ah! To be the third of five—in a family of this flavor. That, to me, explains a lot: parents bright as shiny new coins and infinitely wiser. They would, of course, understand whatever mysteries he brought them, Look Mom, Look Dad! He wouldn’t have to explain the mystery; discovery would be enough.

The first-born are always explaining to younger sisters, brothers. It is the hand that they are dealt—and if the requisite gifts are there anyway, it becomes natural. Clarity of explanation is a virtue at that level; the younger are stubbornly ignorant, it seems. They must be made to see. Hence—the urge to explain. Life, alas, isn’t democratic. First-borns are also loners, at least at first; or they certainly don’t suffer as much when left alone. Those in the middle tend, on the whole, to be more naturally at home in society, first-borns more at home in a hierarchy—provided, of course, that they are at the top; they feel almost naturally troubled by being in the middle. Deep sigh. So many challenges, so difficult to explain them all…

Mythic History, Historic Myths

One of the strangest poets who lived while I was young was Robert Graves, known to some for the movies made of his Claudius novels, to some fewer for his poetry, to fewer yet who found themselves puzzled by his three-volume The Greek Myths, and the handful totally baffled by his The White Goddess. Here was a famous man whose title should have been Impenetrable the Obscure—because he undertook to understand the most ancient roots of Greek and Celtic culture to a dizzying depth where practically no one could descend to follow him, observe what he was doing, and approve or critically correct. Not a way to achieve academic renown—hence Graves was gravely ignored.

I find his reading of the Greek myths fascinating, particularly his conviction that they were originally history, if entertainingly framed, embodying not only facts but also, later, artful revision of the same facts, the addition of spins and interpretation of these revisions as politics, power, and cultures changed, e.g., a matriarchal dispensation morphing into a patriarchal age; alternatively Graves held that some of these very old stories were simply invented by weaving a meaning around even more ancient frescoes or mosaics the original meaning of which had been lost.

Someday I might attempt to render the whole horrific twentieth century into a Greek-style myth of three or four action-packed pages simply titled Adolf and the Torch Nymph. By a reversal of Graves’ method (if I still had the years left to do it) I could write the story of Cain and Able as a ten-volume work tracing the prehistoric conflict between the first practitioners of agriculture in conflict with the then dominant herding culture.

Silent in Siloam

In The White Goddess Robert Graves claims that poets have the power to know the future and also the power to recover the past, and in his poem, “The Fallen Tower of Siloam,” he speak obliquely of this power and rejects its use in practical affairs. Now, first, this tower. Jesus mentions it in a passage of Luke (13:2-4). Some people had approached him and related the execution of some insurgents by Pilate. They were trying to get his reaction. He said:

Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered thus? I tell you, No: but unless you repent you will all likewise perish. Or those eighteen upon whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them, do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who dwelt in Jerusalem?”

The fall of that tower appears to have been a fairly recent current event Jesus expected his audience to know about. Graves used this event to make quite another but, in an odd way, quite analogous point. Herewith the poem:

The Fallen Tower of Siloam

Should the building totter, run for an archway!
We were there already—already the collapse
Powdered the air with chalk, and shrieking
Of old men crushed under the fallen beams
Dwindled to comic yelps. How not terrible
When the event outran the alarm
And suddenly we were free—

Free to forget how grim it stood,
That tower, and what great fissures ran
Up the west wall, how rotten the under-pinning
At the south-eastern angle. Satire
Had whirled a gentle wind around it,
As if to buttress the worn masonry;
Yet we, waiting, had abstained from satire.

It behoved us, indeed, as poets
To be silent in Siloam, to foretell
No visible calamity. Though kings
Were crowned and gold coin minted still and horses
Still munched at nose-bags in the public streets,
All such sad emblems were to be condoned:
An old-wives’ tale, not ours.

A difficult poem with a hard message. It seems to me addressed to poets, not the public. “We were already there,” the poet says. The poet sees the future. For him the tower crumbled to powder before it did; the disaster already surrounded him before it came; he had no need for an architectural committee to asses the visible fissures, the failing foundation—or to mind the glib chatter that took a not-so-serious and therefore satirical note of these signs. Yes. It behooves the poet to be silent in Siloam—except to those who, like him, can smell the air as well. The rest, of course, are preoccupied with those seeking and gaining power, with banks printing money, and the media rechewing the endless cud. The poet is called to the worship of his Muse; it is a higher calling. Silent in Siloam. Hard words… But so are Jesus’ words, addressed to his listeners, suggesting that they repent—or else. What a hoary, almost offensive word that, repentance, in this day and age. And that rapid shift in meaning, there, in that passage, between two kinds of peril: difficult. Difficult like poetry.

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…