Inventing the Language to Tell It

Robinson Jeffers and the Biology of Consciousness

George Hart

• Publisher: American Literatures Initiative
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780823254903
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria nordamericana

From 1920 until his death in 1962, consciousness and its effect on the natural world was Robinson Jeffers's obsession. Understanding and explaining the biological basis of mind is one of the towering challenges of modern science to this day, and Jeffers's poetic experiment is an important contribution to American literary history—no other twentieth-century poet attempted such a thorough engagement with a crucial scientific problem. Jeffers invented a sacramental poetics that accommodates a modern scientific account of consciousness, thereby integrating an essentially religious sensibility with science in order to discover the sacramentality of natural process and reveal a divine cosmos.There is no other study of Jeffers or sacramental nature poetry like this one. It proposes that Jeffers's sacramentalism emerged out of his scientifically informed understanding of material nature. Drawing on ecocriticism, religious studies, and neuroscience, Inventing the Language
to Tell It shows how Jeffers produced the most compelling sacramental nature poetry of the twentieth century.

1 / Rock, Bark, and Blood: Sacramental Poetics and West Coast Nature Poetry

At a “Reinhabitation Conference” in 1976, Gary Snyder remarked: “The biological-ecological sciences have been laying out (implicitly) a spiritual dimension. We must find our way to seeing the mineral cycles, the water cycles, air cycles, nutrient cycles as sacramental.”¹ Poets deal in metaphors and paradoxes, the tensions between image and reality, mind and nature, word and thing. Snyder deftly handles a central paradox of environmental thinking—the idea that material facts contain essential values—making a case (implicitly) for the function of poetry in matters of ecological concern. Environmentalists are committed to preserving the material world, and popular ecology supplies them with concepts such as ecotones, interdependence, biophilia, and biocentrism, concepts that they use to ascribe moral and purposive value to the natural world. Yet such terms alone cannot account for the sacramentality of natural process. Based solely on materialism, environmentalism would be no more than enlightened resource management. Snyder calls for a manifold relationship to the material cycles that sustain life, a relationship informed by science, bound by ethics, and animated by spirit. The physical acts of eating, breathing, walking, building, and so on imply a spiritual dimension that he calls “sacramental.”

How can poetry negotiate the rift between fact and value and bring about an awareness of or attitude toward reality that may be legitimately called sacramental? Snyder’s answer to this question would be “ritual.” Poetry’s basis in song, chant, litany, for a practitioner of “ethnopoetics” such as Snyder, enables it to function in a ritualistic mode that discovers sacramentality in nature. Recently, ritual studies scholar Ronald L. Grimes has followed Snyder’s lead, finding in it an opening to synthesize current ritual theory’s emphasis on performance with environmentalism.² For both Grimes and Snyder, ritual/performance is the means by which material facts can blossom into sacramental value. In our consideration of the sacramental poetics of Robinson Jeffers, an additional element is required to understand the connection between ritual and sacramentality: rhetoric.

Ritual, Rhetoric, and Sacramentality

Grimes and Snyder are thinking of actual ritual, hence the necessity of performance. Performance theory has its roots in poststructuralism, so language—as a performance itself but also as a theoretical framework for understanding performance—is central. Contra strictly materialist approaches to environmentalism, ritual/performance makes a case for the importance of language not only as the means by which we express feeling for nature but also as constitutive of those feelings or attitudes. The standard liberal-Protestant response to the environmental crisis, according to Grimes, is simply to align one’s beliefs and moral codes with “green” politics and ethics, and the only role for ritual is to illustrate this alignment. Performance as action or activism is left to the realm of politics and policy. “This strategy,” Grimes writes, “is necessary but insufficient, because moral principles and legislation do not by themselves ground worldviews or form attitudes. Attitudes are not merely emotional, nor worldviews merely intellectual. Each collaborates with the other in determining how people act, what they perform, and therefore how they behave.”³ Grimes offers a preliminary account of the theories that ritual studies might put into practice in order to cultivate environmental attitudes, including Victor Turner’s performativity, Charles Laughlin’s and Eugene d’Aquili’s biogenetic structuralism, and Roy Rappaport’s ecological anthropology.⁴ Underlying this interdisciplinarity is the linguistic turn of poststructuralism, and it provides the tension between word and action that motivates ritual theory. Language, as a differential system of signification, allows for performance and ritual to be equal: ritual is no longer the privileged term but another form of performance; meaning is produced not by reference—ritualized actions pointing to or mimicking divine actions—but by difference. Yet ritual returns language to the realm of action in order to take effect. Grimes writes, “For me, religious ritual is the predication of identities and differences (metaphors) so profoundly enacted that they suffuse bone and blood, thereby generating a cosmos, an oriented habitat. In such rites people enact a momentary cosmos of metaphor. Ritually, people do not dance merely to exercise limbs or to impress ticket buyers with their skills or even to illustrate sacredly held beliefs. Ritualists dance, rather, to discover ways of inhabiting a place. This is the noetic, or the divinatory, function of ritual; ritual helps people figure out, divine, even construct a cosmos.”⁵ Grimes’s sophisticated ritual theory offers a new way of reading ritual as it structures Jeffers’s poetry. This way of reading will show how his poetics achieves sacramentality and, in turn, how his use of rhetoric and ritual is revised and extended by Kenneth Rexroth and then by Snyder. Such an interpretation is necessary because ritual has been one of the major devices by which Jeffers’s sacramentality is gauged, and a one-to-one correlation of his use of ritual has often been cited as his form of cosmogony. It is time to assess more accurately language’s role in this process, and ritual theory helps bring about this clearer view. In a moment, I will turn to a close reading of a short poem that exemplifies Jeffers’s sacramental poetics, but any discussion of ritual and sacrament in Jeffers must begin with his poem “Tamar.”

“Tamar” has received its most thorough treatment as a ritualized narrative in Robert J. Brophy’s Robinson Jeffers: Myth, Ritual, and Symbol in His Narrative Poems. Brophy’s readings in this seminal study outline and elaborate the myth-ritual structure of five of Jeffers’s long poems from the crucial period in which he discovered and perfected his mature voice, 1921 to 1928. His reading is detailed and exhaustive, and it shows how elaborately structured and finely written this poem is. Without reference to the mythical, biblical, and classical sources and structures so completely analyzed by Brophy, the poem can be briefly summed up: the character Tamar Cauldwell lives on Point Lobos with her father, brother, and two aunts. She commits incest with her brother, becomes pregnant, takes one of his friends as a lover, and then burns down the family farmhouse to purify it of the sins she and her father, who also had an incestuous relationship with his sister, have committed. As we will see, Jeffers gave various accounts of this strange and melodramatic poem’s origins. In a well-known comment in the foreword to his Selected Poetry, he described its genesis: “‘Tamar’ grew up from the biblical story, mixed with a reminiscence of Shelley’s Cenci, and from the strange, introverted and storm-twisted beauty of Point Lobos” (CP 4:393). He makes no direct reference to its ritualistic element here, offering only his version of its literary and place-based influences.

In the conclusion of his argument on the themes and sources of “Tamar,” Brophy summarizes the myth-ritual aspect of the poem: “This is the action of the poem...simply stated: corruption, descent to death, and anticipated rebirth. In these cyclic terms and this movement, one can discover Jeffers’ cosmogonic vision, his psychology of peace, and his metaphysics of value.”⁶ Indeed, Jeffers’s first major poem outlines the contours of his worldview, and such a totality of vision is at once his power and his fatal flaw. The determinism inherent in it leaves little room for inventing new stories and developing new themes, and with such slight concern in the narratives for the intimacies and complexities of human interaction there are only large patterns of action for his characters to engage in. Nonetheless, as Brophy contends, the intention behind Jeffers’s narrative poems is a presentation of a sacramental worldview through dramatized and narrated ritual.

Whereas Brophy treats “Tamar” as an index to Jeffers’s religious themes in a literary-critical context, grafting Northrop Frye’s archetypal myth criticism onto new critical formalism, William Everson, in The Excesses of God: Robinson Jeffers as a Religious Figure, reads the poet himself, as the subtitle has it, as “a religious figure.”⁷ Juxtaposing quotations from the poetry with excerpts from archetypal theologians such as Rudolph Otto, Everson demonstrates the mystical cast of Jeffers’s mind as well as his themes and subjects. Rather than incorporating archetypal motifs into modern poetry by reduction and repetition, as Brophy would have it, Jeffers, according to Everson, actually ritualizes the writing process.⁸ In his own ecstatic prose, Everson argues that “Tamar” was the poem by which Jeffers discovered this ritualizing process. Linking the conception of the narrative with the death of the poet’s mother, Everson writes, “Writing her poem was his first efficacious ritual of the spirit....his first sacrificial attempts—the creation of poems—had been inefficacious. His materials, his words, had lain damp within the body of her womb and he could not ignite them. When she died, he stepped forth fully blown, invincible, and uttered the name of the secret, incestuous Yin, whose offering to life he was—‘Tamar’!”⁹

For the poet himself, Tamar embodies the spirit of place, “the wild rock coast / Of her breeding” (CP 1:25). Tamar’s ritualistic value is presented in two poems. In her namesake poem, a climactic scene involves Tamar’s dance and descent to the dead in a séance on the beach with her Aunt Jenny. Brophy reads the scene as a rite that follows Eliade’s plan for seasonal, death-rebirth rituals.¹⁰ Tamar enacts a ritualized dance in a trance—she “slip[s] every sheath down to her feet, the spirit of the place / Ruling her.../ And dance[s] on the naked shore” (CP 1:44)—and her subconscious is linked to the spirit presences in the landscape: she dreams “two layers of dream,” the “undercurrent layer” tapping into a collective unconsciousness that images the autochthonous presence of Indian tribes and the arrival of Spanish conquistadors (CP 1:34). By inventing such characters to be “vessels,” as he calls them, to be filled with the spirit of a place, Jeffers creates a sort of objective correlative. Rather than being an allusion that objectifies the poet’s subjective emotions, Tamar subjectifies the poet’s intuition of the spirit of place.

Tamar is an unusual character in that her “spirit” seemed to haunt Jeffers’s imagination, and in his mind she continued to haunt Point Lobos as its genius loci. She participates in another aspect of ritual in her appearance in the poem “Come Little Birds.” This uncanny lyric, written fifteen years after “Tamar” and first published in Poetry in October 1939, matter-of-factly describes Jeffers’s visit to a medium for the purpose of contacting his dead father. At the mouth of the Sur River, the old woman goes into a trance as her two sons ritually slaughter a calf and pour its blood into a trench. Drawn by the fresh blood, the dead appear, and after the poet speaks to the ghosts of some soldiers killed in the First World War (the speaker says that the year is 1920), the poet’s father appears. Driven by a filial impulse, the speaker attempts to apologize to his father for some vague failure on his part, but the spirit seems to be unconcerned with news from the living. Then the medium begins to tire and spasms, and the boys prop her up and stoke the fire that has died down. The spell seems broken, and the dead fade away, “but,” the speaker says, “a certain one of them came running toward me, slender and naked, I saw the firelight / Glitter on her bare thighs; she said ‘I am Tamar Cauldwell from Lobos: write my story. Tell them / I have my desire.’ She passed me and went like a lamp through the dark wood” (CP 3:9). The speaker is left on the beach alone to ponder these supernatural phenomena, and he concludes:

I thought these decaying shadows and echoes of personality are only a by-play; they are not the spirit

That we see in one loved, or in saint or hero

Shining through flesh. And I have seen it shine from a mountain through rock, and even from an old tree

Through the tough bark. The spirit (to call it so: what else could I call it?) is not a personal quality, and not

Mortal; it comes and goes, never dies. (CP 3:9)

Everson calls the séance in “Come Little Birds” “a primitive sacrificial liturgy,” and he argues that such representations of ritual mirror Jeffers’s own ritualizing, which takes the form of “a direct ceremonial utilization toward a method in poetic composition.”¹¹ The compositional act, for Everson, is a form of “ritual propitiation.” Jeffers presents the formula in “Apology for Bad Dreams” as the imagining of victims in order to propitiate evil spirits, thereby protecting himself, his family, and his home. In the narratives, these fictional constructs are reified into idols and vessels. Everson, in turn, literalizes these objects in his account of Jeffers’s method: “Thus Jeffers, priest of the word, victimizes the imagination in order to purge the proud flesh of man’s primordial wound....When the liturgy is completed and they disappear into time, he rouses from birth-trance and, peering about him, discovers their words in his book.”¹² In his rhapsodic prose, Everson completes the process for Jeffers. Perhaps, we might say, he invents it. Whereas Brophy approaches Jeffers’s ritualizing from a sympathetic though critical perspective, Everson uses the textual evidence of ritual patterns in the poetry to create a sympathetic response to the tone and mood of the poetry that allows him access to the poet’s subjectivity. Brophy matches the patterns of the poetry to patterns in comparative accounts of myth and ritual, thereby establishing Jeffers’s credentials as a ritualistic poet. Everson attempts, not to determine the accuracy of Jeffers’s representations of ritual, but rather “to sense in his use of them that quality corresponding to the part of the soul from which they originated, to use them as gauges of his authentic religious disposition.”¹³ In both cases, language, through a system of positive identifications, is reified into ritual process. Metaphors transform into action, reversing Grimes’s sense that ritual enacts metaphor, not the other way round.

This inversion is the crux for my discussion of Jeffers and sacramentality. Jeffers knows as a poet he only has language’s signifying capacity at his disposal. He enacted ritual “to discover ways of inhabiting a place,”¹⁴ not least of which, of course, was building Hawk Tower and additions to Tor House. But stonemasonry and writing are different processes, so their productions are ontologically different. One could imitate Jeffers’s rituals of inhabitation and endow a home with s...