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Number
282
August
September 1999
Riding the
Marvelous
JACK FOLEY
Copyright
© 1999 Poetry Flash
BED OF SPHINXES: NEW & SELECTED POEMS
1943--1993, by Philip Lamantia, City Lights
Books, 1997, 150 pages, $12.95 paper.
From virtually all perspectives---early Greek
philosopher to twentieth-century specialist---there
is agreement that artistic creativity and
inspiration involve, indeed require, a dipping into
pre-rational or irrational sources while
maintaining ongoig contact with reality and "life
at the surface." The degree to which individuals
can, or desire to, "summon up the depths" is among
the more fascinating individual differences. Many
highly creative and accomplished writers,
composers, and artists function essentially within
the rational world, without losing acess to their
psychic "underground." Others, the subject of this
book, are likewise privy to their unconscious
streams of thought, but they must contend with
unusually tumultuous and unpredictable emotions as
well. The integration of these deeper, truly
irrational sources with more logical processes can
be a tortuous task, but, if successful, the
resulting work often bears a unique stamp, a "touch
of fire," for what it has been through.
---Kay Redfield Jamison, Touched with Fire
(1993), a favorite book of Lamantia's
Once day my mother, glassy-eyed, said to me:
"Whenever you are in bed and hear the dogs' howling
in the fields, hide under the bedclothes, don't
deride what they do: they thirst insatiably for the
infinite, like you, me, and the rest of us humans
with our long, pale faces. I even allow you to
stand at the window and gaze upon this quite
exalted spectacle." Since that time I have
respected the dead woman's wish. Like the dogs, I
too feel the longing for the infinite…
---Lautréamont (1868)
One of the reasons very little has been written
about the poetry of Philip Lamantia is the fact
that Lamantia's poetry is extremely difficult to
write about. How does one 'explicate' a passage
like this, from "Hypodermic Light":
It's absurd I can't bring my soul to the eye of
odoriferous fire
my soul whose teeth never leave their
cadavers
my soul twisted on rocks of mental freeways
my soul that hates music
I would rather not see the Rose in my thoughts take
on
illusionary prerogatives
it is enough to have eaten bourgeois testicles
it is enough that the masses are all sodomites
Good Morning
Or a line like this, from "From the Front," a
poem which refers to "desperate surrealism":
Motorcycles of atonal venetian blind dust of
wind rooftop!
Lamantia's biographical note in Donald M.
Allen's New American Poetry (1960) is
typically terse:
Born 1927 in San Francisco. Lived in New York
City, Mexico, Europe and North Africa. Hailed by
André Breton as an authentic surrealist
poet; first appearances in View, 1943--45;
broke with surrealism by 1946. Since then mostly
underground, and traveling.
Ann Charters gives us a little more in her
introduction to the Lamantia selections in The
Beat Reader (1992):
Philip Lamantia was born in San Francisco on
October 23, 1927, the son of Sicilian immigrants.
He began writing poetry in elementary school and
was briefly expelled from junior high for
"intellectual delinquency" when he immersed himself
in the work of Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft.
At age [fourteen], after being introduced
to surrealism by the Miró and Dali
retrospectives at the San Francisco Museum of Art,
he began to write surrealist poetry, realizing that
"the purely revolutionary nature" of surrealism,
"even before my knowledge of Surrealist theory, was
part of my own individual temperament." Shortly
afterward Lamantia left home to join the
Surrealists in New York City and was welcomed by
André Breton as "a voice that rises once in
a hundred years."
There is also a charming chapter on Lamantia in
Neeli Cherkovski's Whitman's Wild Children
(1988) and a complex article, "Destroyed Works:
Philip Lamantia's Excessive Subjectivities,"
written by Jody Norton and published in
Sulfur 29 (Fall, 1991).
Bed of Sphinxes is Philip Lamantia's
second Selected Poems. His first, also
published by City Lights, appeared in 1967 as
number 20 of the Pocket Poet Series. The new
Selected Poems is a handsome production,
with a cover design by Rex Ray. The opening poem,
"Touch of the Marvelous," evokes Lamantia's
'surreal youth'. The poem originally appeared in
VVV in 1944.
The mermaids have come to the desert
they are setting up a boudoir next to the camel
who lies at their feet of roses
A wall of alabaster is drawn over our heads
by four rainbow men
whose naked figures give off a light
that slowly wriggles upon the sands
I am touched by the marvelous....
The word "marvelous" alludes to a famous passage
in André Breton's 1924 "Manifesto of
Surrealism"---the 'First Manifesto':
Let us not mince words: the marvelous is always
beautiful, anything marvelous is beautiful, in fact
only the marvelous is beautiful...only the
marvelous is capable of fecundating works....
How does the marvelous 'fecundate' Lamantia's
poem? Mermaids, themselves creatures of the
marvelous, belong to the realm of the ocean. In
Lamantia's poem they show up in the desert and are
associated with camels---equally marvelous
creatures, but, unlike the mermaids, real. Indeed,
the desert is blossoming here, at least "at their
feet of roses." In the next stanza, a wall "is
drawn over our heads." Wouldn't that make it a
ceiling, not a wall? And how can light be said to
"wriggle"---an interesting choice of words in a
passage which begins by sounding almost Biblical:
"A wall of alabaster is drawn..." And what about
"touched"? Does that mean that the marvelous
affects the speaker, 'touches' him?
Probably. But there is at least a glance at the
meaning of "touched" as insane: "I am touched." A
moment later, a Muse figure appears. Her name is
"BIANCA"---capitalized and meaning 'white'. She is
also "the angelic doll turned black,"
however, as well as "the child of broken elevators"
and "the curtain of holes / that you never want to
throw away." The change in the meaning of "of" in
those two lines is dizzying, but no matter: not
only is BIANCA "the first woman," she is also "the
first man." Indeed, the speaker says, "I am lost to
have her." Shouldn't that be lost unless I
have her?
In 1953 Breton defined Surrealism as "a
far-reaching operation having to do with language,"
"the rediscovery of the secret of...language," an
attack on the "utilitarian usage" of words in an
attempt "to emancipate them and restore all their
power" ("On Surrealism in Its Living Works").
Surrealism, Breton goes on, took up arms " against
the tyranny of a thoroughly debased language"; it
was an "operation which tended to bring language
back to true life":
The spirit that makes such an operation possible
and even conceivable is none other than that which
has always moved occult philosophy: according to
this spirit, from the fact that expression is at
the origin of everything, it follows that "the name
must germinate, so to speak, or otherwise it
is false." The principal contribution of
Surrealism, in poetry as in the plastic arts, is to
have so exalted this germination that everything
other than it seems laughable.
Lamantia's poem germinates. The opening
lines purport to describe something: they are a
narrative to some degree. Yet "mermaids"
(inhabitants of the ocean) and "camels"
(inhabitants of the desert) operate in vastly
different contexts: they don't go together any more
than a word like "wriggles" goes with a word like
"alabaster." But of course the incongruity is the
point, as in Lautréamont's famous chance
encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a
dissecting table. 'Realistic' narrative is
ego-affirming; it situates us in relationship to
something we suppose actually exists: if there is a
desert, we expect there to be camels. The opening
line of "Touch of the Marvelous" appears initially
as a narrative---something is described as having
occurred---but it is in fact a syntactical yoking
together of two utterly separate concepts. The poem
places us at precisely the point at which something
utterly irrational and magical begins to happen to
a world which is ordinarily under severe rational
control:
I am touched by the marvelous
as the mermaids' nimble fingers go through my
hair
that has come down forever from my head
to cover my body
the savage fruit of lunacy.
One mode of language---realistic
description---is undercut by another: the freedom
of the words to mean beyond the restrictions of
description, beyond the necessity to 'name' the
world. In the process, the ego shifts and
transforms itself, though it never disappears
entirely:
I am looking beyond the hour and the day
to find you BIANCA.
"Touch of the Marvelous" is a masterful and
extremely early poem, written perhaps when the
author was fifteen, certainly before he turned
twenty. One can easily see how exciting this work
(from the book of the same title) must have seemed
to Breton and others:
In the rose creeping into the tower of
exiles
when the buffet is laden with jewels
when the night is filled with hate
when the womb of Eros is deserted
when the sleeping men are awakened
when the old lovers are no longer frightened
---my heart
(from "A Winter Day," Bed of Sphinxes)
Philip Lamantia was one of the readers at the
famous Six Gallery event---the event at which Allen
Ginsberg first read "Howl"---on October 7, 1955. In
Dharma Bums, published in 1957, Jack Kerouac
presents him as "delicate Francis DaPavia" who
"read, from delicate onionskin yellow pages, or
pink, which he kept flipping carefully with long
white fingers, the poems of his dead chum Altman
[actually John Hoffman]." Lamantia's first
book, Erotic Poems, was published in 1946.
His second book, Ekstasis, was published by
the Auerhahn Press in 1959. In that same year
Auerhahn also published Lamantia's
Narcotica. On the title page were the words,
"I DEMAND EXTINCTION OF LAWS PROHIBITING NARCOTIC
DRUGS!" The opening piece begins,
---against you, psychiatrists would be
conscience of the people! No more!---against you,
doctors, druggists, sociologists, idiots, asses,
the whole fuckingload of shit perpetuated out of
STUPIDITY to elevate that most detestable NADA,
that void attempting the determination of states of
being---of BEING!---and which goes under the name
of safety, fuck yr safety, WHO NEEDS IT?
On the cover was a haunting set of photographs,
taken by Wallace Berman, of Lamantia shooting up.
At the center of the photographs is a cross.
Ekstasis was followed in 1962 by the
amazing book, Destroyed Work, also published
by Auerhahn. In his author's note to
Ekstasis Lamantia wrote of the "erotic,
mythic, magical and devotional" nature of his
poetry: "My object is a revelation, in
manifestation, of beauty---its world, natural or
supernatural…" Here, in a note not included in
Bed of Sphinxes and dated October 20,
1960---three days before his thirty-third
birthday---he writes:
For me it is the Vision in its density and the
truth of what I see the breath is in the Vision and
I come to the rhythms it is above all a question of
MY VISION thru which the images are focused, the
beat in the activation of this energy field, hence
the density, that the Being of poetry erupts out of
nerves emotions skeleton muscles eyes spirits
beasts birds rockets typewriters into my head and I
see, the weir pivot, at that point all is
Evidence Clarity Incomprehension Flame of Perfect
Form and Chaos.
I have already quoted some lines from the
opening poem of the book, "Hypodermic Light." Here
are the first two sections of that poem
complete:
It's absurd I can't bring my soul to the eye of
odoriferous fire
my soul whose teeth never leave their
cadavers
my soul twisted on rocks of mental freeways
my soul that hates music
I would rather not see the Rose in my thoughts take
on
illusionary prerogatives
it is enough to have eaten bourgeois testicles
it is enough that the masses are all sodomites
Good Morning
the ships are in I've brought the gold to burn
Moctezuma
I'm in a tipi joking with seers I'm smoking
yahnah
I'm in a joint smoking marijuana with a cat who
looks like Jesus
Christ
heroin is a door always opened by white women
my first act of treason was to be born!
I'm at war with the Zodiac
my suffering comes on as a fire going out O
beautiful world
contemplation!
It's a fact my soul is smoking!
o
That the total hatred wants to annihilate
me!
it's the sickness of american pus against which I'm
hallucinated
I'm sick of language
I want this wall I see under my eyes break up and
shatter you
I'm talking all the poems after God
I want the table of visions to send me oriole
opium
A state of siege
It's possible to live directly from elementals!
hell stamps out
vegetable spirits, zombies attack heaven! the
marvelous put
down by martial law, America fucked by a stick of
marijuana
paper money larded for frying corpses!
Here comes the Gorgon! There's the outhouse!
Come up from dead things, anus of the sun!
Compared to that, even "Howl" sounds a little
like a Sunday School picnic. One is not surprised
to discover that Allen Ginsberg referred to
Lamantia as his "teacher." The religious impulse
behind these poems---their thrust towards direct
experience of deity---is as clear as day. Reading
them, one remembers writers like the
fourteenth-century mystic Meister Eckhart, with his
term "breakthrough." These passages from Eckhart's
Selected Writings suggest the central focus
of Destroyed Works:
I have occasionally spoken of a light in the
soul which is uncreated and uncreatable. I
constantly return in my sermons to this light,
which apprehends God without medium, without
concealment and nakedly, just as he is in
himself...this light is not satisfied with the
simple, still and divine being which neither gives
nor takes, but rather it desires to know from where
this being comes. It wants to penetrate to the
simple ground, to the still desert, into which
distinction never peeped, neither Father, Son nor
Holy Spirit. There, in that most inward place,
where everyone is a stranger, the light is
satisfied and there it is more inward than it is in
itself... Turn away from everything therefore and
exist in your naked being , for whatever is outside
being is 'accidence' and all forms of 'accidence'
create a Why.
That we may 'live in eternity,' so help us God.
Amen.
"There is some way out of Guerrero
Street! there must be!" writes Lamantia in
"Deamin," "when will he come with the big hypo?"
And in "Still Poems": "everywhere immanence of the
presence of God...Constant flight in air of the
Holy Ghost."
In a review this brief it is barely possible to
deal with a figure as complex as Philip Lamantia.
What I've tried to do here is to suggest something
of the early development of this amazing American
poet who has still not received anything like his
proper recognition. Other books followed
Destroyed Works: Selected Poems
(1967), The Blood of the Air (1970),
Becoming Visible (1981) and, perhaps the
most significant in developmental terms,
Meadowlark West (1986). Of the new work
published in Selected Poems (1967) Lamantia
remarked that "I'm returning to my initial
sources---like an act of nature." "Astro-Mancy,"
one of the most important of the new poems,
announces that
...I'm recovering
from a decade of poisons
I renounce all narcotic
& pharmacopoeic disciplines
as too heavy 9-to-5-type sorrows
Instead I see America
as one vast palinode
that reverses itself completely until
Gitchi Manito actually returns
The poem offers a vision of "matter
lovingly heightened / by meditation, and spirit /
transmuted into matter":
the whole commune conducted by
direct rapid transcription
from a no-past reference
antirational, fantastically poetic.
..
Each one his own poet
and poetry the central fact
The Blood of the Air has some fine love
poems ("Only for those who love is dawn visible
throughout the day"---'visibility' is a theme here
and elsewhere) and the extraordinary "Flaming
Teeth":
I'm obsessed by death fantasies
Husks
And the Night Thoughts of Edward
Young
Death is a pineapple in the cake of death
Which wing?
I deny death I don't know why
Ask the swans who are rocking me under the chair
forest....
"Horse Angel" ("All horse cultures / And
the horse in dreams!") is to some degree explicated
by a note in Becoming Visible:
Cabala---the term cabala has been
elucidated by the twentieth century alchemist
Fulcanelli in Les Demeures Philosophales
where he explains its derivation from the Latin,
caballus, for horse, but signifying
the transmission of knowledge and "revealing the
source of all sciences"...The figurative image of
the cabala as spiritual vehicle is the
Pegasus of the Hellenic poets which derives from
the Greek word for source: "to know the
cabala is to speak the language of the
horse."
The esoteric and the oneiric---even the
obsessional---are constantly meeting in Lamantia's
work. (It is perhaps also relevant to note that the
name 'Philip' means 'lover of horses'.)
Becoming Visible contains the title poem
of this collection, "Bed of Sphinxes." As the
phrase "becoming visible" might indicate, the
section plays on modes of visibility and
invisibility. (An elaboration of an earlier theme:
I cited the love poem in The Blood of the
Air; "Invisible" is also the title of the
penultimate poem in Touch of the Marvelous.)
This is from "In Yerba Buena":
Beauty a great invisible
walks between luminous slabs
...
Those natives called Ohlone
in the peculiar humors of the weather
and those who danced
to placate "The Great Invisible"
in the bay of Yerba Buena
"dance on the brink of the world"
Myth and Native American themes are important in
this book. Lamantia's genuinely helpful notes (for
the most part not included in Bed of
Sphinxes) touch on a number of things, many of
them having to do with place. "Yerba Buena," he
writes, is Spanish for "good herb," "for the
white-flowered wild mint. This was the name of the
pueblo, settled in 1835, that was to become the
city of San Francisco." Oraibi, "literally 'high
rock', [is a] Hopi Indian village,
[in] Arizona, founded in the 12th century,
the oldest continuously-inhabited settlement in
what is now the United States." "Washo---a
tribe whose original territory lay in the verdant
area of Lake Tahoe, on both sides of the California
and Nevada border. Their peyote rite 'The Tipi Way'
in which I participated in the early 1950s has been
a constant source of poetic inspiration." "The
Romantic Movement" continues the love poems to
"Nancy" which are a prominent feature of The
Blood of the Air; it plays upon 'romantic'
meaning lovers and 'romantic' meaning a certain
period and style of writing.
In "Multidimensional Superreality," a review of
Meadowlark West published in Poetry
Flash (October 1986, #161), poet Ivan
Argüelles suggested that the book was
Lamantia's Parlement of Foules. Birds have
always been important inhabitants of Lamantia's
poems, as they are in many poems of "the Romantic
Movement," and one poem in Meadowlark West
refers explicitly to "the Dawn-Bringer Meadowlark."
"Bird" is of course also the name by which Charlie
Parker was known, and that is relevant here as
well.
Birds abound in Meadowlark West, as does
what Lamantia calls "mystic geography." This is
from "America in the Age of Gold":
There are many centers of mystic geography
but the great Black V of gold flashing in the
meadow Bird
unknown
opening the air like all the lore of the chants
this may serve as shield
for the companions of the kestrel....
The poems in this section are a celebration of
"Poetry magic love liberty," of "imaginary birds"
as well as real ones. But they are above all a
celebration of the Northern California
landscape:
all over Northern California still the end day
imaginary land
lupines and poppies vegetable craters volcanic
whispers
"America in the Age of Gold" explicitly asserts
that "these [Pomo] spirits are here now."
Argüelles suggests that there is a sense of
"coming home" throughout Meadowlark West,
and that is surely an element as well: "ancient
wood my native land all this that vanishes." The
concluding poem of this section is the magisterial
and enigmatic "Shasta," a mountain named for the
Native Americans who once inhabited the region
north of it. Lamantia's poem contains a moment of
ecstatic vision:
I see chthonic man, and it's the wheel---the
hated wheel---sending up a sliver of lucent dawn
arched on a sunbeam serrating the vegetable stone:
the light of her going by, a superior earth being,
her clothes blued as a tissue of incandescent gold,
something like an appearance of words---seen.
The vision is "something like an appearance of
words---seen." In its thrust towards transcendence
poetic language becomes the primary means of naming
"Nature," "geography in a mystic state." As he
experiences the natural world as "the sublime in
the old sense"---and as 'image' transforms itself
not 'language'---the poet's voice becomes something
akin to "the great booming voice of nature":
on that chain of Ohlone mountains
shafts of light on a bobcat
through the thick madrones
first seen emblems that endure cupped my nine
years
the great booming voice of nature
(from "There")
Bed of Sphinxes concludes with a section
of "Uncollected Poems (1985--1992)." The first of
these, "Poem for André Breton," is an homage
to Lamantia's lifelong mentor. With its reference
to "oak leaves burnished with mysteries of
marvelous love"---druids but Northern California as
well---it brings us back to the earliest poems in
the book. (The word 'marvelous'---like the word
'dream'---echoes throughout Bed of
Sphinxes.) The poems in this section are
testimonies to Lamantia's continuing power. "Egypt"
is a haunting, haunted evocation of "the Companions
of Horus" who "come into view as the Resurrection
Band." The poet has a vision of "supernatural
beings" as well as of the beginnings of
language:
These moving realities appear on the Nile
as if a postcard view of it held up a hieratic
bird
Silent tonalities a secret passage the beginning of
language
...
supernatural beings somewhere become vanished
Horian light
...
become visible within crepuscular shadows at the
nightfall of the
world
whose matrix is Cairo....
The concluding poem of the book, "Passionate
Ornithology Is Another Kind of Yoga," again deals
with birds: "Thirty feisty finches at the window."
It reminds us that
We, too, were once avian
bridge---window---to another life
It is a fitting conclusion to a powerful
book.
One senses in a considerable amount of Beat
art---painting as well as writing---a deliberate
evocation of the infinite. In Philip Lamantia's
poetry the infinite is experienced as
language. His work is, precisely, "a
far-reaching operation having to do with language."
Its vast openness allows almost anything in it to
connect with anything else. This is from "Ex
Cathedra," one of the "uncollected" poems:
To weave garter belts with chaos and snakes, the
nun's toenail of crimson phallus, her breast of
alligator, her tail, crow's buttocks. Steel pricks
of the ciborium dovetail her white
pantaloons---snake oil on a eucharistic tongue.
If the garter belts, the white pantaloons and
the buttocks remind us of the erotic---even
parodic---nature of this writing, the nun and the
eucharist remind us that it is also, as Lamantia
points out, "devotional." It is no easy task in an
unbelieving time to write religious poetry, but
that is what Lamantia has done. That the poetry is
immensely passionate, challenging and offers far
more 'riddles' than it does 'answers'---it is at
times totally baffling!---is one way of measuring
the tone of the religious impulse in our time. A
bed of sphinxes is hardly a bed of roses. Matthew
Fox has called for more "endarkenment" as a
corrective to our too intense involvement with
enlightenment. Philip Lamantia's poetry has plenty
of that. He remarks in "Primavera," "This way the
poem becomes an open sluice for darkness." And for
him agnosia, the paradoxical knowing of God
through not knowing, is as central an issue as it
is for Michael McClure: "Poetry knows in the not
knowing" ("Isn't Poetry the Dream of
Weapons?").
Can language be a vehicle of the transcendent?
Can religious poetry be written outside the
church? ("The absolute pulverization of all the
churches will be the grace of / love's freedom!"
Lamantia writes in "Ex Cathedra.") What is the
nature of the holy? These are serious questions,
and Philip Lamantia's poetry raises them is a
serious, deeply resonant way. It is a considerable
achievement, and it involves a constant disruption
of the 'ordinary'---the 'ordinary' is precisely
not the 'marvelous'---functions of language.
"N'importe ou hors du monde," writes one of
Lamantia's heroes, Charles Baudelaire, "Anywhere
out of this world." (Baudelaire is himself quoting
the English poet, Thomas Hood.)
I want to end this essay with an untitled poem
that didn't make it into Bed of Sphinxes. It
was originally published in Wallace Berman's
Semina ( no. 4, 1959), and it also appeared
in Ekstasis. The poem was the inspiration
for one of artist Jay De Feo's most haunting
drawings, "The Eyes." The poem---which is perhaps
too Catholic or too Pre-Raphaelite for this
volume---is simple, direct and beautiful. It is an
evocation of the Virgin Mary as Mother
Goddess/Muse---the phrase "Queen Mirror" seems to
be an interesting metamorphosis of "Queen
Mother"---and an affirmation of the religious
character of Lamantia's poetry. The poem does not
represent his final direction. In a short time the
young man will move beyond the need for an
intercessor like the Virgin Mary or Jesus---he will
be after something far more direct---but it is
fascinating to speculate on what, at this point, he
might have meant by "sin":
Ah Blessed Virgin Mary
pray for me I live in you
to sleep in God
and die in God
to praise His Holy Name
O Blessed Virgin Mary
ask Jesus to embed in me
a sword of sorrow
to kill my sin
my sin that wounds His Wounds
Tell Him I have eyes only for Heaven
as I look to you
Queen mirror
of the heavenly court
Jack Foley is a poet and contributing editor
to Poetry Flash. His recent books include
Dead/Requiem, a collaboration by Ivan
Argüelles and Jack Foley. This essay will be
included in O Powerful Western Star,
a new collection of Jack Foley's critical
writings forthcoming from Pantograph Press.
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