We start with a modern antiphony:
Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service
POLYPHILOPROGENITIVE
The sapient sutlers of the Lord
Drift across the window-panes.
In the beginning was the Word.
In the beginning was the Word. 5
Superfetation of,
And at the mensual turn of time
Produced enervate Origen.
A painter of the Umbrian school
Designed upon a gesso ground 10
The nimbus of the Baptized God.
The wilderness is cracked and browned
But through the water pale and thin
Still shine the unoffending feet
And there above the painter set 15
The Father and the Paraclete.
The sable presbyters approach
The avenue of penitence;
The young are red and pustular
Clutching piaculative pence. 20
Under the penitential gates
Sustained by staring Seraphim
Where the souls of the devout
Burn invisible and dim.
Along the garden-wall the bees 25
With hairy bellies pass between
The staminate and pistilate,
Blest office of the epicene.
Sweeney shifts from ham to ham
Stirring the water in his bath. 30
The masters of the subtle schools
Are controversial, polymath.
Can you feel the inner pulse and logic of this poem? TS Eliot's poem given here is perhaps as good an introduction to "inner logic" in poetry as any other candidates (without prejudice to a better one known to the reader). And we catch him doing something similar (and in similar grammatical rhythm) in this poem:
Whispers of Immortality
WEBSTER was much possessed by death
And saw the skull beneath the skin;
And breastless creatures under ground
Leaned backward with a lipless grin.
Daffodil bulbs instead of balls 5
Stared from the sockets of the eyes!
He knew that thought clings round dead limbs
Tightening its lusts and luxuries.
Donne, I suppose, was such another
Who found no substitute for sense; 10
To seize and clutch and penetrate,
Expert beyond experience,
He knew the anguish of the marrow
The ague of the skeleton;
No contact possible to flesh 15
Allayed the fever of the bone.
Grishkin is nice: her Russian eye
Is underlined for emphasis;
Uncorseted, her friendly bust
Gives promise of pneumatic bliss. 20
The couched Brazilian jaguar
Compels the scampering marmoset
With subtle effluence of cat;
Grishkin has a maisonette;
The sleek Brazilian jaguar 25
Does not in its arboreal gloom
Distil so rank a feline smell
As Grishkin in a drawing-room.
And even the Abstract Entities
Circumambulate her charm; 30
But our lot crawls between dry ribs
To keep our metaphysics warm.
Lastly, for our three examples to begin, Yeats is not to be left out:
Sailing to Byzantium
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
– Those dying generations – at their song,
The salmon‐falls, the mackerel‐crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing‐masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
He himself said of this poem directly:
I am trying to write about the state of my soul, for it is right for an old man to make his soul, and some of my thoughts about that subject I have put into a poem called 'Sailing to Byzantium'. When Irishmen were illuminating the Book of Kells, and making the jeweled croziers in the National Museum, Byzantium was the centre of European civilization and the source of its spiritual philosophy, so I symbolize the search for the spiritual life by a journey to that city [Jeffares, Alexander Norman, A Commentary on the Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1968) p. 217]
Perhaps the choice of poetry here betrays some predilections of the author. Yet other pieces of poetry offer logic as well, and one can get a "feel" for them. Having a feel for these, I am able to explain something of their inner logic, or interior Logos.
Unlike the shock of grammar, "inner logic" does not restrict itself to the initial explosions of contours that strikes into perception, with the stamp of something more than just impressions or passions: it does a good deal more with them, and more deftly or subtly. However, very much like grammar, it is rooted in the startled perceptions of the Nous or noetic faculty; it represents an extension of that wonder, or prolongation, in many cases by the reasoning of analogy.
The guiding thought or principle is that (here inside the interior space of the poem and the poet), if I can imagine something, it is a remembering of something, and therefore, a creation of something or restoration. In other words, and by valid (if, as we shall see, somewhat complicated) modus tollens, the power to evoke something, by logical extension, is also the power to create it, and then extend it logically back into the world's dimensions. It is the power to creatively extend the implications of the metaphysical realities captured in the poem, like a dreamweaver that takes and tames its quarry.
The intellect works in this by the doctrine of signatures: A is to B, as C is to D. This implies that the A/C level and the B/D levels are, and that they are to each other, and that there may be other levels or connections discoverable by the noetic faculty of the artist. If more connections are made, or re-made, then more levels become available for those who are aware enough for them. One a pair of analogies is set up as follows: A is to B as C is to D, then a second mirror is created, at the least? How are A and C related? And does A also have a connection to D?
If God exists, then sub-worlds also might exist, made by us in imitation of His creative act. Sub-worlds do exist, but we cannot affirm the consequent, this is fallacious. So they might exist for some other reason than God. However, we could also say that sub-worlds cannot NOT exist. And this might imply rather strongly, or tend to imply, that sub-worlds cannot exist for any other reason other than God (hence, it would not be a "sub"-world, and God is the only adequate explanation). Since sub-worlds are indisputable and necessary, one cannot say "No sub-worlds". And it is hard to imagine any other reason they would have to exist, without positing concretely the link between world and sub-world (and men and other men), which is God.
At this point, there is a theological dispute over whether the argument runs, A: If God, then Sub-Worlds, or B: if Sub-Worlds, then God. The rub, or the poetic rub, seems to be (and this would include the majority of powerful poets, classically theist or not) that BOTH forms of this argument are considered equally valid by the stronger poets, although they may show a penchant for one or the other. To affirm either term is to imply the other, and although "affirming the consequent" is a fallacy, it is not a fallacy if once can reverse P and Q in the initial equation, as a starting point. And this, as we shall see precisely, is exactly what Mythopoeia and Poetry tends to do. It postulates P therefore Q, and also Q, therefore P. It passes through a looking glass.Science and Logic claim it is reasoning in a circle: Poetry claims to be able to see both propositions simultaneously, and to understand how they imply each other.
Kukai would say, "The Mind (God) and the World Co-Arise."
So, we could reason non fallaciously and justly: If there are no Sub-Worlds, then there is no God. This is, I think, a correct form of argument based on a sound premise, the modus tollens of A. But what if we merely have fragmented and meaningless Sub-Worlds? If we don't actually know or accept the logic of either A or B, let alone both? If we deny everything? Well, this is precisely what consistent reductionists do. Not only is God a fallacy, so are Sub-Worlds. So is human nature (and the divine image). So is everything. Things just are. They are there. And yet they are not.
This is not a Zen koan - it is a flat contradiction, and meant to be taken as such.
This is why, more and more, it appears that if the sacred Seven Liberal Arts endure, they will be saved by Christians (as they have been before, in the Dark Ages, in Ireland). Christians embrace the humanism of both the reality of God, and the reality of the World (and Sub-Worlds). Tolkien has more to do with Kukai than with Darwin and Huxley:
The heart of man is not compound of lies,
but draws some wisdom from the only Wise,
and still recalls him. Though now long estranged,
man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.
Disgraced he may be, yet is not dethroned,
and keeps the rags of lordship one he owned,
his world-dominion by creative act:
not his to worship the great Artefact,
man, sub-creator, the refracted light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world we filled
with elves and goblins, though we dared to build
gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sow the seed of dragons, 'twas our right
(used or misused). The right has not decayed.
We make still by the law in which we're made.
Link
But if we pretend it's only "As If", as if all fantasy was mere fancy, and all imagination had no image, then what can we do? In this case, all that poetry can do is to try to set up logical harmonic relationships between hypothetical God and equally hypothetical Sub-worlds, and hope that the right chord is struck which can induce a meaningless epiphany, or at least the suspicion that there is something "vaguely out there" in the Logos of the Cosmos, which is structured in such a way that we get glimpses of it in the poem. This is the current state of the English department and of Analytical Philosophy in the Anglo world. But following Tolkien (and the poets), it is clear that some version of house ruled logic must be accepted, within the mythopoeic realm.
Our preferred logic runs more like this:
If there is no God, then Sub-Worlds would not have the evocative power they possess.
They DO have this evocatory power, THEREFORE, God most certainly exists (Modus Tollens)
If God exists, perhaps Sub-Worlds have even more evocatory power than meets the eye (which is already quite a lot). More evocatory power might imply that God has layers of deeper and deeper meaning. This sets up harmonic deepening and resonance between the two levels of reality, once a real link if accepted and established. It is then easy to extend the range and the complexity of what is being "done" in mythopoeic art. This art becomes a form of sight or vision, with which one watches the creation of the world, and/or its re-creation.
"Sweeney", in TS Eliot's poem, cannot follow this "subtle" logic, and shifts from butt cheek to butt cheek in the bath. But yet it is a simple syllogism, when analyzed according to logical categories. Nevertheless, to the animal man, these conclusions are "controversial" and "polymath". But the conclusions follow quite simply and logically from the "superfetation" of Being - God overflows His nature, into Nature. It does not require spiritual genius, merely spiritual honesty, to accept that. In fact, so mighty is the evocatory power of Creation and sub-Creation, that even the "Abstract Entities" are drawn to the concrete beauty of Grishkin. This, of course, raises questions about the Incarnation, and what it means to exist, and what is this Chain of Being in the first place? When Yeats writes about Byzantium, he is evoking or conjuring a spiritual place and space where he is "gathered into the 'artifice' of eternity". In that place, there is "holy fire from God" and things that are beyond "Nature". His evocation (if we are to believe the logic implicit in poetry) does not merely recall to memory the place where this occurs, but actually functions to create another identical place (either greater, lesser, or perhaps a duplicate) by functioning as that link in memory. That is to say, Remembering heaven actually duplicates it, in some place, and on some scale. This is the uncomfortable logic of poetry: that all of us, in high poetic imagination, are actually creating or helping to finish create the world, right alongside of God.
This is not a special kind of Logic: it is Logic pure and simple, and it is supremely or quintessentially logical. You might say that it is Logic that is alive, or organically fruitful and vivified. Furthermore, it is merely Logic's natural and healthy consequences, Logic made alive by Mythopoeia. This does it mean, in the vulgar English, that it is a special kind of Logic (as if it wasn't really real Logic, or as if different things only had different Logics, so that there wasn't any kind of connection between things at all, save by meaningless fiat). It is Logic first and foremost, and it develops its own traditions of special kinds of Logic, afterwards. But we can, as we shall see, work in both directions at once, which will synergize the process. This is a lot of what goes on in an Objet d'Arte. Something along these lines must have been meant in these words:
Ars Poetica
By Archibald MacLeish
A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,
Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,
Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown—
A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs,
Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,
Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind—
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs.
A poem should be equal to:
Not true.
For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.
For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—
A poem should not mean
But be.
Archibald MacLeish, “Ars Poetica” from Collected Poems 1917-1982. Source: Collected
Poems 1917-1952 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1952)
This "Being" and this "extension" of Being in the created "Object of Art" are not, or should not be, at odds:
A poem doesn't do everything for you.
You are supposed to go on with your thinking.
You are supposed to enrich
the other person's poem with your extensions,
Your uniquely personal understandings,
Thus making the poem serve you.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Now in our time there is a personalistic and subjective limitation understood in this, as if our personhood counted for nothing (and you can see some of this creeping into the modern poet G. Brooks). Ironically, often enough, the bad faith personality of some individual still gets immortalized, and the personhood or latent image of God (which actually does have reality of the deepest sort) gets thrown out as "purely preferential" or "entirely subjective". The Imago Dei becomes a sort of philosophical scapegoat, and is sacrificed. And isn't this what happens with "Pop Culture"? Of Cosmos Kardashian, and before her, of Madonna? It is almost as if Pop Culture tried to remedy the intellectual dead end of Modernity, by deifying the worst aspects of what it entails (partially) in being human.
The intellectual story of how this ironical inversion between True and False occurred is fascinating, a "chiasm of absurdity". Rather than opening this enormous mare's nest of investigative philosophy, we are looking (in the sacred, seven Liberal Arts) for a popularism which is perennial (Folk Wisdom, with the eye of Faith). We are seeking, not a shortcut, but a more direct and participatory approach to the lack of knowledge, wisdom, beauty, truth and goodness. We are bypassing the quagmire of Modernism by taking seriously the art of poetry from the start, and seeing where that leads. This should provide us some armaments against the subjective fallacy, the fallacy of treating everything reductively, so that "heart" is "only the cardiac muscle", "soul" is made up of oxytocin and dopamine release, or adrenaline, etc., etc. This old saw has been banging around like Aunt Gertrude's ghost in the basement, since the first materialist bastardized the poet Lucretius, down to BF Skinner's shameless promotion of man as bundle of programmable tissues (and pigeons as guiders of missiles), and R. Dawkin's incessant quest to rip out the "God gene" from our programming ("Turn It Off!"). It is baffling how anyone could not take poetry as a path to knowledge seriously, and instead play only "as if" it (and everything else) is true, like H. Vaihinger did on a grand scale in Die Philosophie des Als Ob. Instead, we are going to dig around in the logic, analogies, and the prisms of Poesis, and see if it leads to Mythopoesis.
By elucidating and teasing out how this concretely works, we hope to make the process itself more powerful, lucid, and reasonable, or else what is Logic for? We are going to pack, unpack, and re-pack some choice and varied passages from several more authors, and we will tear them down to put them back together. If Logic means anything, it should help us to do this, and we will further our quest through the "Sacred Seven". Let us start in on acquiring and enhancing this metaphysical power, if we can, this time in a selection from the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid's The Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle. A very drunken and loquacious man is out on the heather, contemplating the moon and a particular thistle he is sprawled beside (the dialect is Lowland Scots):
Feedan on the munelicht and transforman it
To this wanrestfu growth that winna let me be.
The munelicht is the freedom that I'd hae
But for this cursed Conscience thou has set in me.
It is morality, the knowledge of Guid and Ill,
Fear, shame, pity, like a will and wilyart growth,
That kills aa else wi-in its reach and craves
Nae less at least than aa the warld to gie it scouth.
The need o wark, the need to think, the need to be,
And aathing that twists Life into a certain shape
And interferes wi perfect liberty-
These feed this Frankenstein that nae man can escape.
For ilka thing a man can be or think or dae
Aye leaves a million mair unbeen, unthocht, undune,
Till his puir warped performance is,
To all that micht hae been, a thistle to the mune.
It is Mortality itself- the mortal coil,
Mockan Perfection, Man afore the Throne o God
He yet has bigged himself, Man torn in twa
And glorious in the life and grisly on the sod.
I dinna ken and nae man ever can.
I micht be in my ain bed after aa.
The hail damned thing's a dream for ocht we ken,
-The Warld and Life and Daith, Heaven, Hell, anaa.
We maun juist tak things as we find them then,
And mak a kirck or mill of them as we can,
-And yet I feel this muckle thistle's staundan
Atween me and the mune as pairt of a Plan.
It isnat there - nor me - by accident.
We're brocht thegither for a certain reason,
E'en gin it's anething mair than juist to gie
My jaded soul a necessary frisson.
I never saw afore a thistle quite
Sae intimately, or at sic an hour.
There's something in the fickle licht that gies
A different life to't and an unco pouer. (253-305)
Right away, we can see in this poem many of the same yearning and "demi-transcendent" characteristics we saw in TS Eliot and Yeat's poems. A definite type of correspondence (never mind precisely what it is yet) is set up between the thistle and man (on the one hand) and the thistle and God (on the other), between various parts of the thistle with various parts of man, and various aspects of God (on the other), and finally with the thistle as a kind of mediator and then Prime Symbol, or symbol of Everything, with all relationships subsumed within the thistle. In all of the poems, an object within an object, becomes a symbol: a jaguar and the beautiful woman Grishkin, a fresco from the Umbrian school, the beehive of Byzantium, and the Thistle in the moonlight. The skill and beauty with which this is handled is aimed to give power to the "suspension of disbelief".
If we accept the purpose of the art work or poem, if we are drawn into it, we have to ask if there is a magical correspondence between a Prime Symbol within a Symbol (the Thistle inside the poem), and our own Image (which contemplates that same Image within the art, inside the art) which is of course set "inside" the Cosmos. By "doing" poetry, the "law of correspondences" is automatically invoked, because the entire existence of the Poem and its Prime Symbol(s) raises the question, or begs it to be raised: Is the Universe a Poem? Is it a "made thing" or an "art object"? And are there magical links (in a powerful poem) that are awakened and evoked between it as a sub-Creation and the World as a whole? If so, can they be identified and intensified, through artifice and inspiration or intuition? This gets close to the heart of poetry, or the "madness" of the poets. Because, there are more than one possible line of correspondences: it is not merely looking in one mirror - there are at least two involved, and if the mirror itself is "alive", and you align them...thusly...what would happen? How many mirrors, or doorways, or correspondences, can we create?
This kind of magic is what most mature poets, at some point, play at. If there are micro and macrocosms, and a Cosmos as a whole, and man as a miniature Cosmos as a whole, then what kind of poetry can "map" the relationships involved between various wholes and parts, which stand for other various wholes and parts? The poet is the man who aspires to be able, by thinking of something with a certain intensity or clarity or in a beautiful way, to actually influence the object, because of course, every poet knows in his rhapsody that his mind is actually in contact with the thing. And his little exercise, not fully self conscious of course, but verging upon it, is precisely what we find in Hugh MacDiarmid's long poem.
The thistle is standing between Me and the Moon as some part of a plan, chants the poet. This is the highly logical conclusion of the drunken man's reasoning. The drunkenness is philosophical in a poetic way, but in this same way that Hegel remarks:
“The true is thus the bacchanalian whirl in which no member is not drunken; and because each, as soon as it detaches itself, dissolves immediately — the whirl is just as much transparent and simple repose.”
― Hegel, G. W. H.
A similar thought, perhaps, to Plato's statement that "Time is a moving image of Eternity" (Timaeus). With the thistle invoked and also evoked or even summoned, the poet (read the whole work for yourself!) proceeds to inquire into the mystery of the Universe and the mystery of the heart through the lowly symbol of the Scottish thistle. It is as if, from the vantage point of drunkenness, certain inhibitions are removed which prevent the thoroughly modern man from seeing the real meaning of the ordinary reality which surrounds him. Having summoned the Thistle, he is then helpless before the revelation which it makes, including (among other things) how there is a thistle that grows out of man's heart and with bristly grotesqueness, can be used as a ladder into heaven. This ladder is also a "silken lady", his wife, a symbol for man or God, the world, etc. etc. It is also (at times) 'just a thistle". That is, the hiddenness or recondite power and beauty of the simple thistle is the disguise of a very humble Omnipotence indeed. God is "shy" in this sense - He can retreat into the thistle. But the poet can detect Him.
Realists or scientists would say the thistle is "just" there. But where is "there"? This "just a" is a magic circle which traps the modern man. Because he lacks poetic insight, he cannot see that:
"Rain symbolizes mercy and sunlight charity, but rain and sunlight are better than mercy and
charity. Otherwise they would degrade the things they symbolize."
He would have to "go and learn" what the above might mean. Apparently, once God "hides" in something lowly and small, even when He can be got out, He never leaves. This is a kind of divine quantum entanglement. He can always retreat into the abode and quiet of "nothing but" or "just a" lowly thistle. Modern man is always proceeding in the opposite direction. For the modern man, a good theory is one that cannot be (currently) falsified. That is, if it has greater explanatory power, can be reduplicated or tested, and cannot be disproven, then it must be "true". It has a provisional texture to it, even if it claims to be "advancing realistically". But in the world of poetry, one knows something for certain, or not at all: philosophical (or scientific) probability does not enter into the matter. Poetry cannot be provisional. It proceeds in the opposite direction: if one can doubt something, then it cannot be true. One accepts only what one knows, from experience and texture, is indubitable. This alone ensures that the mind is in contact with "the Real".
And for the modern man, this way of proceeding is pure madness: for what else can that be but pure subjectivity? For the modern mind, This Way Madness Lies. It prefers the provisional models of its own empirical and reductive materialism, and even its Poetry is "suggestive", at best. Yet strangely enough, it is the "objective" modern within the magic circle that ends up in this purest of pure subjectivity: our age could not be called an Age of Faith nor an Age of Certitude. Although this modern trap is not merely an intellectual one, we can dissect it from that angle. For it certainly does operate detectably at the intellectual level, and can be apprehended and cut open there. Because returning to the law of analogies and correspondences, we note (with Scott Buchanan) that Science exists by definition, by annihilating correspondence and analogy. It discovers that A is to B as C is to D, and then it shoves A,B,C,D on one side of the balance sheet (empirical reality), and works to find another analogy. Which it then shoves onto the same side of the balance sheet, jumbled up in a sack, with all the other "facts" of matter. The point here is that it cannot contemplate the meaning of any analogy of correspondence: for example, why are kidney beans good for your kidneys? In many cases, it cannot even contemplate the meaning of the original link that lead to a scientific discovery, let alone any objective symbolism. Alchemy lead to chemistry (which is "nothing like" alchemy, we are told). Science compulsively plows ahead, shoving everything under the "nothing but" or "just a" side of the balance sheet.
Powerful poetry works in the exactly opposite direction. Working our way, in depth, through the "logic of the thistle", we can see that there is a "Logic of Logic", and even a "Logic of Logos", that the world is an ordered whole, and that attentive and perceptive grammar and logic at the phenomenal level lead us in the opposite direction from reductive and materialistic sciences, towards a Scientia that goes beyond empirical Science.
Logic is one of the preparatory seven, sacred Arts in the antechamber of true Wisdom, or Gnosis.
