On The Poetic Works of John Devlin, Part III
Read Part I here and Part II here.
Devlin’s Triptych Canadensis is available at cost, here.
The Ghost on the Mezzanine is the third volume of John Devlin’s Triptych Canadensis, and in this essay, I am determined to say even less than in my previous two. My desire is to offer a large portion of Devlin’s poetry to the reader and to offer pure reading — which I will define in a moment.
1.
In correspondence, Devlin has kindly relayed to me, at various times, his thoughts relevant to his Triptych Canadensis, including his relationship to organized religion. I’ve collected these and reproduce them here as “1” of this essay, but first I wish to point out that Devlin’s statements to me have not been of the sort to unduly influence interpretation with ‘a reading.’ He would appear to be free of that common vice — this is a condition to aspire to, and one I consider the hallmark of the most fun intellectualism. Perhaps this explains the innocence of Devlin’s relationship to his writing. What I’ve called pure reading embodies something of that attitude.
John Devlin, Untitled, 1988, Mixed media on paper, 21.6 × 27.94 cm. Collection Henry Boxer Gallery.
My father came from a struggling family who were always in the Army. My mom’s family were Anglican (Protestant) and hence more genteel. My father had a wild side. It goes with being Irish Catholic. The wild and the genteel are at war in my soul.”
[Regarding Devlin’s conversion from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism:]
[…]Also the Anglican Church would not fund me to study at Cambridge. As it turned out, the Catholic Bishop was very liberal — a true prince — and was eager to pay my substantial tuition at Cambridge.
1979 was a year of two terrible shocks to my system — becoming an RC [Roman Catholic], and going to Cambridge.
I underestimated how huge these two together would be to handle.
Catholicism was a descent into a strangeness, which, after decades, liberated my imagination.
Bizarreness which is most elaborately worked out in Ghost [on the Mezzanine].
John Devlin, Untitled, 1988, Mixed media on paper, 21.6 × 27.94 cm. Collection Henry Boxer Gallery.
There is a fourth volume to the series which I suppress: entitled ‘The Journey to Zen Coq’.
With the other three I call it ‘A Comedy of Damnation’. Dante begins with Hell and works his way to Paradise.
With these four it’s just the opposite: I begin with the poignant redemptions (in your words) of Painting, working down in Enigma and Ghost to Zen Coq which is an explicit carnival of the senses.
It is 150 erotic miniatures, sort of like the 150 Psalms, but anti-Psalms.
I wrote them during a period of crisis just before, during, and a few years after 9-11.
Some characters in Painting are there: Jesus turns up, as well as John Dark.
*
[Regarding Ghost on the Mezzanine:]
It’s an acrostic poem — 18 lines begin with consonants and the last 7 begin with vowels.
2.
Ghost on the Mezzanine is comprised of 25 long stanzas, each occupying a single page. The text on the left-hand page is aligned to the left margin, while the text on the right-hand page is aligned to the right, which immediately, and not even quite consciously, creates a suspicion in the reader’s mind that there is some kind of duality, or dialogic, at play. The first two poems (pages 6 and 7), when read with this aesthetically prompted, and therefore unavoidable, frame of mind, do suggest different minds or views. The first (left-hand) poem suggests an architectural movement, which will be repeated in the next left-hand page, while the right-hand poem strikes me as relatively more Dionysian, liberating, as it celebrates its loose ends.
John Devlin, Untitled, 1988, Mixed media on paper, 21.6 × 27.94 cm. Collection Henry Boxer Gallery.
Are gothic roses in the sand the same as those
old Bourbon Roses I see from the window on the landing
of an old house in Windsor on a summer afternoon when
all the adults have conveniently disappeared after the clatter
of crockery when empty china dishes of strawberries
and cream are taken away, away, away beyond the pier-glass
in the parlour Phyllis vanished through, when the trees are
telling stories to the wind.
The drooping fuchsia swells her tears, then drops them, one
by one.The summer solstice in a house on a hill in King Street where I wander the garden in search of fractious flowers.
The Sun rises with all the sons of Heaven - and
leaps into brightness with the brilliance of another apocalypse... But the house on the hill with its labyrinths of Canterbury Bells will not pass into nothingness: the long-vanished grandparents lightly float from room to room, up into the mysterious attic
where naughty boys are not to go, but down to Alice’s garden where the roses are feuding with the lilies, and later the
Japanese lanterns will turn red and the pears fall from the bough. Who will buy these gothic roses: the curious hills of Windsor, the literary mansion, the famous boys’ school which
casts a dreamy Victorian glow through the wind which lightly
tosses the muslin curtains of the open window on this rich solstice. The bleeding heart extends her wounds.
Floating palace; lightning on the water.
I dare you to kiss me, Midas,
and turn me to grave metal. Nor can you
eat me, to solve your vain craving...
or salve your famished limbs, so cruelly spent
on vain foolish currency: sore debased gold, now flakes
of alien lead to dim the vision and stiffen the limbs for
a narrow, unshielded grave amid a grove of gloomy hemlock.
This curse - the purgative of many costly physicians, and astrologers
who cannot tell the times nor decipher what o’clock
lies encoded on the fateful Dials.
The arms cannot tell, and this is your loss, and the
triumph of the riddle against a man sick on a dais
swooning among costly perfumes, in a pompous palace on
the shores of the River Blackadder: falling down - now a
home for vulgar pigeons and other creatures of the moonless twilight.
The pox on you Zeus, and may Miranda blight your garden of
fair trees and costly flowers to a twisted, blighted
heap of ruin in this delicate forest, forest where the
goats run wild under a saturated sky finely embellished
with all the colours of a heavenly palette. Saturn displays
his rings, and this does not defeat the catamites who
bring the cup again and again. So this is my home, and do
not forget it, lest I forge you with lost wax into a god.
The bleeding heart extends her wounds.
Floating palace. Lightning on the water.
In pages 8 & 9, 10 & 11, we find the same theme, though it would be a mistake to overstate it. While there do seem to be two Johns: on the left-hand, John Structure, who consolidates somewhat in the manner of a reflexive identity, and on the right-hand, John Dionysus who liberates these same concerns with his otherness; the play in sidedness itself is the real motivation of the poem. The particular side doesn’t matter.
Immured in static states in the cosy, old world, behind the hoary
old walls of a fusty, distinguished college
of smoky fan vaults and dusky river, of tie and scarf
and the gothic wallflowers in the Chapel, and roses by the
early classical cloister - empty now; where footsteps resound
eerily of another deserted evening; lost in that sacred
enclosure under western skies.
Musty and fresh blows a light early summer breeze as
holy wax tapering tapers pale green as the Madonna’s tapering wax
pale green fingers as pale green lilies upon the stone table
remembers again one or several who danced a suffering dance
for the sake of the quiet unearthly peace of this grandiose
Foundation. Unearthly afternoons upon the river of endless
peace and French Suites of an earlier, strange century.
High rides this ark cruising in a stately fashion above
the surrounding flat red sea in frozen suspension of collision
catastrophic with the adjacent Portland stone palace: mostly
Mannerist in effect for the sake of the mutual interpenetration of
the Gothic and the Renaissance.The Author sinks under the
weight of so much masonry slowly erected to demonstrate the
wealth of the Archdiocese: for the Glory of God and Tudor king
who died most cruelly after the double foundation.
Time suspends the crashing of the golden bowl for the Prince’s elevation.
The bleeding heart extends her wounds.
Floating palace. Lighting upon the water.
An existential enfilade extends indefinitely down the corridors
of time, past the many doors I did not open.
Each slams shut, one by one, leaving me stranded on this pedestal
of times lost where the epitaph
among the tombs reads, “Here stands one who faced the time,
and lost.” Nothing more remains
in this lost French castle. Nothing can touch him now: for better or
worse, richer or poor, after the accusations of the twisted space
left him washed up on these strange shores, half dead, yearning
for Ithaca, but curious about the strange house on the enchanted isle. Prospero
led the way down the allée of lindens after the rising sun
strikes a blow to the statue, and hits off a fragment of porphyry or
dislodges a crystalline eye of beryl or onyx. Beryl or onyx,
beryl or onyx incants the wash of the waves on the beach at dawn,
while the Moon sets to a flourish upon the virginals: each setting -
now here, now there, - a different angle for the scruples of the dead
prince. Think closely upon these injunctions at the magic hour, and do
not leave the house until the danger is passed: this will guarantee your
safety before the violet hour. Only then will the ships come to take away
the body, and break the spell at dawn.The hooded necromancer will
leave your gardens, haunting your sleep, disturbing the servants for
fortune of breakfast of tangerines and iced tea or jasmine wine
till the nightingale ends his song.
The bleeding heart extends her wounds.
Floating palace. Lightning upon the waters.I am a secret artist: I play upon my strings
in the privacy of my chamber.
I have never put my hope in any other than Thee.
A bridge of roses spans the river. To imbue a house - studs
and mortar - with Mind. God is the Threshold; God
is the Door. To imbue a city - courtyards and lanes - with Mind.
In the fog I hear the hooting of the great ships on a
foggy summer evening when the lindens pour out their heavy
scent after the Queen left, and so I am in a grief, because
the Queen left. The fog settles in the evening as a benevolent
spell upon the chimney pots, grazing the tops of the trees and
washing the town through and through with the silence of somnolence.
Literary afternoons, after the lilacs fall, after
the rhododendrons fall, after the climbing roses fall.
The flowers fall and fall and linden pollen collects upon
the surface of the oily harbour down where the old docks are rotting.
The bad are held by bands of indigo silk.
The good wander the monkey-puzzle forests of Borealis.
The laughing magician adjusts his pince-nez and produces the
King of Hearts. God is the Lunar Monolith, the Jovian Monolith:
the closed door beyond which there is nothing. So in this manner
was the design of the demonic diptych dictated to me: in fear and
trembling my pencil skated its way across the surface of the paper. Paper
money worthless: except for the experience of God which is
the sensation of the Ratio imprinted in your anatomy.
The reappearance of the last line of the second, third, and fourth poems further suggests the interplay of right and left, especially as the middle iteration changes from “Floating palace. Lightning on the water” to “Floating palace. Lighting upon the water.” By not resolving in quaternity, or mere repetition, Devlin’s dialogic is strengthened without overstating its precise nature.
Every nuance of the Stendhal Room hung in red evokes the shade of Dido
and other sublunary eminences between the verdigris and ormolu
accessories positioned as if in a dream designed by Poe. The overtones
of the Venus Room elicit responses to the dream-like milieu
of chance and counter-chance in the crash of the silver-gilt lily-vase
on the parquet or cool marble floors, echoing and resounding
indefinitely down the corridors to the rooms that were destroyed
by fire in the young Earl’s time. This time is neither forgotten nor lost
to heirs succumbing to the illnesses of age and history, to a curious
Box with many hinges and secret compartments, brought on a China
clipper when the orangerie was set out. Do not let this lull you into a
false confidence - the barometer of the time - for the falling false
plates encounter a smash that revealed the unfortunate liaison,
bringing to a hasty conclusion Byron’s poem and his stay at the
Whig mansion. Such was Dorothea’s grief when her father brought in
the head of a Stag, passed the dripping lustres, passed the copper-green
music room with higher orders of obscure upper meaning, passed the
dreamy sightless caryatids in the Hall where her mother once fell:
to a bronzey fire between the dogs fed by sea changes and livery of
mercury or topaz. Rainbow fires fed by dripping molten metal abused or
transfused recalling Newton’s dabbling with alchemy at college and
subsequent necessary breakdown. So the bad vapours of those regions brought
on glandular fever. Neither the locusts nor the frogs were enough
to deter him from these operations at midnight, when the trees softly sigh,
the tide softly flows, the flowers quietly fall, the bell sadly tolls.
By page 14 & 15, it becomes explicitly clear to the reader that John Structure and John Dionysus have absorbed one another, when in a higher non-duality, John Structure speaks of enshrouded non-dualisms, while John Dionysius recounts feverish and enticing Histories.
Séance in the closed gallery on a rainy summer morning.
Who will inherit my lilac trees when I moulder in vaults
beneath the circular funerary chapel. In a grim, hoary
temple on a hill in the north land.
Nemesis revolves in a path beyond Pluto, shrouded in brown: at
the unseen centre of every rainbow, present too when the Moon
turns to blood - washing penumbra - and enhaloed darkly by the
Gegenschein opposite the Sun at midnight. This dark companion -
Night - will not disclose her light - lunacy full swollen
with the influenza and other forms of astrological fever
when the bay is swollen and heavy with fall mackerel.
Lavender planets tug away at filaments of gas in a Kantian
cosmology nobody understands. The female herms are battling away
with swords with the male herms in the gallery, where all is
hushed and dim in the mysterious museum light on a rainy summer
morning when the public stay away. The magic table comes to
rest in the middle of the dimmed theatre for transignification of
body, blood or bloodless autopsy. Is there a god here
as the table rotates, and the building shudders
and the veil of the temple rips in two. All is calm
as Nemesis governs men’s moods from beyond the known
epicycles Ptolemy struggled for in a grove of Phoenix palms.
And the surgeon’s assistant does not blink as a bowlful
of distant galaxies inVirgo is snuffed out. The light dims further
on this summer morning, but I do not know the Man on the Table.
The withered men in the castle wander from room to room
beneath the frescoes, each grander than the last.The balustrade
statuary of Sawyer Hall is crumbled and covered with moss. Herschel’s
mirror draped green Uranus in a stiff cloth; for the onions and cucumbers
that flourished in Egypt were a great temptation not to get into the
desert and wander like a lost planet buzzing like moths around
the lamp seeking destruction but only finding another revolution through
the stars of titanium or iron. Iron Age aesthetics were a great invention,
luring men in that demonic time to seek the literary Age of Silver
falling short of cruel gold’s false injunctions in a world of paper
stars and broken planetariums. Monstrous clay feet of the ancient colossi
marched across our confused land, when the Titans reigned. The
Giants carried away all our women, and now the Silver Age of obscurer
Latin poets is come upon us like a flash of dull lightning upon the
waters. In Lot’s turning is a great lesson; the City of the Plain is a
great ruin where only owls can live. Caryatids of salt dissolve
their burdens on the wasted shores of the Dead Sea: ideal site for
the enervated men under the dull frescoes of Sawyer Hall.
Antique history is memorized in our sinews and thews:
unencumbered by recent developments in architectural theory
is released by shy glances into a broken mirror.
And so Sawyer Hall and its shuffling men carry within
its curious Frescoes a recollection of the error and the horror.
Or else a lesson of forgotten dream-parties upon the water
and candles in the dome bringing home New Ships from Spain.
Absorbed within each other, these two now spurious Johns whirl through a sort of middle place, or Mezzanine, as described in the first poem. They’re ghosts, I suppose. The spirit riding through the house of human memory. A taste of heavenliness still melancholy with lived sufferings. The hell of the present through which heaven is found — the finding of which is a middle-ground, and the site of personal, heretical, intense theology.
Blood boils out of fissures in the bark of the Judas tree: this is the
hollow parade of effigies under glass that lines the corridors of time.
The haunted universe rumbles on like a padded car through the
fields of glowing wheat and corn to a Stone House of 1720 which for
many years I wished to see but did not see until the auncient subdued
Furies allowed it one evocative morning through the bois of enchanted
Hants - fairytime land of enchanted childhood recovered. Very mild
madness is a great enhancer of life thus transforming into art on a
gentle late summer morning on the lake at the top of the worlds on the
great mountain at the top of the worlds to which all the Nations will
flow with a single will: a great city of towers and domes refounded
with minor duplicate subtlety. Because the original was so beautiful and
demanded replication in reverse at the top of the world. With the shabby
mathematical don we pass past the silvered glass to another Place
replicated because the first was so beautiful. Higher than the Andes is
this place of parabolical arches and rights of way on the still water.
Jesus Christ walked with me here many years before a stone was laid
for encouragement of the mammoth task though ancient slimy reptiles
in the ooze walking leaving fossils and quartz geodes on the beach - -
On the shore we walked and talked of many things and he pointed with
a stick to the waters dividing to the west. And this is the place.
And this is my place: here we will dwell. So forget the other place
and put your shoulder to the wheel here in your own northern land.
A few more glazed bays added to the Chapel will not cost much:
a few more spires floated from the Fens to the Avon Basin is the zone.The trick door pushes open on the side opposite the knob: here enter
Chenonceau arches of varying rhythms span the still river at
Blois, where the King hunted under the chestnut trees. Ghosts in wrought
dress flit through the ballroom where the ceiling is lit by the
moonlight reflecting off the water. All is still and perfect at the French
castle; the garden is a formal tapestry of diagonals where the
dramatis personæ enact their obscure masque at dusk to the faint
music of Lully: sweet French lost exquisite life. England can but
be a great seduction. Do not say that I am not happy to be immured in
this house that is a sea-bridge; this precious Proust-life in
the countryside, dullish and maybe a little boring: dressing for
dinner where the only guests are those of a heightened imagination.
The imagination warming to a scene where the creaking of the stair constitutes
an ‘event’, the swish of the sluggish river through
the arch openings. Let me not forsake this 16th century French ethos
when Montaigne struck a medal, before the regicide took it all away
before the ghost-like Lully-life was shattered cruelly. Surely
France is a great seduction: I am lured to bright, glittering things
at dawn. The house is a museum now. The Grail was depicted in
a Book of Hours, recently purchased by a Canadian collector. So
awake me from my French revery; convince me to stay forever in
old Latin Scotland, although the French were most cruelly
expelled, their grieving spirit inhabits and wanders the woods
in Hants, near Windsor. These mercantile Englishmen have killed
all the dryads of the bois, where gods danced in a gauze of twilight.
Here is a middle-ground in which “the only guests are those of a heightened imagination,” as Devlin says with a tinge of irony.
I think of The Ghost on the Mezzanine as Devlin’s Ars Melancholia. As an Eastern European by birth, I have a strong liking for melancholy and its patina of beauty, something curiously underrepresented in American Poetry. But Devlin is a Canadian!
Time is another dual aspect in which this poem is a middle-ground or meeting place. Below are two quotes that will provide a sense of time’s function.
Time suspends the crashing of the golden bowl
An existential enfilade extends indefinitely down the corridors/ of time, past the many doors I did not open
From these quotes we can see that Devlin’s book inhabits both a priori ‘Time,’ which is an abstract or metaphysical event that exists in entirety; as well as lowercase ‘time,’ the experiential incursion of that Time upon space, in other words, time as we live it. The exact relationship between the two is here less important than their interplay, and indeed plenty of time-lacunae would intercede before we could bore ourselves with a full ontology. Their meeting place seems to be the fervid ground of Devlin’s melancholy aspirations.
John Devlin, Untitled, 1988, Mixed media on paper, 21.6 × 27.94 cm. Collection Henry Boxer Gallery.
‘Time’ is of particular importance because it helps illuminate one of Devlin’s major concerns, both in his writing and visual art — that of Divine Ratio. He writes in the last lines of page 10:
Paper money worthless: except for the experience of God which is
the sensation of the Ratio imprinted in your anatomy.
The logic of Metaphor underlies a divine ratio, where the divine is carried over into the human. This logic is also present in the relationship of ‘Time’ to ‘time,’ strange as that may seem at first glance.
I suspect Kant has had some influence on Devlin. Devlin, like Goethe and Coleridge, has a fruitful, exciting reading of Kant, and he bears this influence to his advantage. So before writing Devlin off as a confused imperativist, we would be richer for borrowing his enthusiasm, one which seems to welcome a metaphorical and magical reading of Kant that makes the old stoney-eyed s.o.b actually useful, if not even beautiful. This somewhat insidious, non-hierarchical reading of a notoriously strict and hierarchical system might remind us of the non-dual Johns described at the beginning of this essay.
Devlin’s interest in ratio ultimately serves to forge metaphoric alignment rather than to promote mere symmetry. Eros in Devlin’s art, both written and visual, is at the center of his ratio(nal) explorations. Ratio and Eros, no different than John Structure and John Dionysus, are in a mutually informed non-dual relationship, articulated by their aesthetic tension.
John Devlin, Untitled, 1988, Mixed media on paper, 21.6 × 27.94 cm. Collection Henry Boxer Gallery.
The Vatican ‘Fading Virgin’ hangs on the wall of the secluded study
near the ikon and the candle. Here sups the lonely monk.
Pan in blue jeans sits on his rock on the shore playing a
lonely tune on his tin pipe like a red-breasted robin
singing clear, new tunes to attract a mate. But cruel Diana
does not listen as Pan’s music fills the clear air.
Beryl and onyx, beryl and onyx incants the wash of
waves on the beach as the music plays on and on. Only a
nude Narcissus emerges from the field at the top of
the cliffs to be entranced by Papageno’s bird-song.
Shimmering gold foils and comets and lights cross
this evening sky in a matrix of coral clouds at sunset.
Pan ties flies or fly-fishes when he is not playing
for the amusement of the creatures of his forest. The
salmon jump and jump in exultation in the quiet waters of
the River Blackadder: the elusive god’s domain of woods.
The Virgin of Milo emerges as a pearl from the muddy waters of the
Bay of Fundy: Oxbridge Island is her domain. The City of God
is let down on golden chains from heaven into the waters near the Cape.
A phantasy on the theme of Cambridge where ruddy kine graze
undisturbed. Near the town that launched the Marie Céleste
another marine village takes shape in God’s clear mind
as a Republic of bicyclists in the image of the Lunar Monolith.
Another Moon sets upon the festival city where gods clap hands
and Mary shimmers in gowns of rustling silks and gold foils.
I showed John the above essay before publication, and I append his response here:
In a way the poem is a labyrinth that sucks the reader in (including me!).
I haven’t the faintest idea what it’s all about.
If only I had the key to the box that told me what my intentions were at the time I wrote it.
I can say two things with some certainty:
It was at every step governed by the algorithm.
And, two, within the constraints of that, I more or less wrote whatever came into my head. Like stream of consciousness.
Other than that I have no idea .
John Devlin, Untitled, 2018, gold and silver leaf on paper, inkjet print, 21.6 × 27.94 cm. Collection the artist.
