Review of Uncanny Resonance, Book Two by Whit Griffin
Uncanny Resonance, Book Two by Whit Griffin. Lunar Chandelier Collective Press, 2020. $10
Whit Griffin has been writing and publishing some of the best poetry for some time now. [1] Some of his earlier books: We Who Saw Everything. Pentateuch. A Far-Shining Crystal. Extramission. The Great Practice. Each should be tracked down and read with care. Now he's published the first of a four book poem — this "Book Two," the other three in process — titled Uncanny Resonance. One can think here of the tetradic / quaternic shape of the mysterium coniunctionis, as well as the fourfold vision of Blake, to image the larger form of the poem.
I won't hide my enthusiasm for this work: as with Griffin's previous books, this one needs and deserves close study. Here I offer semi-discrete points of entry for the potential reader — there is no attempt at comprehensivity, and these are by no means interpretive vincula. They do, I think, give a few useful ways to approach the poem.
William Blake, “Fourfold Vision” from Milton A Poem, 1810. The Chrysalis
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1/ John Clare, "Sighing for Retirement":
Oh, take me from the busy crowd,
I cannot bear the noise!
For Nature's voice is never loud;
I seek for quiet joys.
The book I love is everywhere,
And not in idle words;
The book I love is known to all,
And better love affords.
The book I love is everywhere,
And every place the same;
God bade me make my dwelling there,
And look for better fame.
I never feared the critic's pen,
To live by my renown;
I found the poems in the fields,
And only wrote them down.
And quiet Epping pleases well,
Where Nature's love delays;
I joy to see the quiet place,
And wait for better days.
One of Griffin's early great mentors, Jonathan Williams, often quoted two lines from this poem when describing his aesthetic, one grounded in found language: "I found the poems in the fields, / And only wrote them down." This is a description, or operational principle, applicable also to Griffin's poem. His "work is a collaboration with archives / libraries / texts," with an accumulated assemblage of sentences, phrases, direct quotes, and references. Clare, in fact, shows up several times, by name or by quotation. The reader would do well to keep Clare's lines in mind when picking up this book.
Samuel Palmer, A Hilly Scene, 1826-8. Watercolour and gum arabic on paper on mahogany. Tate
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2/ Athenaeus, Deipnosophistai ("The Dinner Philosophers"):
I remember meeting Whit Griffin in person in 2012 for the first time, and he asked me if I'd read Athenaeus' Deipnosophistai, which he was reading through in the Loeb edition (in a larger collection of Loeb’s bequeathed to him by the recently-deceased poet Ted Enslin, another mentor-figure). At the time I didn't take much note of this, at least in relation to Griffin's own poetry. Now that he's written several long poems — We Who Saw Everything, The Great Practice, and, now, one book of Uncanny Resonance — the long book of 'table talk' seems more relevant. Not the grammarian's or pedantic aspect of Athenaeus' long weave of speech, or any generic markers — the "sympotic," or whatnot — but the element of wide-ranging accumulation and a kind of compilatio of the voices of the auctores (who are "in Eternity," as Blake says).
Christian Jacob, in The Web of Athenaeus, writes of Athenaeus' book as needing "the construction of a complex, multidimensional space, where it is possible to move on several levels, horizontally and vertically." The space is a "fragmented library, . . . a space of travel, where the only imperative consists in never stopping and in multiplying the connections, in tracing an itinerary that connects the largest possible number of textual elements, which makes it possible to take the longest route to the destination, if possible, between poles that are extremely far from each other." Though Jacob's application of an intentional, rhetorical strategy to Athenaeus' book does not fit Griffin's, the reader can seize the gist here.
If Athenaeus had been compiling his table-talk from a large gnostic archive, and been writing of an "eternal present at the speed of light" — where there is no, as Griffin says in a prefatory note to his poem, "cause and effect, no past present future" — the Greek's fifteen-book conversation would contain many of the sentences in this poem. In lieu of the etiquette of Egyptian monarchs regarding silver, Gustav Meyrink on alembic methodology might have emerged crossed with Edgar Cayce and The Wizard of Oz read by Plutarch as a tale of reincarnation.
The kind of assemblage in the Deipnosophistai — which is concerned with the non-human, the animal, the vegetable, the so-called "inanimate" as much as Griffin is — lays Clare's field-found verses, threaded with lore, into rows. We approach a Garden.
Athenaeus, Folio of Deipnosophistae, 1514. Venice, Aldus. Sotheby’s
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3/ Poem & Virus (a word which, at root — like rhythm — means: to flow):
Griffin, quoting Stephen Buhner: "Viruses / have the capacity of DNA (or RNA), and weave them / into their own genetic structure. They / can then weave those sections, as well / as sections of their own genome, into / other living organisms. One of their main / functions in fact is the genetic intermingling / of all forms on Earth." Outside the poem, the quote continues: ". . . viruses are vehicles for genetic exchange between the disparate species that make up the matrix of life on Earth. Our genome, as that of all life on this planet, contains snippets of viral genes. Our forms, our shapes, are an expression of a communication that has been ongoing since life has been. We are the enemy we have been fighting."
In an essay written in 1961, "Properties and our REAL Estate," first published in the Journal for the Protection of All Beings (#1, 1961), Robert Duncan writes, "It is easier for me to see that we are all men, of one species, and that nation-thinking or race-thinking is damned-thinking; for I am surely of mixed race and have no pride there. And I believe that we are mammal before we are men; animal before we are mammal: that most truly we are light." Griffin seems to me to be in harmony with Duncan's vision here, of an awareness of existential fact which unites each of us with the "lowest" or "basest" things: where Duncan says light, Griffin writes of virus, which is seen by nearly all of us socially as an outright enemy to any sense of life (especially as I write this). Griffin differs: "Nothing exists – neither rock, mineral, plant, / animal, or air – that is not filled with / consciousness of its own kind." Elsewhere, "There is consciousness even within / a nail." Consciousness: "organizes energy and energy / is a womb for the material world." In Uncanny Resonance the poet cannot reject such an essential form of terrestrial life as a source of consciousness, energy, creative force. Death itself is not treated as "non-life" in the poem. As Griffin writes in another place, in the essay "The Poetics of Reincarnation": "Death reunites you with Eternal Consciousness — we will come to see that death is the mode of transportation that moves us across dimensions — death is a kind of shuttle." Death the Shuttle. Griffin's poem — its operation, working — can even be read as viral language, a viral process of "genetic intermingling" from "all forms on Earth," an activity the virus works through that is not at all far from the activity of the sophisticated supper-table Athenaeus writes from / of. As Athenaeus stitches together an expanse of texts, transforming them in conversation, the virus transforms genetic data, a weaver on a tiny field. Griffin does something similar in his construction — or dictated transcription — of stanzas:
At the doorway the sacred herbs
are rejoicing. As Helle causes
the hellebore to grow. Pray to
Grandmother Yi for rain. The prayer
of sex brings joy to Xochiquetzal.
As the Goddess Nüwa restored harmony
and balance to the universe. If Devi
closes Her eyes the universe disappears.
Some say Sarasvati brought the gift
of language. Sarasvati, Mother of
the Written Word.
….
Birth and death are transition phases
of our repeated journeys through multiple
worlds. Space as the Receptacle.
WASP-76 b. 1991 VG. Comet
Shoemaker-Levy 9. Polaris, the
World Nail. Vega in 14,000 CE.
Akewa and the moon man. White Toad
Moon, ceaselessly at work compounding the
golden elixir. She who shows Herself
as the gold moon. The Moon of the
Falling Leaves. Moon-viewing pavilions.
Myth is essentially cosmological.
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4/ ἄγγελος & the Living Poem:
The way of attainment by direct
mystical perception. Mysticism is not
regression in service of the ego, but evolution
in the transcendence of the ego. Alignment
and surrender. Seeing and looking, hearing
and listening. My purpose is to open
your inner eyes. A gnostic catalyst.
Remembering and foreseeing. Humility is
one of the secrets of the wizards.
In James Hillman's 1975 book Re-Visioning Psychology he writes:
A new angelology of words is needed so that we may once again have faith in them. Without the inherence of the angel in the word — and angel means originally "emissary," "message-bearer" — how can we utter anything but personal opinions, things made up in our subjective minds? How can anything of worth and soul be conveyed from one psyche to another, as in a conversation, a letter, or a book, if archetypal significances are not carried in the depths of our words?
We need to recall the angel aspect of the word, recognizing words as independent carriers of soul between people. We need to recall that we do not just make words up or learn them in school, or ever have them fully under control. Words, like angels, are powers which have invisible power over us. They are personal presences which have whole mythologies: genders, genealogies (etymologies concerning origins and creations), histories, and vogues; and their own guarding, blaspheming, creating, and annihilating effects. For words are persons. This aspect of the word transcends their nominalistic definitions and contexts and evokes in our souls a universal resonance. Without this inherence of soul in words, speech would not move us, words would not provide forms for carrying our lives and giving sense to our deaths.
Every word of this book is Angel, ἄγγελος, the potently vitaminal vessel through which eternity manifests as dilatory consciousness in this world. In his opening note, Griffin writes, "The transmission of gnosis — the knowledge / awareness that we are all divine, all connected in a web of consciousness — we carry forward the myth, we work with spirits to evolve and move the stories onward. We are engaged in a mystery that never stops unfolding." Words for Griffin are "independent carriers of soul between people." They are never "fully under control": in the same introductory note, he writes, "With my work, everyone will see their own patterns, make their own connections. They will see in the work things I never saw or "planned." The work uses me. I am a medium. The work sees the poem in dimensions that I am not aware of." Elsewhere, in "The Poetics of Reincarnation," he writes — echoing a Spicerian sense of the poem — "To be aware of the sentience of the Poem / to know that the Poem knows what it needs of me." Later in Uncanny Resonance:
Bruno attributed divinity to matter. Bruno
said the universe is a living organism.
Our future may well depend upon the precise
extent of our willingness to expand our ways
of knowing. The message of the marigold.
The omens of the palm kernels. Blessed
by the presence of a kingfisher on the
opposite bank. Ruddy kingfisher.
Narcissus flycatcher perched on one leg. Brown
dipper in the Oirase Mountain Stream.
When the wood thrush first sings in a new
pine wood. It is recorded that his love
for the music of wind in the pines was so
intense that the sound of it would
fill his heart with joy.
Expansion of our ways of knowing: attention to the Message, the Omen, the Blessing. "Receiving / and transmitting information-packed energies / of diverse vibrational frequencies in the multiple / worlds of reality." And in the transmission, "To change the vibrations of Hate / to the vibrations of Love."
Against this, the arrogance of authority and constrictions of what is narrowly called the Rational, Logical Mind: "China banned / Lewis Carroll's books in 1931 because they featured talking animals." This mind the one which moved Blake to the optative (and elsewhere to a grammar of rage): "May God us keep / From Single vision & Newtons sleep." (Did China object also to the talking flowers in Through the Looking-Glass? As the Tiger-lily says, "We can talk: when there's anybody worth talking to.") Griffin in the lines above ("Receiving…") is quoting a book which just after moves on to Buckminster Fuller, who writes of an "omnidirectional epistemology." We can cross this with Griffin in his opening note: "Because everything is happening at once, I want to write poems that reflect, or create within them realms outside of three dimensional linear time. Where everything is happening all at once, and is all connected. Layers of meaning, constellations of meaningful connections." In Greek tragedy, the Messenger, the ἄγγελος, the Angel, bears bad news, and is (almost always) a "side-character" — soldier, servant, herald, whatever. And this tragic version of the Angel is very beautiful (and terrible) in its context. In Griffin's poem, though, the emissaries are everywhere. Tiger-lily, Kingfisher, John Dee's obsidian mirror, historical incident, biographical detail of Coleridge or Pepys, music of the wind in pines (Theocritus mimetically described the sound as ψιθύρισμα, psithurisma), the mushroom: all equally present, prepared for transmission of that "strange power" Black Elk describes, "glowing in my body." This is the Humility that is "the secret of the wizards": "Humility / means recognizing the limitations of our perspective, / while opening ourselves to the vast possibilities / that exist along the spectrum of consciousness."
All's Angel here, rushing as necessary transmission into the unfolding mystery of the Living Poem.
Florence Baptistry Mosaic Ceiling, 1225-1300. Florence Inferno
Hector Giacomelli, Le Martin-pêcheur [Kingfisher], 1890. Engraving. Canopé
Joachim Koester, The Magic Mirror of John Dee, 2006. Kadist.
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The above only hints at what this book offers: I haven't even touched on one of the most essential and recurrent themes of the poem, the historical-mythical suppression of the Goddess archetype and its worship, and Griffin's sense that this archetype is re-emerging in the world.
For that News, the potential reader would do well to look into this book. "The light of heaven is retained / in the eyes."
[1] For notes on influences, background, and certain other things not covered here, see my earlier piece on Griffin's long poem "Summerland" here: Whit Griffin's "Summerland".
