AS THE STARS ARE APART: Blaketalk by Joseph Donahue
Poetic incursions on 53rd Street
“For Eternity stood wide apart
As the stars are apart from the earth”
William Blake
“Down in space, it’s always 1982”
David Bowie
I
May morning, flush with oncoming summer, Ronald Reagan barely shot, I’m walking from the 1 train stop at 50th street to my job on the east side at Third and 56th. I’m stepping ever deeper into the zone of listlessness and panic, my lordly realm in those days. I’m about to have what I will perhaps too grandly consider, here, to be what the historian of religion Jeffery Kripal would call an “anomalous experience.”
Each morning on my commute I had been reading The Book of Urizen, reading it over and over, on the train, that beautiful Shambala edition piled alas on remainder tables everywhere in New York. Was it Blake, or Urizen himself, who sent an eruption in my visible field, sent through me a roiling blackness within a foam of light, just as I was passing MOMA? Was it Blake, or Urizen, who sent me this cosmic migraine, this blown kiss from some still enroute future stroke?
But it also may be that Blake, or Urizen, or Los, or Enitharmon, were themselves just emanations of that other discount shelf lunch break glory acquisition from the theosophical bookstore round the corner from my office, an adamantine gathering of hadiths called The Islamic Book of the Dead. In the severity of the apparitions within them, both books were one.
As I was the reader of both these books you are forgiven for suspecting that life had managed to set me in a situation where I might not mind it if the universe tore open. I might not even hide a hope that some stern potentate establish an interior order that could endure the breadth of Manhattan and ever on into infinity. The following depiction of the incursion of a supra-numinous reality into daily life, written decades after that day, appeared recently in Disfluency:
II
It was a deeply unhappy time in my life. It was a time straight out of The Varieties of Religious Experience. A bright morning in early summer. I was walking crosstown on 53rd to my job at the astrology office proofreading horoscopes. I was just past MOMA. Light grew less. On my left side my peripheral vision vanished. No real physical sensation accompanied the semi-blindness, save those resembling panic. It was a racing arising less from the loss of the visual field than from a black electricity welling at the edge of the eye and then within the eye. I felt a furious force coming to be inside me. Felt exalted and alert, and also, a desire to walk into traffic. The black electricity crackled and sparked and roiled within me for a block then trailed off, as if my life was just a momentary hole through which some energetic malevolence spilled into this world.
SHADOWS IN THE WATER VII, from Disfluency
III
Or put another way, or put a way nothing like that way, or put a way can I say was a part of the way, the way to put what happened, put that non-event, in lines I might have read, that day, or before, or later, but read, no great comprehension, even after the inky incursion into my left eye, like black ink poured into a well, dissipated in some clear current, as if never really there, what other way was there for the non-putting of it, having lived some approximation, albeit debased, some imperfectly understood but powerfully felt pulsation of an artery, this the moment Satan all too readily found. Or just put it a way that Blake would put it:
All the myriads of eternity All the wisdom and joy of life Roll like a sea around him Except what his little orbs Of sight by degrees unfold.
The Book of Urizen
IV
The inky cloud passed by the time I took my post at Jeanne Dixon’s Horoscopes by Phone, a post I had inherited from a poet soon to die of anorexia, who told me this was a perfect job for poets. For years then I read the future, read and rewrote and sometimes just made up the future for all New York. If the astrologer missed a prediction for some sign I was on my own, edited and improvising the future months in advance. A second part of my job was logging the call volume. How many tens of thousands were calling the 54-second horoscope for their sign any given day? (Remember when Skylab was falling? The day it was to pass over New York, the call numbers went through the roof.) Once I had the cosmic fate of New Yorkers ready to be recorded, and tallied the callers, I pursued my third charge: reading the cascades of Miss Lonelyhearts letters the astrologer often got. Her callers in these letters often shared their own anomalous experiences, sometimes in an exquisite hand. A woman from Haiti saw the Virgin Mary efflorescing under the track of a Coney Island roller coaster. Her letter arrived in flowing ink on embossed stationary. She began in English. As her excitement rose, she wrote in French, concluding with verses from Victor Hugo. Her letter, like so many others, if far more memorably, bore witness to the ongoing world of visionary perception that abides within a resolutely secular world. A correspondent with less style sent in xeroxed medical records and a sad plea for a prayer. I may have read those letters with the haughty disdain of a graduate student, but I was enough of a graduate student to see in them what William James proposed, and Nathaniel West confirmed: that there is a verifiable substratum of modern life with alternative causalities, full of terrors and wonders and miracles and endless pain.
V
The chronic distress of those years no doubt invited what I felt to be a Blakean influx, that spasm, that ocular blast, that exuberance passing through me, a mood that had no place for me, or within me. My being was an impediment to some joyous fulfillment. What this tearing open of the interior world revealed was not so much a passing perception as an enduring condition. I often think of it when reading of the appearance of a specter in one of Blake’s prophetic books, rising in pain, “a Shadow blue, obscure, and dismal.” My Manhattan malevolence felt not of the moment, but apart from all moments. Felt not an admittedly twisted aesthetic transport, but a blunt force rapture. I am reminded of that second text that absorbed me round this time, inextricable in memory from The Book of Urizen. The Islamic Book of the Dead, Hadiths of the Fire and the Garden. Some of the hadiths were terrifying, especially one entitled “Concerning the Angel who Enters the Grave Before Munkar and Nakir.” In this hadith an angel confronts a dead man in his grave and orders him to write what he have done of right actions and wrong actions. The angel tells the man, your saliva is your ink, and your finger is your pen. Your paper is this torn bit of your shroud. You will hang this list of right and wrong actions around your neck till the Day of Rising, when Allah will read the list and have you cast into the fire.
VI
The flash of black had as much as said: step into traffic, go to heaven. Suicidal ideation, after all, has played in my head nonstop since about the age of fourteen, like disco music piped into an endlessly rising elevator. That afternoon’s uncontrollable black soon flowed into a poem that never got completed. It was called “Summer Entrance to a Cooler Hell,” a title taken from another of my Manhattan Baedekers of those early days, Hart Crane’s White Buildings. In one iteration of the poem, fortunately lost, I imagined that the phenomenological anomaly in my left eye was in fact Frank O’Hara. Frank was in hell. Not in a circle of homosexuals, but of sensualists. The genius loci of West 53d Street caught my attention as might a panhandler. There, in front of MOMA, Frank was aching to walk on a beloved New York street one more time. He wanted to feel the sun on his uplifted face that cool clear morning. He wanted me to feel the terrible sadness of Frank O’Hara in non-existence. (Decades later, in “The Lost Colony, variations on a poem by John Yau,” I paired this vision with a contrary one: Frank in paradise. He looks down on Manhattan. He sends visions of happiness and sexual ecstasy to all struggling poets.) A permutation of the failed effort “Summer Entrances to a Cooler Hell” found its way into the first volume of Terra Lucida. In this scrap of song, the near overwhelming incursion from the assembled icons of modern art into the life on the street is a matter of light and dark. The anomalous experience is pared to a visual sliver and fit within the aesthetic parameters of the unfolding Terra Lucida sequences, which were struggling to find a reprieve from experience. Until recently I had forgotten that the version of the anomalous experience in Terra Lucida was a revision of an earlier reworking which, directly inspired by both Blake and the Islamic Book of the Dead, was a full on angelophany. Abuzz with the harshness and grandeur with which Islamic angels and Blakean Zoas and specters speak, I presumed to give the intrusion angelic form and speech. This poem, an attempt at Blakean figuration, imagined the anomalous experience within a convenient mythological system. (Because who has time to create their own!) Its proclamatory zeal, if not its overt melodrama, went against what was emerging as the governing tone of Terra Lucida, which owed more to William Bronk than William Blake.
VII
Voices, visions, intrusive thoughts, happenstance in the writing of the text, or within the text, some sudden tongue of flame, a shape appearing on a wall, intercessions by astral bodies, dream excursions led by Khidr to meet Moses, a vortex, or encounters between agents on some alternate plane of reality, a flower on the road to a hospital. . . religious and poetic traditions routinely depict incursions. Modern poetry especially loves just such incursions. One might readily imagine modernist poetic techniques were developed to meet the challenge of rendering such ruptures in causality. The anomalous is but one aspect of an incursion, perhaps only the moment of wonder or fear before contextualization begins the process of placing the incursion within a meaningful narrative. (So that in the following, the anomalous incursion experienced on my walk to work is securely placed in the tradition of otherworldly audition, whether it’s an Islamic Angel of Death or a Blakean specter, though the feel of the inexplicable can persist.) Calmer versions of incursions abound in Modernist parataxis. The two elements in a sequence of elements in a composition can seem to achieve an equivalence. This itself can startle. Two realities, disparate outside the poem, within it are an unbroken plain. We can move ecstatically out of one reality, summoned by the text to another. But a Blakean parataxis, which is to say an apocalyptic parataxis, thrives on disparity. It demands extremes: majesty and abjection. The sublime is, yes, to place another before you. But the sublime is also to bear to extinction the consequences of that sublime gesture. This aspect of rendering incursion was for a long time of great interest to me. (It governed the poetics of the books I would in a few years be writing, Before Creation, and World Well Broken.) In the earliest, recently retrieved rendition of the anomaly on 53d Street, I brazenly betrayed the nature of the non-event by supplying sound. I turned a visual intrusion to an audio intrusion. The original galactic spasm had no sound, though it’s hard to remember it without hearing a roaring inside my head if not on the busy street. Apparently, one way to dispatch the problematics of depicting anomaly is this: send in an angel to stop the questions. Hence my original conclusion of the representational dilemma:
VIII
Do not ask What Lord sent me Undulant desert wind Where no seed flies A first beam from a dark edge A black slice through the daylight Or what eyes are worth to one Who views from blue pavilions of air Straw and brick & how each labors Raising prison and furnace In Egypts of desire Do not ask grant me . . . some last affection image or death record or what origin looms clear or what kingdom rises from shattering or what glance in the street or depth of a cool inner room confirms the error that brings before me the dark core of a bright hour a man or a woman or a man and a woman what reprieve or freedom noise of day or cry from the pit Do not ask What harrowing As the gate swings open What the soul brings out of here Or whether the eternal accepts the soul Or is this world a shadow A cloud burning up in a black sun Or what force finds its shape in me Will dread dissuade me What called me from the dark Acts of worship or Indifference to worship Span of galaxies Breadth of an insect Depth and distance are fading out Hours reach the end of their significance And are forgotten like secrets whispered at a party Do not ask what sword or blow of a sword What answers come Like blows of a sword Or of the magnitude of my presence Or of the end of your exile Not even as it happens Can you know it No word reaches me No glance fathoms me No name calls or keeps me Or the hidden god who sends me My radiance will be the closing of your eyes My last utterance dies on your lips If I appear to you If I speak to you You will be nothing
IX
This rendition of the non-incident on 53rd Street is the call from some other realm of being of a Urizenic voice, one that commands, subjugates, and silences, one that would instigate the Blakean state of non-existence. While I did not pursue this operatic impulse either in Terra Lucida or in the poems that composed Before Creation, Monitions of the Approach, or World Well Broken, in the years after this non-incident, as I’ve mentioned, my poetry took a turn. The rupturing of one realm by another, the mild shock of it, I found both exhilarating and eerie. Free of any philosophic rigor I found in such rupturing a principal of composition. A phenomenological flow of images could be churned to a froth by incursions. I focused on disruptions around the vacillations of selfhood as one tracked the inner flow of any day, any day, that is, in New York in the 1980s. With the help of Norman O. Brown, David Jones, and John Yau, I turned my mind into 53rd Street. My inner theater of stage monologues and lyrical solemnities got torn down, got replaced by a mental cineplex where dreams, texts, movies, fantasies, myths, porn flicks and the day’s data played day and night. Broke into over around and through each other, day and night. These poems, which constituted the bulk of Before Creation and most especially World Well Broken, were film clips of perception with voices that broke in from both outside and within the self. In those early books I was in love with italics. In fact, a reviewer of World Well Broken said the lines in italics were my best lines. Italics, to put it grandly, marked the incursion of a presumptively exterior voice, exalted or abject, breaking in on the poem’s wayward attention. These italicized voices might be internally generated voices, akin to those evoked in that consummate handbook of American poetics, the DSM-5. They might articulate urgencies associated with suicidal ideation, or with paranoia, or with romantic infatuation, the kind of anomalous vocalizing Kripal, following William James, sees as an essential component of religious experience. (As when a depressed woman who, when alive, was my mother, heard alone in a church at night a voice that said: I am with you always, even unto the consummation of the world.)
X
While acoustic intrusion governed the writing and the form of two early poems, “Open All Night,” and “Spectral Evidence,” my most sustained effort of those years, end of the eighties, into the nineties, was yet another allegorizing of the anomalous: “Christ Enters Manhattan.” This poem began as a dream. I had just seen an exhibit of Ensor’s sketches for The Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1889. In the dream Christ drags his cross down the east side highway. Around him, tickertape, cheering crowds. (As when the hostages had recently been released from Iran and were welcomed home with parades.) A film crew was shooting a movie. I had a speaking role in the movie. I was my own acoustic intrusion into the central religious mystery of what was once known as the West. I was to yell out, “Hail, King of the Jews!” But I was awaiting directorial guidance. I felt tongue-tied, fretting about what my tone of voice should be. Christ Enters Manhattan was compelled onwards by intrusive vocalizations. I see now, in retrospect, the whole poem was fundamentally formed by and about the appearances of incursive utterances.
EXAMPLES:
Airhammered risen dust, roadwork. It’s not a banquet. It’s not even a film of a banquet, this head of a garroted activist moldering in a dump by the sea. I have a fire in my brain how can you deny me? ------------- tape lifted from the eye, the one pure organ. Poster: black — & a red jag urging death. I felt a snap inside my head as I danced … -------------- The miracles have grown disquieting. A woman in a black tanktop leads me to a zone of doubling, a mesa deep in the death of this world A wet flick chastens me. A pulse unmoors me. A touch would scatter me. -------------- an earth too hot to inhabit … a poison Venus, a city at night where exhibition graves arrive, in trucks, in chunks … My parents were gone. Only next door. I didn’t know that. I hid myself. I thought the Rapture had happened, and I had been left behind …
XI
Over seven sections, “Christ Enters Manhattan” circled outward from a string of short staccato stanzas that marked location points of a pervasive if interior apocalypse. The lines lengthened. Each stanza was a moment of tonal incursion, lyric, satiric, dramatic, descriptive, either visual, or acoustic, or both. An incursion on what? Upon a presumed equanimity, taking in all data on its own terms? Upon an exacerbated sensibility, that like the newscaster in Network, Howard Beal, who famously just couldn’t take it anymore? Upon the prison of single vision and Newton’s sleep? Was it a dream of a secular poetry with sacred power? Was it yet another postscript to Lorca’s Poet in New York? Or was it just that death and transformation were in the 1980s the order of the poetic hour? There was often an apocalyptic logic at work in my earlier poems. (As someone who read Pursuit of the Millennium on a Caribbean beach on his honeymoon, I concede my end of the world inclinations.) Back then, “Christ Enters Manhattan” found a more than sufficient quota of apocalyptic longing in New York City. It was a decade that began with Syd killing Nancy, a decade bracketed by assassinations, John Lennon, Meir Kahane. It was the hour, as Albert Mobilio reminds me, of the Thompson Square riots, of Daniel Rakowitiz, the cannibal killer who served his girlfriend’s remains in soup to the homeless in Tompkins Square Park, of Bensonhurst and Bork protests, of Tawana Brawley, of the murder of Yusef Hawkins, of the Howard Beach attack on Michael Griffith; of the killing of Eleanor Bumpers, of on a lighter note, the Mayflower Madam (Sydney Biddle Barrows) played in a movie by Candace Bergen, of Bernard Goetz, of Do the Right Thing, of Public Enemy shut down at Columbia, of David Berkowitz and his dog, Sam, of child murderers Hedda Nussbaum and Joel Steinberg, of the murder of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, of the death by police beating of graffiti artist Michael Stewart, of Norman Mailer, Jack Abbot, and the waiter Abbot killed, Richard Adan, of Ana Mendieta who dropped 34 floors from the window of her New York apartment, of an era that guided the soul through its gnostic imprisonment with a New York Post headline: Headless Body in Topless Bar, of the 1986 strangulation of Jennifer Levin in Central Park, of the assault and rape of Trisha Meili, the Central Park jogger, of the insider trading arrests of Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky, of Dan Rather assaulted by the question: "What's the frequency, Kenneth?", of Donny Manes, Queens politician, who slipped a steak knife through his heart while on the phone to his analyst, of the dumping of the deinstitutionalized on the street. It was also, on a more intimate note, the era of the prolonged discontinuation of a love affair where, towards the end, the Beloved snorted coke at work, passed out, struck her head on a desk, was hospitalized, unconscious three days, and woke up not recognizing anyone.
XII
Perhaps the simplest and most pervasive of incursions which Blake placed at the heart of his poetry is the one that most succinctly addresses life in New York City during the years I was living there and learning how to write poetry, the incursion, each into the other, of the contrary states of innocence and experience.
Perhaps this was what the anomalous event hinted at in front of MOMA, that sultry season of my initiation into being a poet in New York. Did I catch non-sight of Innocence spilling into Experience? Of Experience cascading into Innocence? (That black blast was a phenomenon I would later intuitively replicate in the poems I wrote in the 80s and 90s). Was I at the edge of a moment or a millennium when there are no individuals, only states? Or was I getting the theo-physiological memo, as might be said, about my gathering interest in esoteric Islam? Were those hadiths of the fire and the garden that I read alongside The Book of Urizen, what would provoke the beginning of the ongoing song cycle, Terra Lucida?
Perhaps I was merely Thel, wandering for the length of a city block, gazing, but for the starburst of blackness, into the land unknown. (But when have I ever not been Thel?)
Perhaps, in retrospect, Manhattan is the state of experience. Or rather, is the vacillation of Innocence to Experience, Experience to Innocence, and back. Manhattan in 1990, to London in 1790, and back. You’re walking along. You think you are innocent, but you’re not. You’re walking along. You think you are guilty, but you’re not.
And then there’s the poetry. Walking out at the conclusion of a concert, Upper West Side, into New York night air one evening in the mid-eighties, when from within the dispersing audience a voice confides lines not far from some absolute Blakean pathos. Out of the air come words like the lament of Enion in the heart of the “Four Zoas”:
“That’s not a hotel.
That’s where the poor die.”
I enjoyed your piece. Your embedding of a personal mystical experience in the specific context of 1980s New York created a kind of urban spiritual cartography that reminds me of experiences I have had in my life that keep returning with variations of the meaning of what I felt at the time.
The final angel poem (section VIII) is particularly striking. It transforms the visual anomaly into auditory revelation, showing how memory and artistic rendering inevitably betray the original experience even as they preserve its essential force.