Poet James Dickey, 2/2/23: He moves among stars.

Here are some excerpts from James Dickey's wonderful long poem The Zodiac, published in 1976.

He moves among stars.

                                    Sure.      We all do, but he is star-crazed, mad

            With Einfuehling, with connecting and joining things that lay their meanings

                        Over billions of light years

                                                            Eons of time--Ah,

                        Years of light:   billions of them:   they are pictures

                        Of some sort of meaning.   He thinks the secret

                        Can be read.   But human faces swim through

            Cancer   Scorpio   Leo   through all the stupefying design,

And all he can add to it or make of it, living or dead:

                        *                        *                        *

                                                            Only one way beyond

The room.

                        The Zodiac.

                                    He must solve it   must believe it   learn to read it

                        No, wallow in it

As poetry.

                        *                        *                        *

            He has to hold on to the chair: the room is pitching and rolling--

                        He's sick   seasick with his own stars,

                        Seasick and airsick   sick

            With the Zodiac.  .  .  . 

                        He knows he's not fooling himself    he knows

                                    Not a damn thing of stars   of God   of space

Of time   love night death sex fire numbers signs words,

Not much of poetry.   But by God, we've got a universe

Here

                        Those designs of time are saying something

                        Or maybe something or other.

                                                                        Night--

                        Night tells us.   It's coming--

            Venus shades it and breaks it.    Will the animals come back

            Gently, creatively open,

            Like they were?

                                                            Yes.

            The great, burning Beings             melt into place

            A few billion-lighted inept beasts

            Of God--

                        What else is there?   What other signs   what other symbols

                        Are anything beside these?   If the thing hasn't been said

            This way,   then God can't say it.

                        *                        *                        *

                        What animal's getting outlined?

                        All space is being bolted

            Together:   eternal blackness

                                                            Studded with creatures.

            Stars.

                        Beasts.   Nothing left but the void

                                    Deep-hammering its creatures with light-years.

            Years made of light.

                                                            Only light.

                                                                                    Yes.

                        *                        *                        *

            Look, stupid, get your nose out of the sky for once.

There're things that are close to you, too. Look at that!

                        Don't cringe: look right out over town.

Real birds. There they are in their curves, moving in their great element

            That causes our planet to be blue and causes us all

                        To breathe.  Ah, long ghostly drift

            Of wings.

                                                Well, son of a bitch,

                                                                        He sits and writes,

                        And the paper begins to run

                                                                        With signs.

                                                But he can't get rid of himself enough

                        To write poetry.   He keeps thinking Goddamn

                                    I've misused myself   I've fucked up   I haven't worked--

I've traveled and screwed too much,

                                                But   but by dawn, now    NOW

            Something   coming   through-coming   down-coming   up

To me   ME!

                        His hand reaches, dazzling with drink   half alive,

            For the half-dead vision.   That room and its pages come in and

                                                                                                            Out

Of being.   You talk about looking:  would you look at that

Electric page!  What the hell did I say?   Did I say that?

                        You bastard, you. Why didn't you know that before?

            Where the hell have you been with your head?

You and the paper should have known it, you and the ink:   you write

                                                Everybody writes

With blackness. Night. Why has it taken you all this time?

                                    All this travel, all those lives

                        You've fucked up? All those books read

            Not deep enough? It's staring you right in the face.    The

                                                                                                            secret--

            Is whiteness.   You can do anything with that.   But no--

                        The secret is that on whiteness you can release

                        The blackness,

                                                The night sky.  Whiteness is death   is dying

                        For human words to raise it from purity   from the grave

                                    Of too much light.   Words must come to it

                        Words from anywhere   from   from

Swamps  mountains  mud  shit  hospitals  wars  travels  from

                                    Stars

From the Zodiac.

            You son of a bitch, you! Don't try to get away from yourself!

I won't have it! You know God-damn well I mean you! And you too,

            Pythagoras! Put down that guitar, lyre, whatever it is!

You've driven me nuts enough with your music of the spheres!

                        *                        *                        *

                                    You know that from the black death,

                                                            The forest of beast-

            Symbols, the stars are beaten down by drunks

Into the page.

                                    By GOD the poem is in there   out there

                        Somewhere    the lines that will change

                        Everything, like your squares and square roots

                                    Creating the heavenly music.

                        *                        *                        *

                                    the stars are gasping

                        For understanding.  They've had Ptolemy,

                        They've had Babylon

                                                            But now they want Hubbell

            They want Fred Hoyle and the steady-state.

                                                            But what they really want   need

                                                            Is a poet   and

            I'm going to have to be it . . . .

                                                                        WHEN?

                        In all this immensity, all this telescope-country,

                        Why this microscopic searching

                                                Of the useless human heart?

Aquarian poet Elizabeth Bishop

            Born on February 8, 1911, a hundred years ago last week, Elizabeth Bishop wrote about her sudden, sickening childhood identifications with the sky-permeating female scream, and the dizzying awareness of her unavoidable fate: being human, "one of them," accompanied by "the sensation of falling off / the round, turning world / into cold, blue-black space." Of this never forgotten inward trauma, her cosmic fall into identity and time, she solemnly notes the date in these lines from her poem "In the Waiting Room":  "I said to myself: three days / and you'll be seven years old. . . ./ And it was still the fifth of February, 1918."             

          The poet's first conscious creative act, then, was to establish the birthdate as synecdoche of origin, identity and fate. This fetishistic attitude toward the birthdate is in a sense universal and unavoidable, and a source of both the attraction and the antipathy to astrology.

          Thirty years later Bishop commemorated her orphan's birthday with a stoical dejection ode, pivoting hopefully only on the very last word.

          Some readers take Bishop’s prized, meticulous objectivity for the obverse of confessionalism, a betraying concealment of the authorial self in shambles. Her fingerprints: geographical dislocation, abrupt changes of scale and perspective, eccentrically perched vision and spiraling irony, any-and-all adduced to an adrift identity.

          I did a quick search for qualifiers to the term "Self" in some recent books about Elizabeth Bishop, and came across "dismantled,"  "disunified,"  "shipwrecked,"  "fluid and unfixed,"  "unstable,"  "only arbitrarily bounded,"  "denied,"  "questioned,"  "lost,"  "obfuscated," "decentered,"  "abnegated," and  "fractured".

           The poet's famous attentive objectivity originates in self-effacement. The motives for effacement are well-known: female, homosexual, alcoholic, chronically ill, the American gothic childhood. Fortunately, directly opposite confident, sun-ruled Leo, Aquarius deplores egotism. Not so much a self as a constellation of problems, Bishop dedicated herself at whatever cost to a true poet's life of "no regular hours, so many temptations," reading, writing (mostly letters), affections, drinking, and travel.

          Bishop's cold-blooded menagerie, her semi-alive lichen and moss, her wraith-like atmospherics, measure alienation from a solid core of solar identity. With Aquarian Hugo Hofmannsthal she would agree "We are no more than dove-cotes." Her multi-hued mineral grains, the iridescences, her attention to every color playing no favorites, and the triple rainbow epiphany which is central to her reputation, are shining peripheries of hope, the refraction of unendurable singularity.

                   *                 *                 *

        Aquarius, centrifugal of the autocratic heart, circulates democratically, directs the oxygenation of the blood, and identifies with all aspects of the atmospheric cycle  Thus Bishop's asthma , which chronically threatened her life, but stimulated her highest identification. Her work is crafted in a death struggle and is as necessary as cortisone. She breathes easiest when uncrowded before the detailed panorama. Continents, rivers, waterfalls, harbors, mists, moonlight, cities are seen from the slopes.

--- Mark Shulgasser, The Blue Zenith

From Best American Poetry blog.

See Astrological Profiles there for my pieces on Sagittarian and Capricorn poets as well.

Some Gemini poets and Joseph Brodsky's Urania.

" I believe in the fable that the Fates fell in love with Hermes. "  

" Mediator. Mediation. There is nothing else; there is no Immediate known to us. "    

" A good symbol is the best argument. . .  The value of a trope is that the hearer is one; and indeed Nature itself is a vast trope, and all particular natures are trope ... All thinking is analogizing, and 'tis the use of life to learn metonymy. "    Ralph Waldo Emerson

         The Twins, the third sign of the zodiac, associated with the messenger deity Mercury/Hermes, is the first sign of the element Air, and houses the Sun at the births of many writers. It is the first sign that has language at its disposal.

         The symbol of the Twins denotes any and all copula, their functions and manifestations,  from the intimate to-and-fro of personal interaction, to all forms of mediation, transition, re-presentation, mirrors and specula, iteration, duplication or multiplication, mimesis and similarity. Hieroglyph, stylus and pen, typeface, word, metaphor, language, dialogue, translation, figuration, photography, all spring from the Twin's mutual address. Gemini, the third sign, looks back and sees only two things, the majestic parental binary of Aries and Taurus, and channels all its creativity through the revelation of AND.

         Dante Alighieri  in Paradise honored the "glorious Twins" thus:

                                          . . . .  o stars
   

                           impregnate with great strength,

                  to whom I owe whatever genius

                  I possess, with you the sun
   

                           arose and set when first

                  I 
breathed sweet air of Tuscany.

          Each of the three books of the Divine Comedy ends with the word "stelle." Dante taxes us to experience pre-Copernican astronomy and astrology not yet fully separated.  In Dante's comprehensive vision anything believed of the heavens, mythological or geometrical, signifies spiritually.

          Ralph Waldo Emerson, a translator of Dante, reaches for the stars continually:

         "Astrology interested us, for it tied man to the system. Instead of an isolated beggar, the farthest star felt him, and he felt the star. However rash and however falsified by pretenders and traders in it, the hint was true and divine, the soul's avowal of its large relations, and, that climate, century,  remote natures, as well as near, are part of its biography."                                                                (The Conduct of Life: Beauty)

         "Every astronomical fact interested him," Emerson's nephew recalled, but his perspective was entirely symbolic. "I think," he wrote, " I could have helped the monks to belabor Galileo for saying the everlasting earth moved." According to a friend: "The majesty of planets and suns and systems, in their ordered courses, especially appealed to Emerson from youth. . . .  In the years between 1835 and 1845 his journals, and the scattered fragments of "The Poet" show how constantly he sought "the sweet influence of the Pleiades" and "Arcturus and his sons."

                                    Divine inviters, I accept

                           The courtesy ye have shown and kept

                           From ancient ages for the bard.

                           .     . .     . .     . .     . .     . .     .

                           I watch your course,

                           Who never break your lawful dance

                           By error or intemperance.

                           O birds of ether without wings!

                           O heavenly ships without a sail!

                           O fire of fire! O best of things!

                           O mariners who never fail!

                           Sail swiftly through your amber vault,

                           An animated law, a presence to exalt.

 "I am part of the solar system. Let the brain alone, and it will keep time with that, as the shell with the sea-tide." Emerson  looks to the stars with a philosophical yearning and a poetical mood and a downright belief in sympathetic influence that have little to do with astronomy. 

     America's first popular astrologer, William Chaney, adopted Emerson's "Hitch your wagon to a star" as his motto.

 W. B. Yeats casts horoscopes obsessively. His Geminian Sun murmurs "Mirror on mirror mirrored is all the show." He was enamored by the idea of a generative principle which he called the "antithetical self", as unreachable as the image in the mirror. 

                Gay Gemini poet Walt Whitman reaches out to "Poets to come!" Gay Gemini poets reply in echo: Garcia Lorca (Ode to Walt Whitman), Allen Ginsberg ("What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman . . ") and Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (Salutacion a Walt Whitman), who left trunkloads of unpublished astrological papers, pleads (in English):

          With the higher trifling let us world our wit

         Conscious that, if we do it, that was the lot

                  The regular stars bound us to, when they stood

                  Godfathers to our birth and to our blood.

          Gemini Joyce Carol Oates added a name to the list of Pessoa's hundred-odd heteronyms. In a Yeatsian trance, a "real or imagined 'possession'", she "translated" fully 22 stories (a satisfying Gemini number) by her imaginary Portuguese author, Fernandes de Briao, collected in the volume "A Poisoned Kiss". In explanation Oates cryptically invokes Yeatsian antitheses.   "Everything about her had two sides to it," Oates wrote in her most famous story, and in her natus the Gemini itself is one side balanced against another, a powerful Persephone archetype. Her novel based on the life and death of Marilyn Monroe, also a Gemini, was written under the working title Gemini, then renamed Blonde; Oates' antithetical autobiography in a way.  

      Allen Ginsberg relished his birthstars, as here:

          This universe a thing of dream
               

                  substance naught & Keystone void
                                                              

vibrations of symmetry  Yes   No
                                              

                  . . . . all the way down to the first Wave
               

                  making opposite Nothing a mirror

         which begat a wave of Ladies marrying

         waves of Gentlemen till I was born in 1926
 

                  in Newark, New Jersey under the sign

                                                               sweet Gemini ---

            .          .          .          .          .          .

          . . .  I correspond with hopeful

          messengers in Detroit, I am taking drugs

and leap at my postman for more correspondence, Man is leaving

          the earth in a rocket ship,

there is a mutation of the race, we are no longer human beings,

          we are one being, we are being connected to itself,

it makes me crosseyed to think how, the mass media assemble

          themselves like congolese Ants for a purpose

                  .          .          .          .          .                                                     

          communicate with me

          by mail post telegraph phone street accusation or scratching at my window

          and send me a true sign I'll reply special delivery

             DEATH IS A LETTER THAT WAS NEVER SENT   

                                                                                Allen Ginsberg

         As promised by its title, Joseph Brodsky's "To Urania: Collected Poems 1965-1985" inclines to astrology, she being the Muse of that science. The title poem responds to the 1960 "Homage to Clio" of Brodsky's mentor, W. H. Auden (n.b. not a Gemini). Late Auden is permeated with this discouraging principle: 'Poetry makes nothing happen'. In "Homage to Clio" Auden submits to the realpolitic of history (whose Muse is Clio), to rationalization and disenchantment.  He rejects Zodiacal illusions: "We may dream as we wish / Of phallic pillar or navel stone // With twelve nymphs twirling about it, but pictures / Are no help".

         In Brodsky's youthfully Geminian, optimistic counterview the very ubiquity of limitation and division in the sub-lunary world privileges Urania's transcendental exploration over Clio's scrolled archive. Gemini is ever the gadfly to the realist. Urania's profounder Self ("the/body's absence") is a spiritual giant who strides the upper atmospheres like Dante ascending (or a passenger in an airplane), observing Earth's majestic shifts from above.

          Everything has its limit, including sorrow.

. . . That's why Urania's older than sister Clio! ('To Urania')

         So Brodsky rejects Auden's dispiriting obeisance to necessity. Having known prison he is not one to chip away at the possible meanings of freedom, but will keep faith even if narrowed to a twinkling point.

         Auden doesn't think Clio reads his poems, or should, while Urania leans over Brodsky's shoulder as he writes. She pops up often, indirectly in the collection's first poem, May 24, 1980, which is the poet's fortieth birthday -- and two days before Pushkin's birthdate. (Urania implicitly attends all birthday poems.) The brotherhood of Brodsky and Pushkin is common critical currency. They are the Castor and Pollux of Russian literature, as the two Geminis, Emerson and Whitman, are of American, and May 24, 1980 is a compendium of Pushkin/Brodsky resemblances, in tone, meter, rhyme scheme and incident. The Dantesque enters as well: "From the height of a glacier I beheld half a world, the earthly / width."

          In Lithuanian Nocturne Brodsky plunges into the most obvious Gemini terrain. In a teleported visitation, with allusion to Girenas and Darius, a legendary pair of doomed Lithuanian airmen, Brodsky address fellow poet his distant friend Thomas Venclova on the subject of their shared literariness: "Our inkpot alliance! It's splurge!/ . .  Our imprints!" Then a full outcry of the Twin's need to pair:

  Thomas, we are alike;

We are, frankly, a double:

. . . We're a mutual threat,

Castor looming through Pollux,

We're a stalemate, no-score,

Draw, . .

Echoes tracing in vain the original cry . . .

In Stanza XV Urania appears in her glory (and to the disadvantage of Clio). Brodsky's thoughts of Venclova, transcending political boundaries, unite in the upper atmosphere with Venclova's thoughts of Brodsky to become 

  A specter . . .

simply note in this faint apparition a kin

or an aspect of air--like these words, with their fear of the morning,         

Scattered thinly at midnight by some slurring voice --

. . . . but in which

ever-naked Urania is to rejoice!

In Stanza XVII, Brodsky addresses Urania  again: "Muse of dots lost in space! Muse of things one makes out / Through a telescope only!") and sings to her four dithyrambic stanzas ("a little aria") on the subject of Air, Breath and Speech, which resounds with the afflatus, pneuma or prana of the element Air at the roots of indo-European astrological imagery.

 In the kingdom of air!

In its equality of

gulps of oxygen to our syllables! . . .

. . . our O's

shape the vault of the palate,

where a star gets its shine from the vat

of the throat! That's how the universe

breathes.

          Two memorable times in his youth, Brodsky has told us, he experienced "astronomical illuminations" while gazing at the stars, and he regretted (to an interviewer in 1988) that they had never recurred. In The Fifth Anniversary, a dejection ode, the poet tries to talk himself out of silly beliefs. It opens:

                   A falling star, or worse, a planet (true or bogus)

                  Might thrill your idle eye with its quick hocus-pocus.

                  . . .  there are no enigmas, signs in heavens."

Yet Gemini is compelled optimistically to his Penmanship: "Scratch on, my clawlike pen, my pilgrim staff, my salvage!"

Again, in one of his Christmas poems he is disillusioned with the stars: "well after hours, blinking . . . and a thoughtful gaze can be rested on none of these." 

         Astrology is confrontational in Gorbunov and Gorchakov, Brodsky's important novel-in-verse, a poetic genre which few but Geminis attempt. (Pushkin, of course, and Pope ("Why did I write? What sin unknown / Dip't me in ink, my parents or my own?"), Thomas Moore, and, more recently, Vikram Seth and Anne Carson.) The most extended of Brodsky's several conversation poems, it contains the astonishing Canto V (A Song in the Third Person), an x-ray of the bones of dialogue. The subject of Canto X is the primacy of language:

                           "And so it's not the sea that surges in-

                           to shore, but words are overlapping words."

                           "And words are sort of holy relics." "Yes."

The two protagonists are political prisoners in a mental ward. Gorchakov is Brodsky, an intellectual, Gorbunov, his antithetical self, a peasant. Gorbunov consults the stars, Gorchakov mocks them. Gorbunov describes himself in astrological terms, then asks

                                             "And you, What is

                           your sign?" "Well, I belong to Gemini.

                           Born under Gemini, in May."  "I guess

                           that makes you warm."  "I guess." . . .

  Our normally garrulous and provocative Gorchakov is suddenly laconic, unresponsive. His contempt for astrology is belied by his all-too obvious Geminian qualities. Ironically, the obvious fact that Gemini fits him to a T stops his complusive flow of words. Pre-telescopic Urania, who developed geometry out of observation of the stars, is always represented with a compass, and Gorbunov argues with Uranian metaphor:

                                                               "You're

                           forgetting that, although the radius

                           is scorned in life, the compass will endure

                           forever, Gorchakov."

          The usual allowances for problems of translation aside, Brodsky still makes good points, often with pointed, if slightly accented language.  Nothing perishes faster in translation than the sheen of an intricate rhyme scheme, except perhaps delicate conversational gradations of Slavic irony and mood. The notorious "untranslatability" of Brodsky (echoing that of Pushkin) is a fitting part of his Geminian literariness. Adding to his labors and his substance as a personage, Brodsky was not only his own translator, but editor and collaborator with a stable of translator colleagues. Brodsky is a hero of border-crossing, so charmingly grateful for the freedom offered by the West that we English reader generously excuse the inevitable awkwardness. We lean forward to understand -- what communicator could ask for more? 

                           "Indeed, a star that climbs above the field

                           seeks out a brighter interlocutor."

To unite the beginning and the end of this essay, and justify my eccentric practices, I submit quotes from Brodsky and Emerson:

"The surest defense against evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even — if you will — eccentricity."   JB

"I would write on the lintels of the doorpost, Whim. I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation."  RWE

Addendum: Other poets born under Gemini: Thomas Moore, Mark van Doren, Harry Crosby, Josephine Miles, Gwendolyn Brooks, Bob Dylan, Nikki Giovanni, John Yau, Lucie Brock-Broido, Paul Muldoon, David Lehman, Anne Carson

                                                               --- Mark Shulgasser

                                                      astrodreamer.squarespace.com

                                                               wkkbooks@localnet.com

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