The instrument of dowsing

an interlude--, with mayonnaise

Never begin a serious essay with the word mayonnaise in the opening sentence. That would be my sincere and grave advice to any serious writer. Doing so would be a career-ending move.

Just as I was beginning to say so I remembered having read a little paperback copy of Trout Fishing in America, by Richard Brautigan, as a teenager obsessed with trout fishing. That book, supposedly a novel, was of no help to me in catching trout, but I read it anyway because it was a total trainwreck of a book—rather like this essay. It ended with The Mayonnaise Chapter, or How To End Things. I think he meant how to end things like a novel, not his own life. Nevertheless, it was by suicide that Brautigan did eventually end things. Not that this detail is at all relevant. (Writers should always avoid mentioning irrelevant details in serious essays.)

Anyway, let me explain why I mention mayonnaise in the first place. Mayonnaise is an emulsion “An emulsion is a mixture of two or more liquids that are normally immiscible (unmixable or unblendable) owing to liquid-liquid phase separation” (Wikipedia), which is just a fancy way of saying that water and oil don’t mix (usually).

You may think I’m trying to be funny here, but I’m dead serious. That’s my problem! Involuntary comedy leaks into my serious writing, and serious writing leaks into my comedy, and I have little actual control of the whole goddam situation. Let me explain.

Writing saved my life. In particular, it was poetry writing which saved my life. I had a particularly difficult youth in lots of ways (even though I eventually lived in a trout fishing paradise). Ultimately I discovered that the only sensible way to write poetry was to utterly wing it, letting go entirely into the process as if one were a frail young osprey which had never yet left the nest, but which must take that leap anyway. I discovered that only by letting go and falling could I learn to unfold my frail and untrained wings while also learning how to navigate the wind. That is, when I allowed my poems to spontaneously leak onto the page without thinking about them overly much, as if falling through my fingertips into the typewriter keyboard (those were the days before everyone had a computer) a kind of magic known as poetry would happen! It literally caused my skin to shiver when this would happen, but flight actually also began with a sort of shivering in my skin. I would, in some sense, dowse my poems as one would dowse for water; but bodily feeling (including skin shivers) replaced the dowsing twig, which is to say that my whole body was the instrument of dowsing. Good poetry magically appeared when I got out of the way and simply let it happen.

But those elements or ingredients which form the basis of a serious essay are normally immiscible with the elements or ingredients which comprise a good poem. At least, that’s how I see it. Though there are exceptions, such as in the essays of Annie Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which are nothing if not poetic.

A good poem is often (at least for me) a chaotic fracas of immiscibles which somehow cohere into some kind of “aha!” which one can never quite explain because the result is a paradox—like mayonnaise. Let me provide you one of my own poems as an example:

- human skin -
(or, dendrochronology)


human skin
may have been
the original
poem

with all of its
elbows and
ribs
and lobes

stigmas
styles
ovaries
ovules

its river bottoms
with colored pebbles
its exotic and
invisible wounds

the way it wades into
waters
over its own
head

and how it colors itself
with sky
and shades itself
in summer

as if it were a
blue heron
with a giant menacing
beak

which longs to walk long
legged through
pressed cotton
sheets

leaving wild unintelligible
markings
droppings
incendiary devices

which shivers itself
awake
or
drinks itself asleep

oozes or dips
its pen in
deep sea
ink

every age
of this poem
leaves
rings

raises its limbs
reaches
touches
roots

Here we have an explosion of metaphors, allusions, similes, analogues, internal references … and more elements than even I can count or make any complete sense of. It in no way resembles the essay form, and those who are more accustomed to academic writing than poetry will likely conclude that this is less poem-like than it is like the psychotic word salad of a schizophrenic.

Let us unpack these two stanzas in relation to one another.

with all of its
elbows and
ribs
and lobes

stigmas
styles
ovaries
ovules

In the first of these stanzas there are elements of human anatomy — elbows, ribs, lobes. In the second there are elements of the anatomy of a flower — but also of the human form, as in ovaries. And what human is not subject to stigmas? Clearly the poet is alluding to something! Could the title offer a clue?

Dendrochronology is applied to plants — trees in particular. Some trees are known to flower. So what has this to do with human skin (?), which here is being compared to a poem?! And not just any poem, but perhaps ‘the original poem’. (Not just an original poem, but ‘the’) What could be the ‘original poem’? What on Gawed’s green Earth could be the ‘original poem’?

Oh, I get it! The Original Creation!

Ah! Poem is from the Greek, poiesis, which meant ‘to make,’ or ‘making’. Could the poet be saying that …

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.

But I can tell you as the one who penned the first poem that it had almost nothing to do with personal mortality (or mortality more generally), as the Dylan Thomas poem clearly does. It’s ‘the force’ these two poems share in common, the force which today many of us name ‘nature’, and which natural force historically was often set in opposition to the Creative Force of the Cosmos: ‘God’, who, as ‘Creator’ was assumed to stand or sit outside of nature.

As the one who penned the first poem (so to speak), I can only say that my Cosmos is not so divided. The ‘force’ that drives the water through the rocks is the same force — as I see it — which pens any poem. Creation, for me, is no was, but is an ongoing is, and is everywhere present. None of us stand or sit outside of that. There is no outside. And so the ‘original poem’ is still being ‘penned’, and ultimately has no was, because … ongoing. Genesis is not a was, but an ongoing as much as it is a timeless present.

If ‘every age of the poem leaves rings’, the poet must simultaneously mean that the rings of the trees which are measured in dendrochronology (each year representing a ring) are akin to the rings left on a grimy bathtub, and that when a bell rings it rings for thee, in perpetual unfolding in every moment. He may also allude to Annie Dillard’s words in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:

“When her doctor took her bandages off and led her into the garden, the girl who was no longer blind saw “the tree with the lights in it.” It was for this tree I searched through the peach orchards of summer, in the forests of fall and down winter and spring for years. Then one day I was walking along Tinker creek and thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The flood of fire abated, but I’m still spending the power. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells un-flamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck. [My emphasis] I have since only very rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam.”

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood. 

              - Walt Whitman, Song of Myself 52 

The key to ecstatic poems is the ecstasy itself.

ecstasy (n.)

late 14c., extasie "elation," from Old French estaise "ecstasy, rapture," from Late Latin extasis, from Greek ekstasis "entrancement, astonishment, insanity; any displacement or removal from the proper place," [my emphasis] in New Testament "a trance," from existanai "displace, put out of place," also "drive out of one's mind" (existanai phrenon), from ek "out" (see ex-) + histanai "to place, cause to stand," from PIE root *sta- "to stand, make or be firm."

Used by 17c. mystical writers for "a state of rapture that stupefied the body while the soul contemplated divine things," which probably helped the meaning shift to "exalted state of good feeling" (1610s). Slang use for the drug 3,4-methylendioxymethamphetamine dates from 1985. Formerly also spelled ecstasie, extacy, extasy, etc. Attempts to coin a verb to go with it include ecstasy (1620s), ecstatize (1650s), ecstasiate (1823), ecstasize (1830).

— from - ecstasy | Etymology, origin and meaning of ecstasy by etymonline

If we hardly know what Whitman was getting at, it may be because he was speaking from quite outside of ‘the proper place’. For those of us born into a culture in which ‘divine things’ can only be ‘understood’ from within a paradigm (a religious one) in which Creation happened long ago (in six days days, after which the Creator needed a rest break), and by implicit interpretation made Creation a kind of fixed noun which divided Creator from Creation, we will hardly know what he meant to say. For Whitman was speaking from before and after any notion of a Cosmic Division which segregated Creator from Creation — or beings of every kind (including leaves of grass) from Divinity.

But he was saying much the same as e. e. cummings here:

[since feeling is first]

since feeling is first
who pays any attention 
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate 
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids’ flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

Feeling, for ecstatic poets (and essayists who emulate them and seek to speak such a voice in prose) is first. We want to let go and fall into poetry or prose, or whatever the ‘force’ would have us use.

And so philosophy is difficult for us, not because we are not inclined toward it, but because making mayonnaise in such a fashion makes us feel a bit lost and a bit silly. Our wings need training. And the wind is strong.

We hardly know if we are doing comedy while writing essays.

The falling which is our best poetry can fail us in prose, which requires … effort, and time. And causes us to think.