Look for the dragon smoke (excerpt).
Robert Bry
Translated by Dong Jiping.
In ancient times, in the "Age of Inspiration", poets flew from one world to another, as the Chinese say, "riding on a dragon". Isaiah 1 rode on those dragons, as did Li Bai and Pindar 2. There was a long dragon smoke trailing behind them. Some dragon smoke still boils out of Beowulf 3: the poet who wrote Beowulf clings to Danish soil, or follows Glendale into the sea.
This dragon smoke means that a jump has taken place in the poem. In many ancient works of art, we notice a long floating jump in the center of the work. That jump can be described as a jump from awareness to the underlying sanity and back again, a jump from the known part of the mind to the unknown part. In the epic "Gilgamesh", which was written in a stable society, the spiritual power created the "Mao Man" Enkidu4, who was very successful as a companion of Gilgamesh. The reader had to jump back and forth between "Golden Man" Gilgamesh and "Hairy Man" Nkido. In Odysseus, the traveler visits an island ruled by the Mother of the Great Circe5 and is turned into a pig. They make jumps in a split second. In all the mystical arts derived from the Great Mother, the leap towards the unknown part of the mind exists in the very center of the world. The power of "classical art" has more to do with this leap than with the poet's progressively developing order, in order to contain it, and partially camouflage it.
Linguistically, jumping is the ability to associate quickly. In a great poem, the considerable distance between associations, the distance at which the sparks must jump, gives their bottomless feelings, their space, to the sentences, and the speed enhances the excitement of the poem.
When the religious civilization took root and the spiritual patriarchal power deepened, this kind of leap appeared less and less in Western literature. Obviously, the ethical and moral concepts of ** religion constrain it. At first, most church priests were against "jumping" because they felt it was too pagan. Ethics generally support movements against "animal instincts," and the ideas of the apostles, especially those of Paul,6 establish a clear distinction between spiritual vitality and animal vitality, a distinction that is keenly symbolized by "black" and "white." "White" becomes associated with consciousness, while "black" becomes associated with the unconscious or underlying intellect. The ethical ** teaches its poets—including us—to jump away from the unconscious, not to jump toward it.
At some point in the 13th century, English poetry began to show a marked decline in its ability to associate. There are a few exceptions, but the scope of the world dragged into the poem by association has narrowed after Chaucer and Langland7, whose work has taken on a decline since the poets who wrote Beowulf. By the 18th century, the freedom of association had been dramatically curtailed. The word "in the forest" leads directly to "mountain fairy", "meadow", "dancing", etc., and the same is true for "reason", to "**sphere", "sacred order", and so on. They are all stops on the track of the mind. There are very few images of the serpent, the dragon, or the Great Mother, and if mentioned, the Great Mother does not lead to any other image, however, it is more appropriate to say that she leads to the words that imply paralysis and death. As Pope8 warns his readers, "The proper study of man is man."
The loss of freedom of association is evident in form as well as in content. The poet's thoughts advance heavily, slowly, line after line through the psalms, like a man being guarded through a prison. The stereotyped "form" resembles a hallway, punctuated by doors opening and closing. Rhythmic sentences open and close behind the visitor at the right moment.
In the 18th century, many educated Europeans were no longer interested in the imagination. They sought to grow that "masculine" spiritual power—a power they associated with Socrates and his Athenian contemporaries, a kind of intellect stripped of deified overtones, moving in a straight line of bright and tiny rings, and therefore governed by the fact of being connected, rather than by "irrational" emotions. The Europeans succeeded in emphasizing practical reason, which proved to be useful. Industry needed it to guide a locomotive through a huge freight yard, and later space engineers needed it to guide a spacecraft back from the moon through the "re-entry corridor".
Nevertheless, this line of spiritual vitality away from "darkness" and "irrationality", which was initially realized in obedience to religious ethics and morality, and later in obedience to industrial needs, had a damaging effect on spiritual life. This process amounts to a restraint on the flight of the mind, and as Black observes, once a child in Europe has completed ten years of school, he cannot fly and lives with "the only vision and Newton's sleep" for the rest of his life.
Western thought after Descartes accepted the symbolism of white and black, and did not try to combine the two in a circle like the Chinese, but tried to create a kind of "isolation". In this process, words sometimes take on unfamiliar meanings. If a European shuns animal instincts and consistently jumps away from underlying reason, then he or she is said to be living in a "state of innocence". Children are thought to be "naïve". Eighteenth-century translators like Pope or Dryden, in their leap away from animality, forced Greek and Roman literature to be their allies, translating Homer as if Homer were also "naïve". For religious Europeans, the impulse to open up towards sexual instincts and animal instincts indicates a state of decline, a state of "experience".
Blake thought that the nomenclature term was insane and accurately on the opposite side of truth, and he wrote "Song of Innocence and Experience" to illustrate this. Blake discusses "experience" and he declares that to be afraid of jumping into the unconscious is actually to be in a state of "experience" (which we all later experienced in that fear). The state of "experience" is characterized by the dynamism of love, boredom, jealousy, and the absence of joy. Another characteristic is the dull movement of the mind, which may be caused by a constant fear. Blake saw that after 1800 without jumping, the joy was disappearing, the poetry was dying, and "the rope of fatigue barely moved!" The sound is forced, the notes are almost nothing". A babysitter in a state of "experience", fascinated by a fear of the blackness of animals (a fear that increased after the Caucasian occupation of Africa), a certain vice of her childhood when the light falls.
We often rejoice when we read Homer, Neruda, Dickinson, Vallejo, and Blake, because the poets follow an arc of associations that corresponds to the inner life of the objects they are talking about, such as the association between the eyelid and the outer skin of the stone. For poets, the avenue of association is not private, but in a way, it is inherent in the universe.
An ancient work of art like Odysseus, which has a long floating jump in its center, around which poetic imagery gathers like iron filings around a magnet. Some recent works of art have a lot of short jumps and not a single long jump. The "jumping" poet jumps from an object soaked in the spiritual essence of consciousness to an object soaked in the latent or instinctive spiritual substance. One of the true joys of poetry—and not the only joy—is to experience this leap in a poem.
Around 1800 A.D., Novalis, Goethe, and Hölderlin, writing in Germany, participated in what I described as freedom of association. Their ideas, in a parallel way, had elements of a certain paganism and heresy, as Blake thought in England at that time. A century later, Freud pointed out, dreams still retain the fantastical freedom of association, and educated Europeans learned about it only from the poetry and art of the pre-Christian period. We note that dream interpretation has never been a favorite profession for Orthodox people.
In the last 80 years of psychology, efforts to restore the freedom of association of dreams and their metaphors have been partly successful. Some of the psychic abilities that have returned from the known part of the mind to the unknown part have been restored. The same is true of the "jumping" poets: Rilke and Pobrovsky, Lorca and Vallejo, René Charles, Yves Bonafois, and Paul Celan9.
Yeats, riding on the dragon-like associations of Irish mythology, truly wrote great poetry. If we can't learn from Yeats, or from the French Descenders, or from the Spanish Jumpers in the United States, who will we learn from? I think the stakes are high.
Let's drop the "jump" to some of the enemies we face in this country. American Orthodoxy is against the journey to the dark places, capitalism against descending under the soul, realism against the spiritual jump, People's Partyism and social thought against the lonely wilderness, individual ambition in poetry does not allow enough time to be given, collective thought does not support individual adventures, and the recent American poets' reluctant translations have made them ignorant. We note that contemporary American poets tend to judge their own poems by comparing them with those of other writers of their time—making their comments obvious, rather than comparing their own work to that of Goethe, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, or Blake. Reading paves the way for the future There is always something grand in great poetry. Now American poets seem so suspicious of grandeur, so afraid of being perceived as grandiose, that they can't even fantasize about great poetry.