Palingenesis and the American Sublime

Half-Gods and Our Incomparable Materials

America. There lies a honey-sweet harmony in that name—a celestial perfume, as if Ovid had written hymns to her in his works of poetic palingenesis. America could be the name of a seraph or a river nymph, and the faint phonetic similitude it shares with “Arcadia” ignites an aroma of rose-gold nostalgia. There is a great mystery to the United States, one in which I find myself frequently meditating upon. The long thin flame of the American spirit, which folds and infolds upon itself as a Sestina, a complicated melody locked in a helical cycle of cruciform retrogradation. Under the nation lies a vast subterranean tributary of thought, form, and idea, which beats and pulses below the country’s roads and glens. One connected to the sacred river of Coleridge, which has certainly blossomed many an incense-bearing tree. This creative well-spring that flows below us can be intuited through the poets and writers America has reared. We must hold fast to the stalwart tree of our literary heritage, and tap the trunk for fresh sap. With this ambrosia, we shall anoint the forehead of our politics in divine unction.

A great task lies in front of America’s poets and dreamers. That of myth-making, to rekindle and unveil the blaze of America’s navel, to present a burning ideal to serve as a national omphalos. We have relinquished our pole star and with it our self-identity. Manifest Destiny and the Space Race gave the American people a providential task and a mythological locus to orient themselves. These almost divine national labors touched at the very ventricles of the American soul in her self-identification as a piercer of frontiers. The power of myth is that it emanates a dream image that a nation can reflect upon and coagulate into. For it was the collected folk tales of the Brothers Grimm that helped lock their race into transcendental unity.

The magic of Donald Trump comes from the eight-syllable spell he cast, Make America Great Again. The raw power of MAGA is that it explicitly alludes to a Golden Age reclaimed, that most ancient of European longings. The acronym became an incantation overnight, one proclaimed by countless tongues as if to immanentize the civilizational eschaton of the poets of old. MAGA is the hope of an eternal equinox, a sacred history made manifest, a destiny reclaimed. The special providence of which the Prussian spoke— fools, drunkards, and the United States. MAGA is not a sports team scouting the top talent from the slums of Bangalore, it is not a brothel of ‘Elite Human Capital.’ MAGA is a mythological longing, a kinetic undercurrent collecting momentum, the conflagration of national rebirth. Trump understands this profound truth, it is why he has given the nation grand labors once more. Greenland, Canada, the Panama Canal, these territorial ambitions impart upon the country an animating spark.

The German scholar Ernst Robert Curtius in his essay on Emerson wrote,

Emerson and Whitman bring us the message of an America that perhaps lives on today only in secret and underground, but that has not lost any of its meaning for us on that account —an America before Americanism. Emerson's America has been displaced temporally by later history, but spiritually it is invincible—like Goethe's Germany. Emerson's America has annexed a new province for the soul. Wordsworth had consecrated a hemisphere to nature; Emerson embraces and affirms the whole of nature.

This is the fairy castle I am in search of, this hidden America that encompasses her soil while all together transcending it.

Emerson lies as a numinous font half buried in the American topsoil, awaiting a new generation to rediscover his canon and renew the nation’s soul. Of all of his essays the most powerful is simply titled “The Poet.” Walt Whitman confessed that this essay was one of the greatest impulses for his own work. ‘Leaves of Grass’ was Whitman’s response to Emerson’s exhortation. In Emerson’s essay, you can trace the long vein of neoplatonism, that faint blue outline beneath the pale flesh of romantic poetry. He quotes Proclus, Iamblichus, and Plato, and invokes the favorite allegory of all theurgists, the eyes of Lynceus, that which “were said to see through the earth, so the poet turns the world to glass, and shows us all things in their right series and procession.” Emerson even references ‘the flower of the mind,’ the subtle organ of the Chaldean Oracles. In his floral verse we find the supernatural tinge of the American Sublime. The sweet aftertaste of Hellenic wisdom in the landscape of the New World.

From The Poet:

I look in vain for the poet whom I describe. We do not, with sufficient plainness, or sufficient profoundness, address ourselves to life, nor dare we chaunt our own times and social circumstance. If we filled the day with bravery, we should not shrink from celebrating it. Time and nature yield us many gifts, but not yet the timely man, the new religion, the reconciler, whom all things await. Dante's praise is, that he dared to write his autobiography in colossal cipher, or into universality. We have yet had no genius in America, with tyrannous eye, which knew the value of our incomparable materials, and saw, in the barbarism and materialism of the times, another carnival of the same gods whose picture he so much admires in Homer; then in the middle age; then in Calvinism. Banks and tariffs, the newspaper and caucus, methodism and unitarianism, are flat and dull to dull people, but rest on the same foundations of wonder as the town of Troy, and the temple of Delphos, and are as swiftly passing away. Our logrolling, our stumps and their politics, our fisheries, our Negroes, and Indians, our boasts, and our repudiations, the wrath of rogues, and the pusillanimity of honest men, the northern trade, the southern planting, the western clearing, Oregon, and Texas, are yet unsung. Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.

It is in reading such prose that leaves me wondering if the hidden American spirit was not best captured in the paintings of Poussin, a man who paradoxically preceded the nation’s birth by a century.

Friedrich Nietzsche declared Emerson to be the most gifted of the Americans. He went so far as to declare Emerson his “Brother-soul.” His copy of the poet’s essays was found heavy in annotations and underlines, revealing a mind totally immersed. From Twilight of the Idols: “Emerson possesses that kindly intellectual cheerfulness which deprecates too much seriousness; he has absolutely no idea of how old he is already, and how young he will yet be..” Tell me, is this not the essence of the American spirit? An evergreen luster of youth with an indomitable optimism? A stumbling block for Teutons and foolishness to the French? In Emerson’s soul, we see the contours of American exceptionalism. The great Ezra Pound also intuited the distinctly American peculiarity in which Emerson’s poetry ensnared as light in a crystal. From Patria Mia:

No country but America could have produced the code that one finds, first, all about one and later, when one takes to reading anthologies, in Emerson’s verse, ending:

When half-gods go

The gods arrive.

And having in another stanza the lines:—

Nor thou detain her vesture’s hem,

Nor the palest rose she flung

From her summer diadem.

And a few lines later:

After the attempted revival of mysticism we may be in for a new donation, a sort of eugenic paganism.

In all this rambling I have my memory upon the uncertainty of standards which accompanied the Italian Renaissance, and was, perhaps, a symptom or forecast of it.

Having been brought up in the American medieval system, I see also a sign in the surging crowd on Seventh Avenue. A crowd pagan as ever imperial Rome was, eager, careless, with an animal vigor unlike that of any European crowd that I have ever looked at. There is none of the melancholy, the sullenness, the unhealth of the London mass, none of the worn vivacity of Paris. I do not believe it is the temper of Vienna.

One returns from Europe and one takes note of the size and vigour of this new strange people. They are not Anglo-Saxon; their gods are not the gods whom one was reared to reverence. And one wonders what they have to do with lyric measures and the nature of ‘quantity.’

I believe that Ezra Pound was the only living response America gave to Emersons wistful prayer of an essay. The essay that declared:

O poet! a new nobility is conferred in groves and pastures, and not in castles, or by the sword-blade, any longer. The conditions are hard, but equal. Thou shalt leave the world, and know the muse only. Thou shalt not know any longer the times, customs, graces, politics, or opinions of men, but shalt take all from the muse.

Ezra Pound’s Cantos was the closest America got to an epic of mythopoetic palingenesis. But it was too universal in scope to be anything close to an American national epic. Pound, just as his friend Eliot, left American shores and so their work was always too infected with the European germ to be truly American. I cannot fault Pound for this, for I have committed the same sin. And yet by taking residence in the Old World, Pound was afforded a breathtaking clarity in his vision of the New one.

Emerson was the only poet who knew how to properly praise the American wilderness, to bejewel and enthrone the sapphire mountain ridges and smaragdine woodland. That rugged nature which should be the locus of all American art. It is why the greatest paintings ever produced by American artists were that of the Hudson River School, the American Sublime. It is the grandeur of the American wilderness in which the American finds his reflection, his self portrait, the contours of his ambition— in which he dreams himself a body big enough to hold his soul. In the paintings of Bierstadt and Church, where Olympian cliffs and crystalline lakes are set aflame by a preternatural sunburst, as America bleeds into Avalon, and Avalon into America. The axial node in which the United States evaporates into immateriality, leaving the mundane and entering the eternity of myth. Here lies Arcadia and Jerusalem. It is her hymn that must be sung. And so is it any wonder, that by some cosmic sympathy, Bellini and Titians Feast of the Gods lie but a few feet from the Hudson River School Canon in the National Gallery? And the contorted flesh of Grunewalds small Crucifixion but a floor above. Emerson declared that Man is a God in Ruins, but it is in America’s bosom that he is destined to reassemble himself—or at least— this is my hope and my prayer.

But the American spirit in all of its beautiful bipolarity also eyes the wilderness with distrust. The great Puritans who came upon the shores and smelled sulfur with the smoldering fat of babes in faery circled fires, presided over by bedeviled crones with their infernal king. The shadow-spun woodlands, infested with painted savages on painted ponies, prostrated before macabre gods, demoniacs circling them as ravenous wolves. Americans today look back at such anxious superstitions with shame and embarrassment, and yet I see the glittering beauty in this vision, too. The enchanting works of Hawthorne and his Young Goodman Brown, haunted by witch cults who have infiltrated the ranks of the elect. It is from Calvin and his followers that Americans were gifted a great donation, the kernel of conspiracy. Is not conspiracy literature the most American of genres? Has not James Shelby Downard given us lines that rival any in our literary canon? Is there not a beauty to American paranoia? And what of the invectives of the Calvinists? In the scorching wrath of Protestant sermons, which hum with austere poetry in their form and cadence, as if an American Virgil was singing of hellfire. And what of Jonathan Edwards when he preached:

The black clouds of God’s wrath are now hanging over your heads, full of the dreadful storm and big with thunder . . . The bow of God’s wrath is bent and the arrow made ready on the string, and justice bends the arrow at your heart and strains the bow, and it is nothing but the meer pleasure of God, and that of an angry God, without any promise or obligation at all, that keeps the arrow one moment from being made drunk with your blood.

Is there not a flash of the harmony of the Homeric Hymns to Apollo here?

I will remember, nor could I forget, far-shooting Apollo,
whom gods tremble before as in Zeus’s abode he is striding—
then as he comes up close to the place they are sitting, they leap up,
all of them, out of their seats, as he stretches his glittering bow back.
Leto alone stays there beside Zeus the great thunderbolt-hurler;
she unloosens the bowstring and closes the lid on his quiver;
taking his arrows and bow in her hands from his powerful shoulders,
she hangs them on the pillar by which his father is sitting,

The divine percussion of the poets, the alliteration and repetition, both singing of their respective Gods might.

Your wickedness makes you as it were heavy as lead, and to tend downwards with great weight and pressure towards hell; and if God should let you go, you would immediately sink and swiftly descend and plunge into the bottomless gulf, and your healthy constitution, and your own care and prudence, and best contrivance, and all your righteousness, would have no more influence to uphold you and keep you out of hell, than a spider’s web would have to stop a falling rock. Were it not that so is the sovereign pleasure of God, the earth would not bear you one moment; for you are a burden to it; the creation groans with you; the creature is made subject to the bondage of your corruption, not willingly;

Do you not hear the music here? Do you not feel the texture of the symbols? The genesis of an American rhythm? The American genius is found under many a long ignored rock.

Yes, yes… there is something dark there too in America’s bosom. An enchanting gloom, a luminous black light. And it was Poe who enthroned this dread in all its ineffable glory.

Emerson intuited the whisper of conspiracy in the American consciousness, when he described beauty itself working upon the land in conspiracy. In his Ode to Beauty:

All that’s good and great with thee

Works in close conspiracy;

Thou hast bribed the dark and lonely

To report thy features only,

And the cold and purple morning

Itself with thoughts of thee adorning;

The leafy dell, the city mart,

Equal trophies of thine art;

E’en the flowing azure air

Thou hast touched for my despair;

And, if I languish into dreams,

Again I meet the ardent beams.

Queen of things! I dare not die

In Being’s deeps past ear and eye;

Lest there I find the same deceiver.

And be the sport of Fate forever.

Dread Power, but dear! if God thou be,

Unmake me quite, or give thyself to me!

Yes this is the America I believe in. A land of genius. Not of imported tech workers but of poets and physicists. The minds who wrote Moby Dick and put a man on the moon. The Secret America, the eternal America, Emersons America, which needs only be polished to regain the luster. To wash away the stained patina. We must prune all that is ugly and offensive to our souls, and scorch off the rot with a fiery seraphic sword.

We must recover this secret America, the America of Emerson, Pound, Hawthorne, and Poe. The America that is haunted by the luminous shades of both Iamblichus and Calvin. Here in lies the resplendent paradox.

Here is my plea to you, dreamer, go and unearth this countries beauty, recover the ore of the American soul. An alloy every bit as savage as it is phosphorescent. Embrace the whole of America’s heart, and prune that which was falsely set.

Go, with meter, brush, or pen, and set her frontiers on fire with ink— forevermore.

A moody child and wildly wise
Pursued the game with joyful eyes,
Which chose, like meteors, their way,
And rived the dark with private ray:
They overleapt the horizon's edge,
Searched with Apollo's privilege;
Through man, and woman, and sea, and star,
Saw the dance of nature forward far;

Through worlds, and races, and terms, and times,
Saw musical order, and pairing rhymes.

Olympian bards who sung
Divine ideas below,
Which always find us young,
And always keep us so