May 12, 2023
You can’t take it with you, and, what’s more, you shouldn’t even try. You shouldn’t want to own things anyway. Property is theft, said Proudhon. The title of Erich Fromm’s To Have or to Be (1976) presents us with a choice, the same choice that Jesus spoke of when he said that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.
But when Northrop Frye defined what he called primary concerns, the concerns universal to the human race, he included “property,” citing Aristotle’s definition that property is what is proper to a person, meaning an essential aspect of what a person is. Fromm’s distinction, then, is oversimplified. There are two kinds of property, it would appear, extrinsic and intrinsic. The extrinsic kind are extras, luxuries, beyond what anyone needs, and usually at the expense of someone else’s needs. In traditional Middle Eastern countries where wealth was measured in camels, there were no doubt any number of rich chieftains determined to shove their camels through the needle’s eye, resulting only in a bunch of pissed off camels. I doubt that it is a wise procedure to piss off a camel. But there is also intrinsic property, which is in fact part of being rather than having. They may be material possessions, but their value is emotional rather than economic. In economic terms they may not be worth much at all. But to the heart, they are priceless. I remember the heartrending moment from the film Apollo 13 when the wife’s wedding ring goes down the shower drain more than I remember the drama of getting a crippled spacecraft back home again.
Guy Clark has a poignant song, recorded by Lyle Lovett, called “Step Inside This House” that is about this kind of relatively valueless yet priceless property. The singer asks a woman to step inside his house, where
I’ll show you all the things I own My treasures you might say Couldn’t be more’n ten dollars’ worth But they brighten up my day
One is a painting by a friend: “it doesn’t look much like him, I guess / But it’s all that’s left of him. Another is a book of poems given to him by a girl: “ It’s funny how I love that book / And I never loved that girl.”
At my age, people begin to wonder about what is going to happen after their death to the possessions that are so dear to their hearts. It is all the more a question to me because I have no children to burden with them. What of all the photograph albums, compiled so lovingly by my family, spanning a century and a quarter of family history? What of my mother’s collection, accumulated over the decades of a long life, of ruby and milk glass, the beautiful reds and whites? It does probably have a modest monetary and historical value, but I have no idea how to dispose of it. Just last night, at a public lecture, I ran into a student I had in 1989, my very first year at Baldwin Wallace University. In answering his question about the English Department faculty, I realized that within a year I will be the only one left of the faculty that he remembers, I who first arrived on that campus in 1969 at the age of 18. Memories are possessions too, and I am a walking archive of that university, remembering buildings, people, incidents that no one else remembers. There are college histories, but I can tell you things that are in no college history (some for good reason). This is the reason they bury time capsules, but my city of North Royalton, believe it or not, lost the time capsule it buried 50 years ago, a wryly amusing parable about the attempt to preserve the past.
We bury time capsules: we may also launch them in the opposite direction. News articles have appeared in recent weeks about the two Voyager satellites launched in 1977. They are now 46 years old, 12 billion miles from earth—and still operating. They are in the news because NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced plans to tweak them in such a way as to keep them operating until at least 2026. They have left the heliopause, the limit of the sun’s atmosphere, and are well on their way into deep interstellar space. And, because of Carl Sagan and others, they are carrying the Golden Record, a CD-ROM disc filled with the sights and sounds of life on earth, messages in a bottle floating in the seas of space, in case there is someone out there to pick it up. By the kind of synchronicity that no longer surprises me in relation to this newsletter, I have just ended my freshman composition course with an essay, “The Voyagers,” by Native American writer Linda Hogan that I have used as a going-out piece for years.
Hogan defines the Golden Record as indeed golden, an idealized image of “what we value most on our planet, things that in reality we are almost missing” (560), and may be missing altogether by the time that the Record is found, if it ever is:
The visual records aboard the Voyager depict a nearly perfect world, showing our place within the whole…In the corner of this image is a close-up of a snow crystal’s elegant architecture of ice and air. Long-necked geese fly across another picture, a soaring eagle. Three dolphins, sun bright on their silver sides, leap from a great ocean wave. Beneath them are underwater blue reefs with a shimmering school of fish. It is an abundant, peaceful world….To think that the precious images of what lives on earth beside us, the lives we share with earth, some endangered, are now tumbling through time and space, more permanent than we are, and speaking the sacred language of life that we ourselves have only just begun to remember. (560)
Most significantly, she says,
We have sent a message that states what we most value here on earth…It is a sealed world, a seed of what we may become. What an amazing document is flying above the clouds, holding Utopia….These are images that could sustain us through any cold season of ice or hatred or pain. (561)
And not just images. There are also sounds, the sound of fire, the calls of animals, greetings in many of the world’s languages, and music, Western and non-Western, classical—Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, of course—but also popular. Intelligent aliens may truly come to understand us if they can grasp the psychology of a species that can span both the exuberant energy of Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode”—“Go, Johnny, go!”—and the haunting sorrow of Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground,” about Christ’s Agony in the Garden, possibly the greatest slide guitar instrumental ever recorded. “Defining Utopia,” Hogan says, “we see what we could be now” (561). At the end of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Tiresias, the speaker, says, “These fragments I have shored against my ruin.” I offer my students the option of a final essay in which they create their own Golden Record of the images and sounds they would choose to preserve, and in the act define their version of utopia. I think it is a better exercise than reading yet one more of the endless series of dystopias which are so common in recent literature.
The Voyager satellites are contemporary versions of one of the most ancient of all archetypal images, the ark that safely shelters humanity and nature, enabling it to survive a universal flood. Nor are these arks always fictions: in 2021, the Ship of Khufu was moved from where it was buried next to Khufu’s Great Pyramid to an Egyptian museum. Opinions vary on what Khufu, around 2500 BCE, thought he was doing burying a 142-foot ship. It could simply have been a manifestation of conspicuous consumption: a recent column by Paul Krugman in the New York Times was titled “Inequality Ahoy! On the Meaning of the Superyacht” (NYT, 4/11/2023). Apparently owning a yacht the size of Rhode Island has become a way of demonstrating your superiority to the rest of the human race. Jeff Bezos has a superyacht worth $500 million, a lot of money just to shout to the world that “mine is bigger.” But in ancient times, such a boat may have signified the greatest inequality of them all: in the Egyptian myth of the “Boat of Ra,” the boat is the vehicle of the sun god. It takes both gods and elite men on board and saves them from the Apophis Serpent, the dragon of the Nile who is the embodiment of chaos and death. This is an ideological kidnapping of the myth of the universal deluge that goes back as far as the Mesopotamian myth of Utnapishtim in the Gilgamesh Epic, who, like Noah but far earlier, built a ship to preserve both humanity and the animals. The Greek shipbuilder is Deucalion, who appears, among other places, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The idea of a ship that is in effect a microcosm preserving what is most valued from the ultimate negation of death has had an extraordinary hold on the human race. In science fiction, spaceships expanded from small craft holding just their inventor and his friends—for example Dr. Zarkov, Flash Gordon, and Dale Arden—to the kind of traveling world represented by the Starship Enterprise, with all the comforts of home. Even larger are what are called generation starships, invented by Robert Heinlein in Universe, which are literally worlds, such as a hollowed out asteroid, structures so vast that their inhabitants may have forgotten that they are within an artificial structure taking hundreds of years to travel to another star system.
Such vast structures are a far cry from the traveling-tin-can simplicity of the Voyagers. But a curious paradox emerges from the ark narrative, one that the first Star Trek film seems to have been groping after in a limited but intuitive way. Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) starring the original cast, finds the Enterprise confronting a superhuman intelligence that calls itself V’Ger. At the heart of its energy cloud, Capt. Kirk finds a small machine with V’Ger written on it, wipes away a smudge and finds that it reads “Voyager.” An alien intelligence has found one of the Voyagers, rebuilt it into an entity with power godlike enough to do everything except wipe smudges off its side, and sent it off on its original mission to boldly go where no one had gone before, acquire knowledge, and return it to its Creator. What the rather silly plot seems to be reaching for is a revelation more or less identical to Dante’s Divine Comedy. Dante is on a quest for knowledge, one that he likens repeatedly to a voyage by ship. But the achievement of that knowledge transhumanizes Dante, so that for a moment in the final cantos he attains an epiphany that amounts to his mind’s becoming in a timeless moment identical to the mind of God. V’Ger has become more or less a god, but a god who has been created by human beings. What is being hinted at is a reciprocity of the divine and the human, a sense that the divine is the human turned inside out, a center become a circumference as vast as the universe, encompassing “The love that moves the sun and other stars.”
That is an enormous intuition, no doubt too large to fit inside the little ark of a newsletter. But let us see how far we can get by following the associative ramifications of the image of the ark. In the Bible, there is another sort of ark. Before they acquired the city of Jerusalem and Solomon built a Temple in it, the Israelites were desert nomads and had to carry their sacred center with them in the form of the Ark of the Covenant, a tent inside which was a throne on which resided the invisible presence of God. David’s greatest achievement as king was to bring the Ark of the Covenant into Jerusalem, where his successor Solomon would build a Temple to house it. The premise of Northrop Frye’s The Great Code: The Bible and Literature is that the Bible has always been read as a unity, but that the source of that unity is somewhat mysterious, not one of authorship. Whatever scientifically minded scholars may think of the notion, there seems to be a process of imaginative association working within the tradition itself over time, one that resulted in at least a verbal identification of the two arks:
In any case there appears to be an intermediate cyclical movement in Biblical history which runs, in the phrase of Robert Graves, “from ark to ark.” Here translations make a connection that the Hebrew does not: the Hebrew words for Noah’s ark (thebah) and the ark of the covenant (‘aron) are quite different; but the Septuagint uses the same [Greek] word (kibitos) for both, the [Latin] Vulgate uses arca for both, and the AV’s [King James’] “ark” follows suit. Noah’s ark, floating on a drowned world and coming to rest on top of a mountain, a gigantic seed of a new world with all future human and animal life in it, completes the first great cycle of human existence. Another, on a smaller scale, begins when the infant Moses escapes the fate of the other Hebrew children by being concealed in an ark. The Israelites carry the ark of the divine presence through the dry land they reach after their pursuers are drowned in the sea; and the ark is eventually brought into Jerusalem, where it rests at symbolically the highest point in the world, as Noah’s ark did before it. (198)
Frye goes on to find the suggestion of a third cycle in the New Testament, in which the container that preserves what is of greatest value is the manger of the infant Christ in the Nativity story, surrounded by animals that suggest Noah’s ark. The infant Jesus escapes the slaughter of the innocents by Herod’s soldiers by being carried down to Egypt, site of the original Exodus. At the end of this New Testament cycle, the Ark of the Covenant is revealed in Revelation 11:19 in the temple of the New Jerusalem that is heaven itself: “And the temple of God was opened in heaven, and there was seen in his temple the ark of his testament; and there were lightnings, and voices, and thunderings, and an earthquake, and great hail.”
The outcome of all these identifications is a vision of history as a repeated cycle of death and rebirth in which an “ark” preserves what is of greatest value from the forces of death and destruction, identified with the sea of chaos out of which Creation originally arose, and into which it periodically returns. Frye associates this cycle with lines from Robert Graves’ poem “To Juan at the Winter Solstice”: “Water to water, ark again to ark.” In the case of Noah’s ark, the ark’s precious contents are human and natural; in the Ark of the Covenant divine; in the person of Christ in the manger, both at once.
What is this ark, this structure that preserves what we most value from loss? In the story of Noah, it is a construct, a human creation, even if according to a divine blueprint. In the Genesis account, God is a stickler about the exact dimensions and construction, somewhat to the bewilderment of Noah in Bill Cosby’s once-famous monologue (“Uh, what’s a cubit?”). It is a metaphor for all human creation, whose first act is to draw a temenos, from the Greek verb meaning “to cut,” a demarcation that divides the inside from the outside, what belongs from what is excluded. In Milton’s account of the Creation in Book 7 of Paradise Lost, the Son uses a golden compass to draw a circle separating the world, or what will become the world, from the surrounding Chaos. The physical act is an objective correlative of a mental act that is the paradigm for all creation. I tell my composition students that their first task is to find their essay’s focus, drawing a circle in the midst of the chaos that is our normal state of mind and deciding what belongs and what doesn’t.
For the present newsletter, once I had the germinating seed (remember that Frye calls Noah’s ark and Hogan the Golden Record a “seed”) of the ark as a container preserving what we most value, I decided that what belonged to this discussion was a discussion of Jay Macpherson’s extraordinary poetic sequence “The Boatman.” Macpherson was Frye’s colleague, teaching a course on Classical mythology that was a linked counterpart to his legendary course on the Bible, but she was also an important poet, a Canadian Emily Dickinson, writing short poems in simple meters that are nevertheless densely packed, elliptical, demanding. Most of the “Boatman” sequence are first-person poems spoken by the Ark itself, a female vessel addressing its male creator: Noah’s anima figure, as a Jungian would say. I am not sure I totally understand these hermetic poems, but hope to make use of their endless suggestiveness.
In “Ark Artefact,” the ark is aware of itself, or herself, as a temenos, a demarcating form, saying to Noah,
How could you know your love If not defined in me, From the grief of the always wounded, Always closing sea? (39)
The Ark understands the Flood as a psychological event rather than a historical one, a fall of Noah’s consciousness into the chaos of the unconscious:
You dreamed it. From my ground You raised that flood, these fears… (38)
She is aware of having been shaped from that ground, or rather from the wood that grew from that ground, shaped by an artificer, fearful of being rejected and unmade:
If you repent again, And turn and unmade, me, How shall I rock my pain In the arms of a tree? (38)
I think we are probably intended to think of the nursery rhyme “Rockabye Baby,” in which the cradle will fall out of a tree, “And down will come cradle, / Baby and all,” a tragic version of the ark image disguised as a nonsense rhyme, a frightening image that we sing to kids.
But the Ark understands that redemption and rebirth will also occur psychologically, as a reversal of perspective in which center and circumference are reversed. During the Deluge, Noah is contained within the Ark, but when Noah awakes to the awareness that he has made the Flood, he becomes the circumference and both the waters and the Ark will float inside him, the Ark like a child in the womb, like an Eve who was never extracted from the body of Adam:
When the four quarters shall Turn in and make one whole, Then I who wall your body, Which is to me a soul, Shall swim circled by you And cradled on your tide, Who was not even, not ever, Taken from your side.
Yet the Ark’s final words seem to belie this image of potentially peaceful union. The last poem in the sequence, “Ark Parting,” the Ark returns to her original condition as a primal ground of being, abandoned by Noah, a female figure used as an anima figure by a male creator but then abandoned:
Outward the fresh shores gleam Clear in new-washed eyes. Fare well. From your dream I only shall not rise.
Here the Ark, the protective container who saves both Noah and all creation, is herself not saved by rather cast out as a kind of sacrificial scapegoat figure. We will return to the redemptive ark image soon, but I think it is important to note that there is what Frye would call a demonic parody of the ark narrative, one that in Words with Power he calls the sado-masochist cycle, “in which the female may tyrannize over the male or vice versa” (191). One of the famous expositions of that sado-masochist cycle is The White Goddess by Robert Graves. “To Juan at the Winter Solstice,” from which comes the “ark to ark” line, is a kind of synopsis of The White Goddess. The White Goddess is a kind of mythological dominatrix figure who mates with a male, abandons him, turns him into a sacrificial victim, renews her youth and virginity, and is ready for the next victim. Okay, the gossip here is too good to miss—and too revealing. An editor’s endnote in Frye’s Late Notebooks tells us that Macpherson when young had visited Graves in Mallorca before coming to study at the University of Toronto, where she fell under Frye’s influence. But Graves’s shadow still seems to have lingered over her imagination. In a fascinating notebook entry, Frye says,
Robert Graves told Jay that everyone was a murderer or a suicide, meaning, I suppose, that the sado-masochist cycle hits everyone somewhere. He added that all the nice people were suicides. That’s Nietzsche again: he couldn’t get clear of antithesis & cycle, so he keeps saying down with the suicides, up with the murderers. (336)
Graves himself was a suicide, meaning a masochist of the sort who is captivated by narcissistically cruel, capricious women. The woman in his own life was a poet named Laura Riding Jackson. A film about their relationship appeared in 2021, The Laureate. Riding once threw herself out of a window to demonstrate, I guess, an impulsiveness not afraid of nihilism. Graves promptly did what he was no doubt expected to do, threw himself out the window to prove he was equally capable of no-holds-barred excitement and thus worthy of her. “The Boatman” is also about a sado-masochist cycle, but one that moves in the opposite direction, with the female figure redemptively sacrificed for the good of the male.
However, the cycles of dominance and submission are only an ironic parody of the real cycle of the decreation and recreation of reality, imaged as the reversal of center and circumference. Remarkably, in addition to the poems we have been examining, which comprise a section titled “The Ark,” there is a standalone poem called “The Boatman” that also deals with the image of the ark, and also involves the reversal of center and circumference, but this time hopefully rather than ironically. It is as if the influence of Frye supersedes the influence of Graves, the comic vision superseding the tragic-ironic. And literally comic: the style is light verse, the tone witty, the mood a visionary exuberance like that of Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell. I have quoted it elsewhere, but it is essential to our argument, and too much fun to resist quoting some of it again.
The task is to convert the reader into an ark. You “pull him through his navel inside out,” which is to “get his beasts outside him / For they’ve got to come aboard him.” Once that happens “Let the tempest bust Creation: heed not you.” For “you’ve got along for comfort / All the world that ever shall be, was, and is.” “The Boatman” has a companion piece called “The Anagogic Man.” In the old medieval method of reading Scripture according to four levels of meaning, “anagogic” is the highest, “mystical” level. The anagogic man is Noah. Once again there is a reversal of center and circumference, for this Noah holds “All us and all our worlds” inside himself—not, however, as a human ark, but as a kind of walking alchemical sealed vessel, with a “golden bubble” instead of a head, a kind of cosmic fish bowl in which we swim. “Angel, declare: what sways when Noah nods? / The sun, the stars, the figures of the gods.”
These images may seem strange, but they give us the only kind of answer we can have to the question of what kind of ark may preserve all that we love. In ordinary experience, a dot of consciousness, the ego, stares outward at a world filled with objects of desire and love that the ordinary self cannot grasp, or, having grasped, cannot keep. The world recedes as if we were the Singularity of the Big Bang, exploding ever further from us, especially as we age. Within this perspective, life is perpetual loss, the entropy that is life in time. The only remedy is to reverse our perspective: the word metanoia in the New Testament, often translated “repentance,” means a change of mind, a “conversion”—another word that means a turning around. The ego is capable of germinating like a seed, although it has to fall to the ground and die to its ego-self to do so. It may become what I call the Monad in The Productions of Time, the sacred center, the still point in the turning world, the nothing out of which all things come. If it dies to its ego-centric self, it may become an expanding eye, opening wider and wider, eventually becoming the mandala that signifies both psychic and cosmic totality, the larger identity that Jung calls the Self. That mandala is the ultimate ark, but it is not an objective reality. Rather, it is a way of seeing, a way of being, a way of having except that what is possessed is not external wealth, upon which we squat like a dragon on a hoard. It is wealth that we carry with us, as part of us, as we carry our heart.
Jay Macpherson likes to address her readers directly, and it is easy to pick the habit up. Readers, I do not necessarily understand all this any more than you perhaps do. This week I have given you what one section of Macpherson’s book is titled: “A Book of Riddles.” Riddles are close to parables, and the disciples usually did not understand Jesus’ parables. One poem that also addresses its readers directly is Dylan Thomas’s “Author’s Prologue,” the first poem in his Collected Poems. In it, Thomas calls himself “the moonshine /Drinking Noah of the bay,” as he catalogues the natural world he views. “Moonshine” has a secondary meaning, because the day is “winding down now,” dark is coming, and, in the poem’s last line, “The flood flowers now.” Yet this Noah, though drunk, possibly because drunk, is also anagogic. The poem is an astonishing technical tour de force, 52 lines long, the first line rhyming with the 52nd, the second with the 51st, and so on to the center of the poem, where “farms” rhymes with “arms.” Why set oneself such a task? The key is that 26th line: “To Wales in my arms.” The two halves of the poem are two arms in which the poet has gathered all that he loves, in a circular shape, a hug. “My ark sings in the sun,” he says. The ark is his poem, which is his anagogic body or larger identity. Though the mortal Thomas died of moonshine at the age of 39, his poetic ark is still with us, still singing, like the head of Orpheus floating down the river of time.
References
Frye, Northrop. The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. Edited by Alvin A. Lee. Volume 19 in The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. University of Toronto Press, 2006.
Frye, Northrop. Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, 1982-1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World. Edited by Robert D. Denham. Volumes 5 and 6 of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. University of Toronto Press, 2000.
Frye, Northrop. Words with Power: Being a Second Study of ‘The Bible and Literature.’ Edited by Michael Dolzani. Volume 26 of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. University of Toronto Press, 2008.
Hogan, Linda. “The Voyagers.” In Dreams and Inward Journeys: A Rhetoric and Reader for Writers. 6th Edition. Edited by Marjorie Ford and Jon Ford. Pearson/Longman, 2007. 558-563.
Macpherson, Jay. Poems Twice Told: The Boatman & Welcoming Disaster. Oxford University Press, 1981.