Robert Archambeau presents Introduction to
Regrounding a Pilgrimage by John Matthias
& John Peck, Edited by Katie Lehman
(Dos Madres Press, Loveland, OH, 2018)
A Gathering of Ways is a suite of poems centering on the act of pilgrimage—and
therefore, one might reasonably assume, the poem of a pilgrim, on his way to a
sacred place for sacred purposes.[1] But John Matthias is a funny
sort of pilgrim. We have it, after all, on the best of authorities that the
poetry of John Matthias has heretical tendencies. Here’s what Robert Duncan
said about Matthias in an undated letter from the early 1970s:
Matthias is a
goliard—one of those wandering souls out of
a Dark Age in our own time . . . carrying with him as he goes in his
pack of cards certain key cards that come ever into his hand when he plays: the
juggler (as he was to be portrayed later in the Tarot), the scholar whose head
is filled with learning and the fame of amorous women and the heretic
remembering witch-hunts yet to come.
A goliard! Already Matthias is in trouble,
the goliards being clerical students of the Middle Ages who affirmed the flesh
and derided the corruption of Mother Church. And not just any goliard, but a
goliard Duncan associates with the juggler of the Tarot (in esoteric decks, a
figure for the magus who masters dark arts) and with the heretic seeing into a
future of persecutions. We may as well call in Torquemada’s inquisition and get
this heretic burning over with. But Duncan is talking about the Matthias of the
sixties and early seventies, and thinking of Matthias’s political radicalism
and of his early obsessions with alchemy and witchcraft. What of the Matthias
of the later Matthias?
Consider three long poems of Matthias’s that
form a poetic suite: “An East Anglian Diptych,” “Facts from an Apocryphal
Midwest,” and “A Compostela Diptych,” written between 1984 and 1990, and
published collectively as A Gathering of Ways. The general project of the poems indicates a turning-away from
the Matthias described by Duncan: they are attempts of coming to terms with
what Matthias called his “post-activist consternation” and alienation from
American life. “An East Anglian Diptych” is Matthias’s attempt to make a
psychological home for himself in England, and “Facts from an Apocryphal
Midwest” represents a similar home-making project in America. This is no longer
the radical wanderer, but the poet in search of stability. Indeed, “A
Compostela Diptych,” takes as its subject the ancient pilgrim routes across
France and Spain to Santiago de Compostela. It’s an attempt by the
post-activist Matthias to come to terms with, and possibly make himself at home
in, both the history of the West and the dominant spiritual tradition of the
West, Catholicism.
But to what terms does he come? If I were to
try to sum them up, I’d say this: in “A Compostela Diptych,” Matthias attempts
to present a totalized history of the West and of Catholicism. But he fails to
find a happy totality, and this drives him toward an otherworldly yearning, a
yearning for a world beyond history, an eternal world free of violence. This is
essentially a Gnostic yearning for some eternal, infinite elsewhere of light, a
yearning from which he only escapes at the very end of the poem.
When I speak of a “totalized history” in “A
Compostela Diptych,” I want to use the term “totality” in a vaguely Levinasian
sense: as something finite, in which diverse elements are reduced to “the
violently pacified empire of Same” or “the counted-as-one” (to use Dominic
Fox’s glosses for Levinas’s “totality”). With regard to history, we can think
of totalization as the opposite of an unending series of discrete events—the
opposite, that is, of Henry Ford’s version of history as “one damn thing after
another”—or perhaps we can think of it as the hammering of such discrete
phenomena into something whole, in which apparently disparate parts are in fact
manifestations of a single force, or repetitions of a single pattern. We’re on
the same page about this if you’re thinking of one of the most famous passages
in the works of Walter Benjamin, which reads:
A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking
as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating.
His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one
pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we
perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling
wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like
to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is
blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that
the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the
future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows
skyward.
This is a vision of history as total, and as
total disaster. And this is very much the vision of history that Matthias gives
us in “A Compostela Diptych.”
It doesn’t seem that way at first, though. “A
Compostela Diptych” begins with what seems to be a happy vision of the many
pilgrims who have trodden the various routes through France and Spain to the
cathedral at Santiago de Compostela. There’s a barrage of proper names of
people and places: some forty-one different proper names in the first
forty-five lines of the poem. On the face of it, this doesn’t seem like the
writing of a man who would present history as a totality. Nothing, after all,
insists on irreducible specificity more than a proper name. Indeed, proper
names will be very significant at the end of the poem, when Matthias shakes
himself free of a totalized version of history—but I’m getting ahead of myself.
The point I want to make here doesn’t have to do with proper names, but with a
collective pronoun, “they.” Unlike proper names, collective pronouns reduce the
many to the one, and what we see happen in the opening of “A Compostela
Diptych” is a reduction of the people of different European nations and
centuries into a single, collective, “they”—a trans-historical subject for the
people of Catholic Europe. Here we have the multitudes “counted-as-one.” It
doesn’t seem, at first, to be anything but a joyous affair, a holy journey
uniting the many. But this all changes a few pages into the poem. After
Matthias gestures toward the song of the pilgrims, he adds this:
And there was other
song—song sung inwardly
to a percussion of the
jangling
manacles and fetters
hanging on the branded
heretics who crawled the
roads
on hands and knees and
slept with lepers under
dark façades of abbeys
& the west portals
of cathedrals . . .
There is a dissonance in the happy totality
of history: those who do not fit, those who are expelled, despised, oppressed.
This is a vision of the violence of the totality, and soon the history his poem
recounts becomes a history of crusade, jihad, and inquisition, while a small
minority yearns for an escape into timeless peace. Indeed, history becomes
totalized in a new way—as Benjamin’s totality of “one single catastrophe which
keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage.”
Matthias creates a sense of this catastrophic
historical totality through four main techniques. I call them coincidence in
place; rhyming actions; musical refrain; and musical reprise.
Coincidence in place presents history as
total catastrophe by giving us a series of almost archeological sections in
which the same geography hosts similar events over time. For example, Matthias
shows us Charlemagne’s minions slaughtered during a crusade in Spain. These
events coincide in space with later massacres of the Spanish Inquisition
centuries later, and with still later massacres perpetuated by Napoleon in the
Peninsular War. We dig into the history of particular places, and, like
Benjamin’s angel, see only wreckage piling upon wreckage.
By “rhyming actions” I mean historical events
that Matthias presents as essentially parallel. Notable among these is the fate
of the cathedral bells of Santiago. Early in the poem we see these hauled away
by the conquering armies of Islamic Spain under Almanzor, who hangs them upside
down in his great mosque and uses them as candelabra. Much later in the poem
and in history we see Alfonso VI of Castile sack the mosque and take the bells
back to Santiago, installing them in the cathedral for their original use. The
effect of these actions, which echo one another, is to remind the reader of
conflict, and of the hubris of conquerors, as the constants of history.
There are many refrains in “A Compostela
Diptych,” but among the most resonant refrains is the phrase “darkness fell at
noon.” We hear it at many moments in the poem when political disaster falls.
The refrain not only serves to unite these moments—it also connects those
moments to more modern disasters. Darkness at Noon is, after all, the title of Arthur Koestler’s novel about the
evils of Stalinism.
Musical reprise is a technique quite common
in opera and musical drama, but unusual in poetry: the passing of the same
lyrical part from one voice to another in different contexts. A number of
different passages get a reprise in “A Compostela Diptych,” but the most
insistent one is Charlemagne’s dream of war, an eighteen-line passage lifted
from the Chanson de Roland. We’re first given it as a prophetic dream in the mind of
Charlemagne, but we hear it again, in whole or in part, in the voices of other
characters (notably Aimery Picaud, the chronicler of the pilgrim routes, and
John Moore, the English general killed while fighting Napoleon’s armies at
Corunna), or with reference to other conflicts, including modern acts of
terrorism by Basque separatists. The effect of the reprise is to make all of
history into Charlemagne’s nightmare of war—a nightmare from which we seem
unable to wake up.
Not that some characters in Matthias’s poem
don’t try. Accompanying the long nightmare of history recounted in “A
Compostela Diptych” is another story, a story of Gnostics who long for a world
beyond this broken, bruised, and evil one in which we seem perpetually
imprisoned. This group includes the historical Gnostics and heretics of the
times and places covered by the poem (Cathars, Albigensians, and the like). But
Matthias interprets Gnosticism broadly, and includes in it the Eleusinian
mysteries, the practitioners of the medieval Trobar Clus, and the Sufi mystics
of Islamic Spain. He even includes Ezra Pound, wandering as a young man through
the south of France, and dreaming of a light beyond the nightmare and wreckage
of history.
There is much in “A Compostela Diptych” to
indicate that Matthias would join with the Gnostic tradition, especially in the
poem’s final section. Here, Matthias presents us with a moment where we seem to
leave history, and indeed this world, behind, in an intersection of the
timeless with time. The occasion for the intersection is the explosion of an
enormous Spanish armory, an explosion that shakes foundations and, from many
miles away, creates shockwaves that ring the Santiago cathedral bells, the same
ones that had been hauled away by conquering Moors and hauled back by
crusaders. Now, we’re told
men
whose job it was to ring
them stood
amazed out in the square & wondered if this thunder
and the ringing was in
time for Vespers
or for Nones or if it
was entirely out of time . . .
As it turns out, it’s the latter: the
explosion is followed by a stillness that Matthias identifies with the silence
before the existence of time. We are taken to a place of stillness “As it was .
. . in the silence that preceded silence” when “there were neither rights nor
hopes nor / sadnesses to speak of,” where “in the high and highest places
everything was still.” We’re outside of time, and certainly outside of the
totalized, catastrophic history with which the poem has presented. Indeed,
inasmuch as we are in some boundless place, we have escaped totality, and
encountered the infinite.
Another kind of poet would end things here.
Indeed, a properly modernist poet would end things here—gathered into the
artifice of eternity (as in “Sailing to Byzantium”), or purged of worldliness
by fire (as in “Little Gidding”). But Matthias doesn’t. Instead of turning from
the world of history, he returns to it—in fact, for the first time in the poem,
he enters history by name, appearing with his wife Diana on the pilgrim trails.
Here’s the passage:
Towards Pamplona, long
long after all Navarre
was Spain, and after the
end
of the Kingdom of Aragón, & after the end of the end,
I, John, walked with my
wife Diana
down from the Somport
Pass following the silence
that invited and
received my song
It goes on, in prose saturated with more
proper nouns—twenty-nine in twenty-one lines—to describe John and Diana “blest
and besotted” in Spain, and in their moment of history. Escape to a timeless
realm would be the Gnostic’s happy ending, but the true spiritual tradition
informing A Gathering of Ways turns out to be something rather different, the best analog for
which is the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. For Levinas, the encounter with
the unbounded or infinite is not an end in itself: rather, it returns us to
experience with a sense of wonder, and an invitation to enter into dialogue
with the world. And this sort of return and invitation is what we get in “A
Compostela Diptych” when Matthias appears in the historical terrain of his
poem, and when the silence “invite[s] and receive[s]” his song. The encounter
with the infinite releases him from a sense that history is catastrophe and
nothing more. Moreover, by inviting Matthias’s particular song, the infinite
shows it welcomes proliferation, rather than the reductions of totalization:
Matthias’s song is just one voice in a boundless infinity, not the total
summation of all things.
It’s important to note the role of proper
names here, because it underlines a slight difference between Matthias and
Levinas. For Levinas, the encounter with the infinite comes about through
confronting a human face, in all its particularity. For Matthias, though, the
encounter with the infinite is with something still and silent and beyond us.
But the effect of that encounter is to return us to the world of specific
people and places, the world of proper names—and to show us that this world is
not reducible to some totalized history of catastrophe. Particularity trumps
totalization at the end of the poem, as a litany of proper names unassimilated
into a grand pattern of catastrophe leaves us blessed and besotted. In the end,
it is this return that prevents Matthias from being a Gnostic. As much as he is
fascinated with that tradition, he can’t join it: he is too much in love with
all of us who can be named.
[1] This
essay was originally published as “History, Totality, Silence” in Robert
Archambeau’s Inventions
of a Barbarous Age: Poetry from Conceptualism to Rhyme (Asheville, NC: MadHat Press, 2016).
