The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart

Excerpt-Hillman/Bly/Meade

Language: Speaking Well and Speaking Out

- James Hillman

…But the notion of ordinary, only literal speech can be questioned, since words cannot be cut free from their primordial messages. As Gerhart Hauptmann says, “Poetry is the art of letting the primordial word resound through the common word.” All words have roots, histories, families, genders, offspring. They reach back through centuries to the dead tongues of ancient peoples, and they go on accumulating wealth and shedding outworn baggage as they travel from region to region. They bring blessings—like a long-awaited letter from your son or your father; and they bring curses so that even the most soberly abstract term can fix us in spells that last for years, like a psychiatric diagnosis. Because words are so laden with hidden messages, they cannot help but be metaphors, by nature “poetic,” opening beyond their commonsense definitions into mystery and myth. In fact, the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico wrote, “a metaphor is a myth in brief.”

Thoreau recommends extravagance for breaking through usual language. “I am convinced that I cannot exaggerate enough even to lay the foundation of a true expression.” J. M. Cohen’s translation of the incredible exaggerations by the classic French writer Rabelais and a contemporary version of “Amergin and Cessair,” an ancient Celtic incantation, show the power of extravagance. Bombast, scurrility, farfetched similes and startlingly sensuous images, and the humongous immensity of their vocabularies enchant the eye as it reads, the ear as it hears. We are charmed out of the ordinary by the riches of words.

Besides richness—deepness. Something else lurks in the language of a poem. It is a “... sullen art / Exercised in the still night /W hen only the moon rages... ,” says Dylan Thomas. Wallace Stevens says poetry is: “A lion, an ox in his breast. . .stout dog. / Young ox, bow-legged bear, / He tastes its blood.” “Poetry Is a Destructive Force,” says Stevens; “It can kill a man.”

We have come to Lorca and what the Spanish tradition knows as the duende, a “spirit of the earth” “that has black tones.” “The true struggle is with the duende,” Lorca declares, which descends or arises into the body’s gestures and voice, half scream of pain, half leaping exaltation, and wholly a creation of the blood soul. “The poet creates in a trance,” writes Hernandez; and Orpingalik, the Eskimo, knows it too, “making his breath come in gasps and his heart throb.” Poetry as seizure by the lion.

There is yet another element essential to poetic language: elegant intelligence or the edge of wit. When Amergin and Cessair compete, theirs is a battle of wit. They challenge each other to the farthest shores of imagery. How far “out” can you go and still stay sharply brilliant? How to find the fine line between sheer beauty and mere bravado? It takes effort, says Samuel Johnson; recollection in “tranquility” says Wordsworth, “modesty,” says Hernandez, and “tradition,” says Pound, because, says Machado, a poem must be well made, as evidenced in the subtle rhythms and complex internal rhymes of Marianne Moore’s “Rigorists.”