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Your life was outwardly very privileged. Your were born into an aristocratic family in an imperial culture where a high position was yours for the asking. You were sent to the best schools with the result that, even though you did not complete your formal University studies, you remain to this day one of the most learned poets of the English language, the chief possible exception being John Milton. Sadly, your schooling affected you in another way, which has caused your notoriety to exceed your acclaim. Today you are popularly known primarily for being the author of several poems that helped to create the contemporary subculture of sado-masochism, especially “Dolores” and “Faustine.” If only those who turn to your works for their lurid side could be made to know and understand your life and why you wrote to your cousin Mary, your only love, when she rejected your suit, I had grown pure as the dawn and the dew,
There is so much more to know about you than this, and in my heart I know I am committing the same grievous error as the others in focusing on this point ahead of your virtues, but one cannot separate the two, and I have had reason to think about this a great deal. When you were twelve years old, you were sent to Eton, a most prestigious boarding school where corporal punishment was not merely a standard practice; it was a time-bound ritual tradition. It marked you, along with so many of your contemporaries that in brothels on the continent the practice of flagellation was referred to as ‘le vice Anglais.’ During certain formative stages of life, young people are very easily sexually imprinted. You described your masters’ approach to punishment, saying that some of them poured eau de cologne over the boys’ naked buttocks before hitting them because the fragrance heightened the erotic atmosphere for the master and the alcohol intensified the boys’ pain: The strokes were fierce enough to break the skin, allowing the liquid to run into the open wounds. Other stories told about you and, more importantly, the testimony of the songs themselves, as I experience them through a sympathetic maker’s mind, reveal the true nature of what happened to you as a result of the many floggings: You learned to shift, didn’t you? And once it was done, you could not go back. It was all one: the automatic eroticizing of pain, the flight into an interior dimension to escape shame and humiliation, and the later flights into the realm of inspiration, the place of power that was tainted by what you knew of the ways that led you there. And yet, my Swinburne, those flights carried you farther than anyone. Where are you today, and what would you say about these things if you could tell us? ***** This came to me directly after the passage above: HOW I KNOW THAT YOU HAVE HEARD
The fields that are grey and the fields
that are golden are always the same in some part of my mind, ***** Love is the only way to read another person. Love alone is large enough to permit true comprehension. When I was in school, the deconstructionist faction was an omnipresent, irritatingly strident force, but at least they did away with the pretence of objectivity in literary criticism. This is not a critical essay, but even so, I feel the constraint of intellectual knowledge, or lack of it—not an acceptable state of affairs. While poets put their intellect to the task, poetry would not be poetry without magic; that magic is a different kind of power, of which love is the purest and longest-lasting form. Sometimes love is expressed immediately and is immediately recognizable; sometimes it must twist and turn before it finds expression, and then the mind of the listener must do likewise. The more you care for someone, the more you will feel willingly compelled to patience and full application of empathy: the more deeply you will listen. Something in Swinburne’s voice evokes a huge response of love in me. I read him accordingly. The way I love him tells me so much about myself that I cannot help but feel it tells me a great deal about certain qualities that were present in him too. Swinburne, through his songs about the one he called ‘Proserpine,’ showed me the way to the Muse. Outwardly he professed an uncompromising atheism, writing vigorously against established religion and the notion of God, but his most personal songs are imbued with such depth of vision that they can only have sprung from sources anyone else would unhesitatingly call ‘spiritual,’ and I believe he would admit that too, if assured that it would not be used against him. He was caught up in the politics of his day, being inclined toward the free-thinking revolutionary side; one alternative is most obviously visible in the form of the Oxford Movement, which brought a huge Roman Catholic influence to bear on the artists of 19th century Britain. I am grateful that he went the way he did, preserving his independence of thought, but it means that one is required to reconcile his public statements of atheism with the content of his poems without putting foreign words into his mouth. I will assert that poetry, for all serious poets, tells a far deeper truth than any other form of writing; his poems are what they are. He loved someone he sometimes called Proserpine; she apparently had no life in the outward world. I dreamed of someone who initiated me as a poet and, while I see him in my Friend, my human Muse, ultimately I cannot place him in any certain location, either inside myself or out. The longer I live with him, the more I believe that this is as it should be. Swinburne, through his own image as man and poet, carried this charge for a time during my girlhood and has the potential to do so still. Strangely, as passionately as I have loved and still love him, this love does not tend to sexual expression, even in fantasy. Many are the nights I have spent by his side, in converse; the spell would be broken if I attempted to force it to include climactic sexual exchange. When I first met my Muse, we swam through an underwater passageway and emerged from it naked, or so I seem to recall; he showed me to a sleeping chamber and allowed me to lie down on his bed. When I awoke, I wondered if I had somehow misplaced the best part of the dream, the love scene, as nothing like it was present in my memory. After years of trying to conjure up such a scene in my waking imagination, only to feel it shy away again and again, I began to understand: The point is precisely not to find this relationship too satisfying in an ordinary way, not to allow it to replace physical life—bluntly, not to allow it to become a masturbatory escape—but at the same time, to yield freely to its ability to call up the most profound reserves of emotion and to direct the flow of these into song. There they often employ intense erotic imagery and, if quite successful, evoke a similar response from their listeners. The poet stands a little apart from the end result; that is all. This process is called ‘sublimation.’ Swinburne was divided in his sexual nature and his human unhappiness was bitter. He was disappointed in the one relationship that really mattered, knowing all along that it was doomed; not only was he such that “if they knew, /Not a soul upon earth would pity me,” but his lover was also his cousin, in a family where there had already been too many close marriages. He gave free rein to his inclinations elsewhere, and wrote about them as well; when I was in London five years ago, I found a cheap paperback edition of The Whippingham Papers on a rack with other notorious works of literary porn. He wrote this, he created very serious literary works, and he made fierce efforts to drink himself to death, all at once. By the time he was the age that I am now, the friendships on which he depended were falling apart in disastrous ways, his drinking was entirely out of control, and the end was in plain sight. A rescuer appeared in the form of a friend who set up housekeeping with his sister’s family and Swinburne, an odd ménage that proved to be stable if perhaps a little too quiet. Not a happy man, but a superb poet, his example showed me how to wrest beauty from sordid interior surroundings. Because I loved him from the start, somehow I saw the way he struggled and learned to emulate it. I also went through a stage of drinking, although not for the purpose of self-destruction; somehow he always had the power of words even though he often heard them through a haze of misery, but I was terrified of them. We have a great need to feel uncontaminated, ritually pure, who entertain the gods, and yet this is never really humanly possible. He showed me that this seeming conflict is not real, not finally so, although it cost him dear. ***** As a man, Swinburne was a strange as anyone
has ever been. In his appearance, in his character—a tiny man, only
about 5’4” or so and of very fragile build, his physical courage and endurance
were extreme—in his odd, hectic mannerisms, and in the way he composed his
songs—in every way he was not quite of this world. The artists who
were close to him when he was at the height of his powers reported that his
recitals of his daily production would sometimes last a couple of hours and
were accompanied by a sort of frenzied ecstatic dance. If you know
who is writing this now, you might safely assume that I compared our strangenesses
and felt greatly reassured: Yes, there had been another such person
(although he was more exotic by far than I), and yes, it was real—all the
things my intuition had told me about the true nature of inspired song, he
literally embodied. Of course I loved him with all my heart.
And yet, he was very sad. Like so many artists, but in a way that was perhaps more acutely conscious than usual, he seems to have been pulled back and forth between the two poles of his own moral nature. At times he not merely gave in to his sexual predilections, but reveled in them—or gave the appearance of doing so—and certainly did not object to being spoken of in connection with them. At other times, though, his natural idealism held sway and he regretted everything that stood in the way of his attaining his own true stature, in his work and in his life, as the two are finally one. Never mind what we admit outwardly; we have an image that we strive toward, and we measure our worth by the distance between there and here. I see us pacing back and forth between the two, never resting until we find the vantage point that allows us to see them in balance, but how can they cease to contend? Last November I wrote a series of entries in an online journal that seems to have succeeded in finally laying the nightmare that was haunting me and preventing me from giving full, unashamed attention to my work. What must the author of “Reginald’s Flogging,” “Epilogue to Reginald’s Flogging,” and “Another Epilogue to Reginald’s Flogging” have felt when he saw that he had created the following lines, from Tristram of Lyonesse, and compared the two extremes? “…So they lay This is mere foreplay to what follows. The passage continues for nearly another hundred lines, all of them written at this pitch or beyond. Artists do not create anything out of a vacuum; Swinburne had to find this within himself before he could cast it onto the page. I only began to understand his work in depth when I found my Friend and was similarly seized. Something had awakened him, something that he never lived but wrote as few or none in our language had ever written before. Swinburne and his friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti both wrote of erotic love in such intensely spiritual terms. I had no idea that anyone had ever given the power they described a name until I learned about Tantra in its specifically spiritual/erotic aspect. They worked by a combination of instinct and poetic tradition; I have had a very slight advantage in that I have been made aware that Tantra exists as a fairly well-developed path, although I have had little direct access to Tantric teachings (that is to say, primary documents). Poetry, for those who study it deeply, opens the same doors to as great a degree, but it makes even greater demands because our goal is not only to attain understanding but to create on the basis of that attainment. In Tantra, one works to awaken the ordinarily dormant power of kundalini, the storehouse of sexual/spiritual life-force energy that sleeps at the base of the spine, and to see it rise throughout all the subtle channels of the mind/body/spirit until it reaches its apex, figuratively located in the Crown chakra above the head, and there rejoins the cosmic potential from which it was drawn. The practitioner then enters an unlimited energy state in which they feel at one with all that exists. Finding my Friend was my initiation into that state, and when it was given, I turned to Swinburne for direction as he was the poet who had gone the furthest before me and mapped the territory. Kundalini can be manipulated rather than invited to awaken; reverse kundalini is the phenomenon that results from practices that are exciting in the short-term but deleterious in their lasting effects, inhibiting rather than encouraging spiritual enlightenment. Such practices immediately effect the limbic system, causing brief but intense bursts of energy to be released, as certain drugs do; like drugs, their effects are cumulative and destructive, a sort of borrowing on energy credit from one’s own resources rather than drawing on the unlimited source. What I have just described are the two poles I see standing at either end of my song teacher’s mind. When I knew him as my teacher, I understood that I wanted to pay tribute to him by seeking answers to the questions that vexed his life. A year after I first found my Friend, I wrote to him about Swinburne, saying that I knew I had been ‘called to untwist the twisted—not because its forms of expression offend, but because it weeps.’ ***** One scholar who has made a serious and, I feel, admirable study of your work, Professor Morse Peckham, says that contemporary readers are hampered in their appreciation of your poems because they do not know how to give them the close, slow reading they require. Sometimes your sentences are very long and complex and they do not yield their full meaning when read at an impatient prose pace. When I first began to write a great deal of verse, my poems were short, with short lines and sentences. As I entered more deeply into the flow of song, everything grew longer in tandem with my ability to concentrate and simultaneously refrain from thinking in prose. And yet, when I look back to the one poem I recall from my earliest days, a piece written as an in-class creative writing assignment when I was fifteen years old and in the ninth grade, much of what I am doing prosodically now was already present then. I was aware of your work at that time, but only just; I had not yet begun to penetrate it, so I cannot say if your influence was involved. We were told to write a poem with the first line starting with ‘A’ and each successive line beginning with the next sequential letter of the alphabet. Mine read, ‘A man who was quite fond of Pliny the
Elder There they are, my beloved amphibrachs, the short-long-short meter I favor; there the long, long sentences; and—what the reader of this tiny sample cannot know is that, in the story this poem tells, a man who is a dedicated enthusiast of a Roman author I then mistook for a philosopher (Pliny was a natural historian) buys a set of books which bear his name on the covers, but actually contain the works of the Marquis de Sade. He tells his neighbors about the brilliant and high-minded moral philosophy supposedly therein, they take one look at what is actually printed there, and they have the man committed. All I know for certain is that I had read your lyrics “A Forsaken Garden” and “The Garden of Proserpine.” I had read no biographical material. There was only one biography of you in our public library, and it was an early and tame one; I read it a year or two later when my Pre-Raphaelitism was at its peak. I was precocious enough to know about the terrible Marquis, although I had never so much as glimpsed his works (not for lack of trying) and did not know that he regarded himself as a philosopher; I assumed he was just a memorable pornographer. I may have known that you were a rumored masochist, but I could not have known of your admiration for Sade’s writings. As always, my verses ran ahead of my knowing on any other level. Only bits and pieces were present to my foremind, but the verses saw it all. You were even—repeatedly—taken into protective custody by friends and family members when you were on the verge of dying of excess. How very strange all of this is. The longer I live with it, the stranger it becomes. And the longer I work, the more I become myself in my songs, the closer I come to you. My verses have grown into confident, leisurely length, the element of time being one of their basic, conscious components. I do not agree with Professor Peckham that complex verse sentences must be read slowly and pieced apart like ordinary prose rhetoric, although I recommend that readers who are new to my style take that approach until they catch on; you taught me something that goes much, much deeper: that the nature of song is swiftness itself; that any sense of duration of time is the most mutable of things; and that the prose mind is not the song mind and must not predominate either in the making or the hearing of song. You taught me another lesson which I have always borne in mind, but which I am learning again on a new level even at this moment: You taught me that, in shifting back and forth between the poles, there is a sort of balance to be found in lightness and humor. No happy man lives the way you did during your middle years, and yet you were often able to laugh; the flagellation poems, as disturbing as they can be, are really very funny. Even readers who know you only by “The Garden of Proserpine” will appreciate your parody of your own style, “Nephelidia”: “From the depth of the dreamy decline of
the dawn through a notable nimbus of nebulous noonshine, And when Alfred, Lord Tennyson, was pontificating in public with “The Higher Pantheism,” you provided a dastardly accurate restatement of his ideas with “The Higher Pantheism in a Nutshell,” which ends, “Parallels all things are: yet many
of these are askew: Still, it is surely not meant to be a balancing act forever; this mode of humor is an adaptation to disagreeable circumstances more often than not, one that we might in the main forgo if we could cease to feel the pain that makes it necessary. Playfulness is welcome everywhere, but mockery of oneself—even as that serves to lighten, it also serves to remind. You make me smile, but I love you best when you sweep me away altogether. There, in the ecstasy of song, is found the death which is not death; which is life itself, sprung from song’s own source. And you know so well how to take me there—even after many years and many songs of my own, to do so lies well within your powers. From your “Hymn to Proserpine”: “O daughter of earth, of my mother, her
crown and blossom of birth, ***** The following verses were written between the third and fourth parts of this essay. I posted them on my Web page, AEAEA: Recurring Dream Island (www.pacifier.com/~starling), with this note: Exaltée is perhaps
the word you were searching for. You know, when the atmosphere is rife
with the incensuous odor of unwashed priestess. Quick, somebody, throw
a brick through the window. I do seem to be a bit under the weather.
A FEVERISH SORT OF AMUSEMENT
Always roaming around, never one with the
lesson intact; always searching for what has been found |
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