Prof. Eugene Narrett -
Western Poeisis vs Jewish Derekh
[excerpt of meditation on Shelley's poem "Julian & Maddalo"]
Western Poeisis vs Jewish Derekh [excerpt of meditation on Shelley's poem "Julian & Maddalo"]
...A broken Prometheus, a Hunger Artist still strong, angry and hopeful enough to sing, the Maniac knows his madness is heightened by wearing a “mask of falsehood,” a smiling mask over the tangle of his bifurcated history; “no scorn or pain or hate could be so heavy as that falsehood is to me,” he emphasizes, expressing the true agony or passion of the meta-fiction, the one it inflicts on itself. He also epitomizes the use of art as disguise, to avoid further scorn, not to impose imperial schemes. This is an essential distinction. Here we see, at the very center of the myriad liminal figures and enwrapped narratives of the poem the greatest transformation of all: Shelley, a unique Unitarian with an intriguing identification with the degraded status of the Jews shifts the West’s imago-cult from its own self-glorification in art to the pattern of Jewish survival in exile, the need to play a degraded role, like Edgar inKing Lear in order to retain genuine identity. This role is the antithesis of the dazzling artifice of the West’s presentation; it is “to take the most degraded shape that penury in contempt of man brought near to beast.”[1] Like Kafka’s Hunger Artist, the Maniac is a figure of the Jew amidst the fantasies and shadows of the Western beauty show, its pageantry of the voracious, sinuous panther, Dionysus or the “beautiful blond beast.” In the liminal crux of Shelley’s transformative narrative, hidden within an elegant Western fiction and its dominant trope, the tower, is its victim: by his art and ‘act’ the Maniac, like the Jew, like Edgar, “will preserve [his] life” and all the truth and insight of his battered identity may be heard and perhaps understood.
It is not allegory, the parallel is not precise and the classicist Shelley (“we are all Greeks”) always has one foot firmly planted in Hellenism. But his beautiful partner, “pale Pain, my shadow” who treacherously abandons and degrades generative poeisis is not only all the cherished fictions of the West, but a figure of the West in its abuse and discarding of its Jewish father: “I cannot bear…more changed and cold embraces, more misery, disappointment and mistrust to own me for their father.” The degrading lethal “embraces” the West gives in its ‘merciful’ condemnation (its appropriations of the shoah, for example) of the Jews is a liminal act like the bitter and barren embraces by which the salt ooze breeds from earth “amphibious weeds,” a trope of the West’s hybrid identity and, as noted earlier, a figure of Aphrodite’s horrible and ambiguous formation. “The narrow space of level sand” left by the churning of “the tide of [bad] faith” is the “very narrow bridge” that Jewish tradition aptly teaches is the world that Edom has given to those whose identity it stole “to construct a new stage” for its play. The churning “wild language” of the Maniac spatters out a long series of metaphors on the place the West’s image cult has assigned the victim of its theft: “to bear this load as a jade urged by the whip and goad to drag life on…and not to dare to give a human voice to my despair” (300-11). The way of truth must hide not only truth but the groan heightened by the need to wear “a mask of falsehood.” The code of the Maniac’s song uncovers the nexus of Western cruelty to its essential singer. In Hellas, ‘Ahasuerus’ the Wandering Jew and his repudiation of the image-cult delusion emerges to direct the drama just as Israel slowly and in torture is emerging from the West’s efforts to cleanse itself and become a ‘pure’ artifice of eternity, an uncomplicated and dead Lancelot, dead like the ‘perfected’ Georgiana in “the Birthmark.”[2] Repudiating theurgic poeisis, Israel will be free from the mad, ultimate meta-fiction or grail, the blood communion in which the West wants its Jewish victim and source to die with it in “a vast humanitarian situation.”[3]
There is more; as if answering the yet un-written paradox of Keats in “Grecian Urn,” the Maniac in his exposure of the lie and its pain exclaims, “there is one road to peace and that is truth, which follow ye!” There is no more succinct statement of Judaism: shalom, cognate of its root, shaleim (“integrity,” “wholeness”) comes only from truth, emet, the West’s greatest clown.[4] This road (derekh) is the antithesis of the West’s Hellenist ‘truth,’ Love [sic], romantic love or the passion play “which sometimes leads astray to misery” (347-9), this from the poet who exalts love as the essence of drama and moral good, refracting it “as from a thousand prisms and mirrors” to fill the universe with light [5]. The cult of love’s perfect and pure artifice, its ideal passion and professions of “mercy” leads to the “cleansing” of “wintriest bronze” and the shoah. What is Hellenist in the Maniac’s wild music is the reiterated wish for death: “heap on me soon, O grave, thy welcome dust!” This is the liminal turn of the West, when idealization fails, to death and human sacrifice. In contrast, from the threshold (“Pesach”) Israel leapt and leaps across from degradation and bondage to self-mastery and the road of truth which leads to life and, in time, will lead to “peace for the far and the near…” The dogma and Romance of ‘love, love, love,’ leads, as the Maniac remarks, to “misery,” death and the wish for death, the culture death the West has been dying for centuries, a magical mystery tour of de-population and erasure of boundaries, the essence of pollution.[6]
The heart of this dramatic poem’s complex narratives, disguised personae and intense liminality is, then, the Maniac. Beginning the postlude of his revelation, he exclaims “how vain are words” and proceeds, for Shelley were unveiling his heart to the attentive, to define his music and “the wild language” of his lament as poetry. Julian adds, he “spoke—sometimes as one who wrote, and thought his words might move some heart that heeded not” (286-7, emphasis added): words, spoken or written may express a truth or construct a healing image through Romance’s apocalyptic-elegiac agony. The convergence of speech, text and performance in the dark of poeisis, that is, drama lies on the page.
But from my lips the unwilling accents start,
And from my pen the words flow as I write,
Dazzling my eyes with scalding tears… my sight
Is dim to see that charactered in vain
On this unfeeling leaf which burns the brain
And eats into it…blotting all things fair
And wise and good which time had written there. (475-81)
It is a small figural leap to the far different tone and aspiration of “Ode to the West Wind” whose “dead leaves” may “quicken a new birth.” The lines above are a rich site of Shelley’s metaphoric thought as he tries to ‘turn a page.’ The poetic wild language (“a folded leaf in hue too beautiful for health,” 280-1) of the Maniac’s shadow play, his dialog with his lost homolog, the trebly embedded play within the poem is the liminal place where speech and text merge, re-creating the past. Unlike “Lines on the Medusa” here it is not the reader or the dramatis personae or title characters, but the Maniac who is scored by the cruel memories he speaks in writing that burns (supra) in a dark version of the ‘sparks from ashes’ figure. His situation is like that of Usher in Poe’s later story, seeing a reflection of his madness in his words that re-double the hold of pain on him. Art fails its task of idealization but it may instruct.
Julian and Maddalo weep in sympathetic identification with the Maniac who speaks and weeps in his sleep and dreams, his trauma forcing a path from waking to these realms of Romantic generativity. His trauma thus is the inverse of the Poet’s in “Alastor” whose dream vision poisons his life: the Maniac’s experiential pain invades his rest and sleep making them an unwilled extension of his song which is not idealizing but revelation, an attempt to return to or at least lament the real world that is ravaged. The Poet’s dream visions emerge from sleep to destroy his days, like a paradigm of image-work. His story is Romantic, but the Maniac’s use of music and poetic speech inverts this pattern.
In the Maniac’s confession, a genuine not a Rousseauvian one, the “one great poem which all poets, like the cooperating thoughts of one great mind have built up since the beginning of the world”[7] becomes a searing trauma in one particular mind that characters its likeness, inviting sympathy not engraving imitation. If poetry does transform it is through sorrow and pity this inner narrative suggests. The agonized poet, whose urbanity is real but still a mask of falsehood and propriety, writes this poem from the inside-out, like an Escher illustration. This poem does not create an ideal self but unmasks real wounds so that the agonized self may emerge disguised: the persona is an extended agonized elegy seeking sympathy that might heal: poetic drama on paper in place of the deeds of Edgar in Lear. The Maniac’s music is a “shadow” of loveliness “from which shine, fiery and lurid, struggling underneath, the agonies of anguish and of death” expressed in his words. Unlike “the Medusa” from which I quote these words, his music “creates a heaven of sacred silence, hushed to hear,” (260-1) not a gallery of enthralled petrified statues. Indeed, his cruel lover whose curses engraved and seared themselves into his brain was like the Medusa. Music, not physical beauty, as with the Medusa, serves as a veil of anguish that can be expressed directly in ‘unmeasured’ poetry that scans well, if explosively. And his ability to make “a heaven of hell,” briefly is not by satanic casuistry; Shelley uses the reference to Milton as a veil that obscures the Maniac’s difference from most of his image-making protagonists. The Maniac is a figure of healing liminality who throws “the melodious hue of beauty across the darkness and the glare of pain” of the other sufferers in the tower and over his own; his melodies “humanize and harmonize the strain” to suggest the way to a “healing Paradise,” a road that Julian follows too late (for the Maniac), -- out of sight of the “polluting multitude.”[8]
Unlike Hellenist demi-gods of change, of rape, metamorphosis and murder-into-art, of sculpture that Shelley so loved (“twin-born with poetry”), the Maniac, Shelley’s most disguised self, takes a Christian way out of his song: “I give thee tears for scorn and love for hate” a dramatic transposition that ostensibly re-makes the world and given Shelley’s views of Christian hypocrisy, a sharp barb. “Here I do cast away all human passions, all revenge, all pride and do but hide under these words, like embers, every spark of that which has consumed me” (496, 501-5). As noted, he attempts this renunciation after identifying his song with the curses of his tormentor (“the ancient Pilot, pain sits beside the helm again” EH 333-4), re-making their effects. The gospel negation of feeling, the antithesis of the song perhaps suits its ending but also contains the figure that will emerge in the embattled hope of “Ode to the West Wind’s” last stanza, the embers of his agonized self scattering “ashes and sparks, my words, among mankind”: triumph through death, the passion play adopted from the quality of endurance that Shelley honored and which derive ultimately from Psalm 84[9] and the story of the Exodus. He will triumph in his words whose fires derive and are nurtured, “like darkness to a dying flame,” in the ashes of his life, the “shadows” of “sympathies that wax and wane in lovers’ eyes.”[10]
It is a masterful transition: both rejecting and completing poeisis in the ethos of the cult that exalts image-making and establishes ‘truth’ around its ever-greater embellishment in art: the cross, the blood-cup, the queen of heaven, the “seamless garment” of universal communion. But the poem transits borders of liminality – going from sound and storm to silence and quiet weeping match the passage from evening through night to morning, separation and then departure. “The following morning, urged by my affairs,” says Julian, without bothering to explain the details of the patently hollow rationale, “I left bright Venice .” The place of art may not be the site of transformation despite the liminality of the scene treated with the most comprehensive of poetic modes, drama. The anguished music of the maniac is a force of separation; any healing change will take time and be inaccessible to fiction. The essential Romantic leaves the message that poetry alienates at the poem’s end, the ‘goodbye and good riddance’ of its final ‘curtain.’
Julian emphasizes in the last act’s first part (547-83, see above, his separation from Maddalo to whom he yet gave the epigrammatic ‘last word’ on the relation of suffering to poetry, 544-6) that Venice is a place of loneliness and art: “one may write or read in gondolas day or night…unseen, uninterrupted,” just his stance as he stood “stealing [the Maniac’s] accents from the envious wind, unseen” letting himself be “charactered” in a double sense. As for Venice and the arts, “books are there, pictures, and casts from all those statues fair which were twin-born with poetry”; “in Maddalo’s great palace [there is] subtle talk to make me know myself” and efface the distinction between night, dawn and day (551-63). Added to all these wonders, Julian “imagined,” past tense, he didn’t act but if he had… we are left to wonder if a combination of art and sympathy could have affected a healing change. He imagined that if he had studied the Maniac “with zeal as men study some stubborn art” (as “the Jew, Ahasuerus” studies to gain “sovereignty and science” [11]), he mighthave gained “an entrance to the caverns of his mind.” For Shelley this connotes the source of impetuous spirit and transformative creativity from the caverns of mind (mingling with the waters of “the everlasting universe of things” and the winds figured in “Mont Blanc,” in the nuptial cave of Prometheus and Asia to the birth-cave of the Witch of Atlas and of Rousseau in “the Triumph,” all generative figures. This “might have been an idle thought” Julian comments for the urbane Shelley, enduringly and increasingly skeptical about the transformative and even the beneficial effects of image work (skepticism which makes the metaphoric, ejaculatory exaltations of Poetry in “A Defence” often seem as strained as they are beautiful and intriguing). Thus, Julian’s “dream of baseless good…was all accomplished not” (578-82). Like the sunset, like all images it vanishes “without a trace” and Julian leaves “bright Venice ,” the euphemism covering the trauma of liminality, questions of damnation and ruin with which the poem deals. “The rest is silence” as the great drama about the show and play of poeisis relates.
But Shelley offers a variant in his coda: “let the silent years be closed and cered over their memory as yon mute marble where their corpses lie” requests Maddalo’s daughter (613-15). The deep truth remains imageless via the new, sympathetic partnered narrative of the wise innocent and the older, chastened “perilous infidel” whose “wrinkled cheeks” would remain in the realm of fiction. A bond has been re-forged. Return, death, memory and the hidden narrative are the ultimate drama, the real drama is hidden as the liminal power of the Maniac and the poem recedes, like the lives of real people, into mist: the deep truth is imageless, to be enacted and known, not recovered or explained...
Peace is not in this play embedded in the great darkness, the long dark night of the dominion of Esau and its cult of the beautiful image: in the heart of the poem, its longest section by far its controlling narrator uses poetry to describe life honestly, not to make it beautiful; on the contrary. As we have seen, the revelation of horror is transformative for all concerned as Shelley transforms lyric poetry into drama that testifies both for and against the aesthetic perfections it embodies ultimately to bury. It is Israel that the West incorporates, literally, and buries, letting him out, so to speak, as a wandering Jew of various hues. But when the veil is torn aside from the pent mind of degraded Jewry and Israel, and from the terrified and terrifying West we see a figure of its image-compulsion, its Siren, Circe and La Belle Dame sans Merci; “the nightmare Life-in-Death” of Coleridge or, as the Maniac describes her, “Death’s dedicated bride” (382-5) “pallid” as a Greek bust when airbrushed by history and enshrined by Art Historians, the priests of the cult of beauty. As we have been explaining from the outset, this “bride” or “ghastly paramour” is a “mockery,” a reflection, “pale Pain, my shadow,” the phantom and fiction found in idealizing poeisis, always treacherous (ready to collapse back into “the sole self”)[12] and chastening to those devotees who deify it for identity formation: i.e. for idol worshippers. Imagination “cannot cheat so well as she is famed to do, deceiving elf…”
Idol worship is the utmost liminal place where the truth and peace of life is inverted by narcissistic artifice, the cult of the hollow heart and hybrid culture. But idol worship is rejected and discarded in “Julian and Maddalo” having been partially introduced in the person of Maddalo as is most of the stage management that is the human imitation or mockery of Providence : “a new stage had to be constructed” wrote the imagist, Stevens. Mocking and displacing Providence , stage management was and is the logic of culture as image cult, a cult of aesthetics that invents, vilifies and defines itself against “the eternal Jew” and that scripts reality for all people. Identifying himself with this fiction and partly with the Jewish people it viciously represents, it was inevitable that in time and irony, via glorious fictions of liminality and synesthesia that Shelley would finally expose and repudiate the triumphal imperialism of the image. In the end, the play is not the thing however glorious may be the mirror it holds up to life as the Maniac does, through a glass darkly; truth and peace do not arrive via mirrors but by prescribed actions with living experience that hold a society together in integrity, lived not imagined or imaged. Had Julian been a true apostate, he would not have left Venice and the Maniac to their fate, and his own final ‘portrait’ might well have been different. Shelley understood this and saw a different and differently sad version of his future, one in which personal truth could be simply shared if not expressed in verse. Words do not change though they may veil the past and present various versions of it to an undiscerning future; the self cannot become, without anguish and the lie of personae, an artifice: to be pure, Orpheus must lose his head (image) and life... The West is and long has been in the process of losing both.
Two dramatic poets and personae wielded by one lyric dramatist present two perspectives like a Renaissance mirror on the images that vie for emblematic status in a poem whose contentions climax is a tormented man’s broken narrative drama. He repudiates though he cannot escape or undo the image of the person that tortured him and through his “fancy” (the faculty that deploys imagination) still tortures him to death: like Lancelot and Percival, Shelley, rejecting the Western project “had to” die or become cloistered, like Julian. Like the West, the betrayer’s “work is [almost] finished” and all are “left alone,” consumed by the bewildering terrors of diverse anomie, State-generated terrors and its terrifying ‘panaceas.’ When worshipped as an ideal identity, the image does nothing but “lie love” in one’s face with the end being uprooting and sterility as if done by “some maniac monk” (423-8), embodied in postmodern “family courts.” The simile of castration resembles Lancelot’s fundamental dilemma, born of his bad faith and adultery, themselves figures of the West he represents: an “adulterate beast” with “witchcraft in his wits and treacherous gifts.”[13]
[1] King Lear, 2.3.6-9, “I will preserve myself and am bethought to take the basest and most poorest shape that ever penury in contempt of man brought near to beast,” a precise definition of Judaism in the West. See Shelley’s, “the Serpent is Shut Out from Paradise ” included in his letter to Edward Williams, 26 January 1822, for this imagery of “acting a forced part” to conceal pain; “wearing on my brow an idle mask…” The mask is trauma transfigured. Jones op. cit. II #681, first published as “To Edward Williams” but part of Shelley’s “saddest poems all raked into one heap” that he mentioned to his publishers two years earlier, supra.
[2] Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Birthmark” (1843)
[3] See Alice Bailey’s essay, “the Inner Source of the Outer Turmoil” (1939) for the theosophist ‘solution’ to the Jewish problem.
[4] “Emmet Kelly,” the lead clown of America ’s great circus are lightly anglicized Emet Keli, "media of truth" which connotes both the degraded exilic Jew who ust play the clown to survive among the West’s eroticized dominion.
[5] “A Defence of Poetry” 282-3; Aphrodite re-visioned and fulfilled as Asia (PU 2.4-5) or the passage in “Epipsychidion” 170-83, cited above. It is this fusion of love, imagination and moral good that is decisively rejected in “the Triumph of Life” with imagination seen as a betrayal of love and negation of moral good.
[6] Mary Douglas formulates this point of “matter out of place” in Purity and Danger (NY 1964)
[7] Shelley’s Prose, op. cit. 287
[8] “Lines on the Medusa,” 4-16; EH 355-6
[9] Psalm 84:7, “Those who traverse the valley of thorns transform it into a wellspring…”
[10] Shelley, “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” (1816), 42-6
[11] Hellas 551-5
[12] John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale” (1819), 70-4; “the fancy cannot cheat so well as she is famed to do”
[13] Hamlet 1.5.41-2, aptly, it is the ghost of Hamlet’s father, image of an image that exposes the hybrid, incestuous brother who murdered him and took his wife as Rome took “the maiden daughter of Israel .” In regard to family courts and images of dismemberment and uprooting, it is notable that Shelley wrote what may have been the first broadside against the anti-father tendencies of divorce courts, “to the Lord Chancellor” (1817). Though the events of his case were very different from those in most modern Western divorces, his outraged pain against “the hate that checks a father’s love” and “the scorn that kills a father’s care” is bitingly pertinent these past four decades in the Anglophone West. Indeed, the novels of best-selling Maria Corelli (1875-1924), e.g.Vendetta, detail and critique this denigration and destruction of fathers.
visit www.israelendtimes.com and consider the important books, "WW III, the War on the Jews" and "Culture of Terror: the Collapse of America"
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