Possessed by Memory Read online

  Upon my top he breathed the pointed dark.

  He was not man yet he was nothing else.

  If in the mind, he vanished, taking there

  The mind’s own limits, like a tragic thing

  Without existence, existing everywhere.

  William Butler Yeats, D. H. Lawrence, and, rather more skeptically, Hart Crane all were informed by the ancient tradition of Hermetism, the Greco-Egyptian speculation from which the Renaissance Hermeticism developed. In that original speculation, which was inaugurated by a small group of pagan intellectuals in Hellenistic Alexandria during the first century of the Common Era, a story is told of how the first Adam, called Anthropos, is exalted as a divine being. Here is a crucial passage from the Hermetic discourse called “The Key”:

  For the human is a godlike living thing, not comparable to the other living things of the earth but to those in heaven above, who are called gods. Or better—if one dare tell the truth—the one who is really human is above these gods as well, or at least they are wholly equal in power to one another.

  For none of the heavenly gods will go down to earth, leaving behind the bounds of heaven, yet the human rises up to heaven and takes its measure and knows what is in its heights and its depths, and he understands all else exactly and—greater than all of this—he comes to be on high without leaving earth behind, so enormous is his range. Therefore, we must dare to say that the human on earth is a mortal god but that god in heaven is an immortal human. Through these two, then, cosmos and human, all things exist, but they all exist by action of the one.

  Translated by Brian P. Copenhaver

  That is Hermetism at its most exalted. Darker is the account that brings together the Fall and the Creation as one event. I turn here to the most famous text of Hermetism, “Poimandres,” where our primal catastrophe is elegantly chronicled:

  Having all authority over the cosmos of mortals and unreasoning animals, the man broke through the vault and stooped to look through the cosmic framework, thus displaying to lower nature the fair form of god. Nature smiled for love when she saw him whose fairness brings no surfeit (and) who holds in himself all the energy of the governors and the form of god, for in the water she saw the shape of the man’s fairest form and upon the earth its shadow. When the man saw in the water the form like himself as it was in nature, he loved it and wished to inhabit it; wish and action came in the same moment, and he inhabited the unreasoning form. Nature took hold of her beloved, hugged him all about and embraced him, for they were lovers.

  Because of this, unlike any other living thing on earth, mankind is twofold—in the body mortal but immortal in the essential man. Even though he is immortal and has authority over all things, mankind is affected by mortality because he is subject to fate; thus, although man is above the cosmic framework, he became a slave within it. He is androgyne because he comes from an androgyne father, and he never sleeps because he comes from one who is sleepless. Yet love and sleep are his masters.

  Translated by Brian P. Copenhaver

  In Hart Crane’s “Voyages II” there is a paean to “sleep, death, desire,” a celebration of the great erotic relationship of the poet’s life. Nevertheless, “Voyages V” admits that the truth of this love is a matter of instants and must end in separation:

  But now

  Draw in your head, alone and too tall here.

  Your eyes already in the slant of drifting foam;

  Your breath sealed by the ghosts I do not know:

  Draw in your head and sleep the long way home.

  There is a kind of gentle resignation in Hart Crane as he confronts erotic loss. Ultimately I think that stems from the Hermetist version of the Fall as a narcissistic reverie that concludes in a catastrophe. Many of us, remembering the now remote erotic attachments of our youth, scores of years back in time, find that involuntarily we remain haunted by a voice we heard emanating from the beloved that seemed timeless and therefore permanent. There is some link that binds together the making of a poem, the illusions of recall, and the tenuous expectation that somehow we will hear again the voice that preceded the instauration of a cosmos forlorn and vagrant, through which we blankly wander, unable to distinguish what was and what we strain to find again.

  Our experience of a lost voice may come to us in solitude or in the presence of others, whether or not they are related to our past sorrows. When I was very young, I read poems incessantly because I was lonely and somehow must have believed they could become people for me. That vagary could not survive maturation, yet the quest persisted for a voice I had heard before I knew my own alienation. Over the decades I learned to listen closely to my students for some murmurs of those evanescent voices. Since these young men and women are two-thirds of a century younger than I am, I do not seek in their tonalities my own nostalgias. Yet I believe that the teaching of Shakespeare or of Moby-Dick can be an awakening to the ancient Gnostic call that proclaims a resurrection preceding our deaths.

  In my experience, there are a few visions or surging voices that break through the rock of the self and free something that is both spark and breath, in a momentary knowing that seems to be known even as it knows. When I ask myself who is the knower, I have intimations that a primal sound, cast out of our cosmos and wandering in exile through the interstellar spaces, may be calling to me. There is nothing unique in my experience, as was particularly clear to me in the years 1990–92, when I seemed all but endlessly in motion, lecturing at American universities and colleges in the South and Southwest. I accepted speaking engagements only there, when I could get away from Yale, so as to do amateur research listening to people of many sects and persuasions, who I learned to call American Religionists. I recall vividly how many told me they had already been resurrected, and knew they had walked and talked with the Jesus scarcely mentioned in the New Testament, who passed forty days with his faithful after the Ascension.

  At sixty, I both respected and was baffled by so many urgent confessions of women and of men that they had touched the flesh of a living Jesus, who walked with them and spoke of everyday matters. Now, in my high eighties, I understand better what was so dark to me a quarter-century ago.

  I listen for a primordial silence as well as voices coming down from a sphere within and beyond the rock of the self. When Hamlet concludes by murmuring, “The rest is silence,” he intends both an acceptance of oblivion and a longing for what Hermetists call the Pleroma or Fullness. Valentinus the Gnostic sage concluded his “Gospel of Truth” by telling his congregation that it did not suit him, having been in the place of rest, to say anything more. For him too the rest was silence.

  * * *

  —

  How do you listen for a silence? Here is one of my personal mentors, the great Gershom Scholem, in his diary for 1918:

  As long as silence remains intact, people and things will mourn. For our hope in the restitution of language and the reconciliation relies precisely on the conviction that while language suffered because of the Fall, silence did not.

  As the wise Scholem knew, that is a Gnostic formulation. I recall that in 1980, in Jerusalem, he told me that Kabbalah was the oldest of speculations. When I replied very gently that Kabbalah was an amalgam of Neoplatonism and various Gnostic traditions, the magisterial Scholem dismissed that by saying that Plato derived his doctrines from the Egyptians, who borrowed them from the Hebrews, and that Gnosticism began as a Jewish protest against God for having permitted the fall of Jerusalem. One did not argue with Scholem. He was in his early eighties, and his convictions were absolute. Instead, one learned to listen intently.

  One evening in July 1980, after dinner in their Jerusalem apartment, Scholem’s wife, Fanya, and I listened to his rapt praise of silence, exile, and cunning. These were the modes he himself practiced in his concealed messianic enterprise. I ventured that silence was an ancient virtue in many contempla
tive and spiritual traditions. He replied briskly that silence, as he employed it, was a Judaic invention of the sages who had to submit to Hellenistic and finally Roman overlords.

  When I asked how we could know that silence, unlike language, was not part of the Creation-Fall, he appealed to the experience of his own meditative life. I realized only later that he was giving a kind of summa of his “Ten Unhistorical Aphorisms on Kabbalah,” which I had not read, though it had been printed in German in 1958. My own reduction of these ten profound apothegms would be:

  Authentic tradition is always hidden.

  Speech and writing protect secrets whereas silence reveals them.

  God is the Torah, which means that Torah also is unknowable.

  Isaac Luria’s triple rhythm of contraction, breaking of the vessels, and restitution is not just a metaphor but literally true. This means that God himself is degraded.

  To avoid merging God with his Creation, there must be a negative moment or an Abyss in the Divine Will.

  The work of Kabbalah is to transmember Torah into a transparency, and that means Torah becomes antinomian.

  Kabbalah’s flaw is its Neoplatonic theory of emanation. The truth of Kabbalah is the Gnosis of Moses Cordovero, in which God and the Divine Will touch without coinciding.

  Kabbalah is utopian or even magical, since God must be seen “at that place where I stand.” Lurianic restitution is conveyed even by the visionary Marxism of Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch.

  You can pronounce God’s name but never express it; we cannot hear the name unless it is mediated by tradition, and then only in fragments.

  Kafka is secular Kabbalah. Therefore, his writings have for Scholem and Benjamin “something of the strict light of the canonical, of that perfection which destroys.”

  I have always been delighted by the dry tone of these amazing realizations. They abolish all distinction between the normative Judaism of Rabbi Akiba and the heresies of Sabbatai Zevi and Jacob Frank. Our prophet Scholem is telling us that Sabbatai and his henchman Nathan of Gaza are no more or less figures of Jewish spirituality than Maimonides and Judah Halevi. Best of all is the ultimate consequence of Scholem’s vision of the Negative: no distinction remains between those who urge redemption through virtue and those who offer redemption through sin.

  In a late essay, “Reflections on Jewish Theology,” Scholem freed himself to break into a rhapsodic celebration of Lurianic myth treated as though it were the only authentic Jewish theology:

  Creation out of nothing, from the void, could be nothing other than creation of the void, that is, of the possibility of thinking of anything that was not God. Without such an act of self-limitation, after all, there would be only God—and obviously nothing else. A being that is not God could only become possible and originate by virtue of such a contraction, such a paradoxical retreat of God into Himself. By positing a negative factor in Himself, God liberates Creation.

  This is certainly not the God of Rabbi Akiba and his fellow sages. It resembles the vision of divine reality by Rabbi Elisha ben Abuya, who was scorned by the school of Akiba as Acher, meaning the “Stranger” or the “Other,” which can be read as Elisha’s adherence to the Gnostic Alien God, cast out beyond our cosmos.

  In a conversation with Scholem at my house after he had received an honorary degree from the Yale Divinity School in May 1981, I teased him by saying that his true daemon was Acher, since like Elisha ben Abuya he had entered the Pardes or paradise of interpretation and torn up the young shoots in its garden. Scholem grinned impishly and said he regarded that as a grand tribute.

  My intention for this book is to teach myself and others how to listen for the voice we heard before the world was made and marred. Scholem distinguished German language silence from Hebrew silence. For him this distinction was the Torah, because Torah is where Hebrew’s silence overtakes simple silence. Everything contains both silence and speaking, yet Torah is in everything. How does speaking pass from silence to silence, with language hovering between them as silence’s medium? Scholem’s answer is to emphasize that silence takes place in language.

  How can the kingdom of silence be achieved? To Scholem, silence is the source of all language, and we need to achieve it through human lamentation. But lamentation has to be understood by its limitation, which is silence. This is akin to the young Scholem’s memorable apothegm that Zion is the collective loneliness of all people. Human community is founded on two modes: Silence and Revelation.

  Scholem, himself a minor poet, passionately loved Goethe and Hölderlin. Yet this passion was tempered by his desire that their lyricism perform the labor of Revelation. He found that labor superbly manifest in Walt Whitman, a later enthusiasm of the Jerusalem sage. Several times he told me that Whitman restored a kind of natural Kabbalah to a secular world. In many ways, Scholem confirmed my lifelong love for the poet who sang the song of himself and in so singing called his own godhood into being. When I remarked to Scholem that his Whitman was a theurgist, the scholar of Kabbalah was delighted and said I was his most unexpected disciple.

  Poetry, as I most richly conceive it, is the ultimate secular mode of what the ancients called theurgy, which is one of three motions of the spirit:

  Augmentation of a god in ruins

  The drawing down of a god who is too remote for our needs

  A mode I would call world propping, in which our wounded cosmos is maintained

  I modify these terms from Moshe Idel’s agonistic study of Kabbalah, in which he takes on the titanic labor of correcting Scholem. Throughout Possessed by Memory, I employ these apparently esoteric images as aids to the apprehension of elements in great poems, from the Biblical Song of Deborah through Shakespeare and Milton on to A. R. Ammons, who taught us to address the empty place where the god that has been deposed lived.

  My three images derived from Moshe Idel are for me a version of the Kantian categories that grant us our vitality: Freedom, God, Immortality. Voice is the comprehensive phenomenon holding together the Valentinian declaration that what makes us free is the Gnosis. The God is split between a spark or breath in the rocklike ego and an Alien exile wandering in space beyond our cosmos. Immortality is seen as a Resurrection before dying, as when the ancient heretics said of Jesus that first he resurrected and then he died.

  I am aware that some readers may turn aside from Possessed by Memory because what they regard as heretical or at least esoteric distracts from the reading of poetry. I address not them but those who yearn for what I would term a Shakespearean reading of the best poetry made available to us, here in our Evening Land, of the tradition sparked by Homer and Isaiah. That tradition is dying. As a literary and religious critic, I wish to rally a saving remnant.

  Such a desire is open to aspersions of pretentiousness. After so many decades of dismissal as a usurper of critical tradition, I wonder how one earns the authentic call of a critic’s own image of voice. If I speak for myself only, then discard me. Evidence reaches me daily that something in me speaks for multitudes around the globe. I am too decrepit to give public readings or lectures and then sign books. Yet, even half a century ago, I was moved almost to tears by readers I could never meet again who told me that I was their teacher.

  It comes down, then, to teaching. But what is teaching? Once, I thought that it was a form of Platonic eros, but I was mistaken. I recall the gifted classicist Daniel Mendelsohn harshly rejecting my little primer How to Read and Why by saying it showed that I did not love my students. The brief book was hardly intended for him, yet I wondered why he raised the question of loving students. A teacher bears testimony. Her function is both to exemplify and to provoke. Emerson taught me that what I can gain from another is never instruction but only provocation.

  Even in your high eighties, whoever you are, you need to keep reading
and rereading unless you are an original philosopher or an adept of the contemplative life. I am neither. The poets, dramatists, novelists are necessary if I am to get through my remaining days. But so are students necessary. I no longer have the firepower to teach as once I could. In compensation, I have finally learned to listen.

  My career has been a conscious effort to follow the art of criticism as exemplified by Dr. Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt, John Ruskin, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and the American tradition of Emerson, William James, and Kenneth Burke. I cannot judge whether I have earned a place in that lineage. I will not know, as I vanish, if I failed.

  The Poetry of Kabbalah

  1

  GERSHOM SCHOLEM, in his writings and in conversation, insisted that the three canonical works for his Judaism were the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible), the Zohar (Radiance), and the narratives and parables of Franz Kafka. They, above even the Talmuds, manifested “the strict light of the canonical, of the perfection that destroys.”

  As an amateur, purely literary disciple of Scholem, I learned to listen closely to him, awed by his authority and the uncanny ease of his referring to himself in the third person. The founder of the modern study of Kabbalah or esoteric Judaism, Scholem inaugurated a new discipline.

  Mysticism, by one definition, has not the patience to wait for God’s self-revelation. I find the word misleading in discussing Kabbalah, though its use was sanctioned by Scholem and by most scholars in his wake. There were and are ecstatic Kabbalists, questing for direct experience of God, but the intellectual value of Kabbalah seems to me elsewhere, with its speculative intensities and exegetical inventions. Both Peter Cole—in his The Poetry of Kabbalah, an aesthetic splendor equal to his The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain—and Daniel C. Matt, in the twelve-part English translation of the Zohar, continue to employ the term “mysticism,” but here I abandon it.