Nomad Codes

life. And that life in turn was thoroughly intertwined with the life of poet Robert Duncan, whom he first met in 1951. A Bay Area denizen whose poetic voice matured in the 1950s and ’60s, Duncan’s standing among popular readers of poetry has suffered unfairly from the fact that, while he wrote some of the most spiritually intriguing poetry in postwar America, he was not a Beat. It also can be difficult stuff. As a poet, Duncan was more an heir of H.D. and Mallarmé than of Whitman or William Carlos Williams, and, though he shared the romanticism of figures like Ginsberg and Snyder, his tastes and sensibility were almost anachronistic. The mountain-man populism and loud-mouthed, self-promoting sass of so much Beat poetry, which for all its marvels is largely to blame for horrors like the 1990s poetry slam scene, was alien to Duncan, who was deeply versed in hermeticism, mythology, and gnostic literature. Like Yeats, he was beholden to a high and esoteric romanticism, but a romanticism whose spectral beams he redirected through a postwar filter of Freudian self-consciousness, social fragmentation, and an acute awareness of the violent contradictions of eros and the mercurial inconsistency of the psyche.

RISKING HEIGHT

    Commentators often explain the Beat celebration of drugs, mysticism, and Zen as merely a bohemian resistance to the mundane values forced upon them by their upbringing. This pat reading, which tends to reduce transcendence to rebellion and the spiritual to “culture,” does not work with Duncan, whose adoptive parents were bourgeois occultists—members of a small Bay Area hermetic brotherhood that had spun off from Britain’s proto-Theosophical Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor. Duncan’s parents picked their baby based on his astrological chart, which suggested to them that his last incarnation occurred during the fading days of Atlantis. As a boy, Duncan had a recurrent apocalyptic dream that he came to believe was a memory of Atlantis; this dream later formed the psychic seed of one of his most famous poems, “Often I Am Permitted To Return to a Meadow.”
    Though a lifelong acolyte of the romantic imagination, Duncan was never a true believer, nor did he become a public mystic like Ginsberg or Gary Snyder. But though his appreciation for the occult was in a large part aesthetic—one senses that he loved Hermes Trismegistus the way he loved Tic Toc of Oz —he intimately understood that esoterica was, in essence, a spiritual assemblage. Syncretism was the name of the game. Duncan was fascinated, for example, by the core Theosophical texts of Madame Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine , both of which are frothing stews of astrology, alchemy, numerology, neo-Platonism, Buddhism, Kabbalah, and Vedic systems. Duncan called them “midden heaps where, beyond the dictates of reason, as in the collagist’s art, from what has been disregarded or fallen into disregard, genres are mixed, exchanges are made, mutations begun from scraps and excerpts from different pictures ... to form the figures of a new composition.” While he did not believe Blavatsky’s mystic claims, he still bought her basic line. As Duncan put it in his amazing unpublished H.D. Book : “until man lives once more in these awes and consecrations, these obediences to what he does not know but feels, until he takes new thought in what he has discarded, he will not understand what he is.”
    Duncan tried to live and write his life in obedience to these “awes and consecrations,” those transpersonal forces that surround and in some sense compose the self. Rather than “express himself,” like the heroic Beat soul, Duncan took the passive part, opening his soul to influences incoming from literature, dream, painting, the newspaper, the gods, and the spontaneity of language itself. Poetry was the “opening of a field” where such forces would meet, combine, and clash; as the poet, he was as interested as anyone to see how it all came out. Of course, there is an oracular dimension to all this. Duncan did not revise his poetry much, and his great “Medieval Scenes” were essentially channeled in a Surrealist fashion later greatly elaborated by Duncan’s friend and rival Jack Spicer.
    On a more intimate level, this field is a frame of spiritual collage. Duncan’s relationship to the forces of the psyche was essentially that of an appropriation artist who, as Jess once described it, allows found images to find him.