Minotaur as the culdesac of history: raping the minds of hapless men and procreating in blindness:
Each man lost, in some blind lobby, hall, enclave,
Crank cul-de-sac, couloir, or corridor of Time
Of Time. Or self: and in that dark no thread, Airy as breath by Ariadne's fingers forged.
No thread, and beyond some groped-at corner, hulked
In the blind dark, hock -deep in ordure, its beard...[p. 7]
For what I say of Philadelphia now
Is true, but true now only, not true then.
But this much then: We knew we were only men
Caught in our errors and interests. But I, a man,
Suddenly saw in every face, face after face,
The bleared, the puffed, the lank, the lean, all,
On all saw the brightness blaze, and I knew my own days,
Times, hopes, books, horsemanship, the praise of peers,
Delight, desire, and even my love, but straw
Fit for the flame, and in that fierce combustion I ‹
Why, I was dead, I was nothing, nothing but joy,
And my heart cried out, "Oh, this is Man!"
[p. 8-9]
Interests are erased in the blinding joy. But the blindness is the beast that rapes
Jefferson hoped that America could offer men the freedom necessary to stomp out the beast, the merd in the cupboard: the beast was the effect of being shackled [p. 41]
And the Square House [Nîmes] spoke to my heart of some fair time
Beyond the Roman tax-squeeze, and the imperial
Lecentiousness, and the Gothic dark. It spoke
Of a fair time yet to come, but soon
If we might take man's hand, strike shackle, lead him forth
From his own monstrous nightmare‹then his natural innocence
Would dance like sunlight over the delighted landscape. [p.41]
Warren's voice critiques this standpoint:
For if responsibility [total freedom from the social conditioning of history] is not
The thing given but the thing to be achieved,
There is still no way out of the responsiblity [the socially-developed directive]
Of trying to achieve responsibility.
So, like it or lump it, you are stuck. [p. 112]
In NoTime, Jefferson has changed the virtue-through-freedom position:
[Heroism]
is the sadistic farce by which the world is cleansed.
And is not cleansed, for in the deep
Hovel of the heart that Thing lies
That will never unkennel himself to the contemptible steel,
Nor needs to venture forth ever, for all sustenance
Comes in to him, the world comes in, and is his,
And supine yearns for the defilement of his slavering fang. [p. 42]
And the slow dynastic dwingling of blood would leave us
Alone at the night-edge. So now is the time, I said,
To buckle the heart past fond accident, or failure,
And know that my hope lies in the general human fulfillment. [p. 135]
Warren portrays a realist antidote to the Jeffersonian yeoman:
But Boyle's not quaint because he speaks the tongue
His fathers spake, and holds his manners yet.
Or if he's quaint, he's quaint only as a man
O moderate circumstances, modest hopes,
And decent ambitions, and he did his best,
Mortgage and weather taken to account
And minor irritations flesh is heir to.
Will do his best,no doubt, until he dies,
If he's not dead already, caught the flu,
Fallen off his tractor in the sun, or had
A coronary hit him on the street,
Down in Paducah, where he'd gone to trade. [ 26]
MERRIWETHER:
For suddenly I knew there was no Justice.
No, not for me, nor any man, for the human
Heart will hate justice for its humanness.
...
...oh, the wilderness was easy!‹
But to find, in the end, the tracklessness of the human heart [is hell].
The discovery came late, and I was unprepared.
You unprepared me. I hated you. [p. 184]
LUCY:
Your dream, my dear Brother, was noble. I'd not deny that.
If there was vanity, fear, and deceit, in its condition,
What of that? For we are human, and must work
In the shade of our human condition. The dream remains.
But my dear Brother, if your dream
Was noble, there's a nobler yet to dream.
It will be nobler because more difficult and cold
In the face of the old cost of the human redemption,
And knowledge of that cost is, in itself, a kind of redemption. [p. 193]
History and Conscience
Well, there you go again.
Back on the old track, the desperate circle.
"If I had known‹" and once you say those words
You'll end by saying all those other words
You've said, and the great Machine of History
Will mesh its gears sweetly in that sweet lubrication
Of human regret, and the irreversible
Dialectic will proceed. That is, unless‹
"If I had known"‹that is, unless we get
Some new and better definition of knowing.
...knowing is,
Maybe, a kind of being, and if you know,
Can really know, a thing in all its fullness,
Then you are different, and if you are different, Then everything is different, somehow, too. [p. 127-8]
No, the action is not self-contained, but contains
Us too, and is contained by us, and is
Only an image of the issue of our most distressful self-definition.
Isolation: from History and from Society
Jefferson hoped that America could offer men the freedom necessary to stomp out the beast, the merd in the cupboard: the beast was the effect of being shackled. This implies a kind of isolation from the world:
JEFFERSON:
And the Square House [Nîmes] spoke to my heart of some fair time
Beyond the Roman tax-squeeze, and the imperial
Lecentiousness, and the Gothic dark. It spoke
Of a fair time yet to come, but soon
If we might take man's hand, strike shackle, lead him forth
From his own monstrous nightmare‹then his natural innocence
Would dance like sunlight over the delighted landscape. [p.41]
Warren's voice critiques this standpoint:
For if responsibility [total freedom from the social conditioning of history] is not
The thing given but the thing to be achieved,
There is still no way out of the responsiblity [the socially-developed directive]
Of trying to achieve responsibility.
So, like it or lump it, you are stuck. [p. 112]
Warren and the Modern
The black, that victim of an obsolescent
Labor system (we can't, you see, just say
"immoral labor system," as I'd near done,
For that wouldn't be modern, except for people
Who want things both ways)
Driving an Automobile: an imagery of modern existentialism
Amid the sage-grass by the blasted field,
A face fixed at us and the red eye glared
Without forgiveness, and will not forgive.
But touch the accelerator and quick you're gone
Beyond forgiveness, pity, hope, hate, love.
So we ripped on...[p. 15]
And the sad god rises in season past the pathos.
...
And the year drove on.
It drives past the dire solstice, and death of the heart.
Drives past the weeping for innocence, and the childhood lost,...[p. 99]
The Mechanics of interpersonal connectedness
Lilburn experiences what love is directed at him as an accusation of his guilt. Taken the wrong way, or offered in the wrong way/circumstance, love forces us to intensify our own conscience/superego. This intensification is accompanied by accute consciousness of the conscience as a force in our lives. When surrounded only by 'love' that never confronts us with hard 'facts of life' and real limits to our sphere of action, we must construct those limits for ourselves or else repudiate all limits. Lilburn does the latter. What he needed was a person who presented limits to his action. A dog that would draw blood in response to his kick; a nanny who would treat him coldly when he insulted her; a father who would send him from home when he showed no sympathy or understanding for his mother's death and the feelings his father must have had about it.
Warren's solution, then is the connections that occur between people who present limits to one another, who, rather than trying to hide reality/Nature from one another, present it to themselves in its most honest and stark form.
Faulkner Connection
The Faulknerian theme of facing the curse, not fleeing:
CHARLES:
Fled that's the word. I fled the intolerable
World that I had made and that had made me.
It was intolerable only because
There was nothing intolerable in it: that world and I,
Two mirrors set forever and precisely face to face
To match but gaze for deeper gaze, and thus compound
The crime forever inward, each to each...[13]
JEFFERSON:
...love, all love, all kinds, descriptions, and shpes,
Is but a mask to hide the brute face of fact,
And that fact is the immitigable ferocity of self,
And once you find it in your blood, and find even
That the face of love beneath your face at the first
Budding of the definitive delight ‹
That every face, even that one, is but a mirror
For your own ferocity, a mirror blurred
And breathed upon and slicked and slimed with love,
And through the interstices and gouts of that
Hypocritical moisture, the cold eyes spy out
From the morror's cold heart, and thus self spies on self
In that unsummerable artic of the human alienation.
And as I said, once you have learned that fact‹
And I am what I am, but whatever I am,
And whatever you make of my face, and failure,
I still reject, cast out, repudiate,
And squeeze from my blood the blood of Lilburn.
I affirm it is not of my‹[p. 62]
Faulknerian anti-modernism: humanity falls away in the land of the machine
But touch the accelerator and quick you're gone
Beyond forgiveness, pity, hope, hate, love.[p. 15]
Hemmingway Connection
...but the form
Was not adequate: the facile imitation
Of a folk simplicity would never serve,
For the beauty of such simplicity is only
That the action is always and perfectly self-contained,
And is an image that comes as its own perfect explanation
In shock or sweetness to the innocent heart.
But first, our hearts are scarcely innocent,
And any pleasure we take in the folk simplicity
Is a pleasure of snobbish superiority or neurotic yearning.
And second, the action here is not explained
By anything in the action. ... [p. 43]
Images of Sex and Rape
Jefferson on own conception--7
Raped by Minotaur-- 8, 42
The conception of Lilburn Lewis- 12
Violence as Sex-- 139
Life and Death: The dynamic of the Interpersonal
And part of the world that's dead is I myself,
For I was his creation, too, that fleeting moment
I blocked his doorway and he stared at me...
Who yearned to be understood, to make communication,
To touch the ironic immensity of afternoon with meaning,
To find and know my name and make it heard,
While the sun insanely screamed out all it knew...
And all identity tottered to that remorseless vibration. [26-7]
Fit for the flame, and in that fierce combustion I ‹
Why, I was dead, I was nothing, nothing but joy, ...[p 9]
Not anything, then, God‹oh, God‹then all
My life and living was just nothing, God,
And I am nothing, God‹and oh, dear God
...
Oh, God, even if You're God, You haven't got
The right to make me not know anything
And make my life all nothing then, and me
Just nothing...[p. 68]
And so I saw it growing on his face,
And knew a-sudden what it was, and thought
All quiet inside me: Look, he knows she's dead
And we don't know ‹ he knows because her dying
Is like his dying, too. And look, he's dead!
It was his own face dying that I saw...[p. 86]
And the mouth did aim to move, but couldn't yet,
Nor soon, but I knew that when it did make words,
They'd be dead words, and so I thought: Oh God,
We're all dead here, and ain't no use to live.[p. 88]
We must remember that always the destroyer
It is who has most need of love: therefore destroys.
And in the unity of life remember
That destruction's but creation gone astray,
That life and death both enter by a wound... [p. 99]
Defininition by the Interpersonal:
CHARLES:
To Kentucky I had come to seek my reality.
But in Kentucky I had lost the one person
To whom I was real...[p. 97]
Reconciliation With Nature
When the alacrity of blood stumbles on all natural joy
Sees Nature but as mirror for its fear,
And therefore, to be joy, must deny Nature
And lep beyond man's natural bourne and constriction
To find some justification for the natural. [p 9]
Like one great ray that gilds the deepest glade,
And thus I saw his life a story told,
Its glory and reproach domesticated,
And for one moment felt that I had come
To that most happy and difficult conclusion:
To be reconciled to the father's own reconciliation. [28]
...what you is an expression of History, and you do not live your life, but somehow, your life lives you, and you are, therefore, only what History does to you.
That is what I have heard said, but we have to try to make sense of what we have lived, or what has lived us, and there are so many questions that cry for an answer, as children gather about your knee and cry for a sweetmeat. No, it would be better to change the comparison and say it is like children gathering about your knee to cry for a story, a bedtime story, and if you can tell the right story, then these children, then these questions, will sleep, and you can, too. [Band of Angels, p 134]
Dostoevsky
And strange: For love was all he asked, yet love
Is the intolerable accusation of guilt
To all the yearning Lilburns who cannot love,
So must destroy who loves, and achieve at last
The desiderated and ice-locked anguish of isolation. [113]
Dostoevsky's saving childhood vision vs. R.P. Warren's Jefferson's saving childhood vision [Brother to Dragons, 1953; p. 8]
There's worse, I guess, than in the end to offer
Your last bright keepsake, some fragment of the vase
That held your hopes, to offer it to a child.
And the child took the crazy toy, and laughed.
I wish you could tell me why I find this scene so sweet. [Dragons, p. 31]
"We are all guilty before all" and Fyodor Karamazov: always claiming victimhood;
and, Warren:
...So the line of the old poem,
See where the Victor-victim bleeds takes on
A new significance, and the Victim is Victor,
Not because, as the poem so quaintly affirms,
The just deed will blossom from the dust
And the lover of justice, though Victim, be vindicated,
But because the Victim is lover of injustice ‹
That is, of sweet injustice to himself. [p.139]
...
A way to say we're all each other's victim.
Potentially, at least. [p.140]
maintaining the faith in Brothers Karamazov vs. Warren:
...And there may yet be
A reason that your anguish, and my own vanity,
Can hope, at last, to find.
To find? Oh, no!
To think to find it as a given condition of man
Would be but to repeat, I now see,
My old error. I have suffered enough for that.
Oh, no, if there is to be reason, we must
Create the possibility
Of reason, and we can create it only
From the circumstances of our most evil despair.
We must strike the steel of wrath on the stone of guilt,
And hope to provoke, thus, in the midst of our coiling darkness...[p. 194-5]
Melville
That instant, then, dear Sister, you found yourself
At the moveless center of the cyclic storm,
And all life, all the cackle of voices, spun
Like wind around you in that idiot vortex.
But you were still, still and alone in that center
Where Nothing screams nothing.
Well, if you'd known to define
The final reality, then you'd have struck,
Struck hard, and struck that black face whose pain
Was sweetness and reproach, and the blood-bright invitation...[p. 84]
For even if Lilburn couln't know [how he came to the final unforgivable deed]‹knew only
The tightening concatenation of need and terror And the incredibleness of each deed done
In the aghast logic of compulsion,
And unreality grows round him like a fog
And he must strike through the fog, strike hard to find
Contact with something real, something solid,
Something that will, perhaps, scream out its reality
And in that scream affirm, at least, poor Lilburn's own.
For all we all ask in the end is that:
Reality. [112-13]
Captain Ahab: Strike through the mask...!
Ahabs life of sorrow in a moment, and:
...You don't too often have to face
Life in a lump, your fate or definition. [p.146]
Other Connections
See Percifal and the Fisher-King in regard to this:
And that is strange‹isn't it?‹when the good thing
Lies clear and simple, but faculty is frozen.
Ah, had I got the water, bathed the wound,
Then everthing might have been different, and the small
Obligation fulfilled had swayed th weight of the world. [p. 82]