God and JM

...Nevertheless, James Merrill, a poet of unequalled grace and urbanity, has dared to take on the challenge in Scripts for the Pageant (Atheneum, 235 pp., $12.00...

...AH SO HEARTBREAKING," murmurs Wysten Auden, always the quickest with words, "KEEPING UP HIS NERVE...

...managed to create a witty and moving narrative around the otherworldly communications he and his companion, David Jackson, received through a Ouija board...

...Dante saw The Rose in fullest bloom...

...Still, until now he had avoided any direct confrontation with the Divine Plan...

...Sister keeps house...

...In Mirabel...

...Maria, a true daughter of Nature, proves to be Merrill's Muse most literally, and in a manner the most astute reader could hardly guess (although to our abashed chagrin, it has been amply foreshadowed...

...Goethe preferred to concentrate on the redeeming influence of das Ewig- Weibliche...

...Well, yes and no...

...This grim information left JM, DJ and their ghostly guides apprehensively waiting for the Archangel Michael to reveal whether or not God B was some fearsome Mad Doctor...

...In doing so, he has fashioned a poem that defines the Sublime for our age...

...Each word,/Though sociable and mild, sounds used to being heard...

...Barbarity To serve uncooked one's bloody tranche die vie...

...and the Athenian, Maria Mitsotaki, whom Merrill had dubbed "the Muse of my off-days...

...Later, if the hero couldn't smile, Reader and author could...

...Dante heard God's song and saw the cosmos as a manylayered flower, radiating out from its Center, but in our degenerate day Merrill thinks that The lyrics may be changing...

...God B is, in fact, touchingly vulnerable in His love for His Creation...

...Indeed, Merrill's lyricism is pure sunshine, to keep the poem from dissolving in tears...

...Is it still rooted in the Sun...

...For, more than ever, he faces bereavement with a clear eye...

...Its characters live, as we all do, in an age of such technological advancement that man stands at a crossroads, one fork leading to the establishment of an Earthly Paradise, the other to annihilation...

...The predominance of females in Merrill's scheme of things was hinted at as far back as Ephraim, when Merrill remarked that no one should be fooled by "the absence from these pages/Of my own mother...

...1978) darker presences who "SPEAK FROM WITHIN THE ATOM" (Ouija boards have only capital letters) instructed Merrill to write "POEMS OF SCIENCE...

...His informant was one Ephraim, who claimed to have been a slave at the court of Tiberius, and the Emperor's lover...

...Scripts proclaims that Love is stronger than Death, without losing sight of the possibility that this affirmation may merely be the crudest of illusions...

...In Michael's lucid words, this "GREAT OPPOSING FORCE" manifests itself to man as "THE CHALLENGE TO THE MAGICIAN'S ACT, THE RAGE TO PROVE IT WAS, IS ALL DONE BY MIRRORS," the spirit that breeds cynicism, nihilism, disbelief in human achievement, rejection of the efficacy of art...

...Scripts promises to answer the questions raised by its predecessors, but all the answers will be both "YES & NO" (the only actual words on the Ouija board...

...Stay well, and please do not abandon us...

...Because of course she's here/Throughout, the breath drawn after every line,/Essential to its making as to mine...

...Poetic justice, if you like...

...This is a powerful trope for an era in which many of us have been separated from God and Nature since childhood, or, even if religious, have been slightly ashamed of a personal deity as some Old Country notion unsuited to Progress...

...God B has a twin sister/consort, too, called Nature or Psyche...

...If poets in an age of faith found their powers inhibited when describing the Supreme Being, how much harder the task in this age of scepticism, where the very idea of an abstract God is rejected by so many...

...Milton's deity was upstaged by Satan...

...Auden, Merrill's poetic mentor...

...who have seen the bleak Unpetalled knob, must wonder: will it last Till spring...

...Michael, bringer of Light, and God B's favorite, is a "CALM ELATE INTELLIGENCE," instantly lovable (yet recognizable as a kind of glorified Ephraim...

...1900, discreetly, bustled/Trimmed if at all with a fluttering black bow;/Black ribbon at her throat...

...Never has Merrill written so frankly or unself-consciously of feelings...

...Furthermore, as Gabriel explains, "OUT OF THE PANTHEON OF GALAXIES FROM WHICH OUR FATHER COMES, I HAVE HEARD HIS VOICE:/ 'GABRIEL, MY DARKER SIDE, THERE ARE GALAXIES, GODS AS POWERFUL AS I. SON GABRIEL, WE ARE WARND...

...it was really a laboratory, a testing-ground for countless experiments, some of which, including man, might ultimately fail...

...They have none of the occult nuttiness of Yeats' A Vision (similarly based on dictation from supernatural realms), because Merrill has been careful not to let boring or dubious "systems" dominate his lyricism...

...Fully on the side of life, He must fight to prevent what happened once before in prehistoric times-man's self-destruction...

...Dante, who claimed he was granted a vision of Divine Omnipotence, found that metaphors failed him at the sight...

...Blake saw it sick...

...Protected in the past by his polished style, he has now become vulnerable, more human-like his God B. But Scripts for the Pageant is not just concerned with the personal...

...Glance lively with amusement, speaks...

...The dominant presence is Gabriel, the angel of death and master of the bats, who makes us wonder: Is Man not an idea whose time has come and gone...

...A spell Which in mid-sentence turn(ed) iron to sunlight...

...Weren't they Always happy in books...

...The beloved dead who speak from the board are "imagined selves" held on to by the magic of the poem, who must be released when it ends...

...His two previous verse epics (Scripts concludes the trilogy inaugurated with Divine Comedies and continued in Mirabel...

...a cameo;/Gloved, but hatless, almost hurrying...

...The angels, who have become JM's and DJ's Socratic instructors, are a dazzling lot...

...In this Brave New World, Merrill portrays the gods as immigrant parents, anxiously watching for the outcome: "Their Mayflower/Long, run wild, they bend to the poor lamplight,/Her deft hands full of mending, His roughened ones/Forming letters which the flame, tipped blue/As if with cold, breathes fitful life into:/ I've found work, we get on...

...In Divine Comedies (1976) Merrill first reported being told of a heavenly bureaucracy, apparently as tangled in red tape and mismangement as any on earth...

...Ephraim seemed to know everyone worth knowing in the beyond, and helped the two humans contact the sort of famous dead we would all want to meet as well as their own late friends: in particular, W.H...

...In fact, for the first time in the trilogy, women assume a leading role...

...A far cry from frivolous Ephraim, these ominous beings, identified with the fallen angels, took the form of radioactive bats working for "GOD BIOLOGY," whose creation was threatened by man's reckless use of nuclear power...

...Only in the Old Testament does God appear in a guise at once effective and comprehensible to us: Jealous of his peoples' love, argumentative, often wrathful, partial to His favorites, subject to changes of heart-here God speaks the language of human emotions...

...In his grand pageant of reconciliation-man toward his Father and Mother, toward his emotional losses-james Merrill believes that he has been shown an image of the cosmos so that he might "MAKE SENSE OF IT...

...This charmer steals the show...

...God B turns out to be the Jehovah of Western religion, not a mad scientist (though it should be noted that the poem's action is set in Greece and Merrill's heaven is an agora of Socratic instruction, not a Christian school of morality...

...one called it style...

...D espite the overtones of science fiction and the occult, this trilogy is, as much as anything, a bittersweet comedy about life-especially the love story of JM and DJ...

...Merrill has always used his art to "HOLD BACK" against loss: the still-traumatic divorce of his parents, the deaths of his friends...

...That those books are inspired is beyond question, however strange the idea behind them...

...The picture of heaven as a bureaucracy was not exactly right, they explained...

...The New Testament itself relegates the Father to an off-stage voice...

...Mine's for the happy ending," he insists...

...The mortals rather dread the appearance of a primitive earth-mother, until she makes her entrance "in a smart white summer dress,/Ca...

...A bit dubious of this farrago, Merrill and Jackson (called JM and DJ) nonetheless found Ephraim's salacious gossip fascinating...

...WE ARE HARD PREST.'" God B must also continually "HOLD BACK" the controller of antimatter-called the Monitor...

...the poem is a high comic romp, brimming with wit, full of surprises...

...When the guides are finally permitted to hear His song in space, they realize that He is the only kind of deity capable of inspiring our affection...

...Like Virgil and Beatrice, these quasi-parental figures became guides across ghostly landscapes invisible to the living...

...Scripts opens with preparations for their 25th anniversary, and closes with Jackson's 55th birthday (some of the pageantry alluded to in the title...