Paradise or disintegration:

...Will God B (for biology) and Mother Nature triumph over anti-matter and disintegration...

...Mirabel makes the essentially aristocratic point: "A mere two million cloned souls listen TO EACH OTHER WHILE/OUTSIDE THEY HOWL AND PRANCE SO RECENTLY OUT OF THE TREES...

...I cite but a few lines of this magnificent meditation, first about DNA: The world was everything that was the case...

...FOR EMMANUEL, H2O...

...Two previous worlds, we are told, did self-destruct, either through a nuclear blast or by a Malthusian conflict between a-race of centaurs and their bat-like helpers...

...First, Merrill is culturally (and chronologically) of my generation...

...Even so, I am convinced that The Changing Light at Sandover is an event of importance in our culture and not just in my own life...

...But now, the old symbols lose their power and we move from symbols back toward signs: the clock face, Henri Lefebvre remarks, at least imitated the revolutions of the day...

...His points of reference-Blake, Eliot, Auden, Stevens-are my own and there is even a passing reference to the Village bar in which I gloriously misspent most of my twenties and early thirties...

...Ultimately, all the scientific myths-and for that matter, the scientific non-myths-encounter the mystery of the beginning...

...My summary and prose brutalization of the poem should not be taken to suggest that it is a compound of cobwebs and Weltschmerz...

...As JM prepares to read The Changing Light to twenty-six spirits, including Dante, Jane Austen, and Proust ". . .a star trembles in the full carafe/As the desk light comes on, illuminating/The page I open to.'' The lectern lamp-the ordinary-becomes a star...

...The transition from Ephraim to Mirabel is, in part, a shift from the more personal to the more public and it marks a gain in power-it is one of the reasons why this strange poem may be truly great...

...Will the spiritual forces accumulated over the generations produce "a great glory or a great puddle...

...FOR SEEDS, THAT COSMIC DUST LADEN WITH PARTICLES OF INERT MATTER...

...The genius of life is, he says, its responsiveness to the sun "AND SO AS YOU FACE THE SETTING SUN YOU FACE YOUR ancestor...

...That is hardly an original thought, and a theologian like Bultmann is more radical than Merrill in his demythologizing...

...Since JM, openly acknowledging his debt to Matthew Arnold thinks the scribe must replace the priest, it is therefore incumbent on the poet to marry science and poetry (and music), matter and man, nature and spirit, to reconcile all the dialectical contraries...

...SCIENCE, then, is becoming science fiction and The Changing Light with its "R" (for Research) Lab where new types are cloned is not so otherworldly...

...But to blame and despise the mass of the "breeders" is another thing...

...The Changing Light has, as we will see, a very explicit political content: anti-nuclear, environmental, and sometimes a kind of upper-class, elitist Malthusianism...

...Some of the poem's perceptions of the problems of mass society are insightful enough...

...HE IS THE GREENHOUSE...

...That, it struck me, was what all Kandinsky's work was about: the light in the woods was the donnee, all else was implicit in it...

...Without the sustaining myths, Mirabel tells JM, "MAN IS AMOK & CHAOS SLIPS IN (UPON/COLLAPSE, IN INTELLIGENT MEN, OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF...

...In a commentary on Michael's cosmology, Maria says: FOR MICHAEL/SUN READ GENERATIVE FORCE...

...The poem therefore had-has-a relevance for me which could be personal and exceptional...

...Of course, the bomb and nuclear power are a threat to human existence...

...Maria Demertzi Mitsotaki, an Athenian friend of JM and DJ and the daughter of a former Greek prime minister...

...so would Wittgenstein and, in our day, Jurgen Habermas...

...Cells accumulated energy through the suncycles and "THIS accumulated energy BECOMES THROUGH EONS AN ANCIENT AND IMMORTAL INTELLIGENCE . . . AND AT LAST AFTER EXPERIMENT THIS INTELLIGENCE FORMED MAN/THIS IS GOD'S NAME...

...At first, JM is appalled at the notion ("To squint through those steel-rimmed/Glasses of the congenitally slug-/Pale boy at school, with his precipitates,/His fruit flies and his slide rule...

...BEFORE moving to some of the most important particulars within this extraordinary structure, I should acknowledge some problems...

...I don't want to be priggish...

...And a basic theme is fully defined: that there must be "POEMS OF SCIENCE" (the supernatural characters speak upper case, a convention which, strange to say, is not at all bothersome...

...A page earlier, the same insight in different language: Things look out at us from a spell They themselves have woven...

...It projects a supernatural effort to help humans toward an earthly paradise, in part through biology-the "no accident clause" of DNA, time standing still in the clockwork of genes-and in part through an otherworldly research lab, making use of the reborn, reap-portioned souls of the great dead...

...and of course there must be a limit to population...

...And thirdly, I came upon the book shortly after finishing my own analysis of what is one of Merrill's central themes, the effective decline of religious belief in Western society...

...How humdrum what he says Next to His word: out of a black sleeve, lo...

...In this spirit, I conclude, then, with one of the finest passages in the poem, a key to Merrill's third God and his basic meaning...

...That is a problem with Merrill...

...Why couldn't Science, in the long run, serve As well as one's uncleared lunch-table or Mme X en Culotte de Matador...

...the digital watch is pure information...

...In Mirabel the shades of three dead people-W...

...It is, as "WHA" (the shade of Auden) suggests, the community of art and spirit which lies beyond doing your own thing, the "ROSEBRICK MANOR" of language and culture whose family includes Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson...

...The book is "about" a series of revelations from heaven and the dead, communicated to a ouija board whose "Hand" is "DJ" and whose interpreter is "JM" (David Jackson and James Merrill, but both are characters in a fiction and I will call them DJ and JM when they appear in that guise...

...This preposterous notion, and many others, is so totally and convincingly imagined that, when JM and DJ finally break off contact with three of the dead, there is a poignant sense of present loss...

...The second God reminds me of the divinity defined by Hegel in the Phenomenology: an imminent transcendence which develops historically, not simply in nature (which would be a rather simple pantheism) but in the evolution of nature and man...

...Before supporting that claim, however, I should admit to at least three reasons why I might be overly enthusiastic...

...Like Finnegans Wake it comes full circle: it concludes as JM begins reading all that has gone before to a heavenly audience and intones its first word as its last word...

...Bob Adelman, a photographer friend and collaborator, once said to me that you should not cover a war with color film since the carnage will come out vividly beautiful...

...But JM-and Wittgenstein-are right, too: one can imagine in silence or in poetry, a godly source of that beginning...

...So with Merrill...

...I REGRET THIS CRITICISM for the objectionable material arises precisely because Merrill is becoming more socially concerned...

...Secondly, I read, and re-read, The Changing Light during a five-month stay in Europe, i.e., in a time when I was deprived of the boring reassurance of everyday life and perhaps became hypersensitive as a result...

...Then JM explains that Hell in German means bright -So that my father's cheerful, 'Go to Hell', Long unheard, and Vaughan's unbeatable "They are all gone into a world of light' Come, even now at times, to the same thing- But how will Hell-in that double meaning-render what it owes...

...On the contrary, The Changing Light is intricately architectonic and intellectually serious...

...It is that last attitude, I will suggest, that creates problems...

...His third God is reality, the world that is the case, but enchanted, sheer, innocent, and fleet with its overlapping pandemonia...

...All of this raises the truly vexed question of the relation between art and politics...

...But if, to go back to Merrill, "IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD" and now the word is no longer what is was, how are we to face our crises as the light changes in our culture...

...My greatest difficulty is not, however, aesthetic but political...

...Marx well understood that Balzac, the reactionary, was a greater novelist than Zola, the socialist...

...it is also a glory...

...So signal gave way to sign and then sign became symbol and symbol music and the "reasoned indirection" of the garden of human culture was on the way...

...Indeed he turns a scientific account of the genesis of reality into a poetic myth so that his own transformation from bat to peacock is a refraction of his subject matter...

...to discover that the physical laws which rule liquid crystals, a plate of spaghetti, a pile of sand are finally the same...

...Scripts is divided, typically, into three subsections, "Yes," "&," "No...

...As WHA puts it...

...In fairness, JM has his doubts-and I presume James Merrill does, too-and the worst statements are made by assorted angels and shades...

...JM is, I think, even more daring: God B (Who, lacking human volubility, Has no word for His own power and grace...

...Merrill is possessed, he himself understands, of an "unrelenting fluency," a talent to turn everything into "slant, weightless gold...

...Time must participate in a decision which can only be made looking backward at a distance...

...The message hardly needs decoding, so Sheer the text, so innocent and fleet These overlapping pandemonia: Birdlife, leafplay, rockface, waterglow Lending us their being, till the given Moment comes to render what we owe...

...In Scripts, another shade joins the group: George Cotzias, a Greek scientist...

...and, with an allusion to Wallace Stevens, the idea of God as that which (who) conserves an unstable universe whose black holes are scientific intuitions of an unthinkable and metaphysical possibility...

...That is, JM thinks, a "quaint idiom," perhaps "from the parchment of some old scribe of the apocalypse.'' So then one must . . . render it as long rendering to Light of this very light stored by our cells These past five million years, these past five minutes Here by the window, taking in through panes Still bleary from the hurricane a gull's Ascending aureole of decibels, As numberless four-pointed brilliancies Upon the Sound's mild silver grid come, go...

...Whatever the high theoretical solution to the problem, I must confess that I was aesthetically put off by the suggestion-and it is not made by JM himself-that a famine in Africa may be part of a benign plan for the future...

...GOD B is NOT/ONLY HISTORY BUT EARTH ITSELF...

...In this poem everything is dialectical, from matter (which is white and black, order and chaos), through images (which, like photographs, are positives of a negative and vice versa), to Michael (who is good, but perhaps a sentimental liberal) and his sometimes antagonist, the angel Gabriel (who destroys, but perhaps as a necessary work for the sustaining of life...

...The setting is the religious social crisis of the contemporary world which, with its menaces of atomic and population explosions, must face the question of whether reality is ultimately benign or whether it is tending back toward the chaos from which it emerged...

...Not so incidentally, I visited two cities-Athens and Venice-which figure in the poem and even went sightseeing with its images in my mind...

...Wasn't the transmigration of souls merely a way of saying that Shakespeare and Buddha still live in us...

...IT was," WHA says, "THE GREATEST privilege TO HAVE HAD/A BARE LOWCEILINGED MAIDS ROOM AT THE TOP...

...It establishes the basic dramatic premise about the ouija board and introduces some of the central themes: the decline of the old myths, presented in a lovely elegy telling how "Venice, her least stone/Pure menace at the start, at length became/A window fiery-mild, whose walked-through frame/Everything else, at sunset, hinged upon- "; a debate between JM and his artist nephew over realism (science, facts, this world) and faith-art (the otherworldly...

...Lift out the fabulous Necklace, in form a spiral molecule Whose sparklings outmaneuver time, space, us...

...The name, Sandover, we are told, is a corruption of the French, Saintefleur, or the Italian Santofior, "An English branch of that distinguished tree/ Through whose high leaves light pulses and whose roots/Rove beyond memory...

...Ours is the third and last world...

...Who, left alone, falls back on flimflam Tautologies like / am that I am Or The world is everything that is the case...

...of course, the sense of the holiness of the environment is perhaps the most genuine and spontaneous religious emotion of these times...

...Open the case...

...If in one aspect of that excellent transition Merrill nods as politician and Utopian more than as poet, that is to be noted and regretted...

...But it is here, in the domain of the science God, that the elitist neo-Malthusianism emerges...

...the fearfulness of power as JM learns that the bomb at Hiroshima destroyed souls as well as bodies...

...At the time when Malthus wrote, attacking decency toward the poor as an incentive to excess population, most enlightened Britons thought my Irish forebears-and James Joyce's, more to the point-a race of savages...

...It would, of course, be foolish to try to be more precise...

...But then the thought was dismissed as both unworthy and untrue, for the point is to expand the human potential of the billions-just as we have already in fact expanded the potential of the millions, including me...

...This second, "Hegelian" God is described more prosaically-more scientifically-by the Archangel Michael at the close of Mirabel...

...The first book, Ephraim, consists of twenty-six separate poems beginning with the successive letters of the alphabet...

...The Changing Light does more than that...

...Plato is, for reasons which will not be explained here, major...

...and Robert Morse, a neighbor and friend from Stonington, Connecticut-become central...

...One must, JM puts it, "tell round what brass tacks the old silk frays...

...It is in Mirabel (twice as long as Ephraim, followed by Scripts for the Pageant, which is even longer) that the dramatic fascination of a marvelously articulated fictional (symbolic of the real) world becomes quite dominant...

...That is remarkable: to equate the God of Abraham and the empirical reality of Wittgenstein...

...JAMES MERRILL'S UNIQUE SEARCH FOR NEW MYTHS Paradise or disintegration MICHAEL HARRINGTON IT IS POSSIBLE that James Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover (Atheneum, $25, $12.95 paper, 560 pp...

...There were even those-Nassau Senior, for instance-who thought that the Irish did not die in sufficient numbers during the Potato Famine to restore the proper economic equilibrium between food supply and the "demand" for life...

...More simply put: modern men and women have lost that basic, essentially religious, trust in the ultimate goodness of existence at the very moment at which they themselves have acquired the power to destroy, if not the cosmos, then a good part of our small corner of it...

...Robert-a shrewd estimate./ He's after all not Heir to the Estate,/Its goods and duties, but a Younger Son/Free to be ornamental and have fun...

...FOR GOD READ: GOD...

...The coda (The Higher Keys) ties up various loose ends but also focuses upon the rebirth of Robert Morse who, in his new guise (which includes a clubfoot, one more sign of the unity of this imperfect world and its ethereal interpretation), will be a great composer...

...the book, like the shades of the dead whom Merrill summons back to life, must be seen in a rear-view mirror...

...For instance, in Scripts he describes a changing of the light in a supernatural schoolroom: "not/The lights we've seen according to thus far/-Spectral gems, first waters of a star-/But Light like bread, quotidian, severe,/Wiped of the sugar sprinkles of Vermeer...

...is one of the significant works of the second half of this century...

...How does one deal with Ezra Pound's beautiful evocation of the corruption of art by money in the Cantos when one knows that it is quite likely inspired by fascist nonsense about the Jewish bankers...

...But does one, then, confuse a craftsman's formal genius with deep meanings, knowing with Merrill that "affection's/Poorest object, set in perfect light/ By happenstance, grows irreplaceable...

...But what Merrill makes of this commonplace-both as poetry and poetic meaning-is anything but a cliche...

...I do not want to equate Merrill's ambivalent and liberal elitism with fascism or Stalinism, yet the problem it poses is similar to the one raised by Pound and Brecht...

...The reply comes: "COURAGE: gabriel/knows WHAT HE'S UP TO & (LIKE TIME) WILL TELL...

...But if God is in crisis, so is literature...

...Finishing this essay in Venice, tramping as a member of the democratic mass through the aristocratic precincts of the Doge's Palace, I would be a hypocrite to deny that an occasional snobbish thought occurred to me...

...The first painting was of a woods, and the light makes a marvelous pattern upon the dark ground...

...In confronting this challenge, JM presents three new God(s...

...When humans thus play God they take on too great a responsibility, to put it mildly...

...As bats turn into peacocks and science into poetry, the poet goes back to the beginning and ends with the first word, "Admittedly...

...Mirabel ends with a serene meditation by JM, to which I will return, and the appearance of the Archangel Michael, one of the key figures of the next book, Scripts for the Pageant...

...These issues are posed in terms of new myths-the old faiths, Merrill thinks, are unbelievable...

...But then Balzac's monarchism does not threaten me while neo-Malthusianism does...

...Ephraim also contains a poetic fragment of a lost novel which is confusing and wisely forgotten, and many more personal references than the rest of The Changing Light, references which are sometimes excessive and obscure...

...Michael Harrington's books include, The Other America, The Accidental Century, The Twilight of Capitalism, and, most recently, The Politics at God's Funeral (Holt, Rinehart...

...And then there comes a key intuition (it is, I will suggest later, central to the entire poem): Why should God speak...

...That is, I think, Merrill's perception of God, and it pervades-it illuminates-every page of one of the most extraordinary poems of our times, a theology for the godless and godly...

...The poem is divided into three main sections and a brief coda...

...It is simply too early even to hazard the semblance of a definitive judgment...

...This section is divided into ten sections, numbered from zero through nine, which, not so incidentally, is the number of heavens in Dante's Paradiso, one of the many ghosts which haunt this poem...

...Sandover" is also the ouija board and, I suspect, the heavenly flower at the end of the Paradiso...

...The past two or three hundred years, JM comments, "have seen a superhuman/All-shaping Father dwindle (as in Newman)/To ghostly, disputable Essence or/ Some shaggy-browed, morality play bore/(As in the Prologue to Faust...

...One answer is, the changing light at Sandover...

...Not for nothing had the Impressionists Put subject-matter in its place, a mere Pretext for iridescent atmosphere...

...Kant was, and is, right (and on this count, Hegel agreed with him): you cannot deduce the infinite from the finite...

...H. Auden...

...And yet, for all of the demythologizing, The Changing Light is a religious poem...

...There was, I thought, more than a little poetic license in all of this...

...But, for my present purpose, its most significant meaning is the heritage of culture, and that relates to one of the central myths of Mirabel and to one of the basic theories of the age...

...Sun, Earth and Stars in eloquent dumb show...

...WITH THESE qualifications, let me return to the poem and a very basic question: what is it "about...

...Emile Durkheim, and Friederich Nietzsche, both of whom thought grammar a key to God, would agree...

...Buddha, Ahknaton, Jesus, Homer, Mon-tezuma, Plato, and a false Mohammed also put in significant appearances...

...Our human words are weakest, I would urge, When He resorts to them...

...WHA, in welcoming the coming of the "alphas" (from Brave New World) asks, "WHAT OF THE OMEGAS7/3 BILLION OF EM UP IN SMOKE POOR BEGGARS...

...Of course one doesn't judge a work of art by political standards...

...But then I happened to read the comments of a French scientist, Claude Allegre, in an article in Le Monde:' 'To know that the stars are immense nuclear laboratories whose activities continually change the chemical composition of our galaxy...

...FOR GENERATIVE FORCE READ: RADIATION TO THE BILLIONTH POWER OF EXPLODING ATOMS...

...And JM interjects: "Wystan, how can you...

...But then I suspect Wittgenstein might have agreed even though he insisted that this was a matter upon which one must keep silent...

...and thus Ephraim is marred by some loose threads...

...The whole project, one suspects, did not become clear to Merrill until he began to work on the next book, Mirabel...

...First there is the God who holds back the chaos: a distant figure, not at all as human and compelling as Mother Nature in her best mood (Nature, for JM as for the Greeks, is a trinity...

...And there is ubiquitous wit in this poem, sometimes as frivolous as a pun, sometimes more ingenious as when Jane Austen addresses the newly dead Robert Morse "As Mr...

...Mirabel" is a bat-like creature, the survivor of one of those self-destructed worlds, who becomes a peacock as he talks to JM and DJ...

...It was, Mirabel tells JM and DJ, language, culture, which marked the beginning of the transition "OF THE TWO BASIC APECHILDREN" toward humanity...

...And there can be a sort of "willing suspension of disbelief-I think...

...it should not be a reason for turning against The Changing Light...

...The old vocabulary becomes stale, "translucent, half-effaced," but science creates a new language: ". . . through Wave, Ring, Bond, through Spectral Lines/And Resonances blows a breath of life,/Lifting the pleated garment...

...In Paris at the Beaubourg earlier in the summer, I saw a series of Kandinsky paintings assembled to show his progression (which I am not sure was a progression in this case) from representational to non-representational art...

...It is necessary, WHA argues, to bring "WM CARLOS WM'S THOUGHT THINGS /& THE COLD VIRGIN VERB OF MALLARME/ TOGETHER...

...Or with the poign-ance in Brecht's Stalinist play-an agitprop play at that-on the Chinese Revolution...

...But to say that the future might well regard The Changing Light as major is to make a very large present claim for a powerful and unique poem...

...these are some of the elements which today infuse the most profound human thought...

...This is the book in which the chaos-order antagonism is explored and it ends as JM and DJ break a mirror-and thereby their relationship with Auden, Maria, and George...

...Indeed, if all of its parts failed, which is in no way the case, The Changing Light would still be a triumph as an incredibly realized whole...