Slipping Toward the Instincts
BLY, ROBERT
Slipping Toward the Instincts RESCUE THE DEAD By David lgnatow Wesleyan. 79 pp. $4.00; paperback, $2.00. Reviewed by ROBERT BLY Author. "The Light Around the Body," "Silence in the Snowy...
...The ideas in Ignatow are bigger...
...Slipping toward the instincts involves the end of "idealistic love...
...As Western man sinks nearer to the instincts, his emotions become more demanding...
...The third Ritual describes the well-known torture and murder of children on the Scottish moors several years ago...
...During the first Ritual, he enters a theater: The neck of a player is caught between his seat and the backrest, and he has to break his neck as the price of his admission...
...When we arrive at the instincts then, people looking around will not find plastic emotions, mass indecisiveness, soggy feelings, but clear and hard dances, grand and chilling...
...Auden, Lowell, Fromm, et al...
...There is a third kind of work?which we find in both poetry and prose—that is mindless, or at least, idealess...
...So I am going to use David Ignatow's new poems as examples of human language in which ideas lie curled...
...It ends with him circling the room, like a bird, flying with his arms...
...Ignatow's work, in its implications, has a harshness like Robert Lowell's, although to a man interested in ideas, Ignatow's poetry is actually more interesting than Lowell's...
...Rescue the Dead begins with an investigation of one of our most admired "idealistic loves," fatherson love, and lgnatow takes the relationship between himself and his father as a contemporary instance of it...
...To love is to be led away into a forest where the secret grave is dug, singing, praising darkness under the trees...
...Lowell often expresses the thought that our emotions are becoming less precise as mass civilization comes on, political life becomes hazy, a servility "slides by on grease...
...Enough training at this, and he cannot recognize the body hidden in darkness...
...lgnatow belongs to the generation of Berryman, Lowell...
...The last four poems I have quoted from follow each other in Rescue the Dead, so Ignatow knows very well what he is suggesting, and has arranged his book with great care...
...We will join them and be nourished again by our fathers...
...You who are free, rescue the dead...
...To love is to be a fish...
...For in the most nourishing poetry, we always find ideas...
...What happens, Ignatow inquires, if that man is not allowed to jump...
...The sections of the book that follow describe the relationships still possible or only now possible in a society where humanist loves are dying...
...It is a powerful and frightening poem...
...Edmund Wilson is another who, faced with the immense richness of contemporary poetry, can find only in Life Studies ideas denuded enough and under stark enough light so that he can recognize them...
...Does it mean used to reading prose...
...We can see the idea so clearly in Rilke: "to forgo love is to kiss a leaf...
...Come here and I will tear you to pieces...
...That line picks up a curious resonance from Freud...
...In the third section he describes what is replacing humanistic love...
...My boat wallows in the sea...
...I have a brain that gives me pleasure...
...Yet only the most coarse and unsophisticated modern poets state their ideas directly, in the manner beloved of the New Critics...
...Let's see how he says that: Finally, to forgo love is to kiss a leaf, is to let rain fall nakedly upon your head, is to respect fire, is to study man's eyes and his gestures as he talks, is to set bread upon the table and a knife discreetly by, is to pass through crowds like a crowd of oneself...
...Embedded in this line is the recognition that nine-tenths of our love is ordered love, love we undertake at the demand of the civilization, idealistic love, humanist love...
...So here is a man "journeying through strange seas of thought...
...The Light Around the Body," "Silence in the Snowy Fields" This is a curious book for those who are not used to reading poetry...
...The second section talks of a contemporary marriage...
...We are not going to touch on that sort at all here...
...One of his ideas is that we are slowly slipping back toward the instincts...
...But we can realize that to learn to read poetry we have to learn to reach in and uncover ideas, which actually are so much fresher than ideas in prose precisely because they are lying curled...
...The poem's use of the image of stairs is another hint that man is moving again into the non-human, into the state that interested the Greeks...
...In an essay the idea must be clear—every inch of the idea's skin should be visible: The good essayist is like a painter who paints only nudes in bright light...
...He does...
...If European ego-civilization could be described as a wooden floor, then we are sinking through wooden floors down to a stone floor, where the instincts make a pattern like those made by the dancers in Greek tragedies...
...The sorrows will not be dissipated...
...Ignatow makes a brilliant distinction there: At a time when everyone says that loving is living (cf...
...he makes polar opposites of them...
...The great gone, the people one by one offer to die...
...The academics say: There is a defense of rational poetry...
...Finally, to forgo love is to kiss a leaf...
...He is the only member of his generation to whom the young have rallied...
...Suppose a man wants to throw himself down "from a great height/to express sorrow./ Step aside, please...
...it means not being accustomed to finding ideas lying curled under tree roots, only a strong odor of fur indicating something is there...
...They were human like myself, somehow/gone in a direction to a depth I've never known...
...There is solitude and a new ecstasy...
...Not surprisingly for those who understood the implications of Ignatow's earlier metaphors, it is "Rituals...
...Shapiro, Ciardi, et al...
...though it is not these men who have defended his work...
...The man replies, "I am insane, you say/and will send me away?and I will go/and die there/in sorrow...
...If they are not built "by human hands," and not by God, then the other possibility is by hard, chill instincts...
...The poet has a dream he is on a stair going down: "I must get to a landing/where I can order food," and he will "if only I were sure now/ that these stairs were built by human hands...
...What does that mean?not used to reading poetry...
...I respect him immensely, and I find ideas in his work, as I do in the work of Marcuse and Bruno Bettel-heim, that help me to understand what is going on underneath all the rhetorical events...
...The instinct of vital survival is conveyed all too well from father to son...
...Dwight MacDonald, whom I admire, is a remarkable example—he grasps ideas in essays marvellously, and fumbles around in poems like a blind man...
...It is very Austrian...
...There is no need to weep about this...
...Because he has screamed so well, he is invited on stage to take a bow...
...All that, whether we wish it or no, is ending...
...Martin Luther King's pointless murder represents one more step down on the stair leading away from humanist civilization, and his recent funeral gives added resonance to Ignatow's poem, "On The Death of Winston Churchill," which I will quote entire: Now should great men die in turn one by one to keep the mind solemn and ordained, the living attend in dark clothes and with tender weariness and crowds at television sets and newsstands wait as each man's death sustains a peace...
...An essay and a poem are different in the way the idea lies inside them...
...it is men younger than lgnatow who have insisted that his poetry be reviewed and published...
...Ignatow observes that gulls veer off, "afraid of a human...
...Not to love is to live...
...Not to love is to live...
...That admitted, the poet at the end of the section has turned into a bagel, rolling down the street, "strangely happy with myself...
...I want to be a crocodile...
...What he finds is not a picturesque non-communication, but all too much communication...
...Like Rilke, Ignatow notices that human emotions are not becoming less insistent, but more insistent, and they have a greater influence upon events...
...In the second Ritual, the poet turns from an adult into a child, going around in a ring screaming, "Nothing...
...The stairs are not going up, they are not angelic stairs...
...we are not responsible for the blindness of these intelligent men...
Vol. 51 • May 1968 • No. 11
