Voices from the Atom
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
On Poetry VOICES FROM THE ATOM BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL "P JL oems of Science? Ugh./The very thought. To squint through those steel-rimmed/Glasses of the congeni-tally slugVPale boy at school, with...
...Since 1938, when Enrico Fermi first split the atom, mankind has teetered on the brink of a similar cataclysm, but God Biology does not want his supreme creation destroyed...
...When JM asks Wystan if he believes what the powers have been saying, he replies: "Let me say my dcar/1 think the four of usaretouchingly believable...
...Wystan and JM are the seminar's intellectuals, indulging in introspection about their own poetic gifts, and a certain semirepressed rivalry...
...Akhnaton and his Queen Nefertiti, doomed by love and pride, provide what Merrill mockingly styles "Nuits de Cleopatre...
...In that work, the poet told of bizarre communications that he and his companion, David Jackson, had received over a 20-year period from "Ephraim"—a lst-century Hellenistic Jew who claimed to have been a slave at the court of Tiberius...
...w ? ? hat, then, of the "poems of science...
...It is one thing to enjoy gossip from the beyond, quite another to accept an atomic bat as one's preceptor...
...Lest readers get the impression that Mirabell is chiefly devoted to the exposition of dubious metaphysics, I hasten to note that no summary can convey the variety or cohesion of its dramatic changes...
...Although intrigued, the poet and his friend are understandably nervous...
...Their appearance will not surprise readers of Merrill's Divine Comedies (1916...
...later they instructed the heretic pharaoh Akhnaton to build a crystal pyramid that, had it not been slightly flawed, would have immolated the earth...
...Benson's Make Way for Lucia...
...Suppose that the cell is the source of our behavior, Merrill asks, how can we adjust our thinking without losing our sense of worth and purpose...
...Therefore these messengers, repentant of their former mischief, have arrived to warn against the evil of energy that does not come from the sun...
...No reader of Mirabell will ever think of atoms quite the way he did before encountering the personifications of their forces...
...On this awesome note, the poem abruptly ends...
...The details of these lives (and afterlives) make as beguiling a story as any pastoral novel of manners from Jane Austen's Emma to E.R...
...One easily learns to distinguish different speech mannerisms for the various humans, who use "rough pentameter, our natural birthright" (the immortals speak in syllables...
...There are numberless subplots, each more delightful than the last...
...that our race is doomed to extinction...
...Maria explains that they are products of "the mind's eye," the imagination that must see an idea to conceive it...
...To celebrate the newfound faith, there is a picnic of words—a love feast or agape, introduced by Auden, whose much-missed voice Merrill resurrects with uncanny fidelity...
...The poet's function is to translate the abstract into the vividly concrete...
...Science meant/Obfuscation, boredom...
...But at the same time it acknowledges this state of affairs, the poem offers numinous reassurance that we can be saved by "the life raft of language"—that beyond our myopic vision gleams a prol'ounder understanding of life than we have yet conceived...
...One involves the horrifying discovery by the late poet, Chester Kallman, that he is to be reborn as an African political leader...
...But even these affirmations of the triumph of Love over time and place give way to a deeper revelation...
...If He is in the "accumulated intelligence" of DNA, then the impulses transmitted must be His...
...James Merrill has created a poem as central to our generation as The Haste Land was to the one before us...
...the bats frighteningly so, except for the humane Mirabell...
...Through him, though, JM and D J were able to contact dead friends, in particular two quasi-parental figures: W. H. Auden, Merrill's poetic mentor, and Maria Mitsotaki, whom Merrill once addressed as "the Muse of my off-days" (The Firescreen, 1969...
...Maria and Wystan," who also communicate through the board, describe them as enormous black bats with gargoyle faces and red eyes...
...Ultimately, Merrill's celestial circus is a brilliant philosophy of metaphor—that "ritual of the new religion...
...But "NOW SCIENCE, FORCED MORE AND MORE TO SHARE THE RELIGIOUS FIELD OF CONSCIOUSNESS, MUST TRY TO REASSURE," since it cannot offer "justice...
...DJ, the most intuitive of the group, is also the most fearful and inclined to suspect Gothic horrors...
...I really only like Ephraim and his crowd," complains DJ...
...When theology, with its system of ethics, was paramount, God was "WRATHFUL IF IF IF JUST...
...This singular informant gossiped about his past and present, and instructed his listeners on the heavenly hierarchy —seemingly as bound by red tape and bureaucratic mismanagement as any on earth...
...that we have lost religion and morality...
...Mysterious powers who "SPEAK FROM WITHIN THE ATOM" (readers must get used to the ouija board's uppercase letters) have come to tell of the dangers of atomic energy...
...Nobody can transfigurejunk like that Withoutfirst turning down the rheostat To Allegory, in whose gloom the whole Horror of Popthinkfastens on the soul, Harder to scrape off than bubblegum...
...JM names him "Mirabell," after the romantic hereof Congreve's The Way of the World...
...morality is not part of its terminology...
...Mirabell holds a mirror up to our deepest fears: that our actions are impelled, not chosen...
...Ouija...
...Enter 741, a gentle bat, who conducts a seminar on the new religion of symbolic language...
...While our ancestors tended to describe ants and bees in anthropomorphic terms as provident, industrious or dutiful, today the comparisons have been reversed and we easily identify our regimentation and genetic impulses as akin to the insects.' To insist that science and art are diametrically opposed is to ignore how much our thinking has been shaped by the "imaginative" tropes of scientists from Darwin and Freud to Leakey and Skinner...
...Now it turns out that "The Book of Ephraim" wasmerely a curtain-raiser for MirabelPs more solemn masque...
...another relates how the spirit of Rimbaud ghostwrote The Waste Land...
...Despite this initial bleak view, the general movement of Mirabell manages to metamorphosize the ordinary, the trivial, the ridiculous into the sublime...
...Nevertheless, the Muses of most poets today parade like the Madwoman of Chaillot, dressed in outmoded fashions of thought, ready to do single-handed battle against modernism...
...As for JM, who had planned to compose austere odes to DNA, he indignantly protests this farrago: Atlantis, UFOs God's chosen apes...
...Yet after all the grotesques, arabesques, human interest, we become more sophisticated, and are prepared for the unadorned revelation of the angels...
...Instruction in science, history and theology, Arabian Nights stories, arguments and debates are all interwoven with "set pieces"—lyrical poems of exquisite musicality, reminiscent of the songs in Goethe's Faust...
...There is something for everyone, yet it all forms a unity, bonded like those atoms the poem celebrates...
...So James Merrill describes his first reaction in Mira-bell: Books of Number (Athaneum, 182 pp., $10.95) when the spirits who speak through his ouija board announce that he has been chosen to reveal the ways of "God Biology" to man...
...A matter as frivolous as redecorating a room turns out to have cosmic significance...
...To squint through those steel-rimmed/Glasses of the congeni-tally slugVPale boy at school, with his precipitates, his fruit-flies and his slide-rule...
...Maman" Maria furiously attacks the bats for bullying, mothers everybody and preens in her new clothes...
...Heavenly messengers...
...Such a high comic romp was rather startling after the previous "chronicles of love and loss...
...When his voices tell Merrill that "MAN'S TERMITE PALACE BEEHIVE ANTHILL PYRAMID JM IS LANGUAGE," they assume our ability to accept a metaphor that compares structures collectively built by social insects to human culture...
...Perhaps the most powerful enchantment of the book is the vividness and charm of its characters...
...The angels are radiantly otherworldly...
...From the winedark sea of space," the guardian of light, Archangel Michael, brings a divine message: Man is "A SPECIES OF THE SUN'S MAKING," and the accumulated energy of the cell is "AN ANCIENT AND IMMORTAL INTELLIGENCE," which is God...
...They founded, then destroyed Arcadia on Atlantis...
...Unpleasant as the thought may be, we cannot help suspecting that the mysterious motivation of cells controls our actions—that we have no more free will than the animals...
...At all times it is affirmed that there are no bats—spirits have no form...
...Emotions are rife...
...Mirabell, by contrast, is not afraid to tackle the problem head-on...
...Still, it was undeniable that in shaking the burdens of nostalgia and regret, the poet's voice deepened with impressive authority...
...God Biology is no deus abscon-ditus, however, but an intensely personal deity...
...Their fall was a nuclear explosion brought about when they tried to wrest power from the positive forces...
...The voices identify themselves as "bad angels," the negative charge of energy, creators of the black holes in space, and pure reason without matter...
...In the process, his four pupils—JM, DJ, Maria, and Wystan—teach him about human manners, which elevate us above the animal world, and he is transformed into a peacock...
...that we cannot assimilate the increasingly complex way in which our world must be viewed...
...THE DEVIL HAS BEEN DRIVEN FROM US INTO MAN WE NOW MUST DRIVE IT OUT OF HIM OUR TOOLS ARE MIND WORDS REASON LIGHT...
Vol. 61 • December 1978 • No. 24
