DECOLLAGING EXPERIENCE

A significant theme in Rukeyser's poetry is that of the passage, through

phases, or movement between two different realms of experiences or conditions. The

Phase Rule of Gbbs (LP 167) which views the different stages of one's life

as different phases of the same condition serves as an important metaphor in her

poetry as well as in her personal life. Many of the collections of poems refer to this

movement, or imply the interspace that liaisons two conditions: "US 1," "The Gates,"

"Speed of Darkness," "Breaking Open," and "Theo~y of Flight." This movement also

relates to the association of meaning and interpretation that Rukeyser locates in the

reader's negotiations with the text. The sense of location then is a shifting one as the

intuitive experience itself always involves the movement of both flight and r e t q

within the space of the poem as well in the imaginative landscapes of the mind.

Umberto Eco states in The Role of the Reader, that "Thepossibilities which the

work's openness makes available always work within a givenfield of relations" (62).

Even though Eco suggests the possibility of a singular meaning in the text, he also

endorses the possibility of multivalency in interpretation which validates the author's

intentions as involved in the interpretative process:

What it does imply is an organizing rule which governs these

relations.[. . .] we can say that the work in movement is the possibility

of numerous different personal interventions, but it is not an

amorphous invitation to indiscriminate participation. The invitation

offers the performer the chance of an oriented insertion into something

which always remains the world intended by the author. (62)

Eco corroborates this premise with additional comments which refer to the text as

essentially inwnlplete unless it involves the participatory response of the reader. But

this interpretative response does not take the artwork away from the circle of the

writer's context. In fact it is a coming together of both the creator as well as the one

for whom the work is created, through interpretative activity.

The author offers the interpreter, the performer, the addressee a work

to be completed He does not know the exact fashion in which his work

will be concluded, but he is aware that once completed the work in

question will still be his own. It will not be a different work, and at the

end of the interpretative dialogue, a form which is his form, will have

been assembled by an outside party in a particular way that he could

not have foreseen. (62)

One of the characteristics of Rukeyser's poetry which invites the response of

the reader in this process of completion, is the doubling back to origins. The whole

process of the reading activity then involves a passage or movement that does not end

with the completion of the reading process that reaches the end of the text. Rukeyser

returns us to the beginning so that the transformation that occurs in one's interaction

with the text becomes valid only when we return to the text with the knowledge

gained in the process.

Thus as Mary Anne Caws states, "A chosen text can serve, then, as a ritual

center of pilgrimage, liberating and regenerating the reader in its flux" (Metapoetics

15). This recursive action is, as Paul Ricoeur suggests one which "construe[s]" the

meaning of a text [. . .] as a whole.[. . .] It is a cumulative holistic process"

(Interpretation 1heory 76) . Ricoeur refers to the "plurivocity" of the text which gives

the text "a stereoscopic structure." The derivation of' meaning then transcends the

multiplicity of semantic contexts that the text offers. It is in seeing the relationship

within the diffkrent parts of the text that one arrives at a meaningful interpretation of

the text:

The construction of a text's architecture, therefore, takes the form of a

circular process, in the sense that the presupposition of a certain kind

of whole is implied in the recognition of the parts. And reciprocally, it

is in construing the details that we construe the whole. (Interpretation

Iheory 77)

Hermeneutics itself relates to the space between two places or stages as Hugh

J. Silverman explains:

l:H]ermeneutics tries to apprehend its activity as located in the place

between, in the space of difference. Interpretation is indeed the very

activity of placing between: the messenger who travels back and forth

between Zeus and the other gods, or between Zeus and human beings.

This Hermes is a go-between. Hermeneutics is a philosophy of go-

betweenness. Hermeneutics does not speak from a throne. Its job is to

c,arry the message, to bring out the Word, to disclose what is unspoken,

to uncover the sub-floor. Hermeneutics cannot speak from a ground. It

must place itself where the ground sets itself off against the absence of

ground [. . .] . The task of hermeneutics is to operate in the space of

difference between subject and object, ground and non-ground, thinker

and thought, speaker and spoken about, knower and that which is to be

known. (Texiualities 33)

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The hermeneutic circle thus moves from the parts, the specific details, to the whole,

and in the process moves towards a fuller sense of the text. The activity of

interpretation thlis leads to the disclosure of meaning in the manner in which

Silverman describes the process:

bfoving around the circle, across the space of difference, origination

and relationality, the interpt%er lets the being or the work [. . .] speak

for itself But if the being or the work truly speak for themselves, then

the interpreter is also spoken by them. The disclosure is at the same

time self-disclosure. The understanding of the meaning of being or the

meaning of the artwork is also self-understanding. Hence, something

happens in the hermeneutic circle [. . .] the hermeneutic circle discloses

the truth of being or the truth of the artwork. (Textualities 24)

me Tkreshold Es,enenence

The threshold experience of the "inter-space'" or passage contains similarities

with what Arnold Van Gennep terms as the "rites of passage," which includes the

three stages of passage through which the individual is transformed: "the preliminal

rites (rites of separation), liminal rites (rites of transition), and postliminal rites (rites

of incorporation)" (1 1). The threshold has its significance as an area that contains the

dual movement of exit and entry. But it denotes a stage in a passage orjourney, an

area demarcated by its lack of closure. The threshold is an area that leads to another

space, and so lacks the telos of finality of destination. In Rukeyser's poetry, the

intuitive process can be divided into three areas or stages, similar to that of the rites of

passage as stated by Van Gennep. Space is a momentary stasis between two

movements, or a temporary stop within activity and flow. It is not the centre, the end

127

or completion of activity but a pause within continuity. The threshold area is then the

ritual space before and after trans for ma ti or^, the area of the leap of transcendence and

the return after it. The movement of the leap and the return are both part of the same

process. The metaphor of intuition is thus of a break or leap from one area to another,

but also of perpetual return and a dissolution of boundaries. Mary Ann Caws in 7he

Metapoetics of'the Passage defines the term passage as

the corridor between moments, situations, states, at once spatial,

temporal, psychological, sociological and anthropological, its rites

openly acknowledged. It is the place of ritual and psychological

transformation, the moment of shift and displacement of sentiment, the

consciousness of a textual turn. (1 1)

Caws locates the threshold as the text that can alter the perception of the reader, or

finds it located within the mind of the reader, where the flow of ideas can effect a

change that constitutes an alteration in tht: psychological life of the individual. Caws

expands on the idea suggested by Van Gennep:

In the anthropological sense, the 'passenger' undergoes a ritual

ceremony of crossing or of liminality, becoming himself the site of

'actions and reactions between the profane and the sacred [. . .I. ' Van

Gennep distinguishes successive stages in the human cycle: a time or

place of separation, 'preliminary,' in the preparatory instant to the

liminaq or marginal moment; in this stage the passenger is freed of

ordinary costumes and daily ritual, opened to the extraordinary and the

unaccustomed, cut off from before and after, and placed on the sill or

limen, the psychological boundary of entrance and exit, always

between two stages. Later in the final or post-liminary experience, at

the stage of integration, the passenger will enter his new situation,

changing his social and psychological status. But it is above all the

middle, marginal, or liminary time that is of interest [. . .I. (13-14)

The passage is the central metaphor of "Searching/Not Searching" which

moves through the various experiences of searching through the leaves of the past and

the present, expressing different ways of seeking truth through the creative act.

Awareness of this truth is often unexpected, transforming our experience through the

threshold area of the poem:

What kind of woman goes searching and searching?

Among the hrrows of dark April, along the sea-beach,

in the faces of children, in what they could not tell;

in the pages of centuries -

fix what man? For what magic?

[ . . . . . . . . . . . . . , . . . . . . . . . . . . . , . . . . . . . . ]

Among the dead I too have gone searching,

a. blue light in the brain.

Suddenly I come to these living eyes,

I a live woman look up at you this day

I see all the colors in your look. (CP 498-99)

Rukeyser specifies that the searcher is a woman, a woman as poet, who seeks the

resources of the past, but the search divulges not only the figures, the facts and the

circumstances, but a response of one life to another life. As a live woman in the

present, she seeks, finds and faces another who responds with the colours of hislher

experiences. In this response of the poet, there is an inherent invitation of the response

129

of the reader also to the experience of the text, to immerse oneself in it so that it is

experienced as if in the present and as a personal experience.

In the second section, "Miriam The Red Sea," Miriam's song of the

providential escape of Moses and his kindred from Egypt, is the interspace between

two movements., that of destruction and aggression. and of the escape and the search

for the homeland. Her body is transformed into the body of song that enjoins the two

lands, and the past and the h r e in the present moment which is experienced in its

immediacy at every moment of its invocation:

I alone stand here

ankle-deep

and I sing, I sing,

until the lands

sing to each other. ((TP 499)

The lands are connected by a common heritage, and the memory of the land belongs

to those who live in it and create the memory as a tradition for the future.

"For Dolci" proposes another means of "discovery," through the eyes of

children, whose clarity of vision uncontaminated by dualism will create a new vision

and a "new person."

We will form a new person who will step forward,

he it is, she it is, assumes fill1 life,

fully responsible. We will bring all the children,

they will decide together.

We will ask these children : what is before you?

They will say what they see.

They will say what they do not see.

Once again we breathe in discovery.

A. man, a woman,

will discover

a7e are each other's sources. ((2' 500)

Both these images, one of the past and the other of the future conjoin in the

next section, "Concrete," where the image of the concrete city becomes the fluidity of

form, of changing phase. It is not a destruction and erasure of form in the rebuilding,

but a continuity, a constant movement through connected time. The days and the

songs/poems are moments in time, controlled temporally. The buildings and the

poems are both admixtures of different elements that blend and mingle, and take on

new forms as they take on new meanings:

They are setting the forms,

pouring the new buildings,

Our days pour down.

I am pouring my poems. (('P 500)

The next five sections, V-IX, express different means of discovery, through

personal gratification, sacrifice or vision. In "Brecht's Galileo," Galileo uses a model

of the earth revolving around the sun to teach his student, but the reciprocal

relationship removes the division between giving and taking that is inherent in the

passage of knowledge:

Galilee spins a toy of the earth around

The spinning sun; he looks at the student boy.

Learning is teaching, teaching is learning. (CP 500)

131

In "Reading the Kieu," the sacrifice of the woman hero of the Vietnamese

epic who has "sold herself to save her father" (Cl' 501) is violated by the soldiers,

just as the land is by war:

Shame, disgrace, change of seas into burnt fields.

Banners, loudspeakers, violation of each day,

everything being unjust. But she does save him,

and we find everything in another way. ( C Y 501)

The theme of "Sistine Chapel," is the renowned painting of the creation of

man. But as in the two previous poems, Rukeyser interprets the creative act by

connecting its relevance to mankind. The relationship between the representation of

the first creation as inexplicable, intangible endowment is contrasted with the other

extreme, the crowding humanity of arms that proximate the creative act in the daily

exchange of physical empathy and touch that attempts a transgression of the "gap

between finger-tips/across all of space or nothing, infinity" (C'P 501). This is the

human need to overcome the chasm between the created object and the creative touch.

Creation's very being exists in the gap, so that the need to overcome it is a constant

striving. The metaphor moves between the meaning that art bestows and the human

proclivity to extend human desire from the subhuman to the supra- human, "closing

the gap between the continual creation and the daily touch" (CP 501). It is a

movement based on the human desire to communicate, and in the replay of the

hypothetical representation of the primal act of creation, playing out the cosmic act

through human means, through the physical, emotional and artistic actions of

simulating the celestial creative act on human terms. The mystery of continual

creation and the proximation of it through daily touch closes the gap between the

earth and the sky, between mystery and reality. Hut the act is always a movement

between earth and sky, attempting to overcome, and never realising it in its

wholeness, but experiencing it in daily response.

Hallie Flanagan, the stage director and a good friend, communicates a relevant

truth to Rukeyser regarding response, which is the context of the section "H.F.D."

The true meaning of response is not based on it being the telos of any creative action,

even though it is only response that completes the work of art. The action itself is

played out beyond the acknowledgement of response, which occurs in its own time.

You taught me this in your dying, for poems and theatre

and love and peacemaking that living and my love

are where response and no-response

meet at last, Hallie, in infinity. (CI' 502)

The theme that binds these sections is that of human response being inherent in all

forms of artistic activity. The knowledge that occurs is a result of a search for

meanings in lived lives, between two lands, the resources in the relationship between

man and woman, the pouringfdestruction and setting of forms, the symbiosis of

learning and teaching, and the search for an alternate way. It is the response to, and

through art, that overcomes separation. Similarly the grounding of creativity in the

human touch and the mark of infinity, the meeting of "response" and "no-response,"

are all based on the central need for communication --through song, art, poetry.

The next two sections contrast tht: lack of response and the disintegration of

the creative act. The truth embodied in art and form, which was covalent in the

creative process has been separated creating a parody of meaningless rhetoric. The

discovery of meantng in art now beconies a betrayal of truth through means that

controvert reality through rhetoric:

They have asked me to speak in public

and set me a subject.

1 hate anything that begins : the mist as . . .

and as for 'social critic'

at the last quarter of the twentieth century

I know what that is. (CP 502)

In the section "The President and the Laser Bomb action is a denial of the words:

He speaks in a big voice through all the air

saying : we have made strength,

we have made a beginning,

we will have lasting peace.

Something shouts on the river

All night long the acts speak

the new laser bomb falls inipeccably

along the beam of a strict lrght

finding inevitably a narrow footbridge

in Asia (('P 502-3)

Unity, coalescence, empathy and mutuality that arise from the inter-

relationships between man and the environment. expressed through art and daily

intercourse, may be revealed, but may at the same time remain unseen in actions and

words that simulate them Language contains the hermetic power of denial and

assertion, in the ambiguity of meaning If on one side there is the freshness of

"continual creation," on the other, there is the routine that awaits invention and

discovery

As Rukeyser suggests, there is a close relationship between all seemingly

dualistic processes. In keeping with her theory of non-binal thinking, the leap and the

return, contemplation and excitement, stasis and action, intuition and ratiocination,

contain both alternation and simultaneity The search ends in discovery, in a seeing

that belongs to the future, to possibility. This insight which is both an outer looking

and an inner movement, occurs unexpectedly, even though we await in preparation for

its occurrence:

When it happens to us again and again,

sometimes we know it for we are prepared

but to discover, to live at the edge of things:

to fall out of routine into invention

and recognize at the other edge of ocean

a new kind of man a new kind of woman

walking toward me into the little surf.

[ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

I wme to you searching and searching. (CP 503)

The insight is not without the demands of responsibility attendant on the

transformative vision of reality:

how to go on

from the moment that

changed our life,

the moment of revelation,

proceeding from the crisis.

from the dream,

and not fiom the moment

135

of sleep before it? (CP 503-4)

Communication of this experience then becomes a matter of experiencing

freedom and working towards achieving it through a recognition of the manipulations

of language. "Making" takes on overtones that communicate the relationship between

the inner world of discovery and the capillary excursion into the world of technology

that permeates our life and language. To see with clarity involves the appropriation of

a world through language.

As Ricoeur states, "Interpretation is completed as appropriation when reading

yields something like an event, an event of' discourse, which is an event in the present.

As appropriation, interpretation becomes an event" (Interpretation Theory 92). But

the process of appropriation itself is the opening up of a new perspective for what is

appropriated in a text is,

Not the intention of the author, which is supposed to be hidden behind

the text; not the historical situation common to the author and his

original readers; not the expectations or feelings of these original

readers; not even their understanding of themselves as historical and

cultural phenomena. What has to be appropriated is the meaning of the

text itself, conceived in a dynamic way as the direction of thought

opened up by the text. In other words, what has to be appropriated is

nothing other than the power of disclosing a world that constitutes the

reference of the text [. . .I . If we may be said to coincide with

anything, it is not the inner life of another ego, but the disclosure of a

possible way of looking at things, which is the genuine referential

power of the text. (Interpretation Theory 92)

136

The search then, through history, time, the past, through the poem, and

through art, returns to the self as locus, which is revealed in the text. In the "self-

understanding" that occurs in and through the text, Ricoeur "would oppose the self,

which proceeds from the understanding of the text to the ego, which claims to precede

it. It is the text, with its universal power of world disclosure, which gives a self to the

ego" (Interprelation Theory 94-5).

The shadow of my hand.

The shadow of the pen.

Morning of the day we reach or do not reach.

In our bodies, we find each other.

C)n our mouths, inner greet

in our eyes.(C'P 504)

Rachel Blau DuPlessis comments on llukeyser's usage of "inner greet" which

"describes those people with such self-knowledge and generosity of spirit that they

are able to move outward to others.[. . .I" She also states that "Rukeyser has put the

emphasis on the level and sacramental quality of the 'inner greet' which must be

attained to bring: about social transformation" (209)

Reality, and the interaction with it becomes a Heraclitan acceptance of process

rather than a static condition, a process subtended to the individual's interactive

relationship with his environment and other beings. This posits the experience of

reality as basal to one's manner of perceiving -- as one's responses can keep

changing. The very contrast in movement encloses an inherent unity so that difference

becomes an alternate phase of the same condition rather than an opposition of forces.

In such a situation the untrained eye is corlfused between what is seen and what seems

to be seen.Any condition then contains in itself a reversible state or order so that mere

107

routine becomes discovery: "In the poem's speaking the poetic imagination gives

itself utterance. What is spoken in the poem is what the poet annunciates out of

himself' (Heidegger, hetry , Imguage, Zhughi 195). And in this enunciation, the

reader and the poet join in the threshold area of the imagination and see an essential

relatedness:

Pieces of a world away

within my room.

LJnseen and seen, the bodies within my life

Voices under the leaves of 4siq

and America, in sex, in possibility

We are trying to make, to let our darkness be made,

not tom apart tonight by our dead skills (CP 504)

Rukeyser's visualisation of space as a ritual threshold of experience occurs in

poems where the space is not always an enclosed space, it may be a place, a stage, a

house, or even the space of the mind, the body, or the most significant space, the

space of the poem itself

Inner Spoces, Outer Movements

The movement from one condition to another takes the form of the stairs in

"ln a Dark House." The contrast between the violence in the outer world threatening

to break in at any moment, and the seeming silence and calm in the dark house is

juxtaposed. The darkness of the house "shadowed by night," the "unlit lamps along

the wall," the dust which "piles in old house-comers rapidly," "the shade" which

"grows," the accumulation of "evening," denote an area which resonates with the

journey into a dark abyss Mary Anne Caws locates the liminal threshold as between a

double movement outward and inward and of "outlook and "insight." In the poem

the text itself contains the duality of the passage

If we sttuate poetry in the middle or liminary stage, it signals

adequately the equal importance of the outlook and the telescoping of

the inner landscape. [. . .] the viewing line alters with the direction

outward or inward, up or down. For example, the multiple stairs, visual

and verhal, that mark the change of status, of literary pace and of

perception, often signify the descent in one's own mind and into its

depths [. . .].(The Eye in the Text 92)

The man and the woman walk up the stairs together, but each is immersed in the

memories of childhood and the past. Silently contemplating these incidents, each

faces the other, but there is a lack of communication, as each seems to be locked up in

the memories of the past.

But the nights are restless with these dreams of ours

in which we cry, fling our ;urns abroad, and there is no one;

~walls close in to a shaft anti blur of brown:

out of the chaos and eclipse of mind rise stairs.

(Here, metrically and monotonously walks

each several person unprotectedly.)

&lone, the nightmare broadens in the rising,

dull step sinking behind dull step, now, here, here,

nothing in the world but the slow spiral rise, expectancy, and fear. (CP

6 )

The stairs lead upstairs, but it is a movement from a lower level to an upper one. As

Gaston Bachelard suggests, if the space of the house is related to the mind's space, the

movement along the stairs can also he related to the movement of the subconscious.

There are different levels of stairs, the stairs that lead down to the basement, those

that lead up to the bedroom, and then the steep stairs to the attic (25-26). He states

that

All the spaces of our past moments of solitude, the spaces in which we

have suffered from solitude, enjoyed, desired and compromised

solitude, remain indelible within us, and precisely because the human

being wants them to remair so [. . .]. And when we reach the very end

of the labyrinths of sleep, when we attain to the regions of deep

slumber., we may perhaps experience a type of repose that is pre-

human; pre-human in this case, approaching the immemorial. (10)

The physical movement is that of mounting the steps, hut both the man and the

woman are mentally moving downwards, deep into the resources of memory, in an

active daydreaming recalling moments of their past. The fear of loneliness and failure

is a constant in their lives, and the only release is sleep. But even in sleep the stairs

rise in the unconscious, a sentient being that magnetically draws them towards

movement.

The stage is also represented as a ritual interspace between the real and the

unreal, between an area of performance and of wnsciousness. It is a place of escape

from the realities of life, and at the same: time a confrontation of those realities. The

stage is a double enclosure of performance, and the suggested space of retrospective

recall where memory and the space of performance coalesce. Audience identification

and response is a concern that Rukeyser has dealt with both in 7he L!fi of Poetv as

well as in her poems. For Rukeyser the source of art being the experiential basis, the

dividing line between reality and the imaginative is a thin one as one implodes into

the other. The escape from reality through art then becomes a greater involvement

with life.

The house expands into the larser world as Rukeyser writes about the

assertion of her independence and her escape from a world, her home, which she

thought offered her security and belonging in "This House, This Countty." But here,

she only experienced isolation. Even though she physically left the home, the space of

the house remained within her as memory: "1 know in my body the door, the entrance-

halYA wall and my space and another wall" (CP 20). But when she leaves her home,

it becomes a house like any other, not a home, not a sacred space of relationship and

memory, but a mere ob.iect:

I have leR forever

House and maternal river

Given up sitting in that private tomb

Quitted that land that house that velvet room. (C'P 20)

The threshold exists within her mind and it becomes the interspace that differentiates

between the home and the house, when she "crossed frontier" (CP 20).

"The Victims, A Play for the Home" prepares the traditional stage settings:

And if the curtain lifts, it is a window shade,

and if there is a stage, it is the room at home.

Furnished as we remember it. Not too well lit.

The wooden chair the bed quite neatly made. (CP 181)

The single character on stage, is also easily identifiable:

The face is discovered in sl~adow, but someone is there

If we look without fear, we will all know who it is.

This is a theatre and many masks have

the part; female or male : it will not matter here.

The role is traditional. It does what others did,

if anything is said, it is what others said. (CP 181)

In the enclosed space of the stage, "the exits are a window and a door, both shut." The

setting is a universal one. the play a recurring drama:

The play could be anywhert:; the stage could expand. It does not.

Its acts are single actions in the player's head;

[ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The play the player sees is at the margin of the mind. (CP 181)

The space expands and now encloses the audience in the ritual performance so that

the identification occurs. Performative :space occupies experiential memory. The

player and the audience unite in a subtle shiRing of roles. The entry into another space

has already occurred, and there is no entry to another area but only a return, through

an exit back to the world or as it occurs at the end of the poem, away from the world.

The exits at the moment are shut, as the play of victimisation has to be played out:

The player turns in the middle of the room, and speaks.

'Bargain,' shouts to the audience, 'bargain, but answer!

'I will tell you what I am if you tell me where you are

'You are the souls riding me, and I'm to be your ghost-

I have more in me than tharl (CP 183)

The revisualization of theatrical space becomes an imaginative reconstruction of

experiential memory, with memory becoming the repressive element that ties one

down to various claustrophobic relationships, and emotional upheavals that

participation in the family involves. The doors and windows exist as a dual possibility

of either opening or closing, as exit into or fram life, or entry into oneself As Van

Gennep states,

the door is the boundary between the foreign and domestic worlds in

the case of an ordinary dwelling, between the profane and sacred

worlds in the case of a temple. Therefore to cross the threshold is to

unite oneself with a new world. (20)

The text as a spatial object materially represents the aesthetic object as the source of

the transformation. The axiological movement is between the recesses of the self and

the greater participation in the community. The "stage" then, is also the nominative

temporal "stage" or moment in time, of ritual knowledge. As stage, spatial threshold,

it is the momentlarea of transformation. l'he transformation lies in the realisation that

there are two choices: either one accepts this enclosure as being an enactment of

victimisation, which enslavement to memory indicates, or one accepts the experience

as possessing the cathartic effect of release from memory. The exit then becomes an

entry into a different life, with the imagination providing the absolution of the

circumstances of one's suffering. To Edce the shadow reflected on the dark mirror of

the window is to come to terms with one's past, and one's experiences. It requires

courage to do this, as for the disheartened and cowardly this is an impossibility, as

they lie in the enclosure of repressive memories that scar their lifetime. Facing one's

past offers the release. Here the viewerlaudience hecomes player, and finally there is

only an exit, not as entry into world, but as exit from it. The dialectic of

insideloutside, exitlentry, reallunreal coalesce at the threshold area of the stage where

all connections implode into a non-dualistic connectedness. Thus the play in the re-

enactment within the self offers the release. Reality becomes the process that the mind

and imagination achieve, and in the retroversion of reality, the performance

transcends its enclosure, as a desacralised space that presents no visionary view, but

blends into life itself.

For "Girl at the Play" fleeing the violence of the ''powehl hand and "the

men you learn submission from," the play is an escape from her personal reality to a

larger reality that she wishes to lose herself-in:

Seats fill. The curtain's up where strong lights act,

cut theatre to its theme, the quick fit's past.

Here's answer in masses moving; by light elect,

they turn the stage before into the street behind; (CP 107)

The stage that she seeks as the threshold towards escapism presents not an escape

from reality but a greater participation in a reality that does not tenitorialise either the

personal or the communal, but enjoins both in the representation of reality through the

play. The temporary release that she seeks is available through the performance:

and nothing's so forgotten as your dead

fever, now that it's past and the swift play's ahead. (CP 107)

The idea of the stage occurs again in the poem "Ajanta" where the dialectic of

inner and outer is represented through the metaphoric quest within oneself represented

by the caves of Ajanta in India. Virginia R. Tems remarks on the selection of the

caves as the location of the poem as "a comment on the goals the poet is seeking, that

of putting the world, her world, that of the poet and that of the bodily self together [.

.] (I I). The long poem is divided into five sections, recalling the experiences through

the body and the five senses. The prominent image in the poem remains that of the

body, of the cave as a womb of the mind, and of the poetic text with its embodiment

being a source of experiential knowledge. The chaotic world, violent and broken by

war, death and betrayal, is contrasted w~th "shadowless Ajanta" (CP 207), "this cave

where the myth enters the heart again" (('P 208). The cave is described through a

reversal of accepted notions and images:

Space to the mind, the painted cave of dream.

This is not a womb, nothing but good emerges;

This is a stage, neither unreal nor real. (CP 208)

The cave implies enclosed space, but both the mind as well as the dream are means to

transcend space. By implication, the text of the poem also does so, enclosed within

space but leading to a transcending of it, through its embodiment. The body too in its

very materiality possesses the power to mentally travel beyond its physical limits. The

cave as the metaphoric womb, and the body as limitless space are enjoined in the

space of the poem.

The cave represents a contrast to the experiences in the world. The paintings

on the walls represent movement, relations and flux in its static representation. In the

world outside, satiety of emotion has dissipated the sources of affection and

relatedness, or has extended them beyond the normal limits. But in the cave,

everything exists for itself in self-reflexive purity, so that the self confronts itself in a

clarity of visiot~. In the cave, there are only "connections," "a web of movement,"

where all is transformed into its essences:

And earth turning into color, rocks into their crystals,

Water to sound, fire to fonn; life flickers. (CP 208)

The journey to the cave becomes a journey within oneself, one's body as well as the

abyss of consciousness:

The space of these walls is the body's living space;

'Tear open your ribs and breathe the color of time

'Where nothing leads away, the world comes forward

In flaming sequences. (CP 208)

In the cave, where "the walls are the world," a total response is required, there is no

movement away from the self, and every image brings one closer to oneself It is a

confrontation with one's repressed desires., not an escape from it, unlike in the outer

world.

The spaces of the body

Are suddenly limitless, and riding flesh

Shapes constellations over the golden breast. (CP 208)

The fear of death in its unexpectedness, the helplessness of being in a world which

does not recognise or respect sincere love, but reduces all to the physical satisfaction

of desire opens out to her the abyss of meaninglessness:

My life said to you: I want to love you well.

'The wheel goes back and shall live again,

But the wave turns, my birth arrives and spills

Over my breast the world bearing my grave,

And your eyes open in earth. (CP 209)

In the cave "everything flickerdsexual and exquisite" and she has to return to it, to

respond to the deepest fears and regressions within herself, to "the midnight cave,"

before she returns to the world.

The third section, "Les Tendresses Bestiales" and the next, "Black Blood,"

reveal the transgressions of the body:

Deep in all the streets passes a faceless whore

And the checkered men are whispering one word.

[ .. . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . , . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ]

The dice and the alcohol irnd the destruction

Have drunk themselves and cast

Broken bottle of loss, and the glass

Turned bloody into the face. (CP 209)

The experiences of the mind and that of the body which were covalent in the cave are

split in the world outside. The body serves as a source of dissipation and violence.

Until the woman laced into a harp

Screams and screams and the great clock strikes,

[ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I

[ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .] Do not say, Which loved?

Which was beloved? Only, Who most enjoyed?

Armored ghost of rage, screaming and powerless.

[ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..]

[ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ] A girl runs down the street

Singing Take me, yelling Take me Take

Hang me from the clapper of a bell

And you as hangman ring if: sweet tonight,

For nothing clean in me is more than a cloud

'linless you call it. (CP 210)

And perhaps the most ominous note of all exists in the concluding line of the section:

"Try to live as if there were a G o d (CP 2 10).

"The Broken World," the concluding section of the poem returns us to the

world. The cave as threshold area, as conL?ontation of one's desires makes one ready

to face the world again. The holistic unity of self and world, of body and desire, of

imaginative possibility and lived reality, the real and the unreal are experienced in the

cave. The recursive movement occurs with a return to the same word that commenced

the first section, "came." The return to the initial journey, to the cave, aRer the

movement from the cave to the world outside, denotes the transformation that has

occurred. The purificatory ritual is suggested by the entry to the cave through "the

unbreakable waterfall," as the movement from the pre-liminal to the liminal stage.

The transformative experience is initiated by the paintings on the walls, the whole

process of facing and re-constituting oneself through the suggestions communicated

in the space of heightened sensibility and the response to the resonances of the

painters whose experience reveals an essential truth. This can only be felt and not

expressed and is part of the preparatory ritual of the initiation into a world that

involves unity within oneself, despite the fragmentation. A shadowless world is an

unreal world, as in the outer world everything throws a shadow. But the shadows of

the world are transfigurations, misreadings of the real that the mind produces and

reinforced by cultural conditioning. The images of violence and fear rewrite the

original in a script that alters all original intention and desire into a malformation of

truth. In the cave all is in its essential purity:

Came to Ajanta cave, the painted space of the breast,

The real world where eveqthing is complete,

There are no shadows, the forms of incompleteness.

The great cloak blows in the light, rider and horse arrive,

The shoulders turn and every giR is made.

No shadows fall. There is no source of distortion.

In our world, a tree casts the shadow of a woman,

A man the shadow of a phallus, a hand raised

'The shadow of the whip.

Here everything is itself,

[ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Brightness has overtaken every light,

And every myth netted itself in flesh. (C'P 210)

The broken, reified world cannot be denied, Like the mythical hero the descent into

the underworld is a fonn of death. All the images of the journey are there: the water,

the Gods, the cave. But the journey into the abyss is a journey of knowledge that the

rite involves, and the return is imminent. I n the cave where all things are seen without

the distortion of the shadow of repression and violence, and in the essential

relatedness of everything, the mind intuits everything its essential unity and

wholeness. Reason is invalidated as a means of knowledge as reason takes one deeper

into despair. In. the cave the possibility of experiential completion exists within

oneself, but this cannot exist without an incorporation of the world that denies us:

Animals arrive,

Interlaced, and gods

Interlaced, and men

Flame-woven

I stand and am complete. ((7P 21 1)

But the world re-enters, and one must also return to the world:

<:rawls from the door,

Black at my two feet

The shadow of the world.

World, not yet one,

Enters the heart again.

The naked world, and the old noise of tears,

The fear, the expiation and the love,

A world of the shadowed and the alone.

The journey, and the struggles of the moon. (CP 21 1)

Kenneth Rexroth comments on "Ajanta":

Ever since her long poems, 'Ajanta,' and 'Orpheus,' she seems to have

been working toward and around a kind of implicitly philosophical

poetry, a species of unassuring, objectively presented but lucid and

profound 'wisdom literature.' The meanings of like are not analysed

and explicated, they are responded to and embodied. Pre-eminently

these poems are responses rather than reactions [. . .I. (46)

Unreal Lands, Real Spaces

"The Outer Banks" is like "Ajanta" a space that she responds to, in her search

for the self and its connections. As space:, it could be an area of the imagination as

Rukeyser suggests in a note to the poem. This region could be the peripheral limits

between any two opposing movements. But in the economics of Rukeyser's poetic

canon a borderline between states does not exist as each state is a phase of the

seeming opposing condition. As Rukeyser writes, this was the region of the English

explorer Raleigh's earliest settlements where Thomas Hariot the mathematician-

scientist also lived for a year as part of Raleigh's exploration of the "New World."

This is also the place where the Wright Brothers attempted their flight, and the site of

Hart Crane's "l-latteras."

In her description, this site that sources creative and imaginative ability takes

on a surreal aspect. It becomes a mythical space, land and yet not land but the forms

of what the imagination endows it with; most of all that regenerative power and

fecundity that only the conjoining of male and female powers can endow:

Rays are branching from all things:

great serpent, great plume, constellation:

sands from which colors and light pass,

the lives of plants. Animals. Men.

A man and a woman reach for each other. (CP 469)

The central motif is of the spiral lighthouse as sentinel over time and as an entity that

works its magic in the creative and imaginative life:

road of the sun and the moon to

a spiral lighthouse

to the depth turbulence

liAs up its wave like cities

t'he ocean in the air

spills down the world. (CP 470)

The lighthouse is an embodiment of withdrawal and projection, and the spiral as a

symbol of the two reconciling movements of expansion and contraction, involution

and evolution, join in the figure of the lighthouse. The image of the spiral lighthouse

that is the liaison between the sea and the air, the land as symbolic of the male and

female principles, and the poem as a space that conjoins all these elements as part of

the poets experience takes the form of a mandala. The poem becomes an experience

of a release of energy as Rukeyser has a strong intuitive experience that connects her

to the experiences of those who died before her, and she faces the meaning of her own

death.

In Kundalini yoga, the male element as Shiva or pure consciousness, is

symbolically represented as located at the head and the female principle as Shakti, the

passive element is coiled like a serpent at the base of the spine. When energy is

released from Shakti, the coiled serpent awakens and there occurs a surge of energy

connecting both the male and the female elements of consciousness, leading to

enlightenment. The channel connecting these two elements is represented as the spiral

that resembles the caduceus of Hermes, the two coiled serpents. The life principle

thus lies latent within us until it is aroused, and this arousal has both beneficial and

detrimental effects, unless it is channelled in the proper manner. The concept of the

spiral is the central symbol in the collection, "A Turning Wind." The symbol also

occurs in many poems expressive of the latent power within the universe. In "Outer

Banks" it is a passive symbol, but Rukeyser's experience takes her away from the

physical figure of the lighthouse into a release of intuitive knowledge which awakens

an openness and receptive response to the forces of the land and universe which she

allows to release the latent energy within her.

Rukeyser sees a white man approiiching her across the water with a boat, but

in the light he becomes a black man in the sun. Silhouetted against the sunset, he is

then transformed into

A man who is bones is close to me

drawing a boat of bones

the sun behind him.

is another color of fire,

1:he sea behind me

rears its flame.

.4 man whose body flames and tapers in flame

twisted tlnes of remembrance that dissolve. ( C'P 471)

Rukeyser steps into the boat, and the unknown boatman, who has no identity and who

seems to know intuitively where she wlshes to be rowed, takes her towards the

horizon:

At one shock, speechlessness.

I am in the bow, on the sholt thwart

[ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. .. . . .. . , . . . . . , .]

All things have spun.

The words gone,

I facing sternwards, looking at the gate

between the barrier islands As he rows.

Sand islands shifting and the last of land

a pale and open line horizzon

sea. (CP 47 1-72)

The experience was mystifying as it seerned to be taking her either towards life or

death:

The dream on land last night built this boat of death

but in the suffering of the light

moving across the sea

do we in our moving

move toward life or death. (CP 472)

The realisation dawns that her experience is not a knowledge that is produced from

outer sources, but from inner ones. The transformation has occurred volitionally, and

within her. As she looks again at the landscape the meaning finally clears her vision

so that death appears not as a final terminating occurrence, but as a phase that is

inevitable but not without meaning. Whether it was Crane, the Wright Brothers,

Raleigh, or all those drowned at sea, it occurs to her that each life must have sought

some meaning for its existence to transcend the momentary:

a.nd at my left hand and at nly right hand

no longer wing and lightho~tse

no longer the guardians

They are in me, in my spewhless

life of the barrier beach.

A.s it lies open

to the night, out there. (CP ,472)

The life of the barrier beach is not as she says "out there," but within her, as

she too is part of the past and the life that makes the place what it is through the

resonances of all, plants, animals and men, dead and alive who have lived and have

died here. And she too has to open herself to the experience of the inevitable:

Cht there? Father of rhythms,

deep wave, mother.

There is no out there.

All is open.

Open water. Open I. (CP 4'73)

If she found meaning in resistance earlier, at this moment, she finds that all dualities

and differences are reconciled in this openness to experience, be it life or death:

Women. ships, lost voices.

Whatever has dissolved into our waves.

I a lost voice

roving, calling you

on the edge of the moment chat is now the centre.

From the open sea. (CP 473)

Rukeyser commenced her visit to the Outer Banks with a description of the

land, but her intuitive experience overcame the experience of the land in its

materiality and superimposed it as immaterial space, and with a moving centre. In that

sense, one's location is a shifting one as the land that was the grounding of human

experience becomes not a material object, but a space that resonates within us. This is

the intuitive realisation of Rukeyser as the physical images that ground her experience

disappears, and all she can experience is that "everything is in me." It is her altered

perception that validates her experiences, and whether it is in life or in death, her "lost

voice" will be found in some later time, by someone who resonates along the same

morphic field created by her.

Joe Sheridan's personal experiences of intuition with the land leads him to

question the validity of a cultural ethos that valorises the Cartesian duality that

establishes individual intelligence as divorced from Nature:

ii healthier ecological premise is needed to inform a definition of mind

or intelligence that preserves the idea of the earth as both intuition's

origin and the milieu required for its continued existence. This premise

would require us to understand the primal nature in our immediate

environment, in order to establish a potential for re-creating or

maintaining a convivial relationship between our minds and the places

.where we live. To accomplish such re-creation, we would argue for

restoration of natural environments of mythic and intuitive proportions

- in short, for intentionally planting a forest or returning a landscape to

a condition where the primal mind could again make stories &om

155

intuiting the meaning or spirit of the place. That spirit, we believe,

evists in that place and is stronger than the concrete and asphalt

apparitions of affluence that hide it. (62)

The individual's relationship with the land requires the attuning of the human system

to "the biological systems within which we [.. . ] live" (61), because humanity requires

the feeling of belonging that location provides:

Because the natural world falls into places, and because these places in

their totality, form a planetary system, it makes sense to see the

intuitive not only as having a place, but also needing a place. When

those places have ecological stability, with humans playing their part

to ensure that stability, intuition may have as many faces as the

biodiversity that makes up the planet. Recognising that everything is

connected to everything else, we can say that all of creation also

comprises an earthmind.[. . ]

To gain a sense of this earthmind, we must recognise that the

earth is as much in us as wt: are infof it. (63)

The relationship with the land is related not only to tradition, but also to the whole

process of writing poetry as in "Notes for a Poem." The land continues to exist,

though the people associated with it change over the generations, and time and wars

pass their judgement over the land:

Morning comes, brisk with light,

zr broom of color over the threshold.

Long flights of shadows escape to the white sky:

A spoon is straightened. Day grows. The sky is blued. (CP 11)

Poetry exists in the very rituals and the daily association with the land that locates

human life, and :yet, "there will be new ways of seeing these ancestral lands" (CP I I),

as poetry becomes the ritual space where the images are transformed:

The locked relationships which will be found

are a design to build these factual timbers -

a plough of thought to break this stubborn ground. (CP 11)

In the section "Ritual of Blessing," the traditional ritual of blessing the land,

continues over the generations and connects the lives of those in the past associated

with it as well as those who are yet to come:

How can we bless this place : by the sweet horns,

the vaulted words, the pastoral lovers in the waist-deep grass,

remembrances linking back, hands raised like strict flames

pointing,

the feet of priests tracking the smooth earth,

. . . . . . . . . . . . . many hands binding corn : [. .]

[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .I

hands together in the fields, the born and unborn children,

and the wish for new blessing and the given blessing blend,

a glory clear in the man-tracks, in the blind

seeking for warmth in the climates of the mind. (CP 12)

If one is attuned to the "earthmind," the silence and isolation of the people who are

devoid of the sense of relationship either with the human community or with the land

creates a sense of alienation as in "Breathing Landscape." The people "smile" and

"silence follows their faces," "even armoured we hardly touch each other," "the air

placed formally/about these faces and thoughts in formal dancen(CP 18-19). But

157

Rukeyser's communion continues with the land : "Silence hangs in the air/ Nothing

speaks but the sound/of certain rivers continuing underground (CP 18). Her

awareness of the possibility of communion is contrasted with the atrophy of the

people who have denied themselves this attuning of one mind with the other as well

as with Nature, thus remaining isolated from both, and from the intuitive powers

within them.

Seeking connections between the past and the present through the changing

topography of the land, "The Shortest Way Home" does not merely revive memory of

the past but presents its existence as embedded within one's consciousness. The

search is expressed in the image of the tourist who seeks relics from the past. The first

two stanzas commence with negation of the search stating that "there was no place on

that plain for a city," or "that prairie for relief," or "room on that road for a shadow,"

in the "hunt for the past" (CP 176). The connections are discovered in the "totemic

head," symbolic of both the collecti\ie unconscious as well as the personal

consciousness which sees and makes connections between the self and the

community. If we seek a place it must be established in a dual movement towards the

land not as an object to be searched, but an experience with the land to be discovered,

and to resonate with:

A fbgue of landscapes resolved, the hunt

levelled on equilibrium, that totemic head seeing

a natural sleep, a place for people and peace. (C'P 177)

"The Place at Alert Bay," is based on the site of the world's second tallest

totem pole. Rukeyser's poem brings together creativity and experience in a blend of

traditional symbols. The refrain ending the last line of each stanza, "resumed in G o d

connects the earth and human striving through creativity that seeks to realise the

connections with mystical sources. But the totems are also emblems that connect

individuals in the family and the community. They speak in "a language of process"

which "offerdLife above life moving, a ladder of' lives" (CP 418). Everything is

connected to each other, and this essential connectedness unites all forms of the life of

nature, and the lives of both the dead ;is well as the unborn, so that creativity,

symbolised as "the power-winged treenree of meanings where the first mothers

pour1Their totems, their images up among the sun" becomes a symbol of eternal

striving to transcend the physical. (C'P 418)

The totem pole seeks a language of images, that transforms energy into

physical form, so that the myths connected with the totem pole and the whole process

of creating it becomes symbolic of man's relationship with his own unaccessed

relationship with the land. Totem poles appear meaningless unless its language is

intuited beyond its physical configuration:

E:or here, all energy is form: the dead, the unborn,

MI supported on the shoulclers of us all,

/ind all forever reaching from the source of all things.

I'illars of process, the growing of the soul,

Form that is energy from these seas risen,

Identif ed. Resumed in God. (CP 418)

Rukeyser establishes the close relationship with the land in many of her nature

poems, as well as the effect of the destruction of land and its concomitant effect on

the individual's traditions and his autochthonous nature. Many of her poems draw

striking parallels between the weather, the seasons, conditions of the land and the

human situation. This is not a transference of emotions to the landscape, but an

expression of the individual's close relationship with the land and the effect of the

physical and mental estrangement and displacement of affiliations. As Joe Sheridan

and Anne Pineault suggest, there exists a close relationship between the exterior

landscape and our minds. Modem man's mental and physical estrangement from the

land and its traditions has also led to a dim~nishing of his intuitive powers, powers

which are consanguineous with one's primitive self

Seeing a divide between nature and culture is artificial, because it

motivates an attitude to the natural that is corrosive [. . .] such

exclusion of the natural from the cultural can create unhealthy,

unnatural, and incomplete environments with immediate disastrous [. .

1 consequences for humans and their surroundings. (61-62)

This problem is peculiar to modem man as his priorities have been altered

together with the changes in his lifestyle. Instead of accepting the covalence of both

the rational as well as the intuitive, the privileging of the ratiocinative over the

intuitive is a rejection of the memory of the "wild imprinted within us due to "the

very absence of a somatically integrated intelligence in living modern life.

Contemporary life privileges and burdens the visual and the cerebral as the primary

senses of our conduct"' (60). This in tum cuts us off from our relationships with the

past, and our relationships with the traditions of the past: "Intuiting a sacred place on

earth requires resonance with a sacred place in our minds"(60). In failing to establish

this relationship we turn our minds into "natural aliens"(60), and the repercussions of

this alienation affect our self as well as our social and natural relationships.

In "A Plashing Cliff' the illusion created by "immune in ice, the frozen

waterfall/clamped in December" (CP 106) serves as a metaphor for the atrophied

mind of modem man, who develops an immunity of response:

Love, will you recognise yourself displayed?

Or is the age defective, cold with storm

to lock fast water in iron artifice,

whitening cataracts?-contempt, and loss,

and nothing, in the great world can lie calm. (CP 106)

But just as the waterfall has within it the latent power of movement, love too has the

power to move a.nd flow: "And, love. You are all rivers" (CP 106).

"Divining Water" establishes the mystical relationship between man and

nature in the ritual process of a man using "primitive" magical methods to search for

water. The voice of ratiocination and disbelief exists beside the mind deeply

resonating with the moment of magical di~ination:

Everything was there in the moment there

Random and light in the dance on young grass flaming up

While the old man held his branch and walked toward water

Walked to the moment where the branch dives down

We stood in the moment random fiinnily rare

Everything here and everything contained. (CP 420)

But the event is successfiil as the branch leaps down "to find deep under/Reason and

rock the cold sweet-driven springs," which is similar to "the way we guess where lies

the buried life" I:CP 420). Even though the water appeared much later, "the moment

was all water" ((?P 420)

The "divinity" that makes this event a possiblity belies rational explanation.

But is it a reciprocal movement, where the power of man responds to the power of the

water? "Do they divine each other?" (CP 420). Did he draw the water towards him, or

did the water draw man towards it?

And time the branch drove and the hand of man

It shines awake it glitters on the grass

Now waters divine man, we all know what he was. (C'P 420)

Our situatedness within the poem also locates us within the moment of magical

divination, but it moves us towards recognition of our own powers of communication

that can intuit and attune to the resonances of another. The religious significance of

water as baptismal, the biblical suggestion to it as a miracle, as the rock of reason that

finally yields the water, is also a validation of belief in one's own sources of striving

towards possibility.

Water then appears as a connecting link between man and the objects of

nature, being a moving threshold which haptises with insight all the lands it flows

through. It also asserts a symbolic significance in Rukeyser's poetry. As flux,

constantly moving, it resists stasis, and as Rukeyser states regarding her choice of

language, it was this fluidity she was seeking in her poetry:

The reason that I came to do Gibbs was that I needed a language of

transformation. I needed a language of changing phase for the poem.

And I needed a language that was not static, that did not see life as a

series of points, hut more as a language of water, and the things are in

all these lives that I try to see in poems. Moving past one phase of

one's own life - transformation, and moving past impossibilities.

(Packard 13 1 )

Poetry for her denotes process (LP 174), and process involves not only

continuity in the relationships established but also recognition of change and

dynamism as denoted in the various phases of one's life. Water as a source of power

appears in "U.S.lnas well as in "One Life," whose power is to be garnered as well as

a force when unbridled is often destructive. But it is the capacity of water to flow that

presents itself vvith the emotional overtones and effects of this movement. Water

separates, but it also unites, and in many poems, water has appeared as a form of

death. But then it can also be associated with the fluidity of language itself that in its

very depths reveals, and belies, discloses and withdraws, is never located in

hypostatic meaning, yet reveals facets of itself as it flows through different lands of

poetic imagination and effect.

Rukeyser's fascination with water, its dynamic flow, its power, and resistances

to permanent stasis serves as a metaphor not only for her poetic form, but also the

concept of the extended body that resists objectification. The flow canies within it the

capacity for change, the seeds of human possibility and the ability to effect

transformation.

Rukeyser's concern with issues relating to social oppression and the effect of

war was a binding thread connecting her poetic corpus. Equally relevant was the

impact that she placed on the development of inner processes of the self, where poetry

effects the most significantly to alter one's perspective of reality. Even in the poems

where she vociferously denounces the war, she places the onus on altered conditions

that must source from the essential relatedness that we must recognise.

Rukeyser also stresses, like Martin Buber: the change that occurs in one's

recognition of relatedness with others as well as with the environment. The I- Thou

relationship of interhumanism involves what Buber terms as "inclusion." The

characteristic of "inclusion" is, according to Buber, "a perceiving and thinking what is

occumng in the mind and body of another individual"(Befween Man and Man 96).

The term relativises the subject-object dichotomization and converts the "It" into a

"Thou." During, the early stages of human civilisation man shared a close relationship

not only with his community, but also with the environment. This sense of relatedness

163

was a cogent source of his sense of well-being, and established a strong elemental

relationship with nature, and the community of which he was an integral part. With

the development of civilisation, the techo-industrial revolution has caused the

consciousness of the individual to be split and fragmented, leading to the feeling of

alienation. He thus responds to his self also through the paradigm of the I-It

relationship.

In both the I-It and the I-Thou relationships., man is at the centre. This "I" is

not a fixed entity but constituted by the various influences, historical as well as

psychological that affect it. But in both relationships the possibility of It or Thou is

due to the I. It is when the It is transformed into a Thou that the "I" realises its

responsibility to man and the environment, and also to himself. Such a relationship

would be an experience of the other in the fullness of being rather than a response to

the other as subjugated to the self, or as a commodity or object of use and control. It is

a direct, spontaneous and willing encounter with the other, and an acceptance of the

other as an individual entity. Maurice Friedman in his introduction to Buber's book

Daniel explains the term "inclusion" as "the extension of one's own concreteness, the

fulfilment of the actual situation in life, the complete presence of the reality in which

one participates" (33). Inclusion is thus the response of a person who "without

forfeiting anything of the felt reality of his activity, at the same time lives through the

common event &om the standpoint of the other"(33).

Following this pattern, the individual responds to his environment -- to the

earth, animals and plants, not as objects over which his superiority is to be established

but in a partnership of equivalency. The existence of the other is a confirmation of the

reciprocity of the relationship, as one's existence is defined and enhanced through the

experience with the other, and leads to a consequent feeling of fullness of self as the

personhood of another is reflected within oneself.

This sense of mutuality is an intuitive experience that is extremely personal,

beyond any paradigm presented by empirical systems. Donald L. Beny in Mutuality:

7iie Vision of Mbriin Buber describes the relation of the I-Thou as "immediate, lived

in the present, without temporal awareness or reckoning. No conceptual scheme, no

apparatus of desire or planning, no categories of interpretation are used (52). Beny

futther states:

In order to emphasise the uncontrollability of relation, its nontransitive

character, that the stepping into relation is a response to the grace of

being met, the mutuality of'the I-Thou relation is sometimes said to be

momentary, a flash, an instant followed perhaps by another in some

other time and place, but in no connected way. (67)

These sporadic experiences may seem to be unconnected, but at a later stage may

reveal a connectedness. What is really significant is the self-transformation and the

change in perspective resulting from the experience of mutuality: "After one has stood

in relation, one can no longer live with, use or deal with the things and beings of the

world in the same objectifying way7'(Berry 67). Mutuality involves the process of

give and take of another's personhood, or a coalescing of subjectivity. Having

undergone this experience the sensitised individual would be prone to an opening up

of himself to more experiences of this kir~d.

The two-person paradigm is realised in its fullness in the community as the

individual and his personal life does not exist within a self-enclosed realm, but is

always affected by the constantly widening encompassing margin of communal life.

Even though one's concept of the self in that of a fixed entity at any given point of

165

time, it is the embodiment of the self that creates this impression. Flux is a constant

factor of self-evolution, and this is manifested in the manner in which the individual's

dynamic life evolves out of the web of interactive transactions with the experientially

cognised world. The holistic concept of self is an abstract entity constituted by both

the physically visible body as well as the: abstract and complex relationships of the

self with itself, with the environment, and other beings. The gestalt that is the self is

thus a combination of visibility and invisibility. Change is a component of both the

environment as well as human life. Just as the individual's life has a teleological

motivation, this consciousness is also reflected in his relations both with the

community as well as the environment. The individual's relational experiences with

both are closely associated with a personal sense of well being and security.

Through the Eyes of a Child

Joe Sheridan quotes Edith Cobb in The Ecology of Imagination in (,~hildhood

who connects the "creative abilities as they become manifest in the child" and the

child's intuitive relationship with nature (57). He feels that Cobb considers "of mind

as a place" and states that "we may assume that exposure to biological diversity and

biosystems complexity nurtures an intuitive strength in response. The experience of

that response is the child's familiarity with intuition" (59). Sheridan discusses this

capacity of the child in the light of the intuitive capacity to relate and to see the

relatedness of seemingly different objects :

The process of noticing and apprehending the natural world through

lived experience lays the foundation for subsequent noticings and

apprehensions [. . .] The things we think with and our ability to notice

patterns therein are necessarily related .[. . .] thinking with all of the

things that catch a child's eye creates a mental landscape that sees the

connections between these things and perceives an order or logic of

interconnection[. . .] . World knowledge and word knowledge mutually

inform one another. Once ecologic is in place through lived experience

in biodiverse environments, the child develops an earth-centered

ability for creative thought. Creative thought, or the ability to see a

v,ariety of patterns between things is where intuition intersects, in this

regard. (59)

Rukeyser's emphasis on the vision of the child is connected to the capacity she wishes

to revive within, us, whereby we can see unobstructed by cultural conditioning, and

with the freshness of vision of the child. Rukeyser's concern with the war deals with

the greatest loss that war establishes: both the waste of physical life as well as the loss

of innocence in "Song for Dead Children":

Weave grasses for their childhood : who will never see

love or disaster or take sides against decay

balancing the choices of maturity;

silent and cofin'd in silence while we pass

loud in defiance of death, the helpless lie. (CP 6)

But the children are also the most resilient and through their vision the revolution will

become a way for peace and hope for the future. In "Child and Mother" the legacy of

revolution is passed on from mother to child as they endure the effects of the

revolution: "We stand, and these children follow, and all will yet be well" (CP 53).

The contrasting manner of the child and the adult in responding to pain and

suffering is presented in "The Return." The child in his questions provides the

answers that the mind wearied of pain and suffering cannot see or understand. The

child's capacity to see and think holistically returns the poet to the origins and

beginnings of her own existence so that she sees again through the freshness of the

insight that the child unconsciously reveals).

An Idea ran about the worlc

screaming with the pain of 1 he mind

until it met a child

who stopped it with a word

[ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . , The Idea journeying into my body

returned, and I knew the nature of One,

and could forget One, and turn to the child,

and whole could turn to the world again

[ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ]

The child goes alive asking, his questions. (CP 403-4)

Rukeyser sees the essential interconnections between things by connecting the

intuitive vision of the child in "A Little Stone in the Middle of the Road, In Florida"

to a comment by her friend Nancy recovering from illness:

My son as a child saying

(30d

is anything, even a little stone in the middle of the road, in Florida.

'Yesterday

:Nancy, my friend, after long illness:

You know what can lift me up, take me right out of despair?

No, what?

Anything. (C'P 460)

168

A visit to glassmakers at Murano, and the sight of a piece of glass handed to

her recalls an incident from the past in "Junk-Heap at Murano":

And I saw far behind, the face of the child I carried outdoors

that night.

You were four. You looked up into the great tree netting all of

rnight

And saw fire-points in the tree, and asked, "Do birds eat

stars?"

Behind your eyes the seasons, the times,

assemble, dazzle, are here. I:CP 437-8)

Rukeyser's emphasis on the child's vision is also a return to the child-like

vision that we all possessed as children but renounce as adults. In "Voices," childhood

seen as a phase in one's life, also holds within that phase a renewal and a return to

new beginnings During times of war or suffering: the path to possibility lies in the

vision of the child which is untainted by rhetoric. The child's language is direct and in

its intuitive con~prehension involves the very catachresis that Rukeyser attempts in

trying to express experience in all the shades of its existence: "The child perceives

and the cycles are fidfilled (CP 494). The child as visionary speaks beyond the

present moment, beyond childhood. In adulthood, we have forgotten the voices of the

child which still lie embedded within the various stages of our life:

One child in his voices, many voices.

Ilhe sugering runs past the end of the racing

Making us run the next race. The child sleeps.

I,overs, makers, this child, enter into our voices.

Speak to the child. Now something else is waking:

The look of the lover, the rebel and learning look,

The look of the runner just beyond the tape, go into

The child's look at the world. In all its voices. (CP 495)

In the very first poem in the collection of poems "Theory of Flight," Rukeyser

commences the poem "Poem out of Childhood" with the sentence: "Breathe-in

experience, breathe-out poetry" (CP 3). The experiences of the child at a time of war,

and the conflicting emotions that the -war aroused as inexplicable mystery are

presented in graphic imagery. The juxtaposition of contrasting images: "Not Angles,

angels," "Not Sappho, Sacco" (CP 3), presents the dialectics between a world as

projected in art and belief, and the disillusionment that reality contrasts it with:

I opened the door into the concert-hall

and a rush of triumphant violins answered me

while the syphilitic woman turned her mouldered face

intruding upon Brahms. Suddenly, in an accident

the girl's brother was killed, but her father had just died :

!;he stood against the wall, leaning her cheek,

dumbly her arms fell [. . .] ((7' 3)

The disintegration of that world where the very values that grounded the imaginative

world of the child dissolve as puberty sets in. Here it is not the physical maturation

only, but an early mental one too that is suggested:

We never knew the war, st.anding so small

looking at eye-level toward the puttees, searching

the picture-books for scepsres, pennants for truth;

see Galahad unaided by puberty. (CP 4)

The armistice is just as meaningless as the war:

And we were a generation of grim children

1e:aning over the bedroom sills, watching

the music and the shoulders and how the war was over,

laughing until the blow on the mouth broke night

wide out from cover. (CP 5)

The experiences of the past, is a "potent catalyst" that echoes long after childhood.

But its effect is experienced later, not merely as a personal experience but as an event

which in its very internalisation reaches out and echoes in the minds of others as a

shared experience:

Listening at dead doors,

our youth assumes a thousand differing flesh

summoning fact &om abandoned machines of trade.

knocking on the wall of the nailed-up power plant,

telephoning hello, the deserted factory, ready

:For the affirmative clap of truth

ricochetting from thought to thought among

The childhood, the gestures, the rigid travellers.(CP 5)

The essential need is communication, which however, is returned only with silence.

But it is a silence that has its own ,meaning that evolves within each person

responding to the events of the day. It is in this movement that is both inward as well

as outward oriented that the poem's inevitable truth is voiced, and makes man more

involved both in a garnering of the inner resources as well as in a greater participation

of the outer world. And the poem releases this knowledge in the process of one's

exposure to it and response to it.

The Morphology of Silence

Rukeyser expresses the inevitability that language and the word impose and

arouses a lifelong commitment to both self and world. This is seen in the companion

poems which evolve her definition of the term "witnessing," namely, " The Cruise"

and "Mediterranean." Rukeyser travelled to Spain as a reporter for Lfe and 1,etter.s

Today in the year 1936 to cover the Anti-fascist Olympics and was eventually

evacuated with other foreigners when the Civil war broke out in Spain. Kertesz feels

that Rukeyser's '"writing since that time is in large part a record of her evolving vision

of what the struggle begun in Spain has meant to civilisation in our time and what it

has meant in her personal life" (121). This dual concern remains at the core of most of

her poems which visualise change in the outer world as occurring within the

individual as an intuited truth.

As Maurice Blanchot states:

Ifthe poet goes krther and hrther inward, it is not in order to emerge

in God, but in order to emerge outside and be faithful to the earth, to

the plenitude and the superabundance of earthly existence when it

springs forth outside all limits, in its excessive force that surpasses all

calculation. (I 38)

In "The Theory of Flight," the poem in the collection of poems of the same

name which won the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1935, Rukeyser exhorts the people:

Open your flesh, people, to opposites

conclude the bold configuration, finish

the counterpoint sky include earth now. (CP 45)

We have to return again and again to "beginnings" in order to "respond," as response

is a renewal of contact that is always new. Similarly, every reading of poetry is also a

renewal as every reading establishes a new contact with the poem and the poet which

is dynamic:

hlow we can look at our subtle jointures, study our hands,

the tools are assembled, the maps unrolled, propellers spun,

do we say all is in readinesi :

the times approach, here is the signal shock : ?

blaster in the plane shouts "Contact" :

master on the ground : "Contact!"

he looksup : "Now?" whispering : "Now."

"Yes." she says. "Do."

Say yes, people.

Say yes.

YES, (CP 46)

The whole process of establishing contact requires a choreographed simultaneity of

responses, and Kukeyser's presumption is that in the opening up of oneself to the

other the contact is established as an automatic process.

"Poem" is undoubtedly one of her strongest poems that bonds the individual

and the community as well as reveals the solidarity that silent communication

establishes. This is an anti-war poem, but instead of using propagandist rhetoric, she

expresses a personal creed that only a deeply experienced commitment can establish.

The establishment is that of a mental contact through the powers of the mind and

feeling which can overcome distance and the insanity and frustration that war

produces. Once again as in many of her poems there is the recursive return to

173

beginnings that the usage of language implies, and also the suggestion that this

process must continue to be an ongoing process

I lived in the first century o'world wars

Most mornings I would be inore or less insane

[ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . , . . . . . . ]

Slowly I would get to pen and paper,

Make my poems for others unseen and unborn. (CP 450)

Commencing from her own responses and those of her friends, Rukeyser establishes

contact with otbers she has never met or will never know, the anonymous mass of

individuals who resist perhaps in far stronger ways than she does, but whose lives of

sacrifice and resistance go unrecorded:

In the day I would be reminded of those men and women

Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,

Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined

values.

A.s the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,

We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,

To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile

Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,

Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means

To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,

To let go the means, to wake.

I lived in the first century of these wars. (CP 451)

In "Effort at Speech Between TWO People," she writes about the inherent

loneliness of people that yearning for love and companionship always seems to thwart

with loss. She traces the source of this !oneliness and lack of relationship to the

egoistic engrossment of individuals in their own lives. Rukeyser moves sequentially

through various stages of loneliness, sorrow, feelings of suicide, and unrequited love

that is foregrounded throughout the poem

Take my hand. Fist my mind in your hand. What are

you now?

When 1 was fourteen, I had dreams of suicide,

and I stood at a steep window, at sunset, hoping toward

death :

if' the light had not melted clouds and plains to beauty,

if light had not transformed that day, I would have leapt.

I am unhappy. I am lonely. Speak to me. (CP10)

She moves in t:he last stanza to the larger community that suffers from the same

ailment, and fails to respond to each other because they cannot recognise the cure that

lies in empathic communication and response:

\What are you now? If we could touch one another,

if these our separate entities could come to grips,

clenched like a Chinese puzzle. . . yesterday

1 stood in a crowded street that was live with people, and no one spoke

a word, and the morning shone.

Everyone silent, moving. . . Take my hand. Speak to me. (C'P 10)

"Islands" expresses the same theme of' loneliness and isolation expressed through

the reified consciousness of individuals who see in Nature the same duality they seem

to be experiencing, But as Rukeyser states, this is only an illusion, and the

175

interconnectedness and process that is a part of nature can be visualised only through

an insight that sees beyond appearances:

O for God's sake

they are connected

underneath

They look at each other

across the glittering sea

some keep a low profile

Some are cliffs

The bathers think

islands are separate like them. (CP 544)

"The Gates" addresses issues that have been her concern from the

commencement of her poetic career, bw though the theme deals overtly with the

political issue that revolves around the imprisonment of the South Korean poet Kim

Chi Ha, imprisoned by the dictator Park, it binds together other issues of creativity

and personal freedom. Muriel Rukeyser as the President of the American chapter of

PEN International visits South Korea, and though very ill at that time, stands vigil

outside the prison in the rain, in protest against the imprisonment of the poet.

In "The Gates," the dual movement that pre-dominates in her poetry is

represented by the physical image of the gates, which is a space of both entry and exit.

In a prologue to the poem, Rukeyser, speaks about the gates as being "also the gates

of perception, the gates of the body" ( C P 564). The poem locates the body as the

centre of exptxience, but the body itself is seen in its different phases or

manifestations according to the experiences it undergoes. Rukeyser commences the

poem with the establishment of unity with the purpose of a poet she has never met,

hut she reaches the poet through his poems

A11 day we read the words

friends, lovers, daughters, grandson,

and all night the distant lovc:s

and I who had never seen h ~ m am drawn to him

Through acts, through poems,

through our closenesses -

whatever links us in our variousness;

across worlds, love and poems and justices

wishing to be born: ((2' 565)

Rukeyser reaches the poet through the poetry, and her support of his cause

though in keeping with her lifelong fighi. against all forms of power which cripple

personal initiative, is also a struggle against attempts to silence song and poetry. The

poem deals with these very themes of silence and speech, erasing the dualism that

differentiates them, and connecting both to the experiences of the body. Rukeyser

then establishes the close bond that the word possesses with the idea, emphasising the

embodiment of the word as object, yet at the same time presenting the possibility of

transcending it. Her emphasis is on the relationship between word and body as

materially located but sourcing the idea or the imaginative consciousness, thus

establishing the bond that exists between them. Secondly, the relationship that poetry

establishes moves beyond differences of space, race, nation and language. Poetry

builds the bridges, and overcomes the differences through the common concerns that

unite people.

The dual movement between silence and speech, between incarceration and

freedom, is represented by "The Gates" which serves as an entry point, but which

denotes both closure and freedom. In keeping with her association with the gates as

entry and exit of'the body and of perception, she relates all three to the three poets of

the twentieth century, Kim Chi Ha, Anne Sexton and herself. She also travels to the

past, recalling the "Song of Songs" and the martyrdom of her ancestor Akiba, and the

pervading image of Jesus Christ with the two sections entitled "The Church of

Galilee" and "The Dream of Galilee." The martyrdom in this poem is not volitional

like that of Christ or of Akiba, hut as in the case of Kim Chi Ha and his child, and her

own child "cut off from his own father," the crucifixion is an imposed one.

Kim Chi Ha's imprisonment is reflective of the power that denies freedom to

the creative writer. as not only are his poems banned but he is denied the materials to

set down his poetry. The poet in solitary is cut off from the source of his power, his

world, but the imagination cannot stem the irrepressible flow of song that no power

can deny and which suffering brings to outpouring.

I lie in a strange country, in pale yellow, swamp-green, woods

and a night of music while a poet lies in solitary

somewhere in a concrete cell. Glare-lit, 1 hear,

without books, without per1 and paper.

Does he draw a pencil out of his throat,

out of his veins, out of his sex?

There are cells all around him, emptied.

He can signal on these walls till he runs mad.

]He is signalling to me across the night.

He is signalling. Many of us speak,

we do teach each other, we do act through our fears.

Where is the world that will touch life to this prison?

We run through the night. We are given his gifts. (CP 569-70)

In the denial of poetry lies the power of silence and song. Song is a means of

establishing community, but what is unsung is evoked by the silence which constantly

posits the possibility of song. The silence a.fter song speaks and builds community in a

stronger manner when song is denied, bur it is a community of silence. The written

word, and the poetry that has been sung moves forward toward the possibility of what

could be, and the imagination then creates a stronger, more powerhl world through

the imagination of the possible:

Among the days,

among the nights of the poet in solitary,

a strong infant is just beginning to nm.

I go up the stepping stones

to where the young wife of the poet

stands holding the infant in her arms.

She weeps, she weeps.

But the poet's son looks at me

and the wife's mother looks at me with a keen look

across her grief. Lights in the house, books making every wall a

wall of speech.

The clasp of the woman's hand

around my wrist, a keen band

more steel than the words

Save his life.

I feel that clasp on my bones. (CP 567)

The connecting link between Rukeyser and Kim Chi Ha is their common

creative purpose, and also the possibility of another future as envisioned through their

children. For Rukeyser this biological link: is her connection with life. In making her

choice to have her child, in choosing life against death, she was taking on the odds,

social, emotional, and physical. It also set her along the path of recovery and towards

survival, as many of her poems suggest. The two phases of the child as seen in the

infant "beginning to run" and in the adult Kim Chi Ha, is represented by the figures of

the mother and the wife, for whom, like for Rukeyser, motherhood becomes both an

emotional fulfilment through the maternal bond but the link also exercises a

responsibility and commitment that is undeniable.

In the section "Mother as Pitchfork," Rukeyser pictures Kim Chi Ha's mother

as an emblem of both strength and the kulnerability respondent on a mother as her

son's fate hangs in the balance:

Woman seen as a slender instrument,

woman at vigil in the prison-yard,

iwoman seen as the fine tines of a pitchfork

t.hat works hard, that is worn down, rusted down

to a fine sculpture standing in a yard

where her son's body is confined.

'Woman as fine tines blazing against sunset,

-wavering lines against yellow brightness

where her fine body becomes transparent in bravery,

where she will live and die as the tines of a pitchfork

that stands to us as her son'!; voice does stand

across the world speaking

The rumor comes that if this son is killed

this mother will kill herself

But she is here, she lives,

the slender tines of this pitchfork standing in flames of light. (C'P 568)

Rukeyser relates her own responsibility in choosing motherhood, to the

emotional responsibility that motherhood endows, as in the case of Kim Chi Ha's

mother as well as that of his wife. Rukeyser's choice of life for her son was the

ground of her existence. Ths affirmation of life, was also a self-inflicted silence that

could not acknowledge the father of her son. But the silence and darkness on one side

became the shadow of the side that lit up in song:

So I became very dark very large

a silent woman this time given to speech

a woman of the river of that song

and on the beach of the world in storm given

in long lightning seeing the rhyming of those scenes

that make our lives.

Anne Sexton the poet saying

ten days ago to that receptive friend,

the friend of the hand-held camera:

'Muriel is serene.'

Am I that in their sight?

Word comes today of Anne' s

of Anne's long-approaching

of Anne's over-riding over-falling

suicide. Speak for sing fbr pray for

everyone in solitary

every living life. (CP 571)

Death is the interspace between the affirmation and the rejection of life, and its

existence is very much a part of human existence, in a condition of tension that

threatens to overpower, especially in moments of personal despondency. The serenity

that Sexton associates with her, is the outward placidity of a life of struggle and an

inner personal turmoil that she has overcome. Rukeyser selected life over death;

Sexton's own longing for serenity ironically culminated in a rejection of life. Between

these two extremes is the fate of those for whom choice has no meaning or does not

exist, like that of Kim Chi Ha.

The different conditions of life, of "being bound" and being able to run, of

freedom and liberation, of imprisonment that may be physical or mental, may be

inflicted from outside oneself or as in the case of the father of Rukeyser's son, "jailed

by his own fantasies"(CP 571). or volitionally chosen such as the martyrdom of Christ

or of Akiba. The manifestation of fears which Rukeyser sees as a constant of human

life are located within the body, but overcoming these fears requires an overcoming

not through cathartic screaming but through the silence that reverberates more

powerfully after the screams. Speech and silence are then two points along the same

axis, meaningfill in the non-presencinp of'the other of which it is a manifestation:

ifor we invent our fear and act it out

in ripping, in burning, in blood, in the tenible scream

and in tearing away every mouth that screams.

Giant fears : massacres, the butchered that across the fields of

the world

lie screaming and their screams are heard as silence. (CP 569)

The location of these experienct:~ within the body are at the same time a

traversing outside it through a transgression achieved through the imagination. The

displacement of speech with silence is for Rukeyser. only an alternation of two similar

phases or conditions as community is established with one supplanting the other. The

gradations of perception as socially encountered are seen in the final part of the poem,

where the gates are seen as an entry point of freedom. The gates symbolise both the

point of entry and of exit, but it also serves as a site where the double movement of

human choice is demarcated, either as entry or exit, entry into life or exit from it. The

gates then denote a symbolic space that alters as human perception reads the meaning

imparted by the gates, according to the direction of individual human desire:

Near the end of the day

with the rain and the knowledge pulling at my legs

a movement behind me makes me move aside.

14 bus full of people turns in the mud. drives to the gate.

The gate that never opens

opens at last. Beyond it, !lender

Chinese-red posts of the inner gates.

'The gate of the house of the poet.

'The bus is crowded, a rush-hour bus that waits.

nobody moves.

'Who are these people ?' I say

How can these gates open?

My new friend has run up beside me.

He has been standing guard in the far corner.

'They are prisoners,' he says, 'brought here from trial

Don't you see? They are all tied together '

Fool that I am! I had not seen the ropes.

down at their wrists in the aowded rush-hour bus

The gates are open. The prisoners go in.

The house of the poet who stays in solitary,

not allowed reading not allowed writing

not allowed his woman his friends his unknown Friends

and the strong infant beginning to run. (CP 572)

Once again Rukeyser does not base experience merely on the imagination, with

perception as the signifying organ of consciousness. The recursiveness remains

implicit in the questions that follow at the end of the poem:

IJow shall we venture home?

How shall we tell each other of the poet?

IJow can we meet the judgement on the poet,

Or his execution? How shall we free him?

How shall we speak to the infant beginning to run?

,411 those beginning to run') ("I' 573)

184

For the answers we must return to rhe beginning of the poem. And to our own

lives in an evaluation of meaning that we have unquestioningly accepted, the binaries

that have unconsciously been agents of the process of an acculturation which is bereft

of responsibility The responsibility need not always be realised in action or activism,

but in response, to the poem and to the poet.

The foundation of Rukeyser's relational poetics is the common experiential

basis of human life and perception that overcomes all barriers, differences and

demarcation. As she states, she was writing a poetry "of meeting places where the

false barriers go downn(/;P 20). The difference of opinion and purpose, the

divergence in human ideals and ideologies which has led to so much trauma in human

life, are man-made barriers resulting &om the entropy of the human consciousness.

The dualities that man constructs create fragmentation of experience, which can be

overcome by replacing the sense of alterit)- with that of unity. Experience itself is

schismatically represented as inner and outer, but for the individual all responses

involve the inter-play of both.

Thus her poem become a sitelspace where the two concerns meet. The

movement between self and the world becomes a passage that inputs one's experience

and knowledge as the area and temporal entry into a new world of acknowledging the

world as inextricably a part of the self. One of the reasons why poetry degenerates

into mere craft in a technocratised society, rather than a vehicle of reciprocal feeling

lies in the failure to recognise this. Not having honed one's intuitive faculties, the

words fail to spark a response, and the lack of this very capacity leads to the

complaint that poetry fails to make sense. Poetry speaks to the innermost depths, in

silence. The failure to accept this silence, and the failure to hear it, is the basis of a

fear of entry into the resources of the self.

Rukeyser's concerns have been those of the marginalised and the unsung

heroes who have suffered repression and have resisted all forms of oppression in

society and in history. .lane Cooper records that this compelled her to "test [. . .] the

spirit through action [ . .I. She wanted to be there. One way of witnessing was to

write. Another was to put her body on the line literally" ("Everything a Witness" 7).

Even though war and social justice has been a constant thread brocading her poetry,

she focuses on the self as an area of recording the transformation that would relate the

self to the community and the world and alter reality not by the removal of suffering

and oppression, but by relating to the experiences of the other. A world of possibility

will then open out that will recognise the rhizomatic nature of all occurrences which

are related morphically, and which will in that very relationship bring about the

transformation that only the opening up of oneself in full response to the word can

evoke. The word in its very incapacity to record experience in its totality and in its

very striving to do so, relates the experience most intuitively to the individual, not as

object, but as feeling and experience directly communicated.