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Poet, Actor, Spectator

Stuart Kendall 
stuartkendall@kanandesign.com


(c) 2004 Stuart Kendall.
All rights reserved.

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Review of:
Clayton Eshleman, Juniper Fuse: Upper Paleolithic Imagination and
the Construction of the Underworld. Middleton, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2003.

1. Section five of Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy ends with a
curious figure, a "weird image from a fairy tale which can turn
its eyes at will and behold itself [...] at once subject and
object, at once poet, actor, and spectator" (52). The figure weds
Dionysus and Apollo as Nietzsche conceives them. The Dionysian
musician surrenders his subjectivity by sinking into
identification with the primal unity of the world in all its pain
and contradiction. But the Apollonian dream conjures
images--symbols, metaphors--from this identification: "Then the
Dionysian-musical enchantment of the sleeper seems to emit image
sparks, lyrical poems" (50). Nietzsche distinguishes the lyric
poet from the epic poet, who is nevertheless related to him, with
the fact that while the epic poet loses him or herself in the pure
contemplation of images, as in the relentless unfurling of poetic
language, the lyric poet loses him or herself in the pain and
contradiction of the world; lyric images, charged with meaning,
burst with the brevity of sparks. Through the "mirror of illusion"
that is poetic language, the epic poet is "protected from becoming
one and fused with his figures. In contrast to this, the images of
the lyrist are nothing but his very self and, as it were, only
different projections of himself, so he, as the moving center of
this world, may say 'I'" (50). Unprotected, the lyric poet becomes
fused with the world and with his or her images. The hybrid figure
of Nietzsche's imagining--at once poet, actor, and spectator--is
such a lyrist: a poet in the world, a performer of flesh and
blood, and an observer, conscious of himself in his turns.

2. In Juniper Fuse: Upper Paleolithic Imagination and the
Construction of the Underworld, Clayton Eshleman cuts just such a
figure. Three distinct, but intersecting and overlapping, areas of
interest animate the text. The book is at once a book of poetry, a
poet's autobiography, a memoir of his life in and life reflected
in prehistoric painted caves, and an extended scholarly engagement
with the anthropology of prehistory. At its best, and most
complex, Eshleman challenges academic anthropology with the test
of his own experience and the imagination of a visionary poet.
"Instead of solely employing rational documentation (as have the
archeologists), it struck me that this 'inseparable mix' might be
approached using poetic imagination as well as through fieldwork
and research" (xv). Eshleman's method, then, is not one but many.
It is a gesture of what he calls disciplinary pluralism (xii). In
this way, significantly and occasionally disastrously, among its
other pleasures, Juniper Fuse offers a test case for reflections
on interdisciplinarity as well as for the limits and uses of each
of the disciplines involved. Readers are challenged to follow him,
and this is no easy task.

3. Eshleman's subject is not cave painting per se but rather the
imagination that is recorded in cave wall imagery (xi). Because he
tracks this "Paleolithic imagination" primarily through the roots
of his own experience and sensibility, his subject is also his
subjectivity. The underworld of Eshleman's title is first and
foremost the human unconscious, an unconscious which he believes
can be made conscious through the symbolic consciousness expressed
in poetry. (Here Eshleman owes these ideas to James Hillman's
essay "The Dream and the Underworld" and Norman O. Brown's
argument from "Fulfillment," chapter eight of Love's Body.) The
underworld is secondly all that has been repressed or rejected
from human psychology, experience, and history: unacceptable acts
and urges, animal instincts, the extinction of species and
potential extinction of the human race through ecological
disaster. The underworld, then, is the Hell of man. It is the
bottom rung of consciousness and what lies beneath. It is the back
wall of human history. His guiding assumption is succinctly
stated: "Consciousness [...] seems to be the upswing of a 'fall'
from the seamless animal web, in which a certain amount of sexual
energy was transformed into fantasy energy, and the loss partially
and hauntingly compensated for by dreaming and
imagining--processes not directly related to survival" (30). What
Eshleman elsewhere terms the "autonomous imagination," the ability
to think and speak in symbolic terms, in metaphors and images, is
born of a moment of loss, when early humanity began to conceive of
itself as distinct from the world it inhabited. Already in this
passage one observes the extent to which Eshleman borrows his
terms from William Blake and from psychoanalysis more so than from
the staid, responsible, objective terms of prehistoric
anthropology. (Significantly, David Lewis-Williams, one of the
foremost living prehistorians, argues in his book The Mind in the
Cave that symbolic consciousness is in fact essential to the
success and survival of our species: it participates in and
permits social organization and the division of labor in a more
effective, because hierarchical, way than was previously possible.)

4. Eshleman and his wife Caryl began visiting the caves of the
Dordogne in 1974. Resonating with themes and images long
established in Eshleman's work, the galvanizing experience
occasioned a shift in the tone and topic of the poet's corpus:
where his previous major collections of verse (Indiana, Altars)
focused with often ferocious, even embarrassing, psychological
honesty on the poet's own life, his WASP upbringing, and his
education, his writing after the encounter with the caves, while
retaining its rootedness in the poet's inner life, turned more
resolutely outward. Juniper Fuse took shape across the volumes of
poetry and prose Eshleman published since the late 1970s: Hades in
Manganese (1981), Fracture (1983), The Name Encanyoned River
(1986), Hotel Cro-Magnon (1989), Antiphonal Swing (1989), Under
World Arrest (1994), and From Scratch (1998). Juniper Fuse then is
an anthology. It gathers perhaps a third of Eshleman's poetry and
prose on its topic, undeniably the most significant third. The
first two parts of Juniper Fuse represent selections from Hades in
Manganese and Fracture. The latter parts more radically commingle
materials from the later books.

5. But to say that much of Juniper Fuse has previously appeared in
print is misleading on at least four counts. First, Eshleman's
collections of verse are in fact often anthologies of previously
published materials. His poems first appear in journals, as
broadsides or in chapbooks, before finding their way into larger,
more widely distributed collections. "A Cosmogonic Collage" and
The Aranea Constellation are two sections of Juniper Fuse that
before now have only appeared in minor or small-circulation formats.

6. Second, each republication occasions a subtle shift in the meaning
of a poem or prose piece through its new context. In From Scratch,
Eshleman compares and contrasts his process to that of Robert
Duncan in Duncan's "Passages" series (From Scratch 182). For
Duncan, the "Passages" poems, published in sections within
separate volumes, stood apart from the books in which they
appeared. For Eshleman, the writings which comprise Juniper Fuse
fit into the books where they made their first appearance and the
larger project as well. In this way, the earlier collections each
include poems specifically concerned with questions of the
Paleolithic imagination as well as other poems which may or may
not take up these questions. Each of these collections presents a
narrative, however loose, of the author's life, among other
things, in the years of its composition. Juniper Fuse, however,
while still charting such a narrative, presents itself as tightly
focused on the Paleolithic imagination. Furthermore, Juniper Fuse
presents itself as an anthology of both prose and poetry: here,
prose pieces that once served to preface or annotate collections
of poetry mingle with the poems they once prefaced in an entirely
different constellation.

7. Third, each republication often includes revisions: changes of
words or phrases, of lineation, occasionally massive reordering,
additions to or subtractions from the text. Some of these
revisions are minor; others, obviously, are not. In "Silence
Raving," the first poem in Juniper Fuse, originally published in
Hades in Manganese, Eshleman changes, among other things, the
phrase "the power/ the Cro-Magnons bequeathed to me, to make an
altar of my throat" to "the power/ the Cro-Magnons bequeathed to
us: / to make an altar of our throats" (Juniper Fuse 3). In poems
concerned with the nature of subjectivity, such shifts from the
personal to the universal are enormously significant. (In this
particular case, they damage the poem by coming too easily.)

8. Fourth, Eshleman's previous collections, generally published
through Black Sparrow Press, were rarely and sparingly
illustrated. Juniper Fuse, however, is illustrated and the book
benefits from it. "Indeterminate, Open" constitutes a poem in the
form of notes on a set of photographs and drawings by Monique and
Claude Archambeau. The poem in From Scratch did not include the
drawings and it reads like a series of captions to absent images.
By including the images, Juniper Fuse permits the piece to serve
as a demonstration of the primary gesture of the text as a whole:
the intermingling of word and image, image and word.

9. Though Eshleman's writing has long incorporated prose prefaces and
annotations, he regards "Notes on a Visit to Le Tuc d'Audoubert,"
originally published in Fracture (1983), as inaugurating a
definitive stylistic shift to a pluralistic or hybrid textual
"anatomy." Ostensibly notes taken on a visit to the cave, the
mosaic includes photographs and sketches, roughly descriptive and
allusive notes, and passages of dense poetic meditation. Eshleman
borrows the word "anatomy" from Northrop Frye, who used it to
describe William Blake's "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,"
another collection of poems and prose, of fables, epigrams, and
images. For Eshleman, the "term also evokes the writing that
Artaud did beginning in 1945: a fusion of genres incorporating
letters, poetry, prose, and glossolalia" (254). An anatomy is a
text incarnate: a body of many organs and members. Eshleman's
anatomy includes poetry, prose poetry, essays, lectures, notes,
dreams, and black-and-white and color images. Forty of the book's
three hundred pages consist of notes and commentary. Like "The
Waste Land," Juniper Fuse is a poem including footnotes, but
Eshleman pushes this notion farther, in keeping with Charles
Olson's dictum that one should "leave the roots attached" (Olson
106). Juniper Fuse is a collection of poems but it is also a
notebook on the composition of those poems.

10. Juniper Fuse is a self-proclaimed poet's book, written to "reclaim
the caves [...] for poets as geo-mythical sites in which early
intimations of what we call 'muse' may have been experienced"
(xii). The Vézère valley in the Dordogne--where many of these
caves are to be found--is a region of France, but it is also a
moment in time--the Upper Paleolithic--and a mythic
space--Paradise, for Eshleman--all of which can be reclaimed by
the poets (see "Cemeteries of Paradise" 101). Eshleman's travels
through and observations of the region form part of his
autobiography. His appreciation of the period in time reflects his
study of and contributions to prehistoric anthropology. His appeal
to myth recalls his vocation as a poet. Paradise, for Eshleman, is
a designation for the place first offered by Henry Miller, but it
is also a religious sphere of primary concern to William Blake.
The poetic tradition informs not only the language but the agenda
of Juniper Fuse, a book that marshals the resources of poetic
language in its investigation of the Paleolithic imagination and
the hidden depths of the human mind. Poetic language, literature,
according to Ezra Pound, is "language charged with meaning" or
"news that STAYS news" (28, 29). The charge of Eshleman's poetic
language follows from its dense imbrication with complex meanings
and associations.

11. The "fuse" of the title, for example, is first and foremost
historical, factual: it refers to the juniper wicks used in
Paleolithic lamps found in the caves. The juniper fuse is the wick
that provided the light by which prehistoric man painted the
caves. Now, for us, the book casts a similar light on the
paintings; not the light of creation, but that of a particularly
active and engaged mode of interpretation. Eshleman's primary
question is why "such imagery /sparked/ when and where it did"
(xi, emphasis added). The spark of the image ignites the fuse.
"Image sparks" is Nietzsche's phrase for lyric poetry in section
five of The Birth of Tragedy. The fuse is also the fuse of fusion:
the fusion of man and cave wall in the process of engraving and
image making; the fusion of poet and cave image casting image
sparks, lyric poems. The fuse is also the fuse of a bomb (xi). The
fuse is the fuse of fission, of atomic disaster, which haunts
these pages: the images cast by the atomic blast at Hiroshima.
"When such words fuse,/ they thirst in us, thus do not fuse,/
because we are fission incarnate" (112).

12. Fusion is the fusion of language in puns. Here again Eshleman
borrows his terms from Brown's Love's Body. Brown writes: "In
puns, 'two words get on top of each other and become sexual'; in
metaphor, two become one" (252). Puns are the essence of symbolic
consciousness, and symbolic consciousness is Dionysian
consciousness; the erotic sense of reality; the fusion of subject
and object via symbolism. This is not to say clarity.

If there must be clarity,
let it be opaque, let the word be
convexcavatious, deep
with distance, a clear
and dense mosaic, desiring
undermining.

(Eshleman 19)

13. Eshleman's poetry is often a poetics in poetry: a meditation on
and demonstration of the workings of the poem as they are at work.
His poetic language is often, and often best, a language of puns,
of slang, and of neologisms. It is a poetics of force and
fracture: a contorted speech of words twisted and turned as
Eshleman sifts the "etymological compost" of language (51). In
"Winding Windows," the word "convexcavatious" recalls Sandor
Ferenzci's exaggerated and visionary psychoanalysis wherein every
convex surface is a phallus and every concavity a vagina. But it
mingles the convex with its opposite through the notion of
excavation, and thereby discovers the great theme of the book as a
whole: the figure of the "hole that becomes a pole"; the vulva
that seems to produce the phallus which Eshleman posits as the
"core gesture" and "generator of image-making" (235):

The hole that grows [...] may be one of the most fundamental
versions of the logos or story. [...] Increasing in height or
depth as the gods or shamanic familiars ascend or dive, the
soul's end, or purpose is always beyond our own, a tunnel
generating its own light--or crown of flame. It is a hole
grounded in both absence and appearance, a convexcavatious
abyss. (235-36) 

This poetics of force and fracture affiliates Eshleman's poetic
practice with that of a formidable if "minor" strain of
twentieth-century writing whose exemplars include Raymond Roussel,
the Joyce of Finnegans Wake, Antonin Artaud, Paul Celan, John
Cage, Pierre Guyotat, Valère Novarina: writers who, in Novarina's
phrase, chew their words; they crush language, ruminate on its
syntactic building blocks, and reveal its hidden histories and
futures.

14. Crawling through Le Tuc d'Audoubert, Eshleman "is stimulated to
desire to enter cavities within [him]self where dead men can be
heard talking" (72). "I feel," he writes, "the extent to which I
am storied" (92). Juniper Fuse begins, in epigram, with a poem by
Paul Celan (in Cid Corman's translation). Thereafter it borrows
its terms and agenda from William Blake, Charles Olson, Hart
Crane, César Vallejo, Antonin Artaud, and Aimée Césaire, among
others. As a poem including history it must be read in the
tradition of Pound, Williams, and Olson.

15. But the poet here is also among prehistorians: the Abbés Breuil
and Glory, Annette Laming, André Leroi-Gourhan, Siegfried Giedion,
Max Raphael, Paolo Graziosi, Alexander Marshack, Jean Clottes,
Margaret W. Conkey, Paul Bahn, David Lewis Williams, and Richard
Leakey (xv). Eshleman's dialogue with the discipline of prehistory
is conducted more overtly than is his often-implicit continuance
of the poetic tradition. This dialogue too is odd for its
adherence to Blake's maxim that opposition is the truest form of
friendship. Eshleman argues with André Leroi-Gourhan, in
particular, over and over again in Juniper Fuse. He writes as a
perpetual outsider, even after twenty-five years of research and
exploration in the caves; he refuses full participation in the
dominant and dominating anthropological discourse on the caves.

16. Another degree of disciplinary pluralism: the poet among
psychologists and cultural theorists. Eshleman supplements the
archeologists and anthropologists with reference to C. G. Jung,
Sandor Ferenzci, Geza Róheim, Erich Neumann, Mikhail Bakhtin,
Weston La Barre, Charles Olson's Call Me Ishmael, Norman O. Brown,
Kenneth Grant, James Hillman, Hans Peter Duerr and Maxine
Sheets-Johnstone (xv). Here too is a tradition, this time in
cultural theory. It is the countercultural tradition in cultural
theory.

17. Finally, though most importantly perhaps, the poet is among
people. Jacques Marsal (1925-1988), for example, was among the
children who tumbled into Lascaux in 1940: he never really left.
He stayed nearby, leading tours and attending to the cave for the
rest of his life. Eshleman celebrates him in "Like Violets, He
Said," a short text of prose and poetry accompanied by the famous
photo which documents, in its way, the cave's discovery. "I'm
overwhelmed," Eshleman observes, "by the difference one person can
make in the personality of a place, not via declaration or sheer
information, but by being folded in, obliquely, wearing Lascaux,
allowing its grace to loom, allowing us, hardly aware of his
movements, our own reading through his light" (98). The title of
the piece comes from Charles Olson's line, quoted in Eshleman's
poem: "Men spring up like violets when needed." Paul Blackburn
also appears. The piece is elegiac, moving. For Eshleman, the
spirit of a place includes the spirits of those who have passed
through it. The piece is metatextual, the stories layered in dense
mosaic: Olson and Blackburn taught Eshleman to perceive such
spirits, and Marsal became one of them just as Eshleman himself
has now, for us.

18. Juniper Fuse, far more so than the writings of the prehistorians,
courses with reference, with story. The central contrast of the
text is that between Eshleman's subjectivity and the layers of
reference--to poets, prehistorians, psychologists, and those
others who have peopled his experience--through which he
experiences not only the caves but the world. The motion of the
text is characterized by Eshleman's attempt to excavate, to get
beneath these layers of meaning, reference, or explanation, to
sift beneath these presences to what he only experiences as
absence, loss, the zero, the hole (26, 235). "Pure loss pours
through. I'm home" (100).

19. Eshleman's subjectivity, often present in rough physical terms,
in-the-minute descriptions of the physical experiences of the
caves, grounds the book. His response to the writings of the
prehistorians is always to test their maps, their drawings, or
their descriptions, finally their theories, against his own
experience of the caves. If he corrects any given theory or
explanation, as he often does, it is based on personal
observation. He offers a careful description of crawling through
caves, or of standing in a space that lacks sufficient oxygen, or
of his eyes adjusting to the light of the dark. Such observations
are denied us by the disciplinary responsibility of the
anthropologists, the objective necessity of science. Juniper Fuse
offers a phenomenology of the painted caves.

20. The subject of the book, then, is decidedly Clayton Eshleman. But
Eshleman both is and is not alone. A self-proclaimed and perennial
amateur before the culturally legitimated authorities--the
scientists, the anthropologists--Eshleman nevertheless speaks from
the ground of a different authority. Awed and annihilated by the
cave imagery that is his concern, he rediscovers himself in the
animals and hybrid humanoids pictured therein. "If the figure of
the interior leper took me backward, it was also a comment on the
present: the rediscovery of my own monstrosity while studying the
grotesqueness of hybrid cave image" (48).

21. For Eshleman, "a single smoking road leads from Indianapolis
[where he grew up] to Lascaux" (91). It runs via Auschwitz and
Hiroshima. The history of man is a history of horrors.

Faced with so much story, I release my grip
from Whitman's hand, "agonies are one of my changes of
garments"--in the face of Auschwitz?

(93)

22. In tracing the roots of symbolic consciousness, Eshleman has
written a book of the dead, an incantation for absent beasts and
beings. Odysseus stands in Hades as his tutelary figure (67).

We are thus, in the late twentieth century, witness to the
following phantasmagorical /and/ physical spectacle: The
animal images in the Ice Age caves are also the ghosts of
species wiped out at the beginning of our Holocene epoch;
today they "stand in" for the species we are daily
eliminating. [...] Such images are primogeneous to the
extinction of possibly all animal life. (248) 

23. Eshleman's postmodernism is that of Charles Olson. In response to
the totalizing, exclusionary, hierarchical trend in modernity, he
speaks for those who cannot. In Juniper Fuse, he gives voice to
the animals and humans, prehistoric or present, who haunt the
caves. His celebrated corpus in translation--of César Vallejo, of
Aimée Césaire, of Antonin Artaud and others--is but another form
of this same project.

stuartkendall@kanandesign.com 

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Works Cited

Brown, Norman O. Love's Body. New York: Vintage, 1966.

Eshleman, Clayton. Altars. Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow, 1971.

---. Antiphonal Swing: Selected Prose 1960-1985. Ed. Caryl
Eshleman. Kingston, NY: McPherson, 1989.

---. Fracture. Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow, 1983.

---. From Scratch. Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow, 1998.

---. Hades in Manganese. Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow, 1981.

---. Hotel Cro-Magnon. Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow, 1989.

---. Indiana. Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow, 1969.

---. The Name Encanyoned River: Selected Poems 1960-1985. Santa
Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow, 1986.

---. Under World Arrest. Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow, 1994.

Ferenczi, Sandor. Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality. Trans. Henry
Alden Bunker, M.D. NewYork: Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 1938.

Lewis-Williams, David. The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the
Origins of Art. London: Thames & Hudson, 2002.

Hillman, James. "The Dream and the Underworld." The Dream and the
Underworld. New York: Harper, 1979.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy and the Case of Wagner
. Trans. Walter Kaufman. New York: Vintage, 1967.

Olson, Charles. "These Days." The Collected Poems of Charles
Olson, Excluding the Maximus Poems. Ed. George F. Butterick.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.

Pound, Ezra. ABC of Reading. New York: New Directions, 1960.