Prudence in Hell 025
Aide-mémoires in Power, Part I: Poetry and The Orphic Voice
The following is part one of a series on power that was requested by a friend who is beginning to experience and explore it in its foallike stages, with enough conscientiousness to know he would do well to rapidly enlist an éminence grise. Some opacity is required to communicate between lines —as one sometimes must in this particular line of business, where messaging has different levels of explicitness, depending on where you are seeing them from— but I will be touching on unusual sources in unusual ways because everyone knows The Prince —even if few understand him— but we are here to abet the near and future kings of art and industry, whom I will make sure to connect through discreet channels. (And we will revisit Machiavelli and the Machiavellians, all in due course). Who am I to give advice on power? That’s for me to know, and for the aggrieved to discover.
Untoward advice, from an Orphist advisor. “Poetry is a form of power” is the opening salvo of Elizabeth Sewell’s little-read and admirably opportune The Orphic Voice (1960), a book George Steiner thought was:
…designed and written to force your mind to work in Orphic fashion. Sewell insists that the reader trained in linear, logical methods must go postlogical, to work in clusters and concentric circles.
I bring this up first on account of your training, then of a certain fundamental intuition of yours, which is in alignment with Sewell’s claim that “mathematics cannot be set against words because each is an instrument for myth in the mind (p. 13).”
You begin to understand why we are starting here, and not in the more obvious places. To cite Sewell:
Orpheus, who is poetry and myth and postlogic thinking about itself, is not subject to interpretation by other disciplines; he is himself interpretation...
The same can be said about power. The medium is the presage.
So yes, the advice you will be receiving from me comes from an Orphist, someone who believes “discovery, in science and poetry, is a mythological situation in which the mind unites with a figure of its own devising as a way of understanding the world.” This is the most poietic and anti-mimetic form of power I’m aware of, and though we shall explore the two, it is the note I wanted to begin on, because it will set the register for our entire conversation.
We will also commit time to discovering that figure of your mind’s own devising, which is like a skeleton key to your power.
While Sewell –herself a student of Polanyi– thought scientists, and biologists especially, were leading the Orphic way —something I don’t dismiss wholesale, but as a transhuman proposition she might have spurned— I believe the balance of power has shifted from the scientist to the “powerful” since the pandemic. This is not limited to a conventional understanding of the so-called ruling class; it extends to all manner of characters adept at power-capture. (Of course, if this relationship is inverted or perverted, it becomes power-seizure, in a sense not entirely dissimilar to what happens with Anima or Animus possession. One is led by one’s horse, as it were, and not vice versa.)
One must address power from a powerful place. If you intend to not only accrue but maintain power, myth and poetry provide strong capstones to do so, because they are entelechies. In brief, this is not potential energy anymore. This is power.
So first there is the enchantment of the world, natural and material (which in Sewell corresponds to the baroque, through Shakespeare and Bacon). Then there is “the journey to love and death” (the Romantic and Goethian/Goetic part of the power trip I entered last year), and “with Rilke there will be the final high and mysterious figure, the severed prophetic head unconquered even in its destruction, and the human music among the stars…(p.xi)”.
[The severed heads will clearly continue until morale improves, but notice what a powerful symbol of the times they are, and how recurrent in my writing.]
Though we are well past Rilke —which is where Sewell ends— “the death and dismemberment of Orpheus” —the dismemberment of power, or through power (its decentralisation, maybe)— “may well be a promising figure for those of us thinking about the Anthropocene (idem)”.
As you know, I think of the Covidian as a chapter in the Anthropocene. The third part of Sewell’s Orphic anatomy, “the high and mysterious”, is still in need of articulation and re-solving. As Coleridge wrote on Wordsworth –with his The Friend being a genesis for The Orphic Voice—: “the poet is not only the man made to solve the riddle of the universe, but he is also the man who feels where it is not solved.” (p. xiii).
This is a poetic and perhaps even a mathematic intuition, and to see the possibility in this seeming limitation is to understand something about power and how it fills vacuums.
I disagree with the claim there have been no Orphic poets since Rilke: Dale Pendell, in particular, with his incredible command of the elemental, comes immediately to mind. So do voices like Anne Carson’s, poetry’s foremost living mythographer, or the likes of Ezra Pound, or Leopoldo María Panero, or James Merrill.
David Schenck, Sewell’s friend and literary executor —and the author of the introduction I’ve been working from above— frames the prolongation of the Orphic voice as a return to nature, which is not misguided, though —I think— still quite a ways out. I can envision a time when the dregs of human language are nucleated and preserved by the descendants of the last men’s escaped parrots, but I am certain I won’t live to hear that death rattle.
Ovidian metamorphoses is a recurring theme in The Orphic Voice. The C/ovidian aesthetics experiment is cast in the same tradition: it absorbs and includes Ovid in its proposition, and promotes not retvrn but the sort of transformations that will lead to us become ourselves, whatever we are. Power, like science, moves forward.
This may be the strangest introduction to power you have read, or that you could have expected, but you will see it come in handy as we explore the matter further. There is an active transference of power in what I have shared with you here. Train your voice and understand what the sublime itinerary ahead looks like if it so chooses you.
This is also a first and formal invitation to be fearless. Power is and is not yours, insofar as it flows through you, but you can handle it, snake-charmer style. The first thing Orpheus did was, after all, to charm the rocks and trees and beasts.
You may not know how you ended up here, but power does.
Gustave Moreau. Orpheus. 1865. Oip on panel. height: 154 cm x 99.5 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.