FormMatters: lyric investigations

As Sir Philip Sidney wrote (1580), summing up the tradition which was then new, the poet nothing affirmeth. This negative defense of poetry has proved worthy in the modern crisis of logical positivism, where conceptual clarity, more geometrico, served as the only model of truth. But with the rediscovery of metaxological thinking, at its most refined in the work of William Desmond, we can now say that we have a new model of reality that not only supports poetic experience but reflects the structure of poems.

You may recall Simone Weil’s essay ‘Metaxu,’ in ‘Gravity and Grace’: ‘The essence of created things is to be intermediaries. They are intermediaries leading from one thing to the other, and there is no end to this. They are intermediaries leading to God. We have to experience them as such.’

In the definition provided in the Glossary of ‘The Intimate Universal’ (2016)— see below— Desmond provides a useful short definition of Metaxology. Based on his fourfold sense of being—-univocal, equivocal, dialectical, and metaxological—-he argues that all is in relation. The four senses don’t cancel each other out. In poems, the narrative moves from univocal to metaxological, from determined clarity to the full relativity of the between. In this definition Desmond indicates the narrative as moving through the senses to a truer account. The between, he says, is ‘open to the poetics of the trans-systematic.’ But the goal of the poetic narrative is not a dialectical whole. Though the narrative moves through the senses of being dialectically, it concludes on the threshold of an open whole. The poet nothing affirmeth, but the poem reveals the form of metaxological being.

The between is plurivocal. The popular American poet Mary Oliver had mastered the four senses of being so that her poems could flow in the patterns of the between. We see this flow, which concludes with an image of the ‘intimate universsl’—- ‘the family of things.’ The univocals of cultural ‘goodness’ are treated first. Next she moves through the equivocity of animal being. Then the dialectic moves into the abyss of the self’s despair and the otherness of nature. The pattern takes on a shape with the metaxological between open to the imagination. Something calls from the beyond and this voice ‘calls’ to you announcing your place in the open whole. From the self’s despair to the agapeic family: this poem traces the fourfold senses of being with great finesse.

From the ‘Glossary’ (page 423) of ‘The Intimate Between’ (Columbia University Press, 2016).

The short poem or ‘lyric,’ unlike the the genres accounted for in the poetics of antiquity, seems to lack identity other than brevity. But paradoxically in Plato’s attack on the poets in The Republic, the cat is let out of the bag. Attacked for the transgression of mimesis, or representation of reality, poetry became enemy to idealism. But elsewhere in his dialogues Plato talks about ‘metaxu’ or the experience of the space between our bodily existence and the otherness of consciousness. And the idea of the between has provided our postmodern thinkers with the seeds of a new poetics.

In Eric Voegelin’s narrative of the search for the Beginning (In Search of Order, 2000), he uses the Platonic concept ‘metaxu’ to name the participatory mode of consciousness. He argues that concepts like ‘transcendence’ and ‘immanence’ do not refer to objects in space but structures of consciousness. The ‘language’ and ‘the truth of of reality becomes luminous’ (see Introduction).

Voegelin’s exposition leaned on paradoxes and complexes. In the late ‘80s the Irish philosopher William Desmond began publishing essays and books on metaxological metaphysics. Among his other books (his approach to philosophy has been dubbed ‘encyclopedic’), with ‘The Intimate Universal’ (2016) Desmond has produced a fully comprehensive essay on his metaxological metaphysics. His lifelong inquiry has produced a new range of language symbols for what Voegelin, following Plato and Aristotle, had called participation.

I have used metaxic thinking in reading and editing and commenting on poetry for decades. It is now my belief that metaxical structure is essential to poetry and becomes thematic in the narrative of the most popular form, the short lyric. Just another paradox in the long digressive story of the ‘between’; the term is now—2020– quite a la mode.

Let’s look at a text in order, as Voegelin says, ‘to calm things down.’

This poem from Michael Longley’s 2014 collection ‘The Stairwell’ is a wonderful example of poetic craft. An anecdotal base becomes the basis for exploring contingencies of our life in the metaxy or between. The flight of the arrow across the formal stanza break shows how the aesthetics, the descriptions, of events are not mere subject matter but the dynamics of life. The poet fulfills his purpose by presenting the fluid mix — the brotherly arrow—- where love and disaster mirror the fullness of time. All the details meld in the moment of time’s arrow stretching from zenith to end.

Poetic precision seems to model something absolute and primordial. Inside and outside are transparent and, in the vocabulary of metaxical being, ‘porous.’ In William Desmond’s metaxical analysis, the shape of the unity of happening opens dynamically. His word is ‘porosity.’ As we see on page 211 of ‘The Intimate Universal,’ the concept of ‘porosity’ banishes the imagery of the between as a neatly-bounded moment that fulfills itself in becoming an object, a poem. Poems, like betweens, are open wholes.

The popularity of the concept ‘the between’ makes it necessary to distinguish what we mean from all the popular usages. William Desmond offers a new way of talking about the between as ‘porosity.’ Desmond borrows the term ‘poros’ from Plato’s myth of the conception of Eros from poros — plenty— and penia — want (Symposium). Defining the concept in its Platonic sense as ‘metaxu,’ or the space wherein we grasp events both as ‘happening here’ and happening in light of ‘the beyond,’ Desmond emphasizes ‘passage’ —- as for example a passage of music—-as the theme of metaxological being. Everything flows from nothing toward eternity, the limit of our finite between. (Elsewhere, as for example in the third of his between trilogy, ‘God and the Between,’ Desmond presents extended analyses of key concepts like eternity.)

One of the metaphysical problems with the concept of the metaxy has been our inclination to reify the metaphor of space. The boundaries of the between define it, but they do not determine it. A marriage does not determine the passion of the spouses. Their love flows from something deeper ( at least if the marriage is ‘authentic’).

As this passage from ‘The Intimate Universal’(2016) argues, what happens in the between is like a passage of music, and the metaxological analysis, informed by the asymmetrical here/beyond, pushes the analysis to the dimension of selfhood (Voegelin’s consciousness). In the Eros of our being we transcend ourselves. Rather than the Idealistic concept of transcendence, in which the self returns to the closed whole of Godself, we need a metaxological concept. That is: We are ourselves porosities. ‘We are a passing opening.’ The creative act familiar to poets bears witness to Desmond’s refiguration of the ancient idea of metaxu (see Plato, Symposium, 202b5.)

Longley’s poetry combines many discourses, including Homeric, and the transparency of his porosities are unique. But as I have shown elsewhere, short poems in many cultures exhibit the narrative of the between: moving from objective situations through metaxological dialectics to the limit of self-consciousness, at which time the imagery of the universal open whole emerges in the form perchance of Michael Longley’s arrow. One never knows.

As W. R. Johnson argues in The Idea of Lyric, Callimachus (d. 240 BC), the great librarian of Alexandria who helped sort the annals of ancient poetry into a genre system, as a poet created a self-consciously ‘modern’ lyric. In the text above Johnson shows how the kingfisher, anciently a symbol of freedom, became a symbol of human inwardness.

The lyric structure we call metaxical— focusing on the life of mortals ‘between’ the absolute origin and death—- is amply foreseen here. The inwardness is not solipsistic. Metaxological doubles structure the narrative. (Notice how the Poet splits his consciousness between the corpse, Leontichos, and the gull.)

The value of compassion accompanies the ‘you’ of lyric address. The threat of nihilism that is inherent in the metaxological point of view is resisted both by the intention of the dialectic / narrative of the middle of the poem and by the concision and lucidity of the poem itself. The poem itself becomes an image of life in the between. It does not return to itself as pure ‘form’ but opens on the image of the sea.

“Talent is a spring from which water is constantly flowing. But this spring loses its value if it is not used in the right way.“ Wittgenstein, Culture and Value 10e.

The water image. See it as the capacity of the absolute one to dissolve itself in the flow freeing the concrete, finite singular being to be itself. Humans share this self with the poem.

We are all already selving.

The metaxy or between originated in Plato’s myth Socrates tells about when he consulted about love in The Symposium. Love was the offspring of Plenty and Want. Love dwells in the between (metaxy), always subject to change, always longing for permanence.

Lyric embodies the truth of the metaxy. Though lyric depends on moments of contemplative fullness, erotic arrest, poetically realized in images that have a kind of halo, the flow of verse plunges ahead into the abyss of the between. The dialectic yields to a meta-vision of the ‘porosity’ (Desmond pulls this term from Plato’s myth of fullness and lack). This Rees-Jones calls her middle years.

This pattern, in which the ‘form’ of lyric (let’s call it metaxy or between) emerges from the dialectical narrative of the lyric’s ‘passage,’ is very common. Sort of the DNA of lyric. Deryn Rees-Jones, Erato (Seren).