Sunday, February 21, 2010

By Reviewed by Mark Howell

"Earth Poetry: Selected Essays and Interviews"

by William Everson

Hardy Books, $60

The question of whether Fantasy Fest is becoming debauched has taken us back to an essay written more than five decades ago by a wild monk from out West, a work that first introduced us to the fabulous possibilities of "negative affirmation."

The Californian monk known as Brother Antoninus, otherwise known as William Everson, was a philosopher-poet who entered a Dominican monastery in 1951 as a short-haired square and left the order in 1969 as a supple fellow with his hair halfway down his back.

It was in the middle of this transformation, in 1959, that Antoninus wrote "The Reemergence of the Dionysian Spirit in Contemporary Life," which finally appeared in "Earth Poetry," 1980.

We invite you to forego the $60 collectors' price tag on this book -- that's OK, Everson died in 1995 at the age of 83, broke but happily married -- in order to appreciate just how, from only a few sentences of his seminal piece, one can put the Fantasy Fest question into the deepest possible focus.

Dionysius was not known simply as a booze hound until the ancient Greeks "depotentated" him into a cheerful wine god. In Thrace, from whence he came, Dionysius was "a primordial orgiastic mystery cult," says Antoninus, "disputing the worship of various local deities and cursing with orgiastic madness those who refused him propitiation."

In his own realm of field and forest, "Dionysius is nothing dangerous; he represents simply the flow of unconscious life in the whole psyche."

But inevitably he finds himself up against it.

"Over him," writes the hip monk, "stands Apollo, god of light and consciousness, the guardian of civilization and culture, of education, commerce and civic virtue."

Now the story, no longer Greek to us, begins to look more like a life lesson for Middle America.

To the Apollonian person, so focused on "rational consciousness and ego-integrity" that "nothing is more abhorrent -- and therefore more seductive -- than the dark, irrational urge," the civilized ego fears it will lose everything to the ecstatic force and so must organize "all its powers of persuasion and coercion" to check the spontaneous effects.

"The god of light does not understand the darkness," explains Antoninus. Trying to be rational, "the ego simply rationalizes." Finding that persuasions and admonishments won't work, "only repressive action remains."

But locking Dionysius up, repressing the irrational unconscious, "is not the end of the matter, only its postponement." Man is a rational animal, "but an animal for all that, and Dionysius is unkillable."

Unless his voice is heard, unless the irrational is given its proper place in the psyche as a whole, "sooner or later the god will break out."

Laissez les bons temps rouler!

The art principally associated with Dionysius of old was dithyrambic, what the good brother calls "a wild poetry of spontaneous enthusiasm." He cites Jack Kerouac's spontaneous bop prosody in our own times as a "transparent technique for achieving the true dithyrambic deeps, 'from center to periphery.' Nothing could be more explicit."

And our history, too, is pretty much explicit anymore. "The annihilation of the Indian, the enslavement of the African, the atom-bombing of the Orientals," these "persist as a fear and a compulsive guilt in the American unconscious."

The solution, he says, is a "thorough examination of conscience, true contrition followed by heartfelt confession." But that would call for -- and here Antoninus sounds like Market Share gone Jungian -- "the incorporation of genuine ecstatic and mystical needs in the interplay of the collective psyche."

Meanwhile Apollo, due to his "civilized fear," is constantly calling ecstasy "satanic." (And that's the real sin of the civilized -- for it was not Dionysius who crucified Christ but an Apollonian governor and a "rational" high priest.)

To forestall the doom coming down upon us if we don't get the balance right, great festivals such as Mardi Gras and Fantasy Fest try for a genuine synthesis with the unconscious. Without these kind of unbridled events we would be left only with what Antoninus calls "civilization as usual," the chief preoccupation of reasonable men.

But watch out. Civilization is entirely incapable of stopping the up-rush of ecstatic forces from repressed instincts and America's puritanical (i.e. Apollonian) inheritance will always move to satanize such outbursts. That's why "the Dionysian-Apollonian equation is so basic," says Brother Antoninus. "It separates the sheep from the goats."

He concludes in high gear. Both the Apollonian and the Dionysian must learn that "only a supernatural culture, subsumed in collective ritual, is capable of healing the disordered human psyche," a psyche that has been "torn since Adam between the counterclaiming forces of instinct and ego."

So, says this genuinely holy man, if all about us is breaking up, "it is because there is nowhere on earth that has been able to affect any such synthesis."

Except, say we, maybe right here in Key West.

Debauched means literally to "draw away from work," a plowing metaphor originating from the Old French for "to lead astray from weeding" (embauche means "to hire").

Ah, we're headed for our very own Habitat for Insanity and watch out for anyone who says it's too much.

In our interpretation, the hairy bro says give it a go.