That is no easy task. Surrendering completely to the Muse is the key, and only a few poets—like Shakespeare in his dramatic poetry—have ever mastered it successfully. Most poets only get a fleeting taste of it, which is why there are so few truly great poems.
For those who know little about creating poems, let me sketch it quickly: If the 202 ALICE HICKEY
poet is very lucky, as the Muse’s song begins to rise the story will begin forming in the poet’s conscious mind with no effort whatsoever. None. In effect, the poet and Muse have become one.
This is the critical point where the poem will either fail or succeed. It will succeed if the poet surrenders to what is happening; it will fail if the poet doesn’t. I have come to call this surrendering staying on the “golden thread.” It is almost impossible to do in written composition, but almost automatic in oral composition because it is largely an unconscious process.
What the poet does afterward in the way of adding rhyme or altering language, tone, idiom, or rhythm, depends on the poet. Sometimes it’s extensive, sometimes minimal. I’ve done both and prefer taking the baby as the baby comes—and I have found this is most successfully done through speaking: spontaneous oral composition.
While I have been describing the act of poetic composition as modern poets experience it, I believe that Homer “heard” the Muse’s voice essentially as I have described it, although that voice was undoubtedly more tangible than the one we experience, for the simple reason that, as Julian Jaynes suggests, Homer’s consciousness was different. He was more “unconscious” than we are.
I wouldn’t be as quick as Jaynes, however, to bundle the Muse’s voice in with the other guiding voices heard by early humans. This comes from my own experience with the two kinds of internal voices: directive and poetic. I believe the distinctive
“human” nature of the Muse’s voice—which is a more companionable voice than my directive voices—is the result of an internal modification of the directive voices that occurred in the early stages of human development.
It seems obvious that when early humans heard the directing voices of the Gods they would eventually want to respond by honoring and praising them. That praising, of course, would take the form of a story, not a directive, because that is the natural way for us to express our emotions.
The sound of our praising, however, wouldn’t be exactly the same as the sound of our internal directive voices, because the praising would come physically from our very human voices. I believe that over time some of our internal voices modified their texture in imitation of our praising voices. They became less authoritative, more loving, more praising, more story-directed, more “human.” In time, those internal voices became the Muses, and eventually the Muse.
Somewhere in that long cycle, as some part of our internal directive voices began to transform themselves into the story-telling Muse, we began to imitate those stories when we heard them. I believe that imitation to have been instinctive—it is our nature to imitate—but the result was monumental—no less than Yeats’
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Heaven blazing into the head. These were stories—but very different from the stories we had been telling each other. We had suddenly become godlike—
creators of worlds. Very small worlds for sure, but they were still worlds—that is the important thing.
If my suggestion that the original, directive voices generated by the unconscious modified their “sound” and nature to become stories and to conform with the more human, loving texture of our “praising” voices seems outlandish to some, it is only because we have mistakenly come to view the unconscious as a kind of emotional sump whose only function is to be dredged for meaning by psychoanalysts and the like.
It is a shallow view. Both modern and ancient investigators of the unconscious, or soul, repeatedly remind us that the commerce between soul and self—between our conscious and unconscious minds—is a two-way affair and always has been.
We should remember that no aspect of that commerce is more “two-way” than the act of poetry. It is the way the two halves of us—conscious and unconscious—
come together to make us complete. Poetry is not as much a one-way street as is prophecy. Poetry is a praise act, and in preliterate times that “praising” would have meant speaking it out loud, so it makes sense that the Muse’s voice would become more story-like, more praising—as well as more “human sounding” or more “human feeling” as we responded to it by speaking out and creating our little worlds.
If this distinction seems like splitting hairs, I can assure you it is, but these are very important hairs. To anyone who had heard both the Muse’s voice and the daemon’s directive voice, the difference is monumental. It defines what it means to be human, and not only an early human. It is also true for us, except the directive voice has been replaced by our new consciousness with its powerful analytic and reasoning capabilities.
For those of you who have never heard these voices, it may help if I tell you my own experience with them. The Muse’s voice is indeed a psychic voice, but a very human, story-telling one: “Once upon a time…. ’—whereas the directive, prophetic voice associated with my daemon—though it has an unmistakable truth and authority — is relatively neutral in tone and straightforward in structure: “This is what you must do…” .
This explanation of the genesis of our “poetic voices” suggests that the unconscious mind changes in its commerce with the conscious mind. In other words, it grows. This is not a new thought. It is seen in Jung’s thinking about the Book of Job and the changing nature of God. Jung explains the Book of Job by saying that Job’s moral leap—his wisdom in accepting he has no control whatsoever over God's conduct—forces God to match that leap by becoming less 204 ALICE HICKEY
cruel, less unconscious, more human. Jung goes on to say that the Bible is, in effect, a record of God becoming more human, a process that he sees culminating in Jesus.
What Jung is really saying, of course, is that our unconscious became more conscious, more “human” over time. I think we can say somewhat the same thing about the advent of poetry: that it changed the nature of some of the voices heard by early man. And I'll add one more caveat to that: Jung and I are really talking about the same thing.
Let me ratchet up my thinking on this one more click. Not only do we want to speak back to the Muse when we hear her, but it is obvious, at least to poets, that the Muse wants to hear our responses. Poets often refer to this aspect of the Muse as the Perfect Listener, the one who understands everything. Indeed it would be almost impossible to create a poem without having a sense of this encouraging, understanding presence.
Anyone who has created an unpremeditated poem knows it is literally impossible to ignore the Muse’s whispers. Although our response may vary from a complete poem to just a few scribbled words, the reflexive urge to respond—to carry the message into the world—is automatic and out of our control.
But what is it that makes us this way, which is really another way of asking: what is it that makes the Muse, or the unconscious, so hungry, so desirous, of our responses? (Our awareness of that hunger, by the way, is part of what poets feel in addressing the “understanding” Perfect Listener. If it will help you grasp what is going on in the poet, think of the first little stories you parroted back to your mother. What you felt. The hunger your mother must have felt.) My daemon broke through the fog. It said that the unconscious wants to “hear” its
“message” come back “made glittery with time.” It wants to know what it feels like to be human, to be conscious, because only humans live in a world of time, which is another way of saying only humans live in a world of stories.
Thus, if we can think of poetry as the way the unconscious speaks to the conscious mind, we also have to think of it as the way the conscious mind speaks back to the unconscious, because that is the true nature of poetry. It is a transcendent event that brings the two halves of us together. It is the reason why poetry—of all our ways of witnessing— allows us to experience our total humanity, which is another way of saying it allows us to experience our divinity.
This may seem heretical to religious people, who see prayer as playing that role, but that is only because our conception of poetry and prayer have changed so utterly over time. What we now call prayer eventually grew out those very first
“praise” poems we uttered as early preliterate humans. Initially, poetry and prayer
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were one and the same
At some point in time during the late preliterate era, poetry began to separate itself from prayer—but only by a hairsbreadth. We only have to look at the work of the Greek preliterate poet Homer to see this. His two great oral epics are most assuredly praise acts, even if the surface stories take the form of adventures.
Just how close poetry was to prayer—even after the advent of literacy in Greece—can be seen in the historical record, which is filled with reports of the way Homer was honored and respected by the Greeks. Arguments were settled and guidance determined based on what Homer said. For the Greeks, those two great epics held the same authoritative position as the Bible did for the Hebrews.
Homer’s great narrative poems, according to Jaynes, are nothing less than celebrations of the change in consciousness the Greeks were undergoing at the time Homer chanted them—which was about a hundred years before the Greeks discovered writing. The Iliad celebrates the heroic, non-reflective nature of preliterate culture and poetry, whereas The Odyssey, via the character of the wily Odysseus, celebrates the new (self-reflective) consciousness that was taking form.
Here is a quote from an earlier book of mine about Jaynes’ insight: As Jaynes points out, Homer’s greatness lies partly, and perhaps mainly, in the fact that his poems reflect the immense change in consciousness that was stirring among the Greeks. In this respect, his songs have the quality of myth. They represent one of those transcendent leaps that sometimes occur in truly great art.
Homer’s epics are about the monumental transition in the nature of our consciousness. They are the Greek version of our leaving the Garden of Eden.
Thus, in Homer’s lifetime we go from a heroic, preliterate world that is consumed by honor (while at the same time beginning to give evidence of the emergence of deceit) to a world where the hero, by comparison, will stoop to almost anything to get his way. The name Odysseus roughly translates as “troublemaker.”
The job he does on the Cyclops is enough to give you some idea of how out of control he real y was. The Greeks loved him. There’s no doubt that of al the speakings young Homer heard, the themes and characters and elements of the Trojan War must have been like gold laid at his feet. Indeed, after he created The Iliad, it was only a matter of time before he reached back and pul ed out the wily, redheaded Odysseus again (only a bit player in The Iliad) and blew him up to the proportions required. When Homer finally set him loose on the world in The Odyssey it was unlike anything the Greeks had ever heard.
The Odyssey is a poem whose artistry transcended Homer’s time. The very depth and magnitude of the mirror he held up to the Greeks is almost beyond comprehension. To the Greeks, for hundreds of years afterward, the grotesque deceptions and heroic endurance of Odysseus were impossibly beautiful and impossibly true. The man not only slept standing up, he did it with his eyes open.
Odysseus is none other than self-conscious man stepping out of the eggshell and 206 ALICE HICKEY
displaying himself in all his individualistic glory. What is equally beautiful is that Homer had a sense of humor about the whole thing. And so did the Greeks.
It is only in literate times that we see poetry begin to move away from being a praise act to one reflecting the myriad concerns of the conscious mind, so that in time, poetry became completely distinct from prayer. At the same time, prayer was beginning to move away from poetry. The collective unconscious was beginning to give birth to our great Eastern and Western religions—but through the gateway of our new self-reflective minds. Formal, fixed texts were created for those religions as a means of permanently recording and clarifying the various psychic revelations that brought those great spiritual movements into being.
Those new texts also served another purpose: to make sure that prayer—the commerce between God and man—was directed along proscribed channels and not left to the whims of the unruly and unpredictable unconscious. Controlling the unconscious was a problem for religious systems right from the start.
Just how large a problem is evident throughout the Bible. One example can be seen in Moses’ journey to the Promised Land where, despite having been given the Commandments, his leadership was constantly threatened by eruptions of earlier, polytheistic idols. So it is obvious why prayer had to become more conscious. Prayer may have continued to imitate the form of poetry (we can see it even today in the spoken, antiphonal nature of the Catholic Mass), but that was all. Prayer became a conscious act, along consciously prescribed lines.
Similarly, poetry began to feel the pressure of our modern literate consciousness, which more and more sought to exert control over what had been essentially an unconscious process, and as poetry became more written, the more our modern consciousness was able—for better or worse—to exert that control, and glory in it.
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Chapter 42: Alice in Chains Redux
October 2005, Sarasota
I was mulling over how beaten ISLAUGGH had looked when she first appeared, and right then I heard a voice say, “Alice in Chains,” just as I had when Alice and I visited Jane. Jane must have also sensed those chains. It certainly helped explain why she had suddenly become so ornery. My guess is that when Jane opened the door she felt the depth of Alice’s sadness and realized that somehow ISLAUGGH’s burden had become Alice’s as well. I think it overwhelmed her.
She immediately understood that losing the Way of the Mother would be like dying.
As far as Jane was concerned, the Way of the Mother had never gone away.
Living without that guidance would be unthinkable for her. She would probably never admit it, but my best guess is she saw ISLAUGGH ’ s burden as something that was not her concern. To put it more bluntly, if the Way of the Mother had disappeared from the white world, that was their problem. I know that’s pretty strong stuff, and Jane would probably never admit to it, but then again she might.
You could never tell.
I think Jane saw what had happened in Africa to the Way of the Mother in a completely different light—as something like a temporary derailment caused by outside forces. The way of the white man may have brought about great suffering, but the women hadn’t given in. They’d merely pretended to change. The Way of the Mother continued to flourish, sometimes slightly disguised, sometimes right out in the open.
I also think that part of Jane’s competitive reaction to Alice that day was due to their differing perceptions of the psychic world. Jane shared somewhat the aborigines’ way of witnessing Creation. For the aborigines, the psychic and physical worlds are co-existent realities they slip between seamlessly. The aborigines are aware there is something beyond all knowing at work in their lives, and that it exists in that other world, but they also know that the two worlds are almost one and the same: echoes of each other. Like the aborigines, Jane didn’t really care if earth ruled heaven, or heaven ruled earth. She’d say to me, “Stop thinking so much. Wake up! It’s all happening at once.”
That’s how un-theoretical Jane was. She would never talk about the Female Spirit.
She knew what it meant, but she didn’t like it. It was too dry, too thinky . She would only speak about the Way of the Mother and by that she meant pretty much the same thing as Alice meant by Female Spirit—that it was an unknowable intelligence whose presence she could feel in the everyday events and ways of her life.
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But she’d never talk about it in Alice’s terms. As far as Jane was concerned, thinking was the enemy of feeling . It stopped feeling from blossoming to its fullest. Feeling didn’t need any help from thinking, thank you. Feeling had its own intelligence—and was far superior to thinking. It could do something thinking could never do: it could find the Way of the Mother, and that was all that mattered. Jane saw anything or anyone connected to thinking as the enemy. That was it. There was no compromising. No backing down. Not one inch.
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Chapter 43: Mr. Fine Hairs Gets on the Soap Box One More Time December 2005, Sarasota
When Alice first suggested I look at the myth as an elegy about the end of a way of knowing fueled by the Female Spirit , it filled the holes in my understanding of the myth like water running into a rice field. I began to see the myth as not only about early human consciousness, but also about an older way of knowing, about its creation and eventual decline, and how we, as a race, handled that decline: How we handled our own internal dying as the Female Spirit descended beneath the horizon. How we witnessed it. When I looked at it that way, I saw that Alice had been exactly correct: the myth was an elegy.
It also was the breakthrough that allowed me for the first time to really listen to the Witnesses as poets who knew. What these poets knew—what they were singing of—was this: we are the very heart of an incomprehensible mystery.
Mind you, I didn’t say “at the very heart;” I said “the very heart.” There’s all the difference in the world .
This is what we are missing today: that song. No matter how dark, how tragic its tone becomes at times, it is a song that always comforts us on the most profound human level.
Today, however, we have chosen a more logical song. We find it more convenient to think of ourselves as blobs of carbon that evolved into more complex blobs, which is why we are completely lost. It is a dismal song that only comforts the mind, not the heart, and the heart is what counts. Despite the spectacular modern art forms that surround us, even engulf us at times, not one of them has been able to take poetry’s place, because none of them can touch us the way poetry can.
They have merely occupied its space as we have become more and more lost. The fact of the matter is poetry can’t be replaced. That is why we are living severely diminished lives. Not materially, not logically, but emotionally diminished lives.
Turn on the television if you have any doubts.
In theory, there is no reason why some of our spectacular modern art forms couldn't transform themselves into a new form of poetry by ingesting its essence.
Videos and movies are the most logical candidates for spawning this new child of light. But it’s not going to happen unless our hunger for beauty and truth rises above the superficial level it occupies today. We have to begin to face how lost we are.
When I say poetry is missing from our lives I’m not talking about silly, clever poetry, or the poetry of our intellectual quarterlies—a poetry of barely audible whispers that seldom, if ever, works its way down to the roots of our lives. I’m 210 ALICE HICKEY
talking about the kind of poetry that once flooded and fed our preliterate cultures.
It was a largely unconscious poetry of such truth and beauty that it enriched and ordered our lives for millennia.
We haven’t seen that kind of poetry for thousands of years. Nor are we going to.
We can’t turn back the clock. But what we can do is encourage the birth of a cultural energy similar to the energy that drove those cultures. That is the first step. It starts with how we live our lives—the kind of energy with which we imbue it. Everything else will follow, including a new kind of poetry—one that is more unconscious, more of the heart. You can call that energy the Way of the Mother, or the Female Spirit, or the Mother Goddess, or whatever you want, but unless we begin to feed and value that intuitive, feeling, God-like side of us, it’s going to be a very long slide down to oblivion.
I know there are some poets, perhaps many, who will view what I’m saying as absolutely crazy, that our poetry is what it should be, and that a consciously managed poetry is what written poetry is all about and has been since it came into the world.
I don’t disagree. I am a passenger on the Ship of Poetry just as they are. I also know that, except for some very minor alterations, its course hasn’t changed since it left the docks 2,500 years ago. Nor will it. Nor can we get off—because the Ship of Poetry, like Western civilization itself, is in our genes.
Every once in a while, however, if we so desire, we can leave the bridge with its crumpled, scribbled charts and drift back to the darkened stern where the barely visible, numinous outlines of that earlier ship of poetry can be seen far off in the distance. However attractive that ship may seem, we can’t go back. That older Ship of Poetry is as bound to its culture as our own poetry is to ours.
What we can do, however, is go within ourselves, where the remnants of that earlier consciousness still exist. Those remnants not only make our modern written poetry possible, they are also vibrant enough to permit the creation of a poetry remarkably similar to the spontaneous, unpremeditated oral poetry of preliterate cultures. If we wish to experience it, all we have to do is surrender to those remnants and it will happen. It will be like getting a new body on top of your other body.
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Chapter 44: Alice Shows Me Some Poems
February 2006, Sarasota
Alice had a folder with her when we met.
“I have some poems I want to show you.”
“Really, how many?”
“Six.”
“Why me?”
“Because they’ve come to me over the past months. They’re different from my other poems—no flowers, if you know what I mean. I’m not sure why, but something told me I should show them to you.”
I opened the folder. There were six typed poems with no titles. I read the first one: I see the colors rising from your body
I see your body rising into light
I see the light falling on the water
I see the water falling from my eyes
I see my eyes turning into flowers
I see the flowers turning into gold
I see the gold flowing into rivers
I see the river flowing in your heart
I see your heart sitting in the shadows
I see the shadows sitting in your heart
Not bad, I thought to myself, especially for someone who’d led me to believe her poems were filled with flowers.
“Can I ask who the poem is about?”
“You.”
“It’s very flattering.”
“Sometimes.”
I turned to the second poem:
There is another one
another one
inside me
inside me
the voices inside me
the hatred inside me
the tunnels and spiders
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the doors and the bars
inside me
inside me
the wickedness
inside me
the voices inside me
listen
the voices inside me
are flowers
are rivers
they are churning
inside me
the hatred
the heartbeat
the hot blood
inside me
the light
and the fire
are inside me
inside me
the pity, the pity
oh pity
inside m