As If We Were Alive

If I’m going to move into a term, I like it to be deserted first. The 9-stria rafter of James Merrill’s Changing Light at Sandover (a ouija-based spirit/poetic epic), Charles Olson’s Projective verse given in bullish point-by-point, William Carlos Williams’s variable foot (so variable I don’t know what on earth it consists of), the angel-dictation of William Blake’s Jerusalem glossaries, W.B. Yeats’s daemon-watchwork Vision. Each lexicon is a haunted house; an old ballroom where you and I can still dance.

Contemporary poets mutter or blush around these. As well they could: such terms aren’t really lyric- or anti-lyric-leaning; they dwell outside the umbrella of the most apparently useful analytical terms of contemporary poetics, like performative utterance or post-avant practice.

Still, as a poet and reader, I like terms I can stumble on, tap against, then topple inside of. Which brings me to this week’s spooky word: eidolon.

I first heard eidolon from this English Ph.D. who crossed his legs above the knee, wore a scarf indoors and meant the word as half-glimpsed exemplar, or ideal: he was talking about Poe’s significance to opiated syphilitic 19th-century Frenchmen. Likewise Abraham Lincoln, my huge dictionary that night asserted, might be democracy’s eidolon.

But really, eidolon‘s a haunted-house word, a dwelling as weird as Blake’s Ulro and Beulah. The term comes from ancient Greek soothsaying: it means your phantom, or ghostly double. In classical Hellenic art, Patroclus’s avenged eidolon– half-animal, half-human– is often drawn floating over his own burial mound, as Achilles drags Hector’s corpse around the walls of Troy. In Hindu and Theosophic mysticism, your eidolon is called a kamarupa, “desire-form.” Your kamarupa, a ghost image bereft of both your ascendant higher self and your interred body, thins to nothing in the days after your death– unless a necromancer, or the appeals of the bereaved, draws it back to earth, where it becomes a truly godawful-sounding vampire.

How could a modern poet write to this Patroclus, or this kamarupa? Who knows? Sabrina Orah Mark’s new manuscript sounds crowded with them. Michael Palmer calls a gentler eidolon up in this gorgeous poem for his daughter. In another poem, “French For April Fools’,” speaking to an eidolon (or for one), Palmer writes:

Each of us will call it Egypt
because of the wind

Sarah tripped and fell and spelled nest
and the wind is to blame for this

The wind has gathered a sequence of things as pure facts
Are we to become three as in three less

Is that I or me in a hat
Is that he or she in a word

Is it still early
among such stones

Terms maybe make a small sport– a kid ignoring his present and playing in its box. But in a period of a-spiritual, voice-saturated poetry, I’m more and more curious about old scraps of an alternative poetic practice, proprioceptive/bodily or eidolized/mystical. What’s tomorrow’s deserted term? Post-avant? Who knows. Asking that is whispering after ghosts while still head-first in the clamshell packaging of the century. Just give it, as one does any term, time…