Czeslaw Milosz'
Vision from San Francisco Bay --- a collection of essays
first published in Polish in 1969, almost a decade after he
arrived at Berkeley --- has been the most neglected of his works
translated since he receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in
1980. At first glance this neglect is surprising, for this book
will be for most American readers the best introduction to
Milosz' work as a whole. Here, in a series of short, clear
essays, Milosz presents more plainly than anywhere else his view
of the human condition. But it is precisely this view of the
human condition that explains the neglect Milosz' vision of our
predicament is enough to make any comfortable reader wince.
To be sure,
Visions from San Francisco Bay was widely reviewed. And all
the reviews I read were positive, respectful, sometimes
enthusiastic, always full of good cheer. It was the good cheer
that got to me. The review in the San Francisco Chronicle
liked the book because in it one could learn the Great Man's
response to highways, underground newspapers, sidewalk
preachers, supermarkets. Reading that review was like watching
Milosz himself be trimmed and put under cellophane for
supermarket display, somewhere between the capers and fresh
salmon.
The best of the
reviews --- and a careful, intelligent review it was --- bore
the title "The Devil and Mr. Milosz." But here was that good
cheer again, the demonic voices evoked by Milosz rechanneled to
sound amusing, as if from George Bernard Shaw or The
Screwtape Letters. Milosz was being neglected with
attention.
Visions from San
Francisco Bay itself offers a description and explanation of
this strange process, with respect not to Milosz himself but
rather to the great California poet Robinson Jeffers. Milosz
believes that Jeffers failed to be taken seriously by his
contemporaries because he tried to break through "the invisible
web of censorship." "One must recall that he was neglected by
people who placed great value on meat, alcohol, comfortable
houses, luxurious cars, and tolerated words as if they were
harmless hobbies."
Make Milosz' work
a mere exercise in autobiographical expression; make it an
intriguing commentary on the vagaries of 20th-century history;
make it a convenient opportunity to express ringing support for
Solidarity; or to praise the remarkable range in modern poetry;
but when Milosz says that the demonic is at the core of
contemporary life, when he asserts that the highest function of
disclosure is exorcism, or that poets should pray that "good
spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instruments" ---
well, then he must be speaking figuratively. It would be
indecorous to take him at his word. Such a way of talking must
be for so sophisticated, so sensitive, so accomplished a man
only a harmless hobby.
Visions from
San Francisco Bay could have been the title of one of those
lovely coffee books, produced by the Sierra Club, perhaps filled
with Ansel Adams-style photographs of early paradise. Milosz, in
fact, does have much praise for the western American landscape.
Yet he praises it while at the same time confessing that he
finds "something oppressive in the virginity of this country."
Milosz praises beautiful landscapes for making him experience
oppression.
The hostile
beauty of the earth is central to Visions from San Francisco
Bay. In Death Valley, or the Sierra, or in a redwood forest
where eagles circle above chasms of mist, Milosz sees an alien,
inhuman place, a place in itself neither good nor bad, however
tempted we might be to find comfort in its apparent beauty.
The European
landscape can easily be imagined as humane, as but a stage for
human strivings, shaped by human values. The American West does
not permit such comforting delusions. "Both here on the West
Coast, and elsewhere in America, one is faced with something
that is impossible to define by allusions to the 'humanistically
formed imagination,' something incomprehensible in regard both
to the forms taken in by the eye and to the connection those
forms have to the lives of human beings."
If we wince at
being told that, Milosz assures us he winces as well.
Nonetheless, he insists that in this discomfort we are coming
close to the heart of the European immigrant experience so often
romanticized. In leaving their homeland, the immigrants had, if
unwillingly, broken through the cocoon of constantly renewed
interdependencies that had shielded them from the world in
itself. In America they could for the first time see it for what
it was, in and of itself, an alien and indifferent thing. They
could taste "the elixir of pure alienation" and in their
loneliness understand the human condition.
Or this at least
seems to have been Milosz' own experience. "Now I seel shelter
in these pages, but my humanistic zeal has been weakened by the
mountains and the ocean, by those moments when I have upon the
boundless immensities with a feeling akin to nausea, the wind
ravaging my little homestead of hope and intentions."
But Milosz
himself, like any human being, and unlike the impersonal chaos
called nature, cannot and will not dispense with valuation. an
indifferent universe, indifferent in itself, is to him an evil
universe. He finds precedence for this dark conclusion in the
old Manichean heresy which taught the little good in this world
was trapped there as if in exile, yearning for escape. And this
conclusion Milosz finds empirically confirmed not just in the
horrors of modern history but in the teachings of modern
evolutionary biology.
"Obviously the
struggle with Evil in the Universe is an old one . . . .
Yet, never was the position of those who defend the idea of a
hidden harmony more difficult, never was Manichean ferocity more
aggressive than when the nineteenth century observed that the
suffering of living matter is the mainspring of its Movement and
that the individual creature is sacrificed in the name of a
splendid and enormous transformation without goal of purpose."
Some species
rise, others fall, as do human families, and nations, and whole
civilizations. There may well be an internal logic to these
transformations, a logic which when viewed from sufficient
distance has its own elegance, harmony, grace. And our reason
tempts us to be enthralled by this superhuman splendor; but when
so enthralled we find difficult to remember, except perhaps as
an element of an abstract calculus, the millions of individuals,
the millions upon millions, who unwillingly paid for this
splendor in pain and blood.
The call of
nature --- survival of the fittest --- and the call of history
--- the strong do what they will, the weak what they must ---
are a single song, a siren song that would have us lose our
sense of "dread and repugnance for the impersonal cruelty built
into the structure of the universe." And this song governs our
world.
Hell is the
subjection of the human, of the personal to the impersonal, of
the living to the dead, of the concrete to the abstract. In Hell
the elemental wonder at mere existence is lost; everything
becomes a case, an instance, a symptom. And so we must not
mistake philosophy and science for allies in our struggle
against the inhuman. There by their very nature attempt to
reduce the world to a bloodless ballet of categories.
For him
philosophical systems are only worth studying "in order to
dismiss them." And science? "Had I a liking for the sciences,
perhaps only a sociology which examines the self-confident
social sciences would satisfy me. Fortunately, I do not, for I
would then have used the grab of a scientific shaman to conceal
my own preferences and biases."
And what of the
great achievements of technology, which at least in its benign
applications has alleviated human sufferings and otherwise made
human beings less dependent upon the vicissitudes of impersonal
nature? About even these achievements Milosz has deep doubts. He
suggest that these could well be the subtlest ploy of the
demonic. "The greatest trick of this continent's demons, their
leisurely vengeance, consists in surrendering nature,
recognizing that it could not be defended; but in place of
nature there arose a civilization which to its members appears
to be Nature itself, endowed with nearly all the features of
that other nature."
Technology itself
now dwarfs the individual into inconsequence, and far more
effectively because now he is being dwarfed by what appear to be
the products of his own collectivity. And we feel reduced to
"impotence, evasion, a solitude with phonograph music and a fire
in the fireplace." Unless, that is, we are willing to assert
what seems absurd, both to others and to ourselves.
We must assert
the primacy of the living, the concrete, the personal, however
vulnerable, ephemeral, of inconsequential seem to our mind's
eye. Milosz prefers to see the continent in this way, as a
concrete thing. And he claims to offer this vision only as his
personal preference. He does not hope to prove his preferences,
because proof always involve abstractions, an the devil will
always win at his own game. But Milosz can continue to assert
unyieldingly, against the devil and the devil's syllogisms, his
own preference. Even at the risk of embarrassing the reader and
himself. Even by his persistent use of the outmoded language of
demonology.
If the world
sacrifices the individual with apparent indifference, if reality
seems governed by abstract laws, who is responsible for
this travesty? There must be persons behind this -- concrete,
living persons who are devoted to deluding us. And these persons
have traditionally been called evil spirits.
Milosz will
always strive to speak in the language of the concrete, the
personal. He speaks the language of poetry, the language of the
essay. "The only thing we can do is communicate with one
another." To communicate our concrete presence, our uniqueness,
to love one another. And thereby to help one another resist the
seductive voices of the demonic. "Whenever I take up my pen
which itself pretends to knowledge, since language is composed
of affirmations and negations, I treat that act only as the
exorcism of the evil spirits of the present."
Left to itself,
language will pretend to knowledge, reduce the concrete to
propositions. And hence it must be handled with a certain sense
of danger. Language is a contradiction, at once sound and idea
--- as are human beings, at once person and body. And so Milosz
will begin his poem, "As Poetica?": "I have always aspired to a
more spacious form/ that would be free from the claims of poetry
or pros/ and would let us understand each other without exposing
the author or reader to sublime agonies." Such a communication
of individuality, or uniqueness, is not possible except through
the meditation of a language full of claims. The communication
can be achieved only by turning this language against itself, by
self-contradiction, by the sublime agony of attempting to
transcend language itself. There is no art of poetry except on
that ends in a question mark. And the only poem Milosz has
written in praise of reason is called "An Incantation."
So much of
culture, so much of the invisible web of censorship, is devoted
to masking "man's fundamental duality." To mask the duality and
thereby free people from the necessity of choice. Milosz' work
is devoted to unmaking that duality, to making his readers admit
the contradictory nature of their own experience. For Milosz, no
less than for Simone Weil, "Contradiction is the instrument of
transcendence."
Contradiction
forces us to choose, assert our preferences, to make an
"arbitrary choice, not subject to verification." We must
recognize that we are living within the contradiction; it is not
a "background against which to play out our tragicomedies." Our
personalism, our humanism, if such we choose, will scarcely be
comforting. It will be a "piety without a home," a piety that
allows "fortunately no safe superiority." (Superiority would
come only if we knew we were right.) Perhaps this half-ironic
piety is best summarized in the title of the essay: "An Essay in
Which the Author Confesses That He is on the Side of Man, for
lack of Anything Better."
Actually he also
confesses he is on the side of God. Who presumably is a bit
better. But Milosz' God is not the God of philosophers or
theologians. "I desire a God who would love me and help me, who
would save me from the nothingness of death, to whom I could
each day render homage and gratitude. God should have a beard
and stroll in heavenly pastures." Only a thoroughly
anthropomorphic religion can "resist the exact sciences which
annihilate the individual."
Now I must
confess. In presenting the summary of Visions which you
have just read I have violated the spirit of the book, and
perhaps even served the demons. Better to neglect the work of
Milosz altogether than to present it as an easily communicable
system of ideas.
To say that the
choice for Milosz is a choice between abstract and the concrete,
between logic and contradiction, is to state the choice wrongly,
for it is to state it in abstract terms. The choice for Milosz
is never between ideas, world views, philosophies; it is rather
always between persons. At the cosmic level Milosz may think the
choice is between a bearded God and sophisticated demon. But in
the small world of Vision from San Francisco Bay it is a
choice between Milosz himself and the great, neglected Robinson
Jeffers.
Jeffers was in
his way as unyielding as Milosz. He saw essentially the same
contradictions as Milosz, the same dualities at the heart of
human experience --- and saw, too, the absolute necessity of
choice. Jeffers just chose contrarily, and celebrated the
impersonal. Jeffers' God was pure motion. and he seemed to
consider consciousness itself an unforgivable flaw.
Jeffers wrote in
the language of poetry, a language which when understood forces
dialogue. And so Milosz, as he wandered Monterey and wondered at
this fellow poet's life, found himself forced into dialogue. The
result was "To Robinson Jeffers, " the only poem in Visions
from San Francisco Bay and its centerpiece.
Milosz addresses
the alien Jeffers, the dread but somehow still present Jeffers:
"If you have not read the Slavic poets,/ so much the better.
There is nothing there for a Scotch-Irish wanderer to seek." And
he describes the forbidding world Jeffers praises: "Prayers are
not heard . . . Basalt and granite./ Above them a bird of prey.
The only beauty." And having conjured up such an overwhelming
presence, he doubts: "What have I to do with you?" and even
seems to despair: "Oh, consolations of mortals, creeds futile!"
But he finally finds within himself the power, although
qualified, although momentary, to contradict:
And yet you
do not know what I know.
The earth teaches
more than does the nakedness of
elements. No one with
impunity
gives himself the eyes of a god . . . .
Better to carve suns and moons on
the joints of crosses
as was done in my district. To birches
and firs
give feminine names. To implore
protection
against the mute and treacherous might
than to proclaim as you did, an inhuman
thing.
__________
Quinn,
Arthur. "Books: Visions from San Francisco Bay, by
Czeslaw Milosz."
California Monthly. 03, No. 6 (June-July 1983),
pp. 12-13.