ARCHAIC CANON

 

by

 

Robert Milo Baldwin

 

 

Consider Gustaf Sobin s luminous musings on the pattern of waves on Provencal pottery from the 6th Century B.C. The waves move not regular but irregular and more in erratic intervals. Dismissed by some as primitive, they appear to Sobin as fluid architectonics of each given instance. They are not, however, formless. Emile Benveniste says they have form as shaped by the mobile, the moving, the liquid. According to Sobin, the potter was given free play not to his own whims and fancies but to the vibratory flow of yet unregulated energies.

The parallel lines he traced appear to rush, undulate, out of some immediate if invisible point of origin. They rise, plummet, exult . . . about the flanks of some terra-cotta vase like a freshly released creature. If anything, they seem alive.

 

If such art found root in philosophy a vision of existence, as Sobin says the rootstock came from Ionian Greeks who founded a colony in Massalia (now Marseilles). Sobin compares the irregular waves on pottery to the philosophy of Heraclitus by which the universe is considered to be in continuous motion and change, something a Buddhist might call the permanency of impermanence. Heraclitus further believed such continuous motion and change arose from a harmony of opposing forces which, like a lyre, vibrate to a series of tensions and releases.

So, too, does poetry form its own natural music through subtle sound and meaning of words, the inherent conflict of tension that draws us in, the necessary release that lets us go but holds on at the same time. When the wave of poetry moves as it will, it arises from an archaic, more primitive canon from an irrepressible point of origin.

When speaking of the ancient pottery of Provencal, Sobin suggests these supple waves are the graphic rendition of the current of life itself. He speculates that at Saint Blaise after winter rains, a fragment of a potsherd with the design of an irregular wave might inch its way to the surface; that we possibly might hold it like a key, like some very particular kind of key to some particular kind of door. Sadly, he contends the door has long since vanished.

This is not necessarily a new view. Some time ago, G.B.H. Wightman noted, common to most cultures, that early poets held a sharpness of observation we may lack. As he says:

Where people depend on sight, hearing and grip for survival it is natural that their faculties are likely to be more alert than poets whose days are spent in writing advertising copy or teaching in universities.

 

It is the poet s work to hone a fine and deep sense of observation and understanding; to find the natural music of images and words and ideas; to obtain, as Rexroth said of Sappho and Tu Fu, a sensibility acute past belief. This, of course, may be as difficult to find as one of those fragments of potsherds, penetrating from a place near roots in the soil to sunlight in spring. It is, as well, a lifetime s work, with no right of success. But to find the key and open the door that is the thing.

 

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