Man
became divine from the moment he separated himself from
the world and sorted it out into categories and concepts.
The utterance of words meant dominance over the objects
they disguised (3). The growing estrangement between
man and object sealed his divination and as in a circle,
the more man progressed the less he could stand up to
the very core of natural world and, mostly, of himself.
Word
is Maya. Illusion. The estrangement of the core reality
of things became man’s reality. And the word became
the universe.
In
the prologue to his gospel, St. John reports that in
the beginning it was the logos, the word; bringing to
surface the paradox in accepting the word as the very
object. There was no way out, man can not understand
what has not been named, the word is his reality. According
to John the Word became flesh, what surely is more understandable
than if it was said that the " - - - - - "
became flesh (4).
THE
IMP OF MADNESS: FROM WORD TO ESHU
Poe
is noticeable for being one of the first American writers
who took the human sub-consciousness as a field of prime
matter for his work. In many of his pieces, the quotation
on hallucinations and dreaming is done abundantly. Even
though the recursive use of sub-conscious matter has
been used in Poe’s writings as it was in painting
by the Spanish surrealism, a basic difference urges
to be stressed out concerning their relation.
Differently
from surrealism in which the blocks of the sub-consciousness
were directly portrayed on the canvass, Poe’s quotations,
if not in some exceptional excerpts, are conveyed through
his characters’ report. Besides that if we had
to take writing according to surrealism, Poe would be
considered odd man out in style as the writing practice
according to the surreal frame would be that accomplished
by automatic writing what has never been practiced by
Poe and reinforced by him in his The Philosophy of Composition.
This leads his readers to his concern on the human being
undergoing the process of core disclosure instead of
showing the so-called essence (sub-consciousness) manifestations
as surrealism intended to do (5).
Not
a few times Poe brought the question of reality alienation
into discussion. He inquires whether one can say madness
is the total deviation of senses or the sharpening of
them (6), what in certain sense puts all the basis of
rational conceptualization upside-down.
The
point is that the word while a transmitter of an object
is a tricky element or as the Brazilian poet Roberval
Pereyr portrayed in his Poema (7):
A
palavra círculo
e a
palavra bufa
e a
palavra bomba
e a
palavra cínica
a única
e a
fundamental
são
todas elas da mesma essência.
E
a palavra essência,
como
todas elas,
sofre
essencialmente
deste
mal: palavra.
Mas
são todas belas,
belas
e enganosas
-- como
a palavra rio
como
a palavra rosa.
E como
a real
For
ordinary men this element is the good and old understandable
and explainable concept that hides the full light of
essence he can not look into directly; for those like
Poe it is an indication of the truth. Word for these
is Eshu, the trickster and herald of the gods in the
West African pantheon.
Eshu
is the kind of spirit who deals with all the possible
senses of a situation and makes it work against man
whose scarce abilities can not handle the inner elasticity
of things (8). Eshu amalgamates the many very meanings
of an image into the ob(li)vious reality men can not
see for he never dresses the conceptual blindfolds men
do. One who reads his stories will see Eshu is not a
liar. His tricks are often based on the unseen sides
of a truth, truth itself is enough to deceive us ordinary
men.
A
mythical tale about Eshu says that once he started a
quarrel between two close friends whose farms were neighboring
by wearing a hat that was red on one side and black
on the other. He went to the limiting fence and called
the farmers attention due to his unique appearance,
minutes after the friends were joining a torrid argument
on the color of the stranger’s hat and his whereabouts.
As
we descend into Poe’s characters’ bizarre
journey we must be prepared. Eshu will be our inner
guide towards the vaults of our sub-consciousness. In
one of his hands, he has a lantern whose name is Logos,
from its main source light and darkness flow abundantly.
Beware of images, nothing is what it seems.
DOWN
TO THE PIT, THIS ENORMOUS ABYSS WE ARE MADE OF
"The
ways of God in Nature, as in Providence, are not as
our ways; nor are models that we frame any way commensurate
to the vastness, profundity, and unsearchableness of
His works, which have a depth in them greater than the
well of Democritus."
Joseph
Glanville
Abyss,
pit, Maelström. Scanning Poe’s characters’
core disclosure experiences, a peculiar characteristic
prevails: none of them can account the results of the
process, causing them not to feel a bit comfortable
about it. According to their descriptions, the whole
journey feels like descending to a sort of hell they
can not put into words. It is hard for them giving words
for their personal processes as they experience a flood
of insights at the same time.
In
Poe, it is only when man gets amalgamated with the abyss
he is within that a solution comes out into the open.
When man interacts with the pit, he interacts with himself
and vice-versa.
As
in a probation, men are put to the heat in order to
get the gross separated from the soul, so it comes the
first step in the process: individuation. As in the
Maelström, the storm and the sea is in charge of
making three indistinct fishermen siblings become three
separated people whose destinies can not be shared.
Or, as in the Pit and the Pendulum whose character gets
into a more direct conflict: He is originally alone,
the heat in this case is not separating person from
person but fiber from fiber in the same person.
The
second step is what we could name desperation. Man finds
himself alone, his referentials fade before the emptiness
of his soul. He can not believe his role for there is
nobody to interact with him and perpetuate his mask.
Death is the only certainty and that is not enough to
fill his missing identity in this odd situation. Man
as a concept can only survive until the moment the concept
is held by another man.
As
a last attempt to recover his identity and life man
dares looking around and the third revolution happens:
amalgamation (9). In this stage, man is invited to feel
the environment he is in. The pit lends its eyes to
man. Invitation accepted, soon will man possess its
heart, its limbs and the borders between his soul and
the environment’s will grow so thin to the extent
his essence will mingle with that of the pit. The trap
can be lethal but it is friendly for those who interact
with it. If man grasps its silent messages he will be
invited to penetrate into the very abyss of his own
being and the final moment will take place.
Enlightenment
strikes man’s mind, he is not separated from the
world again. In this state, this momentary Nirvana,
the human being can feel the environment as part of
himself and the estrangement that made him an invader
body in the problematic setting is suspended. Finally
he can understand the reasons behind nature and facts,
nothing is really out of control and his soul is filled
up again (10).
Anyway
, this process is not achieved by man as a natural movement
of his soul. Man is always reluctant to go through any
process whose effects can not be previously glimpsed
and whose end can be total annihilation. As we can see
in both stories, the fishermen and the prisoner were
carried by the winds of external factors out of their
control.
Poe’s
continuum sounds like a retelling of the history of
fall and evolution of humankind and its latent potential
-- for "also He has set the world in their heart"
(11)-- in getting to the core of things despite man’s
physical limitations and weak mental endurance to even
a minimal part of the Logos.
So
it is Poe’s plot arranged: At first the dangers
and the perils of the journey can not be foretold --
although man’s intuition warns him something is
at hand -- then, as man finds the personal answer for
his being, a solution comes out and he escapes. Be it
in The Pit and the Pendulum or in A Descent into the
Maelström just after man got in touch with his
inner being and consequently with the telepathy of the
environment around him he can work out an escape.
But
where is our mighty fortress when, after all the process
undergone, we come back to ordinary senses and discover
the world is not the same as we used to know and we
are not as we used to be? Everything is in its usual
place but its images seem to be so unbalancedly magnified
we hardly bear their inner meanings. That is the whole
foundation of Poe’s horror: We can not escape from
the abyss, the pit, the Maelström once we interacted
with them. Our eyes have tasted the blissful results
of a bizarre experience with the essence. Our ordinary
fibers grew so loosened that we can not perceive the
conceptual wor(l)d we live as any other than a building
falling into pieces. Here we are, the first crumbs of
this forged reality that now dims.
KILLING
A WORD TO MAKE IT TELL THE TRUTH
On
October 7, 1849, 5 a.m., the man whose misleading life
exemplified in his bones and flesh the quest for the
core reality through the dissolution of its external
boundaries expired. Found in miserable conditions, wearing
clothes that were not his own, Edgar Allan Poe resisted
among hallucinations for 4 days and passed away at last.
Flesh became logos united to the Logos again.
"God
help my poor soul!" so he said and still one might
say it is just parole, parole, parole if one had not
taken into account that these words summarize the very
goal of all his life: the soul. From whom the core of
things was the reality, one could not expect other last
word than soul.
Poor
souls of words whose robes have been changed and amid
hallucinations beg for redemption from the material
body of concepts they have gotten entrapped. Spectral
spirits salute them as they come back to the realm of
imagery and here, once more, we fall back to parole,
parole, parole in the whole description of it. Poor
soul of ours who conceptualize things that can not be
understood yet.
1.
As we are going to deal with concept, word and object,
it is, notwithstanding, important to discuss the meaning
of such pivotal words in this article. Word can be understood
as the label (name) of an object (feelings, concrete
and/or abstract things, processes, etc.) Concept refers
to the meaning of the label and description of the object
(what it is for, what it is like, how, etc).
2.
The Greeks tried to make up for this limitation giving
three words for the feeling: 1) agape - for divine love;
2) eros - for sexual love; and 3) phileo - for parental
love. Anyhow, can we properly label apart the agape
of an ardent believer from the one of an occasional
churchgoer? Or, can we properly express a feeling to
someone when it is a mixture of all three?
3.
This can be exemplified by some primitive peoples’
moral codes in which the usage of sacred names in vain
would be considered as a serious offense. Take into
consideration the Hebrew anagram YHWH which pronunciation
has been lost for centuries due to respectful avoidance;
anyhow, the now human god could not accept to be higher
than his creator (God as a concept can not stand up
to conceptual rationalization whereas God as a direct,
objective core experience is unmovable).
4.
Even though the human ingenuity for conceptualizing
things fails in putting into "palpable" words
the idea of the Logos being God and the Logos being,
at the same time, another distinct personality.
5.
What in a certain sense seems to be relatively incongruous
to reality as the human sub-consciousness is, for its
own basic nature, frameless and undepictable.
6.
As discussed in Eleonora:
...Men
have called me mad; the question is not yet settled,
whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence
–whether much that is glorious – whether all
that is profound – does not spring from disease
of thought – from moods of mind exalted at the
expense of the general intellect. They who dream by
day are cognizant of many things which escape those
who dream only by night. In their grey visions they
obtain glimpses of eternity, and thrill, in awaking,
to find that they have been upon the verge of the great
secret. In snatches, they learn something of the wisdom
which is of good, and more of the mere knowledge which
is of evil. They penetrate, however rudderless or compassless,
into the vast ocean of the "light ineffable"...
7.
Poem
The
word circle
And
the word pump
And
the word bomb
And the word cynical.
The
unique
And
the fundamental
All
of them made of the same essence.
And
the word essence,
As all
of them,
Essentially
suffering
From
this evil: word.
All
of them are beautiful
Beautiful
and deceiving
as the
word river
as the
word rose.
And
the real.
Ocidentais,
Feira de Santana: Edições Cordel, 1987.
8.
Roy Willis in his World Mythology reports an Yoruba
song about Eshu that finely portrays his personality
and its similarity with the nature of words:
"
Eshu slept in the house, but the house was too small
for him.
Eshu
slept on the veranda, but the veranda was too small
for him.
Eshu
slept in a nut – at last he could stretch himself.
Eshu
walked through a groundnut farm – the tuft of his
hair was just visible.
If it
had not been for his huge size, he would not have been
seen at all.
Having
thrown a stone yesterday, he kills a bird today.
Lying
down, his head hits the roof.
Standing
up, he can not see into the cooking pot.
Eshu
turns right into wrong, wrong into right."
9.
Poe also makes use of the amalgamation of concepts using
a sole referential image as we can see in the following
excerpts from The Pit and the Pendulum:
1).
Amalgamation of sounds and their correspondent meanings:
"After
that, the sound of the inquisitorial voices seemed merged
in one dreamy indeterminate hum. It conveyed the idea
of revolution – perhaps from its association in
fancy with the burr of a mill-wheel."
2).
Amalgamation of the concept of good and evil in the
image of the candles:
"And
my vision fell upon the seven tall candles upon the
table. At first they wore the aspect of charity, and
seemed white slender angels who would save me; but then,
all at once, there came a most deadly nausea over my
spirit..., while the angels forms became meaningless
spectres, with heads of flame, and I saw that from them
there would be no help."
Being
it not the first time Poe refers to the concept of good
and evil in a mingled, non-manicheanistic – and
for us, western Christians, unusual – way. As we
can see in Annabel Lee:
"...But
we loved with a love that was more than love –
I and
my Annabel Lee –
With
a love that winged seraphs of heaven
Coveted
her and me...
The
angels, not a half so happy in heaven,
Went
envying her and me –
But
our love it was stronger by far than the love...
And
neither the angels in heaven above,
Nor
the demons down under the sea,
Can
ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the
beautiful Annabel Lee.
10.
In its structure, The Pit and the Pendulum differs from
A Descent into the Maelström when it comes to the
periodicity of the steps. The man in the pit goes through
desperation to small enlightenments in the course of
the whole narrative and before being saved by the French
general, his final state, as portrayed by Poe, is desperation
and then return to the ordinary reality.
11.
Ecclesiastes III:11 (KJV).
Bibliography:
Paz,
Octávio. O arco e a Lira. Editora Nova
Fronteira, São Paulo, SP, 1982.
Stern,
Philip Van Doren. The Portable Poe. The Viking
Press, New York, 1973.
Luis
de la Orden Morais is natural of Salvador, Bahia, Brasil
and grew up in the historical town of Cachoeira, worldwidely
known as the capital of Candomblé. He's been
living in the UK for more than 4 years now.
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