The Backward Glance (REVISED)

Introduction


This essay spirals down and up the story of a backward glance.

St. Columba’s encounter with the shade of St. Oran in the footers of his yet-standing abbey at Iona has been a fructive one for me: its pale lucency, like a moon hauled up from millennial waters, has provided an eerie wattage to my daily meditations, compassing much of my studies and poems over the years. As origins go it’s a weird tale, blent of old and new dominions, half composed of the face of St. Columba staring back, oh just for one fateful moment, back into depths of his pagan past, the other half composed of the grinning skull of Oran, risen from that dark, staring back. When I imagine that moment, something important yet never fully knowable burns in my mind, like full moonlight on a standing stone.

Columba’s bright white mission—saving souls, building monestaries, copying books—seems archetypal of every constructive, articulate, deepening, questing life. Yet none of it could have happened without that backward glance.

It is a perplex glance. There is something explicit in it, desperate to hold onto the physical reality of that which is being resolutely spaded over. It is also foolhardy and stubborn glance, defiant of commons sense and divine law, and owes allegiance to greater origins than any contemporary canon can vaunt or vault. Too lunar and sea-washed to truly build upon, it has foundations which reach down to doom.

But most of all, it is a pregnant glance. For St. Columba, it occurs at the moment he is between exile from one land and founding a new life’s work in another. There can be no forward moment until that backward glance has completed its descending, original work—a work which forms an interior bridge to the future.


I.

As an early leading light of the Celtic Church, St. Columba’s life was a complex one, vital in the raw seam between old and new dominions. He was exiled from Ireland in 563 AD over the copying of a psalter in secret. When the owner demanded it back (books were private property, unlike the songs of bards) Columba assembled his warriors and pitched into battle, shouting “As Christ is my Druid!” Columba’s force was divinely and lopsidedly victorious in battle, but it resulted in ostracism by his native country. He was summarily exiled from royal ambition and excommunicated by his church. His penance was to be dispatched upon the ocean desert in a boat with twelve of his followers. The additional ban upon Columba was heavy: He was not look to back on his homeland again, and he was to save as many souls as had died in his bloody battle for possession of a book. He and his crew rowed north and east until they came to a shore from which they could not see the faintest outline of Ireland. That place was Iona, a small island off the southwestern shores of Scotland. Religious rites had been practiced that sacred isle for ages, far back beyond all of Christendom’s precedents.

Out of sight of his homeland, exiled from throne and bishopic, Columba enacts the ritual drama of entitlement to Iona’s energies, tapping a legacy which was old in equal measure to the hot futurity that would fly out from the saint’s newly-minted Christian ambition. The two halves, oldest and newest, seem paradoxically joined, but the infernal logic proved fructive.

The story of what ensued is well-known to this community. At first, the abbey construction fared badly; each day’s work is leveled overnight by a malignancy of wind. The watch for the night is found dead amid the fallen timbers. The entire work of beginning is at a standstill. Columba’s work is dead in the water, so to speak, until he comes terms with the latent energies of the land. His dilemma is very much that of Christianity in the British Isles of that time, barely a generation into literacy and the spread of monestaries which perpetuated the new faith and its glosses. The old canon seemed corrupt, too blood-soaked, weedy with bards, its venerations too week, its deities too distant; but the new canon, with its imported Latin and Mediterranean iconography, desperately needed to be grounded into local articulation.

Thus Columba himself vigils on a tempest-blasted night on the eve of the Irish Church, staring deep into the maw of origin. From that first backward glance an apparition appears, a half-woman, half fish risen from the brutal mash of the midnight gale and sea. The creature—in modern lingo we might imagine her mythologically as a mermaid or selkie, or psychologically as a mediatrix or anima-figure—declares that the sea god Manannan had been disturbed by the cutting of the sward and that a man must be sacrificed by burying him standing up in a hole twice as tall as he dug in the footers. This was old pagan practice; bones have been found in digs of many old structures throughout Europe and the British Isles. Merlin himself supposed to be buried in the footers of Vortigern’s tower so that it could stand.

Columba, with a strange and seemingly heretic intuition, decides to heed the apparition, and Oran either volunteers or is selected via lot for the sacrifice. On October 28, three nights before Halloween, the eve of the Celtic New Year, Oran climbs into a muddy cold hole dug in the center of the abbey’s foundations, and submits to his internment by his brothers.

Columba’s second backward glance comes on Halloween night—naturally!—when he wishes to look upon the face of his friend Oran again. He is also eager for news of what his friend has discovered in his night sea voyage to the Otherworld. He bids his fellow monks dig down and uncover Oran. But once the face is revealed, Oran’s eyes pop open and his mouth looses a string of chilling words: “There is no wonder in death, and hell is not as it is reported. In fact, the way you think it is is not the way it is at all.” Surely this is pure pagan antipathy to the new faith, akin to the dialogue Columba would later have with the seal-man Black Angus MacOdrum on the shores of the sea, who satirized the cleric in exquisite Gaelic. The risk of looking back is eloquently phrased at this moment of encounter.

Too much information! seems to be Columba’s response, who promptly had the babbling skull covered back over with dirt, exclaiming, “Mud, mud back over Oran’s mouth, lest he blab no more!” The survival of this story into the present—Hebridean parents still scold their children with Columba’s words when they have spoken out of turn—bespeaks something deeply psychological about Columba’s response. Columba needed his backward glance, but what to keep and what to quell of what came into view?

What Columba does next in the story provides a deeply satisfying answer, for he commits his friend back to the ground and death yet at the same time declares him patron of island’s graveyard, saying “no man may access the angels of Iona but through Oran.” Columba accesses and harnesses the energies of both pagan and Christian Otherworlds by sacrificing Oran to both. And it proved a mighty pronouncement, because Releig Odhrain became a immensely revered graveyard, housing the bones of many Scottish, Irish and Norwegian kings.

Then comes the the of Columba’s transformed life and mission, recorded in the Life of Columba by Adamanan, third abbot of Iona (reputedly one of the finest examples of biography since Augustine’s Confessions; in his retelling, Adamnan makes the myth out of the man). And the story is pure miracle, mystery and magnificence. He becomes one of the pillars of the emerging Celtic church, founding many monestaries, sending scores of missionaries into Pictish Scotland and championing the copying of texts with such unrivalled artistry that one astonished reader of the Book of Kells (which Columba is reputed to have labored on) would deem it “the work of an angel.”

Columba’s story has one more backward glance, and is perhaps the strangest one, since it is rigidly framed around the impossibility of that glance. Columba returned only once to Ireland, in blindfold and facing the other way—owing to the ban which was the condition of his exile—to settle a dispute over the elimination of the poetic class, which was at the time threatening to bankrupt the land with demands for tribute. Columba made an impassioned speech for the poets at the Council of Drumceatt. He said to the assembled nobles, “Humans of dust, you are nothing but a story. How you get your living or your clothing is your story. I urge you to keep the bards among you, for it is better to buy the enduring story than a fleeting one.” It was a winning (and essential) appeal, and as a result the bardic class was preserved though downsized, and mandated to become more open to all through the building of schools. The bards were also instructed to oversee the writing down of the old stories, allowing for one of the most remarkable survivals of an oral literature into a written one.
So the backward glance here is a spiritualized one, blindfolded, so to speak, to prevent action on the physical plane, forcing it to another gradient, that of a mental backward glance which embraced of a dying culture by burying it in the texts of the next culture.

The tropes and rigors of the past must be outlived. Fathers must be buried and their ghostly reminders exiled to ramparts and lonely islands. Yet the miracle of Irish Christianity—in the early centuries, at least—was that it built its monestaries in a weird partnership with its past that celebrated the story even when it contradicted new articulations. Maybe it seems aberrational because so much history has simply piled up ruination upon ruination. Much of our human nature is similarly fraught; laziness and fear conspire to wall off the backward glance, let sleeping bones lie, opting instead to stay safe and warm within the security of the known.

Surely Columba would not have needed the backward glance had he been allowed to enter the royal fray back in Ireland (he was in succession to the Ui Neill throne), or even had he remained at Derry, where he founded his first monestary. It took the catastrophes of his life—going into battle with his profane and sacred fathers over the copying of a text, and the subsequent exile and excommunication—for Columba to turn back upon far older sources for his inspiration, his fire, his saintly libido. Look back he did though, long and hard, and from that backward glance he hauled up a rich and fecund futurity.




II.


I’ve been encountering that backward glance a lot recently in my reading, as if I were being shouted at by disparate skulls of an lost choir. Most of those encounters have been in literature, mythically poetic. They lead me to believe that in the quintessence of the backward glance, the literal alchemizes into the literary. Fiona Macleod once called Oran “the adventure of the dreaming mind,” and Columba’s backward glance is seeped in Oran. Indeed, his story of how he came to meet up with Oran has literary origins, since he got into his pickle over his devotion to the poetry of the Psalms. One etymological root of Oran is o-ran or “song,” so literally Columba buries an old song that it vitiate its next singer. Our crises and epiphanies are rounded by a strange sweet music, whether it wears the formal feathered singing robe of the tuion or is being nervously read by some teenager in the Glen of the Temple.

***

Orpheus, ur-poet, was a renowned singer, but his story had to go through hell and back before its found its greatest registers. Robbed of his wife Eurydice on their wedding day—she steps on a snake in field in which they were to be joined—he descends to hell to retrieve her, wooing all the deities down under with his song, and manages to win her release on the condition that she follow him out and that he must not look back until they have cleared the final threshold of Hades. Ovid writes in his Metamorphoses,

They climbed a hill through clouds, pitch-dark and gloomy,
And as they neared the surface of the Earth,
The poet, fearful that she’d lost her way,
Glanced backward with a look that spoke his love—
Then saw her gliding into deeper darkness,
As he reached out to hold her, she was gone;
He had embraced a world of emptiness.
This was her second death—and yet she could not blame him
(Was not his greatest fault great love for her?)
She answered him with one last faint “Good-bye,”
An echo of her voice from deep Avernus.
(transl. Horace Gregory)

For Orpheus, the backward glance is his fatal error, yet it is also a bridge to his own transformation. The loss of Eurydice seems to me a deeply sexual one, for desire’s consummation is the shore we can never get back to once its gone. Like Orpheus, we all remember our loves lost, and revel in the those now incorporeal passions with a dogged backward glance.

Devastated by the immensity of his loss—Eurydice now twice dead, twice lost—Orpheus grieves inconsolably by the waters of Hell, the magic of his love-song spent, useless to him. But then the story abruptly changes: he animates, turns back to the living world and climbs up Mount Haemus where he establishes a monestary of sorts, renouncing the love of women and singing paeans to Apollo. The transformation of Orpheus has to do with an alchemy in his song; Orpheus thought he was bringing real gold back from the dead, but his backward glance mediated Eurydice—an ancient moon-goddess—into “the stone hard to attain,” which we moderns would call psychological reflection: psyche in the service of the imagination.

The old, wild music must die in order to grow into the future, but letting go of it isn’t easy. The backward glance is our refusal to give up on the fantasies of perfect mortal union implicit in every torch song. But let go we must, else we fail to grow into an even wilder music. Rilke writes in his third “Sonnet to Orpheus,”

... Young man,
it is not your loving, even if your mouth
was forced open wide by your own voice -- learn

to forget that passionate music. It will end.
True singing is a different breath, about
nothing. A gust inside the god. A wind.
(transl. Stephen Mitchell)

***

In the tragedy of Hamlet, the backward glance encounters a ghost which forcefully demands obedience—and revenge. Hamlet, arguably the origin and zenith of modern consciousness, is radicalized by his parley with the ghost of his murdered father, decked out in the archaic armor of medieval Denmark (the story was imported by Shakespeare from the three centuries back). Father bids son to commit regicide in vengeance for the same crime. To refuse a father’s command is anathema to a son’s superego, but to heed such a voice is perilous to the soul, as Horatio argues with his prince:

What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord,
or to the dreadful summit of the cliff
that beetles o’er his base into the sea,
and there assume some other horrible form
which might deprive you of your soverienty of reason,
and draw you into madness? Think of it:
The very place puts toys of desperation,
without more motive into every brain
that looks so many fadoms to the sea
and hears it roar beneath. (I, iii)

That sea echoes chillingly under the voice of Hamlet when he demands that his friends vow not to speak of the encounter to others. Swear, the Ghost repeats after the son, like the booming of a fatal tide.

In his backward, sea-winding glance, Hamlet transforms from afflicted son into tragedian of the mind, and everything which then transpires in the play is a virtual resonance of his aybssal imaginings. Bending his outward and once-noble purposes toward madness and murder, at the same time he develops an enormous voice in conversation with its certain demise. That conversation resonates loud as ever five centuries later, perhaps because Hamlet was willing to look back on the dread origin of every true utterance.

It is said that the Hamlet we have today is the descendent of an earlier, failed version of the play, an ur-Hamlet Shakespeare wrote in the early 1590s; into the mythic mix which has so drawn critics is the fact that Shakespeare apparently had a son Hamnet who died young. So the surviving play with its eerie bold protagonist is both the son of an earlier work and the literary ghost of a real son. When Hamlet looks upon his spectral father on the ramparts of black Elsinore and hears a voice blent with the booming beacon of an even darker sea, the tale which ensues outlives every age.

***

The backward glance which points toward the sea also figures in the main inspiration of John Keats, whose greatness as a poet may be because, like Columba, his ghosts limned the border between real persons and literary ones. He was profoundly stirred by his reading, but the crisis he had to work through was to find a way of welcoming those shades without being buried and silenced by them.

Keats was 15 when his mother died and he was forced to leave school (his father was already dead) and seek employment to help care for his orphaned brother and sister. Almost in response to this turn of events, his reading suddenly became a furious engagement for him. According his old schoolmaster, whom Keats continued to visit and who introduced the young poet to much of that reading, a backward glance on a line from Spencer’s Faerie Queene, was the catalyst for his short yet unparalleled career. The anecdote is related in Walter Jackson Bate’s biography of Keats:

.. as a young horse would through a spring meadow—amping! Like a true poet, too—born, not manufactured, a poet in grain, he especially singled out epithets for that felicity and power in which Spenser is so eminent. He hoisted himself up, and looked burly and dominant, as he said, “what an image that is—‘sea-shouldering whales!’’’

According to another biographer quoted in Bates,

“It was ‘Faery Queene’ that awakened (Keats’s) genius. In Spenser’s fairy land he was enchanted, breathed in a new world, and became another being: till, enamored of the stanza, he attempted to imitate it, and succeeded.”

Spenser’s retelling of an old Celtic tale sprung a magic door in Keat’s latent imagination, unleashing from below (or behind) an equally if not wilder sea of invention.

Bates posits that it was his genius for looking back that was the agency of Keats’s unparalleled development, “the sort of empathy -- the adhesive, imaginative identification—that increasingly marked (his) own poetry and that later deepened in his clairvoyant understanding of Shakespeare.”

Negative Capability is just that -- “The ability to negate one’s identity, to lose it in something larger or more meaningful than oneself.” (Bates.) To step aboard that big fish and ride it to hell, high water and whatever Truths a human heart can abide. At least on paper.

***

In the “The Honor and Glory of Whaling” chapter of Moby Dick, Herman Melville seeks to add depth and resonance to his already wild and most worthy tale by joining the task of the Pequod—or rather, of dark Ahab and the White Whale—or, rather still, of a contemporary author and the next timeless work—with primary sources. “The more I dive into this matter of whaling,” Melville writes in the persona of Ishmael, the Horatio who survives to tell the tale, “and push my researches up to the very spring-head of it, so much the more am I impressed with its great honorableness and antiquity; and especially when I find so many great demi-gods and heroes, prophets of all sorts, who one way or other have shed distinction upon it.” He adds, “I am transported with the reflection that I myself belong, though but subordinately, to so emblazoned a fraternity.”

He then ranges through a variety of mythic whale-sized endeavors, from Perseus freeing Andromeda from Leviathan to Jonah spending three nights in a whale, from Hercules battling his way out of one to St. George defeating the Dragon (pairing whales and dragons with this quote from Ezekiel: “Thou art as a lion of the waters, and as a dragon of the sea”).

Yet that such precedents are not enough to give full resonance to his tale. Thus looks further back:

Nor do heroes, saints, demigods and prophets alone compose the whole roll of our order. Our grand master is till to be named, for like royal kings of old times, we find the headwaters of our fraternity in nothing short of the great gods themselves. That wonderful oriental story is now rehearsed from Shaster, which gives us the dread Vishnoo, one of the three persons in the godhead of the Hindoos; gives us this divine Vishnoo himself for our Lord; -- Vishnoo, who, by the first of his ten earthly incarnations, has for ever set apart and sanctified the whale.

When Bramha, or the God of Gods, saith the Shaster, resolved to recreate the world after one of its periodic dissolutions, he gave birth to Vishnoo, to preside over the work; but the Vedas, or mystical books, whose perusal would seem to have been indispensible to Vishnoo before beginning the creation, and which must have contained something in the shape of practical hints to young architects, these Vedas were lying at the bottom of the waters; so Vishnoo became incarnate as a whale, and sending down to the uttermost depths, rescued the sacred volumes. Was not this Vishnoo a whalemen, then? ever as a man rides a horse is called a horseman?”

Indeed. The tale transforms the deeper it goes. Melville descends from the contemporary reality of whale-hunting to the history and mystery of whale-harrowing, riding the whale, camping in the whale, fighting out of the whale, all the way down to becoming the whale, a sort of shamanic assumption of the whale’s body, flukes and all. And there, at the bottom of things, is the very text that enables God to create the world and Melville to write his book—infernal Vedas, perhaps, but of a language containing all the Shakespearean depth and resonance is sea tale needed.





III


Three perspectives are layered in that backward glance, like dimensions or conjoined threshold, and each is necessary to get to the unexpected fourth result—a vision of pure futurity. Maybe the backward glance is alchemical in nature, following the dictum that “out of the three comes the one.” First there is the burning desire to follow the apparition into “The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn/No traveller returns.” Second there is the voice encountered back there, drenched in origin, more awful and awesome than any human throat seems capable of welling. And third, there a pregnant pause or crossroads which requires a response, each one fraught with consequence. Obey? Defy? Bury? Build?

The fourth result is unexpected and miraculous: the backward glance devours whole the devouring whale. The encounter is spiritualized, made mythic. Dark energies (which were always in the individual psyche to begin with) are appeased and now fructify the work. As Erich Neumann writes in The Origin and History of Consciousness,

“The assimilation of unconscious contents, in whatever form, leads not only to an enrichment of the conscious material but to an enrichment of libido, which makes itself felt, subjectively, as an excitement, vivacity, and a joy that sometimes borders on intoxication; and, objectively, as a heightening of interest, a broadened and intensified capacity for work, mental alertness, etc.”

In the process of realizing and assimilating “Oran,” the unconscious content, the ego “Columba” makes a “descent,” from the conscious standpoint, into the depths, in order to raise up the “treasure.” In terms of psychic energy, the pleasure of the “conquering hero” arises from the combination of conscious libido with that of the newly acquired content which is incorporated. There is more vigor for the copying of texts and missionizing the Picts than can possibly be imagined, but that’s where it came from.

***

It is in this fourth dimension entered via the backward glance—in the metalinguistic veld or pleroma where I and Thou are one—where the real work always begins. It is at once an intuition of the depths, hearkening to its sea-like cry, tapping enough of its tidal desire to wash all of that raw energy forward.

It’s important to note here that we look glancingly and not stare fixedly; only a drop of that ocean is needed. Sirens freeze the imagination, and dark waters compel with the Medusa’s frozen stare of horror. No: the backward glance must turn back round, and when it does, it turns back upon present and future with eyes harrowed by what it saw rising from sea and grave. Such harrowing hallows the vision, allowing it to focus on the essential work at hand. There in the visage of the lost lies the reflection of the future, if one is schooled with the proper eyes, if one is ready to embrace older numens, if one can find a means to sing back with words wilder than wind.