Peter Sanger

Poor Man's Art:
On the Poetry of Robert Bringhurst

Early in the First World War, T.E. Lawrence and his Arab guides patrolled a Roman ruin in North Syria. The Arabs believed it was once a palace built by a border prince for his queen. They also believed its clay had been kneadedfor greater richness, not with water, but with the precious essential oil of flowers. They went from ruined room to room saying, "This is jessamine, this is violet, this rose." Finally, one drew Lawrence to an empty window facing the desert where there was only wind and said: "This ... is the best: it has no taste." 1

At work in those last words is a secular form of faqr, the Koranic word for self-effacement, or spiritual poverty and proportion. In the Koran, faqr is defined by Sura XXXV ("The Creator") in lines which have been sympathetically translated as: Oh Men, ye are the poor in relation to God, and God i's the Rich to whom allpraises are due. 2 Another translator, Aj. Arberry, avoiding metaphor and the reality which metaphor in this case signifies, has translated the same passage as this: 0 men, you are the ones that have need of Go& / He is the All-sufficz'ent, the All-laudable. 3 The contrasting versions indicate a linguistic crux is at issue, one at which one culture can define its own choices by choosing to translate or carry over another culture incompletely. What is at issue appears even more clearly in the compromised and compromising connotations of "fakir," the word made into English out of the misapprehended root offaqr. The Oxford English Dictionary, for instance, gives two dismissive, inaccurate and self-betraying usages in the nineteenth century: A fakir would hardly be an estimable figure in our society and Hindoo mysticism . . . has died down into brutal fakeerism. 4

Robert Bringhurst's poetry is located for many readers in the kind of cultural and linguistic crux faqr proposes for English. His three major collections, Bergschrund (1975); The Beauty of the Weapons: Selected Poems 1972 - 1982 (1982); and Pieces of Map, Pieces of Music (1986) are shaped by Bringhurst's need to think, as he has written, outside the terrible myth, or antimyth called the March of Western Histog which creates a world being sterilized by greed. 5

Those of us raised in colonial North America
have been taught not an ecology of living 
facts, but a vision of endless progress, 
endless development, endless gain - and a 
vision also of social . ustice and personal
liberty.  These visions have been linked in
the presumption that the world of endless 
development is a universal world, one that 
has room within it for everything.  But a 
world with room for nothing outside 
itself, room for nothing beyond its 
control, is a world in which liberty 
and prosperty are hollow, and one in 
which justice is severed from both 
its origins and its ends.6

Putting it briefly, poetry for Bringhurst is an opening in the air, 7 like that empty window admitting the desert wind untasted by Lawrence's Arab guide. It is the poor man's art; it doesn't thrive in a world of distractions.

That latter definition perhaps involves Bringhurst's own harkening to the composer Philip Corner's poor man music of claps, stamps, and scratching . . . and all the soundsyour voice and breath andl throat may make / except words. 9 If it does, it is also a revision into responsibility of Corner's easeful irrationalism and eccentric egocentricity. Revision of that kind, at least, is offered by Bringhurst's poem, "Thirty Words." Its accounting is what it says it is, in all exact poverty:

Knowing, not owning.
Praise of what is,
not of what flatters us
into mere pleasure.
Earth speaking earth,
singing water and air,
audible everywhere 
there is no one to listen.10

Earth in that poem and the sounds of earth (earth . . . air . . . every where) go on without us, both using and not needing our words, but not excepting them.

To what extent Bringhurst's poetry (and poverty) is it religious" or not is difficult to say. Bringhurst has said he would prefer to substitute the word "theology" for the word "religion," adding: knowledge of the gods is one thing; adherence to a creed is another. 11 Whatever else it may involve, however, his theology draws upon apophatic mysticism, upon those traditions of unknowing, of negative theology, which are characteristic of complex religious belief. Notably, there appear throughout Bringhurst's work the paradoxes and dissolving solutions of Zen which encompass unity, duality, and a third term which is not simply a synthesis of the first two. The dualities involved may be expressed as sound and silence, movement and rest, outer and inner, masculine and feminine, existence and essence, among other possibilities. The third term resists these generalizations. In Bringhurst's poems, it is usually expressed in narrative. From the sequence, "The Book of Silences," for example, is this poem, "Nanquan Puyuan," which draws its title from the name of a Zen monk who lived between 738-834:

Let me tell you a story. 
 The gardener
and the cook sat together
in the garden.  A jay sang. 
 The gardener

tapped his fingernails against 
his wooden chair. A jay sang 
again. The gardener tapped

his chair again. A jay 
did not sing. The gardener,
for the third time, tapped

his wooden chair. The cook was 
 sitting
quietly, while all this
was happening, sipping his tea. 12

To read this as a poem of the third term could begin by remembering that the thirteenth century Zen master, Dogen, composed a treatise called Tenzo Kyokun which discusses the significance of the head cook in a Zen monastery. Dogen once asked the old cook who inspired the treatise, "What is the way?" The cook answered: "The whole universe has never concealed it. " 13 On the other hand, of course, such remembering can be unnecessary.

But Zen is not a skeleton key with which to unlock the -resistances of Bringhurst's poetry. He has himself anticipated and repelled any compromising identification with specific religious tradition. But if I'm a Buddhist, he has said, I'm a carnivorous Buddhist. It isn't, for me, what is usually meant by religion. I've taken no vows. The very idea that one could take them, in a ceremonial and human context, rather confounds me. 14

Those of us who have taken vows, in ceremonies of various kinds, including those of marriage, may in turn find Bringhurst's facility at this point also rather confounding. But if a defence of Bringhurst is required, it should be that like any other contemporary metaphysical poet he is in straits which make self-protective, even aggressive, polemic necessary. He must elude interpretations of his work based upon various fashionable modes of sentiment, opportunism, propaganda which pre-empt real metaphysical thinking. He must also cope with ihe belief (really a disbelief), that metaphysical thinking is meaningless, that all that counts, in a considerably different kind of account than the faqr of Bringhurst's "Thirty Words," are the methods of power and control which claim to prevent disintegration by technocratic manipulation. Against these enemies a metaphysical poet can bring what? - a rebirth of images (to use Austin Farrer's term) - or antecedent to that rebirth, a simple beginning again. Ironically, in his or her search as hunter and pilgrim, the modern metaphysical poet starts and often ends in a state of not-knowing which is boundary to the apophasis of metaphysical unknowing. Hence in Bringhurst's poems, there are so many double negatives, positive refusals, enthroning poverties:

So you can read
a book full of words.
Can you read one without words?
You can bring music
out of that lute after tuning
the strings.  
Can you play one without strings?

One man listens to music
or looks at a painting
and nurtures his mind with them.
Another wants from them only
their physical energy.
One walks the mountains

and studies the clouds to draw wisdom
and strength from them.
To another, they are loud noises
in visible terms.  They may frighten
or thrill him, but what
does it matter?  What has he learned?

Taste the still air,
hear the still water: new leaves
wellspring from the doorpost.
Plum and bamboo will rise through you.
Snowflakes and stones will set roots
through your shoulders and hands."

Language in this poem is used to plead both the poverty of rightly used words and the poverty of the user of right words. It is also used to verify the mutual accuracy of such use and such a user. Similarly when Bringhurst invokes, as he frequently does, by citation, translation and paraphrases the work of thinkers and poets such as Herakleitos, Empedokles, Lucretius, Holderlin, Rilke and Char, he is praising equitable encompassing of poverty and truth in their work. Heidegger, a presence throughout Bringhurst's poems, designates the kind of encompassing which their language attempts with the term logos.

Heidegger's logos is not the same as the logos which Christian theologians use to refer to the second person in the Trinity. Heidegger's is a pre-Christian or post-Chlristian logos which, according to him, designates a kind of language separate from "discourse" and "speaking."16 It is a language which is based upon a primal gathering principle, which collects the conflict of the opposites, while maintaining the full sharpness of their tension. 17

Heidegger's analysis of logos is far too complex to summarize here. Perhaps it is too complex and subtle to summarize anywhere in the kind of discursive language to which this essay is committed and which Heidegger's own philosophical language constantly confronts, subverts and rejects. Bringhurst himself, however, has published a poem which attempts to set a context within which the Heideggerean logos might be defined. Significantly, as a demonstration of the cohesiveness and concentration of Bringhurst's work, it is a poem which could be read as a continuation of the poem last quoted in this essay, though both poems are separated in the collection in which they appear by over forty pages:

But who was it who taught us 
the artist's ambitions: 
a house in the country, a house
in the town, an apartment in history?

Listen: this music
is all about water. The words
are the earth, and the music
is water

An artist is anyone
who remembers, it is not you nor me
nor the boss but the gods who are 
  watching.
For these we perform.  The others
are eavesdroppers, boob-squeezers, 
  thieves
or voyeurs, or they work here.

The tongues of the gods include
no dates and no names.
This is the logos. 18

Ernst Cassirer, who interprets the pre-Socratic meaning of logos radically differently than Heidegger, describes the seminal stage of language within which Heidegger and Bringhurst locate logos as characteristic of what he calls the primitive mind, for which myth and language are, as it were, twin brothers, and the social power of the word, experienced in innumerable cases, becomes a natural and even a supernatural force. 19

No doubt Bringhurst would agree with that description. But his poems and essays also show that he would convert the pejorative implications of Cassirer's primitive mind, with its evolutionary assumptions, into one way (not the best way) of naming the kind of thinking which any culture suicidally ignores. Bringhurst calls it an archaic sense of integrity (moving the latter word back to its root meaning) and cites its survival in the

. . . remains of those old, now 
voiceless, cultures of Europe 
from the paintings of Lascaux to
the fragments of Empedokles and 
Herakleitos . . . in many of the 
philosopher-poets of the Orient - 
in Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Saraha, 
Sengcan, and in those remarkable
Sung dynasty writers, Danxia and
Xueduo (Redcloud and Snowcave) 
... But to me it seems clearest 
of all in some of the quiet, 
cornered voices of the native 
American tradition.  It is there 
to be read in the salvaged scraps
of oral literature, and it is 
still there to be heard in the 
mouths of a steadily shrinking 
number of native gardeners, 
hunters and herders who live in 
the steadily shrinking real 
world - the lean tracts not yet 
consumed by an insatiable white 
society with the stupidest goals 
in the world; money and jobs.  
Not piety, grace, understanding, 
wisdom, intelligence, truth, beauty,
virtue, compassion.  None of these.  
Not real wealth either, but only 
factitious wealth; and not a 
relationship with nor a place in the
nonhuman order, but life in a wholly 
consumptive, introverted scheme: 
money and jobs.20

Obviously, this is a rigorous and dismissive vision. There is more than a little of the prophet in Bringhurst. When he wrote monologues for Moses in "Deuteronomy," for Jacob in "Jacob Singing," and when he wrote the sequence of brief impersonations 21 which gives voices to the Chinese, Japanese and Indian monks, scholars and religious masters who speak in "The Book of Silences," Bringhurst is tapping his own passions and beliefs, as well as the resources of sanity sometimes available in preindustrial cultures. 22

It is for nothing, yes,
this manicuring, barbering, this
shaving of the blade.

Nothing: that is that the edge should 
  come
to nothing as continuously
and cleanly and completely as it can.

And the instruction
is given, therefore,
to the archer, sharpening

the blood and straightening 
the vein: the same instruction 
that is given to the harper:


Tap.
Strum the muscle.
Breathe.

And come to nothing. 25

... To speak of nothing will always 
remain a horror and an absurdity 
for science.  But aside from the 
philosopher, the poet can do so - and
not because, as common sense supposes,
poetry is without strict rules, but 
because the spirit of poetry (only 
authentic and great poetry is meant)
is essentially superior to the 
spirit that prevails in all mere 
science.  By virtue of this 
superiority the poet always speaks as 
though the essent were being expressed
and invoked for the first time.  
Poetry, like the thinking of the 
philosopher, has always so much world
space to spare that in it each thing 
- a tree, a mountain, a house, the cry 
of a bird loses all indifference and 
commonplaceness.28

But the appearance in which sun and 
earth stand, e.g. the early morning
landscape, the sea in the evening, 
the night, is an appearing. This 
appearance is not nothing.  Nor is it 
untrue.  Nor is it a mere appearance 
of conditions in nature which are 
really otherwise.  This appearance is
historical and it is history, 
discovered and grounded in poetry and
myth and thus an essential area of 
our world.
  Only the tired latecomers with their 
supercilious wit imagine that they can 
dispose of the historical power of 
appearance by declaring it to be 
"subjective," hence very dubious.  
The Greeks experienced it differently.
They were perpetually compelled to 
wrest being from appearance and preserve 
it against appearance. (The essence of 
being is un-concealment.)29

In the high West there is everything 
it is that the high West consists of,
mountains,
named animals and unnamed birds,
mountain water, mountain trees 
and mosses, and the marrow of the air
inside its luminous blue bone,
And the light that lies just under 
 darkness, 
Artemis

grazing the ice
that is sea-rose under the sunset, 
 and sea-green
and sea-deep under the snow's froth.  
 Under
the still white water the sudden
fissure in the wave.

Measure from the surface,
measure from the light's edge
to the surface of the darkness, measure
from the light's edge to the sound.30

The apple is the palpable 
aura and hysteresis 
of the seed, the tissue is 
a proof of the polarity and necessary 
coldness of the bone. 33

In the blood's alluvium
there are alphabets: feldspars and ores,
silt jamming the mouths, and the sea's 
 weight
or the white magmatic fire
is required to read the spoor:

the thumbprint on the air, the soul's print
beached on the foreshore under the slag,
the spine-tracks and excavations
of sea urchins
climbing the high crags.36

These, therefore, are the four
ages of man:
pitch-black, blood-color, piss-color, 
 colorless.

After the season of iron the season
of concrete and tungsten alloy and plastic, 
and after the season of concrete the season 
of horn, born in the black October,

hooves and feathers hooves and feathers
shudder past the tusks
and navigate back between the horns. 37

Death does not extinguish things in such a
way as to destroy the bodies of matter, 
but only breaks up the union amongst them,
and then joins anew the different elements
with others; and thus it comes to pass 
that all things change their shapes and 
alter their colours and receive sensations
and in a moment yield them up; so that from
all this you may know it matters much with 
what others and in what position the same 
first-beginnings of things are held in union
and what motions they do mutually impart and
receive, and you must not suppose that that 
which we see floating about on the surface
of things and now born, then at once 
perishing, can be a property inherent in 
everlasting first bodies.  Nay in our verses
themselves it matters much with what other 
elements and in what kind of order the
several elements are placed. 38

The limits of this essay prevent our looking at length at other significant parallels between "Hachadura" and De Rerum Natura. A particular loss is not to be able to show fully the relationship of Bringhurst's ... darkness which is always / interposed/ between two surfaces when they close 39 to the Lucretian conception of void. As Lucretius wrote: ... since there is void in things begotten, solid matter must exist about this void, and no thing can be proved by true reason to conceal in its body and have within it void, unless you choose to allow that that which holds it in is solid. 40 Heidegger's meditations upon unconcealment 4l can be used as a commentary upon the Lucretian void and also upon Bringhurst's darkness. But here we can go no further than to make such suggestions and must end discussion of "Hachadura" with the following quotation from Santayana, which in light of the discussion of these last few paragraphs assumes its own context of irony. It is ironic because Santayana was one of Stevens' masters, perhaps his chief one if the effect of Scepticism and Animal Faith be taken into account. And yet in many ways, the following quotation fr om Santayana supports "Hachadura's" revision of Stevens and summarizes some of the premises upon which it and other poems by Bringhurst are based:

The soul of nature, in the elements of it, 
is then, according to Lucretius, actually
immortal; only the human individuality, 
the chance composition of those elements,
is transitory; so that, if a man could 
care for what happens to other men, for 
what befell him when young or what may 
overtake him when old, he might perfectly
well care, on the same imaginative 
principle, for what may go on in the world 
for ever.  The finitude and injustice of 
his personal life would be broken down; 
the illusion of selfishness would be 
dissipated; and he might say to himself, 
I have imagination, and nothing that 
is real is alien to me. 42

We began our discussion of "Hachadura" by proposing to show how some of the opinions Bringhurst has expressed in prose are far more intricately and accurately expressed in his poetry - where, in effect, they really cease to be "opinions" and become that listening 43 to logos which Bringhurst has proposed for himself as a poet. Any of the other remarkable sequences, "The Book of Silences," "The Lyell Island Variations," "The Old in Their Knowing," or long poems like "Tending the Fire" and "The Stonecutter's Horses," can be read (listened to) the same way. Let this essay close, however, with a few brief notes on "Tzuhalem's Mountain," which must be accounted one of the finest poems, or sequence of poems, to have been written by a Canadian poet.

The Santayana quotation just used describes the overt protagonist of " Tzuhalem's Mountain," Tzuhalem himself, as well as the various covert protagonists, among whom are the poet (whoever he may be), the reader, and the mythical figures of Orpheus, Narcissus, Marsyas and Aeneas which appear as metamorphic types of anagogical puns. All these figures are really also types of mankind in his relationship both with earth and with the humankind which encompasses and unconceals the feminine. To use Santayana's words, the finitude and injustice . . . the illusion of selfishness in Tzuhalem are broken down and dissipated in the course of "Tzuhalem's Mountain," though not (and the point is central to any reading of Bringhurst's work) in any morally exculpating way that a reader might easily appropriate.

On the face of it, this suiting of Santayana's terms to Bringhurst's Tzuhalem may seem wrong. The actual, historical Tzuhalem, ab Bringhurst explains in a preface to the sequence, was a hunchbacked, sausage-mottled ... Coast Salish Indian who was banished by tribal leaders in about 1830 for bride-theft and murder. 44 Tzuhalem took to the mountain named after him, accompanied by his fourteen wives, by his children, and by a gang of followers, and proceeded to practice piracy, kidnapping and headhunting until December 1854, when he was trapped and killed while trying to kidnap yet one more wife. The most accessible account of Tzuhalem's life is in Howard O'Hagan's Wilderness Men, 45 where, among other outrages, Tzuhalem's practice of inflicting "bastinado," roasting his captives' feet in order to cripple them, is carefully described.

But the historical Tzuhalem and the Tzuhalem of Bringhurst's poem are only partly the same. Bringhurst's Tzuhalem shares his namesake's mountain, his hunchback, exile, and sexual energy. But Bringhurst's Tzuhalem, unlike his historical namesake, lives out and endures the symbolic, theological, metaphysical stringencies of his situation. For example, the hunchback of the historical Tzuhalem becomes the three shoulders of Bringhurst's protagonist who dances by moonlight with his wives, dancing joined to their dancing / in ftont of the fire. 46 The hunched back of Bringhurst's Tzuhalem becomes, in fact, one of a set of three "third terms" in the sequence. Another is the ternary -group of three razor-edged, milkwhite / stones in a nest of sea-green lichen which is described in the first poem of "Tzuhalem's Mountain" entitled "The Parable of the Three Rocks." 47 The third ternary is, in fact, prefigured by those three stones or rocks. It is the sequence's very form, which consists of three parts, containing seven poems each.

I suspect the symbolic, visual and formal puns which this set of three 'third terms' constitutes emulate in part similar patterns of play the definition which Bill Holm has distinguished in Northwest Coast Indian Art. 48 But we are also dealing with connotations which can lead in at least two other ways. One is to Zen, for these three ternaries "contain" or unconceal, but are not the sum of one and two, of flesh and bones, of birds and fish, of beak and claw, of man and woman, of man and nature, which occur and re-occur throughout the sequence. The second direction the three "third terms" lead is backwards and forwards to that reconciliation of love and strife, of Venus and Mars, whose process Lucretius found open in Herakleitos and Empedokles. Not for nothing does "Tzuhalem's Mountain" conclude a collection with the Lucretian title, The Beauty of the Weapons . . .

No doubt the real, murderous, historical Tzuhalem's part in the origin of Bringhurst's sequence makes "Tzuhalem's Mountain" a disturbing work of art. It is unsettling to conventional moral sense. The real Tzuhalem's actions might seem to be justified as necessary access to knowledge. But Bringhurst's Tzuhalem has been conceived in those mythic terms which answer to a deeper necessity than our moral sense. Tzuhalem has not been created to ustify the historical Tzuhalem's actions, but to enact the mythos of humankind's effort to understand logos. For in this sequence too, Bringhurst is guided by Heidegger, whose commentary upon the first chorus in Sophocles' Antigone (a chorus Bringhust has translated and dedicated to Heidegger 49) insists upon the violence needed to surpass the limits of the familiar, to experience thepower of appearance and the struggle with it as an essential part of being-there.50

Who is good in the Iliad?  Who 
is bad? Such distinctions do not exist; 
there are only men suffering, warriors 
fighting, some winning, some losing.  
The passion for justice emerges only in
mouming for justice, in the dumb avowal 
of silence.  To condemn force, or absolve
it, would be to condemn, or absolve, 
life itself.  And life in the 
Iliad (as in the Bible or in 
War and Peace) is essentially 
the thing that does not permit itself 
to be assessed, or measured, or condemned,
or justified, at least not by the living.
Any estimate of life must be confined to an
awareness of its inexpressibility.  This 
pliable wisdom, consubstantial with 
existence itself, has very little in common
with the parade drills of Stoicism.

Sprung out of bitterness, the philosophy
of the Iliad excludes resentment.  
It antedates the divorce between nature 
and existence. Here the Whole is no 
collection of broken pieces put back 
together with indifferent success by 
reason; on the contrary, it is the
active principle of interpenetration of 
all the elements that make it up.  The 
inevitable slowly unfolds, and its 
theatre is the heart of man, and, at the
same time, the Cosmos. 52

The man in the sun, savaged 
by cats, drags his cloak through 
the waters
and limps up the mountain, 
his footprints in tatters. 53

... the stranger stood there motionless
for years - but they say that the music 
you almost hear in the level blue light
of morning and evening, now, is the 
sound of the stranger moving, walking 
back toward his own country, painfully, 
one step at a time. 55

My great companion, my great guardian spirit,
My great companion, my great guardian spirit,
Hear our fine incantation, our fine cries.
There is no snow-hut; it is empty of people.
He is not a real man; it is empty of people.
Beneath it, down there, let us two search. 
56

5. R. Bringhurst:

Pieces of map, Pieces of music: McClelland and Stewart: Toronto: 1976: p. 120. Bibilographical details for the other Bringhurst titles mentioned are: (1) R. Bringhurst: Bergschrund The Sono Nis Press: Delta, British Columbia: 1975; (2) R. Bringhurst: The Beauty of the Weapons: Selected Poems 1972-1982: McClelland and Stewart: Toronto: 1982. Other texts by Bringhurst which are not cited in this essay but helped shape it are: R. Bringhurst: Ocean, Paper, Stone: William Hoffer: Vancouver: 1984; R. Bringhurst: Shovels, Shoes and the Slow Rotation of Letters: A Feuilleton in Honour of John Dreyfuss: The Alcuin Society: Vancouver: 1986; R. Bringhurst: "Conversations with a Toad" and "From Being to the Other: Paul Celan" (An essay by Emmanuel Levinas, translated and introduced by Bringhurst): Descant 59, Winter 1987, 18(4): pp. 7-14, 99-105.

6. Bringhurst: Pieces ... : p. 103.

7. Ibid: p. 111.

8. lbid: p. 118.

9. J. Rothenberg: Technicians of the Sacred: Anchor Books, Doubleday & Co., Inc.: New York: 1969: p. 380. Rothenberg is alluded to in Pieces..., p. 104.

10. Bringhurst: Pieces ... : p. 66.

11. Ibid: p. 111.

12. Ibid: p. 29.

13. P. Matthiessen: Nine-Headed Dragon River: Shambhala: Boston: 1987: pp. 175 and 165.

14. Bringhurst: Pieces ...: p. 118.