Review of From the Lost Land (I–XII) by André Spears
From the Lost Land (I–XII)
by André Spears. BlazeVOX, 114 pp., $16.00.
Men dead and white abounding, social perspectives out of key with culturally mixed societies, heroes strutting their toxic masculinity — the classical epic is not exactly a go-to genre for contemporary writers or readers, nor, for similar reasons, have the 20th-century re-dos of William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, or Charles Olson found favor. So much to clean up, so much to apologize for! But André Spears does not clean up or apologize; in From the Lost Land (I–XII), he blows the genre out of its wine-dark sea. Equal parts Star Wars, On the Road, Deleuzean war machine, and surrealist delirium, this poem-ever-in-progress is literature on steroids, philosophy on acid. It is scandalous, funny, erudite, and endlessly generative. It is an epic without organs.
Back in 1980, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari published Mille plateaux, volume 2 of Capitalisme et Schizophrénie, with Les Éditions de Minuit; in 1987, the University of Minnesota Press put out an English language edition. Some of the key tropes in this volume of anti-philosophy and anti-psychoanalysis were the rhizome, the Body without Organs, the line of flight, the multitude, the machinic assemblage, and the war machine, among many others. These energies burrow into their contraries — organic unity, the cogito, linear history, and the socio-political apparatuses of the state. Milles plateaux proposed a paradigm shift toward a dynamic, hydraulic cosmos rather than a static, substantive one. The point was to loosen the death-grip of the substantive on the imagination because its thinginess aligns historically with property of various kinds — psychic, economic, intellectual, social, and sexual capital. All that owning has not exactly worked out well for social justice or planetary well-being. What Deleuze and Guattari performed was a grand dérèglement (not a deconstruction) of categories: history and fiction, past and present, concepts and things, art and science, and all the countless attendant binaries that have shaped western thinking. “A rhizome,” they wrote, “ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles.” Or to change the trope, a war machine floods its region; a state builds pipelines. Their antagonism must not resolve.
Photo by Anne Rosen
Fast forward to a world in crisis over the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, looming environmental disaster, and an American culture fractured and fractious. Après Trump, le déluge? [1] Perhaps. Now, more than ever, the relations between persons and things and events need to be reimagined. Deleuze and Guattari suggest some vocabulary for Spears’s indescribable epic (give it up, benighted critic!), but the poem itself does not describe or narrate so much as generate possibility. From the Lost Land consists of twelve brief sections or “books,” titled roughly after the higher arcana of the Tarot cards. “Roughly” is the operative word; poem and cards do not explain each other, but there is a family resemblance between Spears’s text and the curious mix of fate and chance suggested by the Tarot: draw a card, any card, and the possible changes, without decreasing or increasing the quanta of possibilities. “Un coup de dès / jamais / n’abolira / le hasard,” Mallarmé wrote in his most famous poem.
Like a pair of dice (paradise), the poem unrolls through the twelve books in two columns. On one side is a series of letters that pass between the lovers, “S” and “A,” relating their adventures; on the other, a series of quotations drawn from a wide range of literary and philosophical texts. The two columns do not explicate each other any more than the twelve books explicate the Tarot or vice versa; rather they are generators of connections. Deleuze would say “lines of flight” and “plug-ins.”
Exhibit 1: The poem begins with a reference to Mu (variously called Lemuria or Atlantis), through a quotation of Col. James Churchward’s parsing of the Greek alphabet as an esoteric symbol system in his Lost Continent of Mu. Mu has been declared a geological impossibility by scientists, but as a myth-concept it tracks across the 19th-century pseudoscience of Churchward (1851–1936) or Alice and Augustus le Plongeon (1851–1910 and 1825–1908, respectively) into 20th-century science fiction, Marvel comics, Manga, rock bands, and video games — across high and low cultural registers, multiple genres, and disparate historical zones, in other words. Producers of the myth have claimed evidence from Mayan, ancient Egyptian, Indian, Polynesian and Biblical contexts.
Exhibit 2: S and A had (have?) an absent child, Es, perhaps fallen into the “Limbo Abyss / or the ones at Eden / or Ur,” A speculates. Es has one translation in the German “it,” a pronoun that serves as the indeterminate finger-point of language; it has another in the Spanish “is.” It / is. In On the Road, Kerouac writes: “the car was swaying as Dean and I both swayed to the rhythm and the IT of our final excited joy in talking and living to the blank tranced end of all innumerable riotous angelic particulars that had been lurking in our souls all our lives.” In that high, they escape the middle America of plodding work and dogged accumulation; just for a moment, like jazz musicians, they experience the “pit and prunejuice of poor beat life itself in the god-awful streets of man.”
IT / IS, ecstasy, paradiso. Mu, Atlantis, Lemuria, Eden. Moving between and within a myriad micro-narratives, Spears’s poem does not advance from A to B, say in a linear history of paradisos, nor does it confirm any interpretive path through the text. Rather it is blown around by the winds of Porno and Nirvana. Before the reader can fixate on Mu or its analogues, the poem tosses up the “S\S MARU,” a “Byzantine scout vessel.” “Maru” includes “mu”; in Japanese, “maru” means “circle” and it figures in ships’ names, such as the SS Rakuyō Maru and SS Kachidoki Maru. These were vessels transporting British and Australian prisoners of war in 1944; both were torpedoed by American submarines with great loss of life. “Maru” also has a culturally various history in places and surnames, and a life in myth as the name of the Māori god of war. Byzantine it is, so to speak, and that is without even beginning to read the “S\S.”
So the plot ever-thickens. S is on a ship sailing toward the Orionis Ripple. Some of the figures on board include Tarzan (a “she”), Venus, Maria, Möbius the Mapper, Occam the Weatherwoman, Avon the Poetess, and Ben-Cnopee. A is playing a game of cards for penny stakes in cash, life and death in flesh. Some of the figures on site include Jiminy (Cricket?), Death, Sophia, Psychê, Ahab, Freytag, Ramus, Racter, Góngora, Thoth and Bombario the Dwarf. The genders of S and A are unclear, not that it matters much anyway, the poem suggests, since genders can shift. Both have astonishing adventures in strange places with weird characters, but where they have come from and where they are going is never in sight. Events puddle out; none are definitive. No margin-center, no social pyramid, no linear progression. Deleuze would call this a “plane of consistency.” The poem finally just stops for breath — no doubt while Spears writes the next installment — in a letter from A that lands on the Tarot cards again: the Hanged One, the Universe, the Scales, and the Fool. “Regardless of the outcome, / The Fool spells Khaos,” A writes to S. In Hesiod’s Theogony, cosmos comes from Chaos. Translated into Deleuzean, that would mean Chaosmos.
Despite the mighty churnings — the “Ocean of Reading,” the gender bending, the cataclysms, the alien armadas, the “fabled region [of] Oops,” the “angels writh[ing] in pain / on a mound of ears” — From the Lost Land is always still an epic, and one of its many gifts is a revitalization of the genre. The epic has always been more than a hero’s journey: it is a genre that reaches out for the beyond of what humanity currently knows and is. Möbius is the Mapper, always twisting inside and outside, until things get “curiouser and curiouser.” Ignore or repress this complexity — this unsayable sitedness that is both a physical and spiritual condition of the human — and we have the planetary disasters we are now in the middle of. Spears’s epic is not a poetry of direct political statement: it is a poetry which creates imaginative conditions that, were they to be seriously taken up, would render such disasters unthinkable. That is another gift of the poem.
The Odyssey ends when Odysseus finally reaches Ithaca, kills the suitors consuming his wealth, and reclaims his kingdom, forcefully asserting his ownership of property, kingship, wife, and home. In Spears’s epic, home is ungraspable because it is always moving, like the nomad’s encampments. Perhaps the thinginess of it is there with Es in the abyss at Eden or Ur. So let the suns rise on a “flawless brimming sea / into a sky all brazen.” A White sea, a Red sky. Literally a child of both Greece and France, Spears wanders his Greek heritage through a French war machine to find possibility again in our straitened, darkening world.
Photo by Anne Rosen
[1] See “Après le Déluge" : « Le sang et le lait coulèrent. » Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations and Other Prose Poems, translated by Louise Varèse, (New York: New Directions, 1957).
