Cyclopes: In Greek mythology, a race of one-eyed giants, descended from the Titans, inhabiting the island of Sicily.
In 1969, the unpublished poet Charles Leonard Lambert (a.k.a. PHAROAH since 1972) wrote the following Haiku +2 (2 extra syllables). Despite 31 years having quickly passed since Cyclop was penned, and all the world’s great poetry notwithstanding, it is to especially these lines, along with one from Mr. Yeats (Like a long-legged fly upon the stream, His mind moves upon silence), I return to again and again.
What are we to make of these 3 lines that must be deemed ugly and repulsive for all time by even the most generous category of aesthetic judgment? And yet verse that is sufficiently compelling to dispose the most dismissive reader to interrogate it -- if only to confirm his worst suspicions. So to the poem itself, Husserl would urge, into the maw of this exemplary, cyclopean ugliness.
And what do we find? The creature at rest in the plenitude of its nature, with its own peculiar tastes and appetites, and irrepressible life force that compels it to live in its own manner, as humans and snakes must live in their respective manner of being-in-the-world.
Through the deliberate ordering of the words and their sounds, the poet beguiles the reader to pay less attention to the container (the vial), and contents (the vomit), and more to the alliteration, the repeating ‘v’ sound in both words, to the effect that the significance of the repellant image is magically dissolved in language that transcends the horrific evocation of the words. By disclosing an aesthetic realm, we discover language has a life of its own, whose operations and effects reach far beyond the things it represents, that beauty potentially inheres in all manner of experience and the language that recreates it.
In the poem’s final line, ‘one-eyed in the autumn tide’, the image completes the transformation of the horrific into the beatific, by concentrating in the sounds of its vowels and consonants the very stuff of the aesthetic transcendental, to the effect that although I am not the author of these 19 syllables, I am left with a sense of having participated in the act of their creation.
This remarkable little poem is a testimony to the transformative power that inheres in purposeful language, that because of and through language we discover the banal and horrific already contain the seed of their opposite. And while individual differences will determine whether we are called upon to create language or merely cultivate an appreciation of it, the individual alone bears responsibility for ‘the word,’ for his words, no less so for the very meaning of his life.
All of which leaves both you and I with one overwhelming question. What are we to make of the above analysis/interpretation, and how might it affect the mind of the naïve, impressionable reader? Am I a word-shaman, a trickster, or de facto role model for literary criticism that finds itself caught in the slip-stream of relativism where anything and everything these days pass for art. Perhaps I am guilty of glibsterism, the disingenuous employment of superior writing and rhetorical skills to raise inherently inferior works to undeserved eminence -- to the effect that the usurping critic becomes responsible for the content of art.
This polemic invites you, the reader, to make this critique a forum for debate on the nature of art, and/or what determines great art? Is the above Haiku poetry for the ages or merely filler for blank pages?
THE END