Orphic Politics
by Tim Lilburn
McClelland & Stewart, 2008

Review by John Herbert Cunningham

Perhaps there is no better way of entering Going Home than by quoting from p. 2 of Lilburn’s introduction:

Going Home attempts a resuscitation of a small part of this jettisoned tradition – the erotics of Plato, as they are found in his middle dialogues and his Seventh Letter, which are, as well, the erotics of Christian Platonists of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. It is a book about conversation, a book about reading; it is a book of attempted retrieval; it is, above all, a long walk beside a line of texts – Plato’s Phaedrus and Symposium, John Cassian’s Conferences: The Divine Names, The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy and The Mystical Theology of pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite; and The Cloud of Unknowing – Europe’s true erotic masterworks, in which a detailed account of desire, desire on the move, is set in place.

This is also a fitting opening to Orphic Politics as it seems as if both the books were (or should have been) written as a set given the titles of the sections in Orphic Politics – ‘from Phaedrus’, ‘from De mysteriis’, ‘from Book of Conversations’, etc.

Approach Going Home with a dictionary in hand. You will come across such words as ‘Apokatastasis’, ‘maieutic’, ‘hermeneutic’, ‘anamnetic’ and ‘apothegmata’ which, except for the first, are all found in one paragraph. The Online Oxford English Dictionary does not contain definitions for the latter two terms which may be spelled incorrectly. The closest it shows to ‘anamnetic’ is ‘anamnestic’ which, in its adjectival form, means ‘Recalling to mind; aiding the memory or recollection’ which would appear to be appropriate in the context. There is no equivalent for ‘apothegmata’. You’ll probably need that dictionary for Orphic Politics as well.

Going Home is about Eros - sexual love or desire – as opposed to Agape which is love that is wholly selfless and spiritual, in Christianity the sexless love of man for his fellow man. The first two chapters concern Socrates as depicted in Plato’s The Phaedrus and The Symposium respectively. In the second chapter, ‘Where Desire Goes’, Lilburn has this to say about one under the sway of Eros: "All the individual who knows erotic matters can do is report what he underwent; to be in possession of a theory of desire, of beauty, of goodness, is to betray one’s initiated state. Those who are erotic, like Eros itself, then, both know and do not know; like Aristophanic lovers who remain with one another through life, yet cannot say what they seek from the other…but who can say little of this, the soul divining what it wants, dimly and speaking it in riddles, the erotic individual is both expressive and dumb."(59).

In the second part, Lilburn turns his mind to medieval philosophy beginning, in chapter 3, with an analysis of John Cassian’s Conferences where we find this passage concerning ways of reading: "writing with formative power has a subterranean vitality that scarcely shows on the surface of writing – a shadow book lies within the book, hidden – and that one gains entry to this altering, inner book through forms of attention, ways of holding languages before one, which themselves provoke the same sort of change in the reader that the sequestered force within writing later will with even greater power…One does not read for comprehension but to be made comprehensible, trued. Each of these forms of attention to literature, to writing with its own interiority, exercises, as well, a suppressant effect on imagination, and so helps to produce, says Cassian, puritas cordis, a pure heart, the treasure of the contemplative life; each narrows and sustainingly builds desire."(80) Has this been that which propelled Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, et al into questioning the nature of the language and the text their language seemingly echoed here.

The final section of Going Home leaves behind the lofty thoughts of the ancients returning to the more mundane, the more quotidian. Here Lilburn returns to Saskatchewan, where "I realized that at forty , though I had been probed by many psychologists, spent eight years in Jesuit formation, read many books, I had done nothing to educate myself to be someone who could live with facility, familiarity, where he was born."(170-1) He goes on to philosophize this experience: "We need to find our own way to take this place into our mouth; we must re-say our past in such a way that it will gather us here." And so we listen while he learns to be at home and to explore his surroundings.

And out of these surroundings and into his medieval philosophizing, he takes us to Orphic Politics which opens with the poem ‘Getting Sick’. One cannot but hear Hopkins in the heavily alliterated, anguished phrases:

I dug a slot into the gravel of no address,

I dug a slot warm as a hand into the air’s water-cliff.

The eye seeing me is a charred-wood-backed river cannonballing

through badlands badly disciplined, lizardly hills, water in mitres

of cinder freighting necessity’s weight past my head on the ground sleeping,

the eye’s windy mouth, love-yanked night wall; pines triple axel in it.

Coal-masked generosity, no name.(1)

Then, in the second section which begins with a prose piece ‘Sophocles’ appearing to be part of Plato’s Phaedrus, we are treated to a surrealistic impression of nature: "Ten yards of mineral hair fall inside the cruciform hummingbird,/inside these unthrottled, ox-bearded shoulders of wasps,/Egyptian quail, the Orient of the quail, are a ringed hand swum over this strangled grass,/the stone jaws of dragonflies, sleeps hinge over this near-fire ground."(13) This continues, in part II of ‘Meeting The Angel, Tasting What It Sees’, with a piece reminiscent of Robert Kroetsch: "I portaged the summa painting of religion, 4x6 glass,/through it September 2, 2005, afternoon, rain sprinkling done in Loss/Creek, alder leaves in stopped, oil-coloured water, stones with winter/like a boat tied up in them."(14) After another piece of prose from the Phaedrus, we come to ‘See You’ which begins with the words "Poor fuck"(25) and finally we are jettisoned free from Lilburn’s over-the-top style into his more down-to-earth one, delivered from homily to homey, to the style that won him the Governor General’s Award a while back where, rather than screaming at, he whispers in awe of nature and life.

The third section delivers us into medieval philosophy. The tie in between the two books is confirmed in ‘Politics’ when we encounter the line ‘And Don is with me’, the Don being Don McKay with whom Lilburn explored Saskatchewan in the last part of Going Home. There are Governor-General Award-winning lines here, such as "up flint-flashes of granular cold like the twelfth century church/sending up eros-scented ideas, and I go down to the staring/valley badly, practised limp, coyotes bones waving/in the stammered wind." We can see the ‘flint-flashes’ as the line is played off against the sentence in an indeterminate no-man’s-land of poetry v. prose with no winner.

All poetry is the survivor of a war between the forces of Eros and the forces of Agape. Lilburn’s poems reflect that war. In the poems with the most over-the-top language, he places the secular and the sacred back-to-back in such phrases as "barrel goateed with strips from Deutero-Isaiah"(24) or the line "Avicenna crests and skims in shoes of olive shade, above soles of moon" found in the same poem as the phrase "loop de loop, as it somersaults and woozes"(43). To combine levels of language as Lilburn does is an art. And it is this art which makes Lilburn a must read whether in prose or in poetry.