Czeslaw Milosz and the Metaxy

Czeslaw Milosz once told an interviewer that during his long life he had experienced two conditions of terror: the first in Poland under the Nazi and Communist regimes, the second in the U.S. under economic terrorism.

In his prose and poetry Milosz responds – perhaps “resists” is a better way to put it — to all kinds of ideology that reduce human life to conceptual models that are alien to human freedom. His output in prose and poetry, fiction and memoir, was prodigious and reflects his “search for truth” by means of what as a professor he would call “polyvocalism” (as embodied for example in the novels of Dostoevsky, which he taught in his classes at Berkeley). Readers of his many books experience a liberation from the need for a universal perspective from nowhere and learn to hear many voices from many times and traditions in the search for truth. In this sense, Milosz is an exemplary metaxological writer. In his intellectual agonies and religious scruples, many heretical, he is one-of-a-kind.

Milosz was born in Lithuania in 1911 and in Warsaw during the war years worked for the resistance. He was raised as a Roman Catholic in a rural way of life which supplied him with images of paradise for the rest of his life. As a young rebellious poet he wrote about “catastrophe” and drew on apocalyptic forms of thought. In 1946 he enetered the diplomatic service of the new People’s Republic of Poland. After serving in Washington D. C. he returned to Warsaw and defected to the West – to Paris — in 1951. There he wrote his classic account of intellectual accommodation to the ideology of Stalinism, The Captive Mind. Some of his colleagues at the time saw this as a “defection” to the West; Milosz’s autobiographical writings – and like Montaigne, Milosz is always autobiographical—involve him in a deeply dialectical response to his own “trans-shifting” (Herrick) times.  He immigrated to the U.S. in 1960, and became Professor of Slavic Languages at U.C.Berkeley. In Visions of San Francisco Bay (published in English in 1982) he writes with the radical simplicity that became Milsoz’s trademark as he matured; the ironies are thick and sometimes disarming. In the 1970s he began to translate various books of the Bible into Polish; he also published books of poetry in English and seemed to me at the time to have almost become a contemporary American poet. In 1980 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.  He died in 2004.

Reading Milosz involves a freshening sense of going against the grain, of strategic reconfigurations of key narratives. In his useful book Theology and the Spaces of Apocalyptic (Marquette University Press 2009), Cyril O’Regan defines the metaxy as a space between two other apocalyptic spaces characterized by “fullness” and “emptiness”; the first indicates the space occupied by, say, Balthasar, the second by, say, Walter Benjamin.

Along with O’Regan’s other books on the gnostic return in modernity, this little book is proving very useful as I develop a metaxological poetics. For example, his description of metaxical “space” as a verb is a pungent formulation recalling Eric Voegelin’s meditations in In Search of Order. As we’ve seen in earlier essays, the idea of “narrative,” which helps O’Regan differentiate the key element of reconfiguration of the original Biblical narrative, can be applied with great discretion to poetic texts. And, as demonstrated in earlier essays on Heaney and Stevens, we can see the metaxy unfolding in the “narrative” movement within the space designated by a short poem.

Enter Milosz. His readings of the gnostic return confound the elegant taxonomies of the theologian. With all due confessions of betrayal, Milosz remains loyal to original Biblical values as he developed a literary technique of polyvocalism as a response to ideological terror and its social institutionalizations. In practice, Milosz was open to a diversity of voices, many considered heretical; while he remained loyal to the Catholic faith of his childhood, he drew on sources such as William Blake, Swedenborg, Gnosticism, and especially Manicheanism, on which he taught an undergraduate course. O’Regan’s meticulous attention to the full array of theological responses to apocalyptics gives the reader of Milosz plenty to think about; he himself notes Milosz’s strong rejections of the idea that Blake was a gnostic. But reading Milosz in this context throws light on his intentions in response to “Ulro” — he uses Blake’s term in The Land of Ulro (English edition 1984). “Ulro” refers in Milosz to Voegelin’s “scientism:  to the regime of the anti-traditional forms of experience that emerged in modernity undergirded by reductive ideologies.

Milosz’s polyvocalism as a response to Ulro is part of a metaxological poetics. While his personal agon may be dramatized in terms of his loyalty to his native Catholic realm, Milosz resisted the central trends of modern philosophy. The metaxy has its roots in Greek philosophy and there are plural metaxies that come into play in modernity. In attending to the irreducible fullness of experience, the contemporary Irish philosopher William Desmond is, as O’Regan notes, both poetic and encyclopedic. O’Regan’s essay on Desmond in Between System and Poetics: William Desmond and Philosophy after Dialectic (Thomas A. F. Kelly, ed,, Ashgate, 1988) is perhaps the best essay yet written on Desmond. O’Regan points out that for Desmond philosophy is a response to experiences that are primitive (that of others, evil, or value) and modes of experience that are primal (wonder and perplexity). For Desmond, the emphasis is always on experience as conceptualized by the major philosophies of the Western canon. But the roots of Desmond’s analysis of consciousness are in a radical – “root” – way of primal experience that transcends all determinations, which in fact makes all determinations possible. This radical root itself is beyond determination. For Milosz, the “sacred” is both rooted narratively (e.g. Biblical myth) and experiential wonder and imagination.

Because of the lucidity and richness of his analysis of experience, Desmond helps us read Milosz. Milosz’s experience of evil made him a pessimist and a student of Manicheanism; and his experience of primal wonder made him an exponent of apokatastasis, the ancient belief that all things shall be restored in the end to their identities in time. As a Catholic, Milosz was agonizingly aware that his beliefs put him at odds with the canonical teachings of the Church. As a self-consciously modern poet, he had no brief for canons. The tensions remained. Adapting a saying of his cousin Oscar Milosz, Czeslaw would often say that what matters is the search for truth.

The tensions informing Milosz’s sense of human consciousness are evident everywhere in his work. Also evident is what O’Regan describes, in his essay on Desmond, as a whole “open rather than closed, fissured by transcendence rather than articulating immanence, and completely mediated rather than dialectically self-mediated” (92). “Completely mediated” refers I think to the primal ethos as always in play: that is, in another vocabulary, the sacred is always there in the between. For Desmond, the metaxy reconnects each mode of experience with the primal ethos of being. This ethos is always already in play; the other ways (univocal, equivocal, dialectical), which have their truths, yet reduce it to one or the other dimension of experience. There is no final synthesis: the metaxy happens in consciousness when consciousness opens up to the source of experience beyond consciousness as shaped by the univocal, equivocal, and dialectical ways. This is not “apocalyptic” in the common sense of the term because it does not destroy or overcome the more limited ways to God; they remain important to finite consciousness. For Desmond, this final opening of the metaxy is especially relevant to how we understand our experience of great art.

In a word, philosophy needs great art. Of the metaxy Desmond writes, “It lives between peril and crux. As a figuring of the primal ethos, it divines the nature of the togetherness, the absolved relativity, with heed to the difference, and without forgetting the transcendence of the divine and its reserves. We need a finessed, transdialectical logos of the metaxu” (God and the Between, 117).

At a more granular level, Desmond’s analysis of experience into four “ways of being” – the univocal, the equivocal, the dialectical, and the metaxological – is useful for our understanding of Milosz’s polyvocalism.  As I showed in earlier essays, lyric poems take shape under the sign of the metaxy: the movement within the poem is between various types of reductive consciousness and towards metaxological or full, porous consciousness. We’ve seen how a poet like Stevens explores reality in terms of the imagination. And, as we saw in the commentary on a poem by Heaney, the dimensions of the space may be thought of as “archaeological,” a figure which combines space and time.

In Milosz’s late lyric, “Realism,” the metaxical movement is sponsored by a meditation on works of art. As meditation, the whole poem becomes metaxological space.

We are not so badly off, if we can

Admire Dutch painting. For that means

We shrug off what we have been told

For a hundred, two hundred years. Though we lost

Much of our previous confidence. Now we agree

That those trees outside the window, which probably exist,

Only pretend to greenness and treeness

And that language loses when it tries to cope

With clusters of molecules. And yet, this here:

A jar, a tin plate, a half-peeled lemon,

Walnuts, a loaf of bread, last – and so strongly

It is hard not to believe in their lastingness.

And thus abstract art is brought to shame,

Even if we do not deserve any other.

Therefore I enter those landscapes

Under a cloudy sky from which a ray

Shoots out, and in the middle of dark plains

A spot of brightness glows. Or the shore

With huts, boats, and on yellowish ice

Tiny figures skating. All this

Is here eternally, just because, once, it was.

Splendor (certainly incomprehensible)

Touches a cracked wall, a refuse heap,

The floor of an inn, jerkins of the rustics,

A broom, and two fish bleeding on a board.

Rejoice! Give thanks! I raised my voice

To join them in their choral singing,

Amid their ruffles, collets, and silk skirts,

Already one of them, who vanished long ago.

And our song soared up like smoke from a censer.

After the opening reference to Dutch painting, with its luminous realism, Milosz refers to the modern condition of dualism whereby what is univocally out there is also bracketed as clothed in mental draperies added by the intellect. As he argues in The Land of Ulro, this is the world of abstraction constructed by early modern philosophy.

The poem follows the narrative path of Desmond’s four senses of being. The univocal way leads in the narrative of consciousness to the equivocal; we doubt our senses. Greenness and treeness are essences that exist only in the mind.  As we doubt, we follow a dialectic that can only undercut our very sense of self. What saves us is the painting, the art. Loyal to our experience of the art,  somehow we finesse the differences and still believe. The poem becomes a metaxical space where within the narrative of the ways of being, space becomes liturgical, and the poet a priest.

If this is irony, this degree of irony can be disorienting to modern readers. Polyvocalism it is. It deserves another name.

To review the final stage of the metaxical journey: And yet this here: Nevertheless we “enter” the landscapes of realism. Though as exponents of abstraction – and Abstract art – we really don’t deserve it, we can participate in what we behold. Indeed, it is hard not to believe in its lastingness; after all, the paintings reach us over centuries of modernist deformation of consciousness. Milosz’s study of apokatastasis comes into play here as often in his works. And this, in O’Regan’s terms, is his “metalepsis” of canonical apocalyptic. His “swerve.” Swerve he does, and must, to make sense of his experience. He’s on sacred ground, guilty as sin.

Having once happened, these beings are. They draw on the original ethos of being. Milosz’s metaxological, ironic finesse of crippling mental habits of modernity restores a world of “luminous things” (the title of his best-selling anthology of world poetry).  Following through to the metaxical space, he is “already one of them, who vanished long ago.” The poem, which began with an account of his modern alienatioin, plagued by the disfiguring figurations of univocal, equivocal, and dialectical modes, finally breaks into the metaxical space of praise.

Also available are “Seamus Heaney and the Metaxological Narrative,” “A Late Poem by Wallace Stevens about the Metaxy,”  “Geoffrey Hill and the Metaxy,” “Elizabeth Bishop and the Metaxy,” and “The Question of Literary Form.”

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