The Whole and What May Follow

from THE WHOLE AND WHAT MAY FOLLOW


1.
The drama of our time is the coming of all men into one fate, "the dream of everyone, everywhere." The fate or dream is the fate of more than mankind. Our secret Adam is written now in the script of the primal cell. We have gone beyond the reality of the incomparable nation or race, the incomparable Jehovah in the shape of a man, the incomparable Book or Vision, the incomparable species, in which identity might hold & defend its boundaries against an alien territory. All things have come now into their comparisons. But these comparisons are the correspondences that haunted Paracelsus, who saw also that the key to man’s nature was hidden in the larger nature.

The very form of man has no longer the isolation of a superior paradigm but is involved in its morphology in the cooperative design of all living things, in the life of everything, everywhere. We go now to the once-called primitive—to the bush man, the child, or the ape—not to read what we were but what we are. In the psychoanalysis of the outcast and vagabond, the neurotic and psychotic, we slowly discover the hidden features of our own emotional and mental processes. We hunt for the key to language itself in the dance of the bees or in the chemical code of the chromosomes.

2.
The drama of our time is the coming
of all men into one fate,
"the dream of everyone, everywhere."
The fate or dream is the fate
of more than mankind.
Our secret Adam is written now
in the script of the primal cell.
We have gone beyond the reality
of the incomparable nation or race,
the incomparable Jehovah
in the shape of a man,
the incomparable Book or Vision,
the incomparable species,
in which identity might hold & defend
its boundaries against an alien territory.
All things have come now
into their comparisons.
But these comparisons are the
correspondences that haunted Paracelsus,
who saw also that the key to man’s nature
was hidden in the larger nature.

The very form of man has no longer
the isolation of a superior paradigm
but is involved in its morphology
in the cooperative design
of all living things,
in the life of everything, everywhere.
We go now to the once-called primitive—
to the bush man, the child, or the ape—
not to read what we were
but what we are.
In the psychoanalysis of the outcast
and vagabond, the neurotic and psychotic,
we slowly discover the hidden features
of our own emotional and mental processes.
We hunt for the key to language itself
in the dance of the bees
or in the chemical code of the chromosomes.

Robert Duncan

Posted over on Poems & Poetics

1. The prose written by Robert Duncan.
2. Line breaks by Glenn Buttkus