The whisper apparatus

79 Pages·2011·0.2 MB·English

THESIS

THE WHISPER APPARATUS

Submitted by

Klayton Elliot Kendall

Department of English

In partial fulfillment of the requirements

For the Degree of Master of Arts

Colorado State University

Fort Collins, Colorado

Summer 2011

Master's Committee:

Advisor: Juan Morales

Cynthia Taylor
Donna Souder
ABSTRACT

THE WHISPER APPARATUS

The Whisper Apparatus details the poet's lifelong withdrawal (and subsequent
suffering) from the world of techne-logos to one of poiesis. The manuscript's tripartite
structure corresponds directly to the poet's life and subtly depicts via occult motifs a
journey inward and a return outward, a psycho-spiritual transformation occurring along
the way. The Whisper Apparatus attempts, via the medium of verse, to speak the only
linguistic alternative to techne-logos available to human beings on a dying planet: the
language of witchcraft, the poetics of voodoo, the instructive "midwifery" of the pre-
Socratic pagan philosophers. The poet offers an alternative to the misappropriation of
Aristotelian mimesis by utilizing taxonomies of intuition, not scientific empiricism, by
cataloging the subconscious via trance and dream. For the true sorcerer of words,
Platonic anamnesis involves the logic of correspondence, not mathematical identity. The
Whisper Apparatus, utilizing occult themes such as demonic possession and ritual drug
use as a means of overcoming the psychotic symptoms and tendencies of a capitalist,
patriarchal, and Puritanical upbringing, fits squarely in the Renaissance tradition of
flirting with taboo, a transformation aesthetic employed by Sir Philip Sidney in Astrophil
and Stella.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to my advisor, Juan J. Morales, whose enthusiasm for the paradoxical
nature of poetry inspired me both to reach back and move forward at a time when I
would have done neither by myself.
A special thanks to all my dark sisters, living and dead, who have gathered with
me beneath the moon. Robert Graves insisted that the "function of poetry is religious
invocation of the Muse" (14)—and I trust he is correct. My poetry, indeed all my art, is
for Her.
"Gynecologos," "Über," "Dark Idyll," "Kid," "January as Genesis," and portions
of "The Eternal Night of My Twenty-First Year" appear in visions&(re)visions, a novella
by Klayton Elliot Kendall (Wasteland Press, 2002). "Gynecologos" and portions of "The
Eternal Night of My Twenty-First Year" appear in Slope #16 (Fall/Winter 2002). "The
Cobbler" appears as "The Spatial-Distortion Cone, pt. 31" in the January 2008 issue of
NEWSPEAK! "Pursuit" and "January as Genesis" appear in the 2009-2010 edition of
Tempered Steel. "The Crab" appears as "Thirst" in the Spring 2011 issue of Pilgrimage
Magazine.

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DEDICATION

The Whisper Apparatus is dedicated to my wife, Patricia, whose support made
this thesis possible.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract ………..……………………………………………………………………... ii
Acknowledgements …………………………………………………………………... iii
Dedication ……………………………………………………………………………. iv
Table of Contents …………………………………………………………………….. v
Introduction: The Whisper Apparatus: A Contemporary Application of Sidney's
Alchemical Aesthetic ………………………………………………………………… 1
Works Cited ………………………………………………………………………….. 26
The Whisper Apparatus ………………………………………………………………. 29
Phase I: Nigredo ……………………………………………………………………… 30
Kid ……………………………………………………………………………………. 30
typing ………………………………………………………………………………… 31
Becoming a Happy Failure …………………………………………………………... 32
Ode to High School …………………………………………………………………... 37
gadfly ………………………………………………………………………………… 38
The Manuscript ………………………………………………………………………. 39
The Cobbler …………………………………………………………………………... 41
Empedocles Said That God Is a Circle Whose Center Is Everywhere and Whose
Circumference Is Nowhere …………………………………………………………... 42
Summer Job …………………………………………………………………………... 43
Rara Avis ……………………………………………………………………………... 45
Über …………………………………………………………………………………... 46
Pursuit ………………………………………………………………………………... 47
Phase II: Albedo ……………………………………………………………………… 49
The Eternal Night of My Twenty-First Year ………………………………………… 49
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The Crab ……………………………………………………………………………… 49
The Lion ……………………………………………………………………………… 50
The Virgin ……………………………………………………………………………. 51
The Scales ……………………………………………………………………………. 52
The Scorpion …………………………………………………………………………. 53
The Archer …………………………………………………………………………… 54
The Goat ……………………………………………………………………………… 55
The Water Bearer …………………………………………………………………….. 56
The Fish ………………………………………………………………………………. 57
The Ram ……………………………………………………………………………… 58
The Bull ………………………………………………………………………………. 59
The Twins ……………………………………………………………………………. 60
Phase III: Rubedo …………………………………………………………………….. 61
January as Genesis …………………………………………………………………… 61
Gynecologos ………………………………………………………………………….. 62
Eurorailed …………………………………………………………………………….. 63
Legs …………………………………………………………………………………... 64
Volume 29 ……………………………………………………………………………. 65
Those Three Words …………………………………………………………………... 66
Sunday Puzzle ………………………………………………………………………... 67
Fun with Numbers ……………………………………………………………………. 69
Exodus ………………………………………………………………………………... 70
Antichrist ……………………………………………………………………………... 71
Dark Idyll …………………………………………………………………………….. 72
The Piping of Pan …………………………………………………………………….. 73
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INTRODUCTION:
THE WHISPER APPARATUS: A CONTEMPORARY APPLICATION OF SIDNEY'S
ALCHEMICAL AESTHETIC

For Sir Philip Sidney poetry is a quasi-alchemy that transforms nature’s “brazen”
world into gold. The poet, like the alchemist distilling the elements in pursuit of the
Philosopher’s Stone, actually refines nature: "Nature never set forth the earth in so rich
tapestry as divers poets have done; neither with so pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-
smelling flowers, nor whatsoever else may make the too much loved earth more lovely.
Her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden" (Defence 216). An agent of
transformation, poetry’s ends are to “teach and delight” (217). With its method—the
sublimation of eros—poetry is “an art of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it in the word
mimesis—that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth—to speak
metaphorically, a speaking picture [. . .]” As Sidney reveals, mimesis—for the sake of
perfecting the represented—is a project of self-transformation, or learning:
This purifying of wit—this enriching of memory, enabling of judgement, and
enlarging of conceit—which commonly we call learning, under what name soever
it come forth, or to what immediate end soever it be directed, the final end is to
lead and draw us to as high a perfection as our degenerate souls, made worse by
their clayey lodgings, can be capable of. (219)

As the poet labors in the creation of a golden world of pure forms, forms that are already
familiar to the eternal mind (or Nous, as will be discussed), the poet is incapable of
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deception, as he provides no additional commentary. “Now, for the poet,” writes Sidney,
“he nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth” (235). In order to answer the charges of
poetry's critics—that poetry is merely the Satanic, boastful vanity of man—Sidney
defends the analogous relationship between the mind(s) of the poet and God. His poetics
epitomizes the Renaissance project as it combines the wisdom of Plato and Aristotle by
implicitly recognizing the necessity of Plato’s doctrine of recollection in the process of
refinement and by giving explicit credence to Aristotelian mimesis. For Sidney, and
indeed for any Renaissance epistemology, learning is necessarily a mimetic-alchemical
process: the human mind recognizes in nature what the mind of God already perfects.
Poetry is divine speech that clears away the mind’s dross: "in nothing [man] showeth so
much as in poetry, when with the force of a divine breath he bringeth things forth
surpassing her doings [. . . O]ur erected wit maketh us know what perfection is, and yet
our infected will keepeth us from reaching unto it" (217).
To appreciate how poetry “teaches,” one must consider the passage in Plato’s
Meno, wherein Socrates introduces the epistemological doctrine of recollection
(anamnesis):
As the soul is immortal, has been born often and has seen all things here and in
the underworld, there is nothing which it has not learned; so it is in no way
surprising that it can recollect the things it knew before, both about virtue and
other things. As the whole of nature is akin, and the soul has learned everything,
nothing prevents a man, after recalling one thing only—a process men call
learning—discovering everything else for himself, if he is brave and does not tire
of the search, for searching and learning are, as a whole, recollection. (880)

Knowledge, already present, is contained within the “erected wit” (Defence 217), as
ideally the minds of God and man are identical. The poet’s golden forms serve to endear
the reader to Truth: “poetry ever sets virtue so out in her best colours, making Fortune her
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well-waiting handmaid, that one must needs be enamoured of her” (225). Poetry—
radically eidetic as understood by Sidney—is a systematic recollection of true forms.
How else can the “wit” function erectly in a postlapsarian world if not guided by divine
memory?
Neoplatonic Elizabethans understood a tripartite cosmology—drawn from
Ptolemy and Dionysius the Areopagite—depicting “the sublunary, the fallen world in
which we live, subject to change and decay; the celestial, the unchanging world of the
planets and stars; the supercelestial, the dwelling of angels and the Godhead” (Roche
705). Because the entire cosmos is “contained within the mind of God” (a first principle
of Hermetism), the three worlds are “analogically correspondent”—meaning that
relationships affected in one sphere affect analogous relationships in the others (705,
706).
Foundational to Renaissance epistemology and cosmology was the Corpus
Hermeticum, the ancient teachings of Hermes Trismegistus translated in the 1460's by
Marsilio Ficino, who was directed by Cosimo de' Medici to cease translation of Plato for
"this even more significant work" (Salaman 9). Especially significant is The Emerald
Tablet of Hermes which begins: “What is below is like that which is above; and what is
above is like that which is below: to accomplish the miracle of the one thing” (Tyson
711). Expressed in The Emerald Tablet is “the idea of resemblance and analogy between
the celestial and sublunary sphere and their creation by a single divine being or principle
acting upon a common underlying substance and for a single purpose” (Linden 20). The
process of alchemy, and indeed of poetry, is purification: a cleansing of the “infected
will” (Defence 217) that impedes our view of the cosmological analogy.
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In his essay “Tudor Aesthetics,” Clark Hulse claims that “Sidney’s idea of the
poetic second world in a sense redefines mimesis as an act of prosthesis: a repairing of a
defect of nature, a defect that exists both in the material world and in language” (57).
However, this interpretation runs counter to Sidney’s stated program of purification, not
prosthesis, as a prosthetic is an artificial substitute for what is lost or degenerate. God has
perfected nature—it is man’s “infected will” (Defence 217) that blinds him to true nature,
that distorts the imagination and taints the soul. Sidney does not suggest, as Hulse would
imply, that man is greater than God, that God’s creation is “brazen” and man’s
“golden”—but that the Bronze world of quotidian reality is in fact the Golden world of
Eden, that man has never set foot from Paradise, that his expulsion was a blinding. Man,
through the original sin of Adam, has merely forgotten the analogous relationship
between the various agents of the tripartite cosmos. The poet—as teacher to man—
affirms nothing; he adds nothing (235). His ends are strictly alchemical: to reduce nature
to its ideal forms of Beauty, forms with which the eternal mind (Nous) is already familiar.
In Astrophil and Stella, over the course of 108 sonnets (108 being the number of
Penelope’s suitors in The Odyssey—a possible allusion to Penelope Rich, Sydney’s
married love interest) and 11 songs, Sidney transforms the spurned, tormented lover,
Astrophil, into pure poetry, and thus, by the oft repeated intention of his art, into pure
Love—Cupid himself. “Sonnet 45” is a key to this transformational process:
Stella oft sees the very face of wo
Painted in my beclowded stormie face,
But cannot skill to pitie my disgrace,
Not though thereof the cause herself she know:
Yet, hearing late a fable which did show
Of lovers never knowne, a grievous case,
Pitie thereof gate in her breast such place,
That, from that sea deriv'd, teares’ spring did flow.
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