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"A Scattering of Salts": Merrill's Temporal Innocence

2004, Twentieth-Century Literature

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"A Scattering of Salts": Merrill's Temporal Innocence Author(s): Reena Sastri Reviewed work(s): Source: Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 50, No. 3 (Autumn, 2004), pp. 239-267 Published by: Hofstra University Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4149258 . Accessed: 04/09/2012 12:17 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. . Hofstra University is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Twentieth Century Literature. http://www.jstor.org A Scatteringof Salts: Merrill'sTemporal Innocence Reena Sastri In A Scatteringof Salts the return of innocence "with a difference" (Poems 651)1 is Merrill's aim and his subject. This volume's poems seek ways to combine innocence and experience, to achieve a renewal of innocence that does not deny knowledge, experience, or time. Merrill desires innocence as an openness to the possibilities of each new moment, a way to approach the present and future with potential for wonder and hope. But his is not an Adamic stance that erases the past, motivated by a will to what Emerson calls an "original relation to the universe" (3).2 Neither is it an elegiac yearning for an idealized childhood or Milton's "native innocence" (373) prior to knowledge and guilt.3 Rather, like Blake's, Merrill's innocence "dwells with Wisdom" (697).4 Like Stevens in "The Auroras of Autumn," Merrill pursues innocence through confrontations with change and death. But Stevens struggles to find or imagine an innocence outside of time, "innocence / As pure principle" (361), not subject to mutability.5 Merrill relinquishes desire for purity or transcendence and invents a contingent innocence that arises in time and is subject to change.6 It is a shifting, dynamic balance of contraries, an ongoing poetic creation that does not reconcile opposites into harmonious simplicity.7 Its aspects of youth and age, hope and dread, imagination and knowledge "dissolve / And meet in astounding images of order" (Merrill, Poems 11), the balance between opposing terms constantly changing. A Scatteringof Salts invents a new figure for this complex innocence: a gem or crystal seen in its temporal, material process of becoming, a "bright alternation" (674) of crystallized form and contingent flux. This volume's gems are very different from the static, decorative ones Literature 50.3 Twentieth-Century Fall2004 239 ReenaSastri that encrust FirstPoems,those "emeralds. . . sapphires. . . pearls"that Richard Howardsees as the defining featureof that work (33). Howard reserveshis praisefor laterpoems that get "into the streamof occurrence" (13) and the unusualearlypoem that dismisses"jewelsand emblems in favorof happenings"(12).8In A Scattering of Salts"Gemlikeprojectskeep forming" (Poems638), but they are productsof "the streamof occurrence,""happenings"in motion and in time. Saltscrystallizeand dissolve; layers of calcium carbonateaccrete to form a pearl,which in time is droppedback into the sea;"molecules"under heat and pressurearerearranged to form gemstones,and the same forces "de-crystallize"marble to "chalk"(606). The gem formation and chemical synthesisin "Press Release,"the saltsthat dissolveand recrystallizein "A DownwardLook" and"An UpwardLook,"the materialsthatundergomelting,cooling,and "Volcanic metamorphicor syntheticrearrangementin "A Look Askance," and "The all model an "Alabaster," Pyroxenes" ongoing alternaHoliday," tion between the achievedgem and the temporaldissolutionout of which it arisesand to which it returns.Withits dynamicinteractionof random fragmentsand orderedmirrorsthat createthe appearanceof symmetrical patterns-gemlike arrangementsrealizedonly momentarily-the kaleidoscope that appearsin "PressRelease" (638) offers one version of this process and a striking image of how the volume balancesthe aleatory and the constructed.' Haunted by AIDS, Merrill in A Scattering of Saltsis more awarethan ever of the contingency of innocence, and more resolvedto continue to build it anew.AIDS is a quiet but pervasivepresencein the volume.It is there when a "computervirus"strikesthe poet's laptop (635) and when "patriciancells await / Invasionby barbaricviruses"(641), when "The Monster"speaksfrom a Scottishloch-"They have diagnosedmy presI mutate,I metastasize" ence, neverfound me. A shape-shifter, (630)-and when "unheardambulances"threatento "wakethe graysleeper"(662).It is both an internalthreatand a "GreatPlague"(643) affectinga broader community.Linking sex and death,AIDS presentsa compound, formidablechallengeto innocence.Eroshaslong been a form of innocence in Merrill'spoetry,the recurrenceof love a "triumphof hope over experience" (Vendler46), but AIDS shadowseros with illnessand death.In the 1990s homosexualityno longer represented,as it did in the 1950s,"the worst iniquity,"in Merrill'swords,"my parents(andmany of my friends) could imagine" (Recitative 80), but AIDS threatensto redemonize it in 240 A Scattering of Salts:Merrill'sAchieved Innocence the popular imagination.10 These late poems must work to acknowledge how AIDS alters the erotic landscape without allowing love to be wholly infected with fear or guilt. These concerns form in part the pressures under which Merrill achieves his knowing innocence, an innocence that includes eros and death. Death is one among many chemical and geological processes he imagines working transformations between the organic and the inorganic: chemical reactions, atoms and molecules cross and recross the boundary between living and dead. In Thom Gunn's The Man with Night Sweats, death cuts off such interchange: friends' deaths from AIDS leave the speaker frozen in a marble block, an unfinished sculpture. "Abandoned incomplete," he writes, "I find no escape / Back to the constant play of give and change" (80). Merrill's stones themselves display the give and change that the poet strives to maintain in the face of his own turning to stone. Acknowledging that, in Eliot's words, "Every poem [is] an epitaph,"the volume also emphasizes that "Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning" (Eliot, Poems 208). Insistently temporal, the volume's innocence comes into being at the intersection of forward- and backward-looking impulses; it is as involved with death as it is with childhood. In "Alabaster,"a Dickinsonian slant of sunlight catches a marble tabletop so That its translucent inset glows, Mild, otherworldly, from the underside. As once in love or infancy Yesterday'scargo-pine cone, junk mail, keyFloats on a milky tide, Grime-swirled, with blood-pink glimmerings. For me The time I dread Is coming, thinks the table. (Poems606) "Yet"for "Long minutes after dawn, whatever weighs / Upon me light / Bears up." An "otherworldly" glow makes beautiful and satisfying, but ultimately does not alter,the conditions of bodily existence; when Merrill brings stone to life, he makes it not spirit but flesh: milk, blood, grime. The innocence evoked, "As once in love and infancy," is an embodied one. Under these conditions, although the "minutes" of grace are "long," they will yield to "a starless night." In Dickinson, we recall, "Alabaster Chambers" are tombs. 241 ReenaSastri The balance shiftsin other poems. Some are preoccupiedwith the past,others with an ephemeralpresent or with the courage needed to face the future;varying temporal emphasesyield new metaphorsand differentcombinationsof hope and"dread," "life fizzing up again"(649) and death'sshadow.In "Pearl"(665) innocence is elusive,the wonder of childhoodis lost,and the poem as pearldependson castingoff the mortal body."Pearl"respondsto time with a double movementthatparallelsthe volume's models of geological melting and metamorphosing,chemical dissolvingand crystallizing,and kaleidoscopicmotion.This doublemovement involvesmultiplecrossingsbetween pastand present,crossingsthat, like the passingof time figuredby the back and forth motion of a clock's pendulum, are both destructiveand creative,both honest about time's lossesand wishing to make gainsof them.The poem'sform is symmetrical, taking an hourglassshape on the page and rhymingthe first andlast of its 31 lines,the second and thirtieth,and so on." Rhymed lines match also in length (indicatedby indentation);the central(sixteenth)line is the shortest,consistingof the two words"Of grit"and rhymingwith the first and last.The hourglassrecallstwo earlierpoems, "Hourglass"from First Poems(in which each stanzatook the characteristic shape)and"Hourglass from Yellow Like "Pearl" is II" The Pages.12 them, preoccupiedwith time's but the laterpoem replacesthe flowing sandsof time with irreversibility, an "angrygrain of sand"and its slow transformationinto a pearl.In that form, however,it remainssuggestiveof loss, becoming, in a description of the final scene of"Sasha Guitry'sclassic Perlesde la Courronne," the "Gem swayinglike a pendulum"fromthe handof the "hero,"who, having "trackeddown / His prize,"accidentallydropsit overboardinto the sea. Although innocence in "Pearl"dependson Blakeanvision ratherthanan idealizedview of childhood,it is nonethelessthreatenedby time. In the opening lines the third person distancesthe speaker'schildhood self, characterizedby the knowledge he lacks,which the speaker provides: Well, I admit A smallboy'seyes grew rounderand lips moister To find it invisiblychained,at home in the hollow Of his mother'sthroat:the real,deepwaterthing. Farfrom the mind at six to plumb X-raywise those glimmeringlamplit 242 AchievedInnocence A Scattering ofSalts:Merrill's Asymmetriesto self-immolatingmite Or angry grain of sand Not yet proverbial. This childhood self,"athome" with his mother,captivatedby beautybut "Not yet"cognizantof its grittyreality,hasbeen lost.As an adult,although he retainsthe pearl,the speakerhas lost the mother: Yet his would be the hand Mottled with survivalShe having slipped (how?when?) pastreachThat one day graspedit. In the last lines, the hero of the film loses the pearl he has sought and found;it dropsinto the sea Where an unconsciousworld, my yawning oyster, Shuts on it. The waters of Lethe-the self's forgetfulnessor unconsciousness,the inhumanworld'sindifference-close over an irretrievable"Gem,""Sign," the pearlin the film is not pearlof "wisdom,""trophy,""prize."Although the pearl seen in childhood, paralleldescriptionsas "wisdom'strophy" and hero's"prize,"as well as the symmetryof the poem's form, conflate the two.What had been carefullyevoked,from its "glimmeringlamplit/ Asymmetries"to the slow accretionof "Skinupon skin,"is gone;like the cherishedsouvenirof time travelin "Novelettes"that"Falls[...] through cloud-shreds,"the pearlis "pastretrieval"(625). But as that last punning phrasefrom "Novelettes"suggests,the gain found through loss is the gain to the work: the poem as pearl.As the "smallboy's eyes grew rounder and lips moister,"containing its rhyme "oyster,"the poet opens himself to ("admit[s]")that "early mote / Of grit"at the center of the poem. Where the sea "Shutson" the pearl,he shutson the mote to generatethe poem. Earlier,the "lastshot"of Perlesde la Couronne is "One layer,so to speak,of calciumcarbonate/ That formed in me."Thefiguresuggeststhe conclusionto TheUseof PoetryandtheUse where Eliot quotesA. E. Housman'sdescriptionof the writing of Criticism, of poetry as a "secretion""like the pearlin the oyster"(138) and reminds us of Shakespeare's sea change:"those arepearlsthatwere his eyes"(139). Transformingorganicto inorganic-the poet to the poem-the process leavesthe art object as gem. 243 Reena Sastri IfpoNeitherEliotnorMerrillsuggeststhatsuchsecretionis passive. requires it andsimply"Time," etic creationrequiresopenness,receptivity, andthe wisdomnot"to gloat/ In verdictover also"X-ray"vision,"wit," meat"-as if the soulaspearlcouldcastoff the the shucked,outsmarted body andnot,likethe film'shero,"allsuavityandwit,"to be complacent The poet's"hand"in the firsthalfis matched about"wisdom'strophy." that the pearlis to understand by the hero'sin the second;to "gras[p]" yetthe we graspslipsthroughourfingers.It slipspastretrieval, everything poet invitesus to "manthe camera,follow"its descent,andin evoking of the past.In thepoem's childhoodthepoemperformsa partialretrieval wherebylossesbecomegains,the finalityof "Shutson secondmovement, sensethatwhena poemis finishedit"comesrightwitha it"evokesYeats's doesnot clicklikea closingbox"(LJetters24),13butthatformalsatisfaction compensatefor the senseof losswith whichthe poem ends.Thepearl's extractiondependson the oyster'sdeath,andthe poem'sfirstuse of the Inorganic firstpersonindirectlyidentifiesthe poetwiththe cast-offshell. itself,yet producedwithinandby a livingcreaturewhosedeathreleases closeanalogyfor the poem. it, the pearlcanseeman uncomfortably We mightdecidethatwhetherlossandgainbalanceone anotheror by"Asymwhetherthe poem,like the mother'spearl,is characterized metries"is a questionof vision.Withthat"angrygrainof sand/ Not yet that"mote/ Of grit"at the centerof the poem,Merrillinproverbial," "To "Auguriesof Innocence": visionof Blake's vokesthe now-proverbial see aWorldin a Grainof Sand/ Anda Heavenin aWildFlower/ Hold Infinityin the palmof yourhand/ AndEternityin an hour"(490).But how elusivethatvisionis.Thechild,we recall,couldnot see the sandin suggestto him either the pearl;norwouldthe sand"Not yet proverbial" a worldor the gem of Blake's"Mockon Mock on VoltaireRousseau" sandbecomesa Gem / Reflectedin the beams (to the visionary"every divine"[477]).Does the poet succeedwherethe childdid not?He has Thatwordapthe difficultyof "holding"anything. certainly"grasped" pearsin referenceto the film'shero,describedas holdingforth,thatsummernight, At the ship'srail,allsuavityandwit, Gernswayinglikea pendulum Fromhis fing oops! But Blake'ssuggestivelinesdo not, afterall,advocatethatsortof over- 244 A Scattering of Salts:Merrill'sAchieved Innocence confident grasping; they encourage the mind to expand, not the hand to contract. Merrill's "X-ray" vision draws in and expands out, crossing and recrossing to see the sand buried in the pearl, the hourglass implied by the sand, the "pendulum" formed by the "Gem swaying," and the poem as the pearl that forms within and outlasts the bodily self. The poet of "Pearl"is "X-ray wise" in tracing the crossings between abstract and concrete, childhood and adulthood, loss and gain, and in enabling us to "follow" them through the "camera" lens of his rigorously double vision. But where in "Alabaster""a milky tide" sustained embodied innocence for "Long minutes," the fulcrum of "Pearl"is that "mote / Of grit" admitted, transformed, and lost in a process that abandons the body as "shucked, outsmarted meat," a process that, despite the hourglass form, we recognize as irreversible. While "Pearl" evokes the difficult, elusive vision of Blakean innocence, "Volcanic Holiday" (617-18) pursues in Keatsian and Wordsworthian terms the relations between temporality,art, and passion.The poem's form-seven stanzas of seven lines rhyming across stanzas-embodies the process whereby lived experience is overlaid with subsequent contemplation; the pattern becomes apparent only through temporal layering.At the same time, the poem wrestles with art'sfidelity to present emotion. It demands, and finds, alternatives to both the Grecian Urn and Wordsworth's "spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion ... recollected in tranquility" (LyricalBallads 246) in the way it imagines art's response to time. It does this most conspicuously beginning in stanzas 5 and 6: 5 Adolescence, glowering unkissed: The obstacle course yearning Grew strong in. Cheek to cliff face, sheer devotion .... To be loved back, then, would have been to die. Then, not now. Show me the tomb Whose motto and stone lyre compete With this life-giving fever. As it fades 6 From the Zen chapel comes that song by Liszt. Is love a dream?A burning, Then a tempering? Beyond slopes gone ashen, Rifts that breathe gas, rivers that vitrify, 245 ReenaSastri Look! A bough faltersinto bloom. Twin rainbowscome and go, discreet, As when togetherwe hauntvirgin glades. Conjuring the "Ode on a GrecianUrn,"the speakerchooses breathing humanpassionoverart'seternalpresence,translatingthe moment of Keatsian"yearning"into the descriptionof an adolescent"gloweringunkissed" for whom "Tobe loved back [...] would havebeen to die."Theyouthful exaggeration-a versionof innocence now outgrown-doubles as a gloss on Keats'surn, whose lovers,stilled in art, can never kiss but are by the same token immortal,immune to a "burningforehead."Merrill'sspeaker chooses the "fever"of experience,fully awareof its brevity:no sooner is the fever affirmedthan it begins to fade.In the context of AIDS, where to love and "be loved back"may mean "to die,"the celebrationof "this life-giving fever"is a courageousone.The inorganicprocessesthatfollow the volcano'seruption suggestdeath ("slopesgone ashen")or at leastan end to motion ("riversthat vitrify")."Beyond"them, the poet imagines new life and new innocence. His "twin rainbows"attestto love'srenewal (ratherthan,like the solitaryWordsworthianrainbowwhose coming and going they repeatwith a difference,dimlyreflectinglost glory).YetMerrill also qualifieshope for that renewal:"As when together we hauntvirgin glades"combinesa wish for a new beginning,an emotionalvirginity,with the fearthat the loversare ghosts of their former selves. "Islove a dream?"the speakerasks,"A burning,/ Then a tempering?" Love cannot burn with a steadygemlikeflame;the heartand the self are tempered,hardenedlike steel by heatingand immersionin a processthat parallelsthe volcanic eruption,cooling, and solidifyingsuggestedby the title. This volcanic process evokes Wordsworth'smuch-quoted definition of poetry in the prefaceto LyricalBallads.Defining poetry as "the spontaneousoverflow of powerfulfeelings ... recollectedin tranquility," Wordsworthadds:"Now the music of harmoniousmetricallanguage,the sense of difficultyovercome,and the blind associationof pleasure"taken from similarliteraryworks,"all these imperceptiblymake up a complex feeling of delight,which is of the most importantuse in temperingthe painful feeling which will alwaysbe found intermingled with powerful descriptionsof the deeper passions"(266-67). Art tempersloss with aestheticpleasure.Yetat the same time, Merrill'spoem hints that to see through love's burning straightto its fading-to see through"passion" in the first stanzato its rhyming"ashen"in the sixth-may hastenthat 246 A Scattering of Salts:Merrill'sAchieved Innocence fading; seeing present emotion as future art may destroy innocence as receptivity, wonder, and good faith in love. To look forward, as the last stanza does, to looking back at-and writing about-emotion risks missing the experience in the present. Merrill avoids that risk here: 7 Moments or years hence, having reminisced, May somebody discerning Arrive at tranquil words for ... mere emotion? Meanwhile let green-to-midnight shifts of sky Fill sliding mirrors in our room -No more eruptions, they entreatWith Earth's repose and Heaven's masquerades. Attributing the future "tranquil words" to "somebody discerning," he acknowledges that the person who remembers emotion is not the person who experienced it. However, even as he imagines that "somebody" in the future may reminisce, he registers passion's power and immediacy through the speaker'spresent inability, indicated by the ellipsis and wondering question mark, to find for it adequate "tranquil words." "Meanwhile" returns us to the present, yet Merrill acknowledges that the present itself must be imagined in order to be experienced, at least in poetry: to render it he uses not the present tense but the subjunctive "let."14"Volcanic Holiday" ends in a reflective yet dynamic state, not with "more eruptions" but with "green-to-midnight shifts of sky" filling "sliding mirrors."Those mirrors, shifting as in a kaleidoscope, suggest a more dynamic model for art than "tranquil" recollection or the "cold pastoral" of static representation. This art matches the movement of time in the world of experience ("shifts of sky") with movement of its own. In its "shifts" of tone and image from stanza to stanza and its rapid evocation of the self's development from Keatsian "yearning" through a celebration of love's "life-giving fever" even "As it fades" to a pastoral renewal of love to a cool future and back to an uncertain and dynamic present, the poem enacts that controlled yet responsive motion. On "Earth,"the end of love and of life is stillness or "repose,"but art enacts the "masquerades" in which experience finds its afterlife or "Heaven." Merrill figures the adolescent yearnings evoked (and outgrown) in "Volcanic Holiday" in terms of the Paterian ideal-"To burn always 247 ReenaSastri with a hard,gemlike flame"-in his memoir A DiferentPerson(1993), an account of his coming of age as a poet and a gay man.Recounting a crucialpoint in his psychoanalysis, he recallshis persistentdesire"neverto breakfaith with the pure,gemlike feelings of adolescencelest [he] turn, like Dorian Gray,into a hideous and corrupt thirty-year-old"(183).His fear of corruptionand his changingPater's"hard"flame to a "pure"one suggestthatwhat he idealizedin those adolescentfeelingswas innocence. With the help of his analyst,the memoir records,the 25-year-old Merrill recognized that this ideal was keeping him from growing up. In A Scattering of Salts,Merrill transformsthis "pure,"unchanginginnocence. Returning with a differenceto the Paterianadjective,the poet of"Press Release" (638-40) reflects,"Gemlikeprojectskeep forming deep within / Our mine. Under what pressures?"The need to keep faithyields to the participle"keepforming,"staticenduranceto a processof destructionand renewal.Adolescence'spurityis replacedwith a maturepartnership("Our mine") that is both creativeand erotic.1s "PressRelease"begins by comparingthe laboratorycrystallization of a "new syntheticsubstance"to a sexualinitiation,and ends by imagining first the compound'sdissolving,then its recrystallizingin a new form, the "lovers'knot" of two Alpine climbersclaspinghands.In between,it recordsand enactsmotion, change,and chemical and artisticrearrangements of elements into new but impermanentconstructions.Theseconstructions,"Gemlikeprojects"of which the poem is one, form in "Our mine";the closenessof thatphraseto "our mind"and the pun on "mine" suggestthat the seeminglysolitarywork of artisticproductionmerges(as in The ChangingLightat Sandover) with the collaborativework of love. In figuring sexual love as a processboth scientific and creative,Merrill which callslove a crystallization: may havein mind Stendhal'sDe l'amour, Stendhaldevelopsthe metaphorby describinga baretree branchthrown into a salt mine, retrieved,after two or three months' exposure to the dampsalineatmosphere,coveredwith "petitscristauxmobileset cblouissants" (4:287) next referredto as diamonds.16In Merrill'shands,the image appearsparticularlyappropriateto homosexuallove, which here as in The ChangingLightbrings forth art-the poem as gem, formed under the pressuresthat the punningtitle'sfirstword suggests-rather than children. But AIDS means that love may also bring death.The poem respondsto the intensifiedbrevityof this Paterianshortday of frostand sun,the rapid transformationof the organic to the inorganic,by incorporatingthe in- 248 AchievedInnocence A Scattering ofSalts:Merrill's organicin its own gemlike character.But "PressRelease"is not a steady flameor only a multifacetedgem;its intricateform embodiesthe ongoing it describes,rearrangingelements,alternating yet discretetransformations between fluid "solution"and crystallinecompound. In its kaleidoscopic form, its crystallizationsand dissolutions,"PressRelease" is a "solution" (though one whose equilibriumis threatenedby the next "turn/ Of the kaleidoscope")to the problemof innocence within experience. The opening lines announce a chemical crystallizationnext figured as a sexualinitiation: Now comes word that a new syntheticsubstance Crystallizedin Sacramentofor the firsttime. After much coaxing.These virgin substances Don't know how. Or it "hurts"like the first time You were kissedby a man. From then on, each time Gets easierand perhaps-with crystals,who knows?More pleasurable.Soon this enlightenedsubstance, Its code (so to speak)cracked,its maidenheadtaken, Unblinkinglyreenacts,time aftertime, And in remote labs,a rite of passageunknown Two weeks ago. Analogous to the creation of a new substance,this initiation is more a beginning (the birth of the sexual self, of pleasureand enlightenment) than an end (to some idealized state of virginity or negatively defined innocence). In the penultimatestanza,Merrill returnsto the chemical model, usingit to askwhether,aftera more negativetransformationor diminishment,a positiverenewal-of love, of youthfulenergy,of health-is possible.When"longlankthreadsof polypeptide"havebeen "untied/ Rib/ bonwise," "Their one hope"is to take up "postures"of "preternatural Kinkiness,as in yoga,"shapes"like our lovers'knot"which, in turn like a crystal,"One dawnwill glitterfrom a furtherpeak."Like the loss of innocence at the beginning of the poem, the renewalof "hope"and strengthis figuredas both destructive("untied,""denatured")and creative(the "new synthetic substance"crystallizes,the "polypeptide[s]"fold into complex, organizedstructures).In the words of Yeats'sCrazyJane,"Nothing can be sole or whole / That has not been rent,"but as the prefixes"syn-"and "poly-"suggest,Merrillis more interestedin the multipleand composite 249 Reena Sastri than in the Yeatsian sole and whole. Further, the poem's rapid transitions show the impossibility of coming to rest in any achieved state, however tightly knotted or strenuously achieved. These lines exemplify the "rapid"shifts that characterize the poem as a whole, both thematically and formally. The "new synthetic substance" crystallizes and "polypeptide[s]" are "denatured";"Gemlike projects keep forming deep inside / Our mine"; "the clabber of rapids / Under the bridge reanimate[s], refigure[s] / The inert shadows we cast";"Innumerable [...] traits / Reorient themselves" within the individual;"a turn / Of the kaleidoscope" gives rise to startling shifts of "vision."Merrill matches discursive changes with frequent shifts of metaphor and, further, enacts formally the model of kaleidoscopic change that the poem invokes. The nine nine-line stanzasinvolve repetitions of end words, but these are often repetitions with a difference: corresponding end words take on different forms (plurals,varied verb forms, negatives-as when "know" becomes "unknown" or "fit" "unfitted"), or are used in different idiomatic expressions ("at a turn," "turn the light on," "wrong turnings"; "happy to be worked," "at work," "in the works"), or share a purely homophonic connection ("Hallowtide, "untied," "polypeptide"; "fits,""counterfeit"; "side,""suicides"; "concentrate," "traits").Words, like atoms, combine in different ways to produce new compounds, and such changes take their place among the myriad changes that the poem both records and creates. Using chance shiftings among verbal elements to create a highly organized structure, the poem is kaleidoscopic. The self is no less so: in the last stanza,"Innumerable [...] traits / Reorient themselves within the substance / He has contracted to become." Eliot's Four Quartetsprovides a model for a kaleidoscopic sort of innocence that bears comparison with Merrill's, though Eliot's religious discourse differs significantly from Merrill's more insistently aesthetic one. In lines that describe a radically kaleidoscopic vision, Eliot rejects the notion of "wisdom" coming with age: There is, it seems to us, At best, only a limited value In the knowledge derived from experience. The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies, For the pattern is new in every moment And every moment is a new and shocking Valuation of all we have been. (Poems 185) 250 A Scattering of Salts:Merrill'sAchieved Innocence Further, he questions the model of "evolution" as a way to view history, including the history of an individual life: It seems, as one becomes older, That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequenceOr even development: the latter a partial fallacy Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution, Which becomes [...] a means of disowning the past. (194) Merrill too questions any easy application of "superficial notions of evolution" to the story of what happens to "substance" in "time" (key end words in the first and last stanza).At the structural center of the poem (the fifth line of the fifth stanza), the speaker seems to accept the evolutionary model, reading that "'Against such dark views [as he has been entertaining], Nature's best provision / Remains the tendency of certain organisms / Long on the verge of extinction to return / At depths or altitudes they had once been unfitted / To endure."' But to accept the speaker's acceptance is to endorse a Romantic relationship to nature that Merrill ultimately undermines.17 The passage from "Nature" to the penultimate stanza's"hope" and the last stanza's"courage" is not a direct one. Numerous transformations intervene, transformationsthat illustratethe imaginative "work"-labor, but also embellishment-required for hope and courage. In order to crystallize, the "new synthetic substance" requires "much coaxing"; chemistry is "depicted as working" her "sampler" with "a new molecular stitch"; the plans of the lovers ("Gemlike projects") form "Under [...] pressures"; the transformation of the individual in the last stanza demands "concentrat[ion]" and "sweat."The creation of the work of art ("Today's nine-sided figure, / Prismatic epitome") is, by implication, equally arduous. Merrill's "hope," "courage," and renewed innocence are achieved (briefly) only by an active acceptance of the mortality on which nature insists. He counters teleological "notions" of evolution with a model of kaleidoscopic change, suggesting the importance of incorporating the "dark views" of experience: Whether you are at my side Or off shooting a film, or tigers, or rapids, Gemlike projects keep forming deep inside 251 Reena Sastri Our mine. Under what pressures?Today's nine-sided Figure, prismatic epitome, may at a turn Of the kaleidoscope-nightfall is rapid In these parts-yield to a fly's faceted vision Hatching a micromorgue of suicides From one poor sleeper. Buzzed awake, he turns The light on-ah, how old! Who could have envisioned Twenty years' loneliness, ill health, wrong turnings? He opens a book, squinting to clear his vision: "Against such dark views, Nature's best provision Remains the tendency of certain organisms Long on the verge of extinction to return At depths or altitudes they had once been unfitted To endure..." The plain language of "Twenty years' loneliness, ill health, wrong turnings" contrasts with the more elaborate syntax and figuration of the previous stanza, suggesting that beneath the verbal acrobatics (the play on the various meanings of "shooting," the reflexive reference to the "nine-sided / Figure" which is both gem and poem, the metaphor of the kaleidoscope) remains the plain truth of age, illness, regrets. Further, the echoes at work-of Blake's "The Fly" and "The Tyger" (its fearfully imagined "distant deeps or skies" behind these evolutionary depths or altitudes) and Dickinson's "I heard a Fly buzz" (223)-deepen the darkness that has fallen.18To the personal suffering of "loneliness, ill health, wrong turnings," such echoes add a "dark view" of human existence in which tiger devours lamb; God is remote, blind, or even malevolent; death is absolute; experience vanquishes innocence. Although the speaker seems to recover from this moment of crisis in the next lines, we soon see that what has been offered "'Against such dark views"' is not adequate: Eyes shut in all but visionary Consent, he lets the words reorganize Everything he lives for, until it all fits Or until he forgets them.What's the inorganic Teardrop in Bulgari's window to thesefits And flashes of blankness? 252 A Scattering AchievedInnocence ofSalts:Merrill's "Eyesshut,"the speakeris still in darknesslike the speakerof "I hearda Fly buzz":"And then the Windows failed-and then / I could not see to see-" (224). His passivitymight describe a positive receptivity to new perspectivesor arrangements-particularlylinguisticones-but for the anticlimaxthat follows:"until it all fits / Or until he forgets them." fits / And flashesof blankness"remind the speaker"how old" "[TJ]hese he has grown, and reduce the gem-already diminished from the aesthetic ecstasyof Pater'sgemlike flame to the item for sale in the jeweler's window-to blinding flashesof memory loss. If the speaker'sinnocence is to "return,"it will do so not by forgetting deathbut by incorporating mutabiliy. In the last stanzas,Merrill achievesa precariousbalancebetween innocence and experience. Solutions whereby molecules are untied Ribbonwise, or (to quote the technician)"denatured," Enervatethe long lank threadsof polypeptide. Their one hope then'sthe prompt recallto nature, To postureseven of some preternatural Kinkiness,as in yoga. Or like our lovers'knot. Looming throughpsychic azure-woe betide Its severer!-it also,if we concentrate, One dawn will glitterfrom a furtherpeak. In nature, To reachthe pass,you must follow,like it or not, Trailsof loam and caustic.By concentrating On flameworkoverhead,ice to sun slipknotted, Each climbersweatshis own salt concentrate Of courage.Innumerable,faster-stabbingtraits Reorient themselveswithin the substance He has contractedto become. So let us not Act like children.These are the Alps.High time For the next deep breath.My hand.Hold. Concentrate. Although, asVendlerobserves,these lines suggestWordsworth'scrossing of the Alps in book 6 of The Prelude,Merrill'sclimb is differentfrom Wordsworth'sinfinite upwardmovement ("Our destiny,our natureand our home / Is with infinitude-and only there"[216]).Once Wordsworth has crossedthe Alps,"thenceforwardall our course / Wasdownwards,"a 253 Reena Sastri disappointment that must be "usurp[ed]" by the "Imagination!-lifting up itself / Before the eye and progress of my song" (216); in Merrill, the imagination works to include both the high and the low. Merrill achieves this range in part by locating himself and his art "In nature,"-a very different nature from Wordsworth's.That phrase is stressed by its position as an extra foot at the end of the penultimate stanza, the only stanza that uses the Spenserian hexameter for its last line.19The changing forms of the end word nature-"our natures"; "'denatured'"; "recall to nature"; "preternatural";"In nature"-express a complex dynamic interchange between nature and art. (Merrill's changes to the root organ-"organisms"; "reorganize"; "inorganic"; "organ-/ Grinding"-do something similar.) Although he neither relies on nature for spiritual guidance nor translates natural into moral evolution, Merrill, unlike the Yeats of "Sailing to Byzantium," does not desire to move "out of nature."Yeats'slater "images that yet / Fresh images beget" (Poems 249) could well describe the shifting metaphors of "Press Release," not least in the suggestion of bodily reproduction, which distinguishes Merrill's andYeats'smodels for the imagination from Wordsworth's "unfathered vapor" (Prelude 216). In "Press Release," love, birth, and death (even when metaphorical) are situated in the body, as they are throughout the volume. In "Alabaster," the innocence possessed "once in love or infancy" returns as "a milky tide, / Grime-swirled, with blood-pink glimmerings"; here "courage" is rooted in "loam and caustic,""substance" and "sweat."The embodiment of Merrill's Alpine climb is striking; there is no sweat in Wordsworth. Loam and caustic might be thought of as the conditions of existence: the one an especially fertile soil, life-giving; the other a burning substance that destroys living tissue.While the end of "Press Release" puts "hope" and "courage" together with dread and despair, neither Vendler's nor Shetley's reading, it seems to me, places enough emphasis on the presence of death or the "dark views" that persist to define the achieved "courage" (the pressure that leads to the qualified release). Here as earlier, intertextual echoes deepen the darkness; our experience as readers of the texts to which Merrill alludes is part of the experience that must be faced and included. "Ice to sun slipknotted" suggests the rapid melting implied by Pater's"short day of frost and sun"; "flamework" and "ice" conjure the humorous but dark view of the powers of desire and hate in Frost's"Fire and Ice"; the image also perhaps recalls Shelley's "Mont Blanc," where, at the summit, "many a precipice / Frost and the Sun in scorn of mortal 254 A Scattering AchievedInnocence ofSalts:Merrill's power / Have piled:dome, pyramid,and pinnacle,/ A city of death,distinct with many a tower / And wall impregnableof beaming ice" (92). Moreover,if sweat suggeststhe embodiment of Merrill'sclimb, it also suggeststhe night sweatsof AIDS.What the speaker"has contracted"is a diseasethat may lead to death.Merrill does not reach for a transcendent "home [...] with infinitude";he accepts his diminishments,his contraction,without giving in to them. His Alpine crossingis no less courageous-indeed it is more courageous-for refusingto subordinate "substance"to spirit,body to mind. Yet the end of "PressRelease"also evokes a beginning.A meditation on the numbernine in the voice of WHA (Merrill'sAuden) nearthe end of Scripts for thePageantsuggeststhat the poem'snine-line stanzaspoint to birth both and death: 9 MY DEARS? THE BIRTHING MONTH THE STAGE B4 THE OVALENIGMA:LIFE'S INDRAWN BREATH, THE BASIN WHERE OUR OLD SELVESDROWN. ARABIC9 (AS ON YR TRANSCRIPTPAGE) FACE AVERTED FROM THE CIPHER LOOKS BACK ON THE LONG ROAD TRAVELLED. ROMAN IX SERVES FOR US: ONE FOOTSTEP FROM THE CRUX OF TIME WE STAND POISED WAITING TO LEAP IN (ChangingLight509) In the last three lines WHA refersto the new lives that await him and Mariaafterstagenine,but his words could applyalso to the living human "poised"before death.ThroughWHA's play on the shapesof the symbols for nine, the number,like Merrill in A Scattering, looks both to the past and to the future,both fearingdeath ("FACE AVERTEDFROMTHE CIPHER") and creatingthe futurein an artisticprocessof "birthing." If we should"not / Act like children,"an echo of Stevens'slate poem "The Desire to Make Love in a Pagoda"helps to define what innocence might nonetheless mean in the last stanza,in the context of love and death: In the firstinch of night, the stellarsummering At three-quartersgone, the morning'sprescience, As if, alone on a mountain,it saw far off An innocence approaching toward its peak. 255 (456) ReenaSastri Stevens'sconjunctionof"the firstinch of night"and"the morning'sprescience"happensin the imagination,in the "As if."His "innocence"is but still"faroff."In"The locatedin thatimaginativefuture,"approaching" Aurorasof Autumn,"a season"lavishing[...] itself in change"(359) prefiguresthe incessantchange of"PressRelease,"as Stevensacknowledges that death "may come tomorrow,. . . / Almost as a part of innocence" (362) and prefiguresMerrill'sapproachto death, which may be what "innocence is [...] is about to be. In Bloom's words about "Auroras," dialecticaland involves holding the imagination open to death"(277). innocence In "The Desire to Make Love in a Pagoda"as in A Scattering, arisesonly in the context of change.Stevens's"innocence approaching to its peak"anticipatesMerrill'slovers'knot that"One dawn will glitter from a furtherpeak." Because this complex innocence knows death and the desire and dangerof makinglove,we aretold "let us not / Act like children."But the gestureof claspinghandswith which the poem ends-"My hand.Hold. Concentrate"-complicates this exhortation.Especiallyto help with a difficultclimb or crossing,the gestureis appropriateto "children"or to an adultand a child, as the hand is extended both to offer help and to seek it. At the same time, the echoes of Keats's"This living hand"(384) and Blake's"The Tyger"("What the hand dare seize the fire?","what dread grasp / Dare its deadly terrors clasp?"[24]) make the hand powerful, potentiallydangerous,suggestiveof death.The hand is both the physical hand of the lover,standingfor the body by means of which we love,and that of the artist,reachingout to the readereven from beyond the grave. The "Concentrate"of poet and reader,as the lattermatchesthe former's concentrationon the poem, may itselfbe, in one sense,a "new synthetic The connection that is conjuredby the invitation to join substance."20 hands modulates the isolation of "Each climber"perspiringin solitary labor"his own saltconcentrate/ Of courage."Both love and art,at their best,succeed in sharingthe individual'ssubjectivevision. The "lovers'knot" that"One dawn will glitter from a furtherpeak" distanceslove in time and place. Like this knot (whose "severer"is anticipated),like the formationand denaturingof crystals,like the weaving and unweaving of ourselves,the claspingof hands is impermanent:the two words of the poem's title suggestthat the moment of contact is followed by the moment of letting go. Merrilldoes not let us forget that (in 256 A Scattering AchievedInnocence ofSalts:Merrill's Eliot'swords)"thepatternis new in everymoment / And everymoment is a new and shocking /Valuation of all we have been";"aturn / Of the kaleidoscope"changeseverything.Thefinal gestureembodiesthe willingness both to make the "perilouscrossing"(Merrill,Poems619), to clasp the hand of death,and to presswith a child'strustthe hand extendedby love while foreseeingits release. The volume's last poem, "An Upward Look" (674), confronts the conjunctionof the hand of love and the hand of deathin the case of HIV infection.The close of "PressRelease" evokes the self's contractionto mere "substance," yet separatesthe third-personself from the firstperson the who continue imaginativelyto climb."An UpwardLook" plural, pair that threshold to look upwardfrom within the graveand to goes beyond even a death from AIDS as"a part of innocence" (Stevens362). It accept begins afterlove'send: O heart green acre sown with salt by the departing occupier lay down your gallant spearsof wheat Salt of the earth each stellarpinch flung in blind defiancebackwards now takesits toll The erotic self has been put to pasture;the heart has become aYeatsian acreof grass.But this field hasbeen salted.Generatingelectricalimpulses, salt has kept the heartbeating;superstitiouslyflung backward,it brought luck;but it "now takesits toll,"figuring as a "departingoccupier"'sstrategy for making"earth"and its anagram"heart"barren.Although we may hear"tears"in "spears,"and taste them in salt,the alterationof nourishing ears of wheat into destructive"spears"is more than a chronicle of love and loss.As destructiveseeds"sown"by a love affairand leading to the grave,this poem's saltsare,among other things,a deadlyinfection-a high "toll"indeed.21 Calling the lover a "departingoccupier"introduceswar or military invasionas a metaphorfor both love and disease.24From an occupying soldier-Cupid's arrowsconvertedto spears-the lover next turns tiger: 257 Reena Sastri Up from his quieted quarry the lover colder and wiser hauling himself finds the world turning toys triumphs toxins into this vast facility the living come dearest to die in How did it happen Blake'squestion in "The Tyger,""When the starsthrew down their spears/ And water'd heaven with their tears,/ Did he smile his work to see? / Did he who made the lamb make thee?" (25), haunts these lines. In a world where erotic experience is also deadly, lover and beloved become innocent victim and corrupting source of infection. AIDS becomes the marker of a new fallen era;as Sontag writes, the years preceding its advent appear in retrospect "a lost age of innocence" (76). In a world of temporality,too, experience devours innocence: in this dizzying "turning,"the earth'srotation becomes a factory consuming the raw materials of life and producing only death. Not least of the poem's "triumphs" will be to find imaginative means by which to escape the oppositional logic of lamb and tiger, innocence and its destroyer. These means involve the creation of a temporal hybridity: In bright alternation minutely mirrored within the thinking of each and every mortal creature halves of a clue approach the earthlights These lines illuminate the poem's form: its two-part lines and central spiral of white space suggest the double helix of DNA, blueprint for every living creature,encoding the "clue" to life's renewal as well as to its "mortal" limits.23In conception, the parents'DNA-"halves of a clue"-combines in their child. In the context of disease established by the poem's opening lines, this process also suggests one that is analogous but opposed: in infection, viral genetic material combines with the host's, resulting in offspring of a sort in the form of new viruses. (Merrill's "vast facility" of death echoes medical language that describes viruses converting their host cells into factories producing more viruses; the poem's form might further suggest the body's openness, its vulnerability to penetration and 258 A Scattering AchievedInnocence ofSalts:Merrill's infection.24)Yet from anotherpoint of view, conception producesdeath no less than infection may:the innocent newborn "creature"that results is "mortal."Life and deathareas intertwinedas two strandsof the double helix. Merrill'sdouble vision works here againstthe negativemetaphoric potentialofAIDS's sexualtransmissionand its perceivedlink with homosexuality-the homophobic idea that in the era of AIDS homosexuality breedsdeath as heterosexualconception breedslife.25He acknowledges AIDS'sspecificity,but ultimatelytreatsit as part of a broadermortality. This movementawayfromAIDS as a fall from innocence or an indicator of guilt has alreadybegun at the poem's"turning"point, the tercet precededand followed by four couplets.The imageryof infection and of lover as tigeryields to a recognitionof temporalityas the true predatorone that is innocent of intent or responsibility.Whenthe lover"findsthe world turning,"his look "Up"comes close to catchingtime in the act.His bafflement("How did it happen")recalls"The Book of Ephraim"'sreflection on the end of Proust'snovel:"A world abruptlyold, whitehaired, a reader/ Looking up in puzzlement to fathom / Whether ten yearsor forty have gone by."(When "Young"JM found this "foreshortening... unconvincing";older,he affirmsit as "truthinstead / Babblingthrough his own astonishment"[ChangingLight 70-71].) The transformations caused by disease-the salted field and blighted wheat-are subsumed into "the world turning"even as that turning is acknowledged as life "turninginto" death.Merrill'sword games-turning "heart"into "earth" and "ears"into "spears,"mining "salt"for its wealth of denotationsand figurativeuses-match time's entropic transformationswith the mind's creativeones:metaphor,linguisticplay.Theimagination's"triumphs"over time are qualified,embedded in temporality (as the word "triumphs" appearsfor a moment between "toys"and "toxins").Merrill'slinguistic rearrangementsat once reflect truthfullytime'sirreversibleprogressand find spacefor the mind'sseriousplay,a form of innocence. At the poem's end, the saltsconceived as destructiveat its beginning dissolveand recrystallizeto suggest the reviving power of smelling salts, the liveliness,freshness,and wit that saltfigurativelygives. Morning star evening star salt of the sky Firstthe grave dissolvinginto dawn 259 ReenaSastri then the crucial recrystallizing from inmost depths of cleardarkblue Blake'sfearful symmetry becomes the beautiful symmetry of a crystal as the terrifying turning is answeredby the kaleidoscopicturns of the imagination.But the poem's resolutiondepends on a radicalacceptance of loss;its recrystallization requiresthe dissolutionof the self in the grave. not This ending is "crucial" in the sense of deciding between two rival hypotheses,markinga decisivevictory for one or the other,for Merrill's vision is insistentlydouble. It is crucial ratherin the chemical sense of being associatedwith the trying action of a crucible,whose great heat It is crucialalso in resultingin a is one way of effectingrecrystallization. crossor hybrid,figuredby the poem's evocation of the double helix of DNA. Crossing"Morning star"and"eveningstar,"26 "dawn"and "dark," Merrillproducesa hybrid of these "halvesof a clue,"ending and beginning, experience and innocence. As Vendler notes (47-48), this poem's recrystallizinganswersthe when "the self,"figuredas a "tissue-thin"slice of moment in "Alabaster" cannot "resist,/ Broken on terrorlike a rack,/ When wavesof alabaster, nightmareheat decrystallize/ Her lucid moleculesto chalk"(Poems605). Yet without end punctuation,ending with the vastblue of sea or sky,the poem, and the volume, remainopen to dissolvingagain.Thetwo actions part of a largertemporalprodisplaceeach other "In bright alternation," cess reflectedin the poems that frameA Scattering of Salts:"A Downward at Look,""ALook Askance,""An UpwardLook."Positioned,respectively, the beginning,roughlythe middle,and the end of the volume,thesethree poems structureit, enactingits ongoing processesand dynamicbalance.In "A DownwardLook" (589) the landscape"Seen from above,"markedby faults,/ A delta thicket,"appearsas a figure outstretched "protuberances, In "An UpwardLook""saltof the in a bath"scattered[...] with salts."27 earth"balances"saltof the sky"and "dissolving"is matched by "recrystallizing.""A Look Askance"(637) figuresartisticcreationas a volcanic eruption ending in the immobile permanenceof"stone."In the absence of"PressRelease"'skaleidoscopeor "VolcanicHoliday"'sslidingmirrors, "fixed scope"is the "steep cost" of permanence:the poet's writings and his life "passinto this / Fossilstate thought up, then idly / Jotted down on stone."Yet the phrase"fixedscope"itselfsuggestsan alternativein the changingperspectivesthat"A DownwardLook"and"An UpwardLook" 260 A Scattering AchievedInnocence ofSalts:Merrill's provide.Merrill'svision of landscapeas body in "A DownwardLook"recallsAuden'sin "In Praisein Limestone,"and that stone,as"Pharaonateof Lime"and"chalk,"as gypsumand calcite,figuresin "Alabaster" (604-06). A deep-seaformationcomposedof fossilsand shells,limestoneunderheat and pressurecrystallizesinto marble,and when dissolved,forms stalactites and stalagmites,downwardand upwardrecrystallizations. Thus the salts scatteredin "A Downward Look,"having become living creatures,turn to the "fossil"of "A Look Askance,"which turns to stone that in "An UpwardLook"dissolvesand then recrystallizes, reachingupwardfromthe grave towardthe stars.Only at the level of chemical components,life's elementalbuildingblocks,is this processcyclical;as the opening lines of "An Upward Look" rearrangethe letters of "heart"to form "earth,"so the physicalcomponents of the body turn to dust. AsYeatswrote late in his life,"allthatis personalsoon rots;it must be packedin ice or salt,"and"Ancientsaltis best packing"(Essays522-23), advice that Merrill quotes in the 1987 prefaceto the second edition of TheSeraglio "fueland stabi(Novels631).28Yet as"FOOD/ FORTHOUGHT," lizer / Of the body electric"(ChangingLight141), saltnot only preserves but stimulateslife and motion. In Merrill'searlyverse play TheBirthday, Mr. Knight, a wizard figure, points out that "A drop of human blood [...] / In chemicalproportionis equivalent/ To simple seawater"(Novels a magical"polarwand"turnsa drop 436). In the late poem "Processional," of water into a snowflake,"gemlike,nevermore to melt! // But melt it would" (Poems583). "An Upward Look"'s"crucial recrystallizing"is a promiseof new "Gemlikeprojects"assurelyasit is a recognitionof the time when theseprojectswill be not the self'sbut thoseof "thelove // That drew the bath and scatteredit with salts,"a generativeforce that"Stillradiates new projectsold as day"(Poems589). Merrill'scrystalsand gems are at once a partof blood and sea,andpreciousconstructspoised for a moment beyond their flow.They attest to the imagination'scapacity to answer embodiment and mortalitynot with a dreamof transcendentinnocence prior to experience or outside of time but with creative,transformative processes.Throughthese processes,Merrill'sinnocence, his kaleidoscopic patternsand his achievementof the poem as gem are continuouslyand strenuouslyrenewed as the poet remakeshimself and his work in the futurethat remains. 261 Reena Sastri Notes 1."Yes,yes, it comes back.With a difference." 2. "Why should not we also enjoy an original relationto the universe?" 3.J. D. McClatchyfinds"longings ... for the pastoraland primitive,for an idealizedchildhood and a sentimentalizedheroism,the paradiseslost to maturity and contingency"in Divine Comedies(317); I see such longings neither in that volume nor in any beyond FirstPoems.My position is closer to Harold Bloom's assessmentthat"Merrillis notan elegiac poet" (Introduction5);he "studiesthe nostalgias"ratherthan indulgesthem (2). 4. "UnorganizedInnocence,An impossibility[.] Innocence dwells with Wisdom but never with Ignorance." 5. Bonnie Costello callsthis struggle"tragic"(82):"Stevenspersistsin the longing to 'dwell'in an innocent state,or to 'master'the changesof the temporal world"(85). I place Merrill among the laterpoets who "see time in less tragic terms"(85). 6.This argumentcontrastswith Timothy Materer'slinking of innocence in The with timelessness.Although Matereracknowledges ChangingLightat Sandover that Merrill'sis "not the Adamicinnocence of EmersonandWhitman,which seeks to free the self from history"(111), he goes on to quote Ihab Hassan's has never reallyacknowledgedTime. Its vision of RadicalInnocence--"America Eden or Utopia is essentiallya timelessvision.... This is a radicalinnocence" (Hassan325)-and assertsthat"thesewordswell describeMerrill'spoetic vision in Scripts"(Materer112). He furthersuggeststhat Merrillseeks innocence as a way to move "beyondhis dualism"and beyond aestheticism(12).I see Merrill'sinnocence as double ratherthan singularand enabledby,rather than opposed to, the aesthetic.I focus here on innocence in Merrill'slastlyric volume, but my claimsabout innocence extend to the trilogy.My argument differsfrom the positionVernon Shetley sketchesin his review of A Scattering of Salts.Shetley compares"Merrill'sproject"to that of the "Puritandiarist" who examineseach day'sevents,"seekingsigns of election";the poems "seem a persistenttest of the writer'snature,in which assurancesof his innocence ... are sought throughthe confusionsof experience and the temptationsof selfdeception"(40).The desirefor innocence does persistin Merrill'swork.But Merrill does not seek signsof an enduringpurity;his innocence is actively constructed,and his "nature"is not just tested but made and remadein an image that is both contingent and chosen.While Shetley also notes the volume's concern with "Change,transformation,metamorphosis"(40), his discussionof innocence implicitlysets it againstchange. 262 A Scatteringof Salts: Merrill's Achieved Innocence 7. Willard Spiegelman argues that the trilogy proceeds through complexity to "regain the simplicity of truth," the "reintegration and harmony" of a "higher innocence" (230). 8.Judith Moffett similarly refers to Merrill's "nervous habit of encrusting his early poems with gems" (14) and his tendency to petrify or freeze his subject (5). 9.This rendering of process takes further a practice that critics have noted in earlier volumes. Lynn Keller writes, "To the extent that Merrill is willing to point to a truth,it is," as for other contemporary poets, "process" (244). Stephen Yenser sees Merrill's poetry begin to incorporate process in WaterStreetand writes of "The Book of Ephraim" that Merrill "seeks [...] to turn the destructive flow of time into the creative flow of the imagination" (229). I would add that, by contrast with the emphasis on fluidity in "Ephraim," the poems of A Scatteringof Salts model art as, and themselves create, a sequence of discrete patterns arising from and returning to flux, yet distinct from it. 10. In an essay on art and AIDS Langdon Hammer writes, "Although the connection between HIV-transmission and gay male sex is only contingent, male homosexuality and AIDS are indissolubly bound in the imaginative constructions of our society. This is the case" in Merrill's and Rich's elegies for David Kalstone, the focus of Hammer's essay,"no less than in the tabloid fantasies of mass culture" (105). 11.The one exception is the juxtaposed "sand" and "hand" (lines 8-9), matched but not perfectly rhymed with "Couronne"and "down" (24-25). 12. It also recalls the "ideogram" drawn in lesson 8 of Scriptsfor the Pageant:No (Changing Light 474-75), where the double hourglass warns against human use of both atomic energy and fossil fuels (seeYenser 303-04). 13.Whereas the "correction of prose, because it has no fixed laws, is endless, a poem comes right with a click like a closing box." 14. He uses the same strategy earlier in "Verse for Urania," a poem equally concerned with the inadequacy of recollection as a model for poetic creation. In a 1972 interview with David Kalstone, Merrill writes of the present tense in lyric: "For me a 'hot' tense like that can't be handled for very long without cool pasts and futures to temper it" (Recitative21).The end of "Volcanic Holiday" finds an alternative to the hot-cool dichotomy in kaleidoscopic motion. 15. IfAIDS provides a new impetus to "link anxieties about male homosexuality with anxieties about the effects of art" (Hammer 105), the degree to which both A Diferent Personand A Scatteringof Salts resist anxiety and guilt to celebrate homosexuality and the aesthetic is striking. 263 Reena Sastri 16. Merrill earlierrespondedexplicitly to this metaphorin the lastsection of The Air Is SweetestThat a Thistle Guards"(Poems22). I am in"Variations: debted to Shetley for suggestingthat"PressRelease"evokes"perhapsa crystallizationof the sort Stendhalused to describethe processof fallingin love" (41). 17. Here I differwith Vendler'sview of Merrill'srelationshipto nature:"in a book on evolution,"she writes,the speaker"findsencouragementto hope for a more positive repriseof the morallife on a deeper or higher level";"Taking Nature'sadvice,the poet decides to try a new beginning in altitudeshe had once been 'unfittedto endure"'(48). 18.The "fly'sfaceted vision"may also recallthe reducingof the sphereof Parmigianino'sself-portraitand indeed of the globe to "the gibbous / Mirroredeye of an insect"at the end of Ashbery's"Self-Portraitin a Convex Mirror"(204). 19. Called to mind by the nine-line stanzas,SpenserinformsMerrill'sversion of natureas well.The Mutabilitiecantos of TheFaerieQueeneareparticularly relevant,especiallycanto 7, which uses turnboth in the sense of a wheel turning and of transformation: For,all that from her springs,and is ybredde, How-euer fayreit flourishfor a time, Yet see we soone decay;and,being dead, To turne againvnto their earthlyslime: Yet,out of their decay and mortallcrime, We daily see new creaturesto arize; And of theirWinter springanotherPrime, Vnlike in form, and chang'dby strangedisguise: So turne they still about,and change in restlesswise. (1044) 20. Shetley suggeststhat"Perhapsthe difficultclimb to which the poet alludes is an analogy"both for "the work of love"and"alsofor the reader'sdifficult encounter with the poem" (41);both processesinvolve"an inwardreorientation that changesones' substancefundamentally." Shetley stressesthat"the poet is there to help,reachingout his hand";he placesthe poet higher on the slope. By contrast,WilliamWaters'sreadingof poetic addressin (amongother texts) Keats's"This living hand"emphasizespoems'appealfor intimacy,their capacity to transformthe readerinto the uniquely intended addressee,and the reader's responsibilityto "come to the text as if [his]presencematteredto it" (220).To the extent that Merrill'shand is extended to the reader,it seems to me thatit is in this more mutualway. 264 A Scatteringof Salts: Merrill's Achieved Innocence On the other hand, as it were, just as Stendhal's insistence on the novelty of the word cristallisationas he is using it resonates with Merrill's invention of a new form and his emphasis on new projects, so Stendhal's belief that readers won't let him get away with this coinage ("il estfort possibleque si cet essai trouvedes lecteurs,ils ne me passentpas ce mot nouveau")and his willingness to lose those readers ("J'engagedoncle lecteurqui se sentiratropchoquepar ce mot de cristallisation, aifermerle livre" [3: 27]) for the select few who will be pleased by it suggests a way of reading Merrill's last word as a challenge: it is a bait for that ideal reader,"that single silver carp" for whom one needn't dynamite the pond (Recitative22). 21. The cost for wild oats sown, for having been, perhaps, salt in the adjectival sense "lecherous, salacious,"is excessive--salt in its slang sense "costly, dear" (OED). 22. Criticizing what she views as harmful metaphors for disease, and for AIDS in particular (including the military metaphor), Susan Sontag writes: the move from the demonization of the illness to the attribution of fault to the patient is an inevitable one, no matter if patients are thought of as victims.Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt. (11) 23. An earlier imaginative response to DNA appeared in Mirabell,book 6 (Changing Light 203). See Kalstone for a discussion of that passage in terms of the "jewels" of Merrill's early work (140). 24. Hammer suggests that spaces perform this function in Rich's elegy for Kalstone (111). 25. Hammer writes of Rich's elegy for Kalstone, "The irreversibility of HIV and its sexual transmission connect infection ... with human conceptiononly it is death, not life, that gay male sex breeds" (109). In Merrill's elegy ("Farewell Performance"), by contrast, Hammer argues, "the special 'horror' of AIDS-its linking of sex and death-cannot be confined to the gay man with AIDS" but reflects "the confusion of life and death that, in Lacan as in Freud, structures psychic life in general" (Hammer 115). Although it does not rely on the Lacanian version of the death drive that Hammer invokes, my discussion of "An Upward Look" comes to a conclusion similar to Hammer's about "Farewell Performance": that it breaks down the boundary between those who are affected by AIDS and those who are not. 26.The two names give two perspectives on the same star;in the context of the poem's concern with eros, we remember that that "star"is the planet Venus. 265 Reena Sastri 27.When Merrill reversesthe metaphorto figurebody as landscapein "The Instilling"(Poems623) and"The GreatEmigration"(629-31), he stressesthe body'svulnerabilityto invasionboth by illnessand by the explorationsof medicine. 28.The form of"An UpwardLook" might be said to recrystallizean ancient one: the alliterativefour-beatline ofAnglo-Saxon verse. Works cited Ashbery,John.SelectedPoems.NewYork:Penguin,1985. Blake,William.The CompletePoetryandProseof WilliamBlake.Ed. DavidV. Erdman.NewYork:Doubleday,1988. 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