And then indeed toward the end of the first millennium B.C., just as the oracles began to become prosaic and their statements
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versified consciously, so poetry also. Its givenness by the unison Muses has vanished. And conscious men now wrote and crossed out and careted and rewrote their compositions in laborious mimesis of the older divine utterances.
Why as the gods retreated even further into their silent heavens or, in another linguistic mode, as auditory hallucinations shrank back from access by left hemisphere monitoring mechanisms, why did not the dialect of the gods simply disappear?
Why did not poets simply cease their rhapsodic practices as did the priests and priestesses of the great oracles? The answer is very clear. The continuance of poetry, its change from a divine given to a human craft is part of that nostalgia for the absolute.
The search for the relationship with the lost otherness of divine directives would not allow it to lapse. And hence the frequency even today with which poems are apostrophes to often unbelieved-in entities, prayers to unknown imaginings. And hence the opening paragraph of this treatise. The forms are still there, to be worked with now by the analog ‘I’ of a conscious poet. His task now is an imitation or mimesis19 of the former type of poetic utterance and the reality which it expressed. Mimesis in the bicameral sense of mimicking what was heard in hallucination has moved through the mimesis of Plato as representation of reality to mimesis as imitation with invention in its sullen service.
There have been some latter-day poets who have been very specific about actual auditory hallucinations. Milton referred to his "Celestial Patroness, who . . . unimplor'd . . . dictates to me my unpremeditated Verse," even as he, in his blindness, dictated it to his daughters.20 And Blake's extraordinary visions and auditory hallucinations — sometimes going on for days and sometimes against his will — as the source of his painting and 19 On the history of this word, see Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1967), p. 57, n. 22, as well as Ch. 2.
20 Paradise Lost, 9: 21-24.
376 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World poetry are well known. And Rilke is said to have feverishly copied down a long sonnet sequence that he heard in hallucination.
But most of us are more ordinary, more with and of our time.
We no longer hear our poems directly in hallucination. It is instead the feeling of something being given and then nourished into being, of the poem happening to the poet, as well and as much as being created by him. Snatches of lines would “bubble up” for Housman after a beer and a walk “with sudden and unaccountable emotions” which then “had to be taken in hand and completed by the brain.” “The songs made me, not I them,”
said Goethe. “It is not I who think,” said Lamartine, “it is my ideas that think for me.” And dear Shelley said it plain: A man cannot say, “I will compose poetry.” T h e greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness . . . and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure.21
Is the fading coal the left hemisphere and the inconstant wind the right, mapping vestigially the ancient relationship of men to gods?
Of course there is no universal rule in this matter. The nervous systems of poets come like shoes, in all types and sizes, though with a certain irreducible topology. We know that the relations of the hemispheres are not the same in everyone. Indeed, poetry can be written without even a nervous system. A vocabulary, some syntax, and a few rules of lexical fit and measure can be punched into a computer, which can then proceed to write quite inspired’ if surrealist verse. But that is simply a copy of what we, with two cerebral hemispheres and nervous systems, 21 Percy Bysshe Shelley, “A Defense of Poetry” in The Portable Romantic Reader, H. E. Hugo, ed. (New York: Viking Press, 1957), p. 536.
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already do. Computers or men can indeed write poetry without any vestigial bicameral inspiration. But when they do, they are imitating an older and a truer poesy out there in history. Poetry, once started in mankind, needs not the same means for its production. It began as the divine speech of the bicameral mind.
And even today, through its infinite mimeses, great poetry to the listener, however it is made, still retains that quality of the wholly other, of a diction and a message, a consolation and an inspiration, that was once our relationship to gods.
A Homily on Thamyris
I would like to end these rather clumsy suggestions on the biology of poetry with some homiletic sentiments on the true tragedy of Thamyris. He was a poet in the Iliad (2:594-600) who boasted he would conquer and control the Muses in his poetry. Gods, as they die away in the transition to consciousness, are jealous gods, as I have said earlier. And the Sacred Nine are no exception. They were enraged at the beautiful ambition of Thamyris. They crippled him (probably a paralysis on his left side), and deprived him forever of poetic expression, and made him forget his ability at harping.
Of course, we do not know if there even was a Thamyris, or exactly what reality is being pointed at by this story. But I suggest it was among the later accretions to the Iliad, and that its insertion may point to the difficulties in hemisphere cooperation in artistic expression at the breakdown of the bicameral mind.
The parable of Thamyris may be narratizing what is to us the feeling of losing consciousness in our inspiration and then losing that inspiration in our consciousness of that loss. Consciousness imitates the gods and is a jealous consciousness and will have no other executives of action before it.
I remember when I was younger, at least through my twenties, while walking in woods or along a beach, or climbing hills or
378 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World almost anything lonely, I would quite often suddenly become conscious that I was hearing in my head improvised symphonies of unambiguous beauty. But at the very moment of my becoming conscious of the fact, not loitering even for a measure! the music vanished. I would strain to call it back. But there would be nothing there. Nothing but a deepening silence. Since the music was undoubtedly being composed in my right hemisphere and heard somehow as a semi-hallucination, and since my analog ‘I’
with its verbalizations was probably, at that moment at least, a more left hemispheric function, I suggest that this opposition was very loosely like what is behind the story of Thamyris. ‘I’ strained too much. I have no left hemiplegia. But I do not hear my music anymore. I do not expect ever to hear it again.
The modern poet is in a similar quandary. Once, literary languages and archaic speech came somehow to his bold assistance in that otherness and grandeur of which true poetry is meant to speak. But the grinding tides of irreversible naturalism have swept the Muses even farther out into the night of the right hemisphere. Yet somehow, even helplessly in our search for authorization, we remain “the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration.” And inspiration flees in attempted apprehension, until perhaps it was never there at all. We do not believe enough.
The cognitive imperative dissolves. History lays her finger carefully on the lips of the Muses. The bicameral mind, silent. And since
T h e god approached dissolves into the air,
Imagine then, by miracle, with me,