“It's absurd I can't bring my soul to the eye of odoriferous fire / my soul whose teeth never leave their cadavers / my soul twisted on rocks of mental freeways,” a young Lamantia writes. He has been expelled from San Francisco high school for “intellectual delinquency,” and moves to New York where he will soon become assistant editor at View, a literary arts magazine credited with introducing avant-garde thought to the masses circa 1943. Dalí, Man Ray, Matta, and Yves Tanguy had fled to Manhattan from a war-stricken Europe during this period. Breton, also among them, became a frequent contributor to View, and hailed Lamantia as a poet’s poet, someone who had “a voice that rises once in a hundred years.”
Lamantia, still a teenager, did eventually benefit from Breton’s mentorship, and derived inspiration from Blake and Poe, but his beginnings and form were of his own making, something no one Surrealist could have helped him divine. The dream-like premonitory nature of his prose is often fed by eros and a sense of loss, naturally he then thinks of utopia and transcendence. “As humans, we’re constantly looking outward for evidence of the sacred,” he relays to a journalist decades later. “I’m now convinced, however, that the universe is within us. There’s no need for us to go into outer space to and out about the secrets of the universes. In earliest childhood all knowledge is inborn, I believe, and it’s all retrievable. Each individual poet, or painter, seeks the ‘golden fleece’ on his own.” Though Lamantia’s time in New York was brief (he returned to San Francisco in the late 40s, where he would famously mingle with the Beats and various jazz musicians), it informed a confidence for travel and gnostic inquiry. For a majority of the 1950s he journeyed between Morocco, France, Northern Mexico and Southwestern states participating, when permitted, in ritual native to each region. Peyote rites with Washoe tribe in Nevada and Cora tribe in Nayarit, would fuel a series of poems and manifestos on hallucinatory substance as altering to soul and personal religion. For Lamantia this period might have been more isolated but elucidated investigation into euphoria, how it is often so closely linked to complete collapse of ego or ill will. “The night is a space of white marble / I’m sitting here, slanted light fixture, pot, altitudinous silence / your voice, Dionysius, telling of darkness, superessential light / In the silence of holy darkness I’m eating a tomato / I’m weak from the altitude / Something made my clogged head move! / Saint Dionysius reminds us of flight to Unknowable Knowledge / the doctrine of initiates completes the meditation,” he writes beneath skein of stars without power line, or lineman. Dionysius, god of ‘ritual madness, religious ecstasy, festivity’ guides the hand but the mind knows this unknowingness is what opens a dialogue for a gratitude too dated to categorize.
For most this is a passing thought, one that is appreciated but altogether unachievable, for Lamantia a love of other, of the beloved or the cosmos, began with intense study of passions arriving at clear in world of excess. “As with Poe and Milton, passion is qualified as the central sun of poetry—indeed, analogously, the human and suprahuman erotic, the active and creative principle, attains in nite degrees of transformational power,” Lamantia writes. “Passionate love is the lever for the poet and saint; androgynous union: source and culmination in renewal of vital energy...Saint-Pol-Roux reminds us: ‘Poetry is nothing less than the renewal of God’s original activity.’” Lamantia, in his later life, would return to the Catholicism of his upbringing, raised by Sicilian immigrants, yet the oneiric would be the primary hold, the grain from which he sowed. My own dream of him, of a past I was not a part of, is his standing before a Joan Miro painting at the Museum of Modern Art, seeing not what a poem does with its teeth but its mouth. The trance like, the pulsing, is what differentiates a Lamantia poem from another’s. One might attempt it in the liminal spaces that do exist as passageways to Anew, in a variety of phenomena if one looks closely. I tell myself I’ve experienced this in a number of ways, in the apparitional sense of the city, the way the fog settles into gutters and returns days later through the guise of construction. The way snow becomes rain,
with lightning bolts of dawns, of the ritz and circus spotlights, of explosions, of radiations, understood and used as artistic battlecry but seldom spoken of outside the halls of partitioned studios. The painter primes the canvas of a dream and the poet thumbs a loosie, elaborating camera movements.
“Blue Grace under dark glasses getting out of one hundred white cars at once ! / The nicotine heaven of Bosch’s painting emanates the thousand beauties of Christopher Maclain ’s tool box, of mechanical brass jewels / I sing the beauty of bodily touch with my muse, Blue Grace.” Slick, sultry, beatified, Lamantia says all that I struggle to find the words for. “Lamantia's poems are about rapture as a condition," Tom Clark wrote. It is not a headstone epigram, but it might as well be.
-Katie Calderon