Could We See Them

Poems

The Paradox of Victor Turner’s Poetry:A Preface

EDITH TURNER

Department of AnthropologyUniversity of VirginiaPO Box 400120Charlottesville, VA 22904-4120

These poems by Victor Turner were written from 1942 to 1958. They areexcerpted from an unpublished manuscript entitled Anti-Wastelanders: SelectedPoems and Letters of Victor Turner. In 1942, Vic was a conscientious objectorserving in a noncombatant company in the British Army. He wrote many lettersto his lifelong friend John Bate, who is still in residence at this time in Berwick-upon-Tweed. I first met Vic when he was in the same unit as John Bate and mybrother Charlie, stationed at Letcombe Bassett, 16 miles from Oxford. Vic, John,and myself and other conscientious objectors wrote and published in smallpamphlets, printed out of John’s army office. These friends were enthusiasticwriters, often in a liberated style, with an “anti-Wastelander” philosophy,opposing that of T. S. Eliot, which was fashionable at the time. Vic read ArthurRimbaud and Paul Valery, Charles Baudelaire, William Blake, and Rainer MariaRilke, and produced a style, blazing, liberated, captivated by the magic of theworld and in a sort of awe of the words that poured out of him. His friends andI flourished in the warmth of his engagement with life. At the end of the war, hesaid, “we must grow together with creative people toward the future, taking nothought for the morrow.”1

After the war, Vic went to London to study anthropology, and we lived as acommuting family, us and our babies for that decade until 1951—then we allwent, the five of us, to Zambia (Northern Rhodesia).2 There he and I—in thelight of that poetic past—encountered Ndembu ritual. The poems from 1951 to1958 show Vic’s love of the Ndembu and also later, something of modernEngland’s scarifying effect on us on our return. “Vision” was now “out.” Vichad a dissertation to write. The shock effect of academia arrived, and Vicreacted. His publications turned out to contain a profound new theory ofconflict resolution, the social drama,3 and soon a philosophy of ritual (1) that itwas real,4 and (2) that it led to a human understanding lighting our way throughthe darkness of functionalism and beyond—into liminality theory,5 and therebyliberated us from the chains of causality. Anthropology can never again go inDurkheim’s chains and altering eyeglasses.

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Anthropology and Humanism, Vol. 37, Issue 2, pp 236–249, ISSN 1559-9167, online ISSN 1548-1409.© 2012 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1409.2012.01132.x.

Notes

1. Letter to John Bate, June 15, 1942.2. See Edith Turner (Heart of Lightness: The Life Story of an Anthropologist. New York:

Berghahn, 2006).3. See Victor Turner (Schism and Continuity in an African Society: A Study of Ndembu

Village Life. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1957).4. See Victor Turner (Revelation and Divination. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,

1975).5. See Victor Turner (The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago: Aldine.

Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969).

Victor Turner

The Final WinnowingThe final winnowing, the wildGrave wind is flowing through our night,Taking the last leaves from the trees’ tired hands,The wind that stirsOnly for Birth and Death.The ocean talks it in its nearest language,It is the Breath of breath.

O AutumnO autumn,O deep reverberating silence,Melancholy flameAnd sweet blue smokeOf one year’s life.O acrid golden one,O crimson kissOf farewell or of aftermath,Woodland of wasting apples,PlumsLike sumptuous purpling drops of bloodPendent on thornsIn the pearly hedge,White breath of beeves,O nights more alive than flowersMilky with starsHas spring gone royal into heaven?

ChrysanthemumsHeavy with singed and smoky colors,Crinkled by autumn’s death-fanned fires,Chrysanthemums lingerIn smoky whorls of red and burnt umber,Pitch-pine torches for funeral pyres.Chrysanthemums lingerLoll and linger in sumptuous weightWhile the dead leaves crackle and whisper round themOr drift in the Outbreath’s tide of cold,Heavy ripe flames of earth’s experience,Full-bosomed, earth-smelling gold.

Turner Poems 237

The FallAutumn, you bonfire of the spring’s biographies,Life the unceasing licking up the ceasing stuffThe seed puts on its seasonal wearOf stem and branch, the burgeoning blue flossOf blossoms; Autumn, you flash point,Too much heat of individual life in flareGranule of charcoal tombing up the sun.Fruit, rainbow pattern of firm heavy flesh,Apax of color between life and death,Intrusion of beginning on the end,Finality of a sudden becoming a promise again;Invisible landscape, hills and hedgerows dense with trees,Whole sequences of seasons clinched in a stalk’d- red sphere,Each setting apple a shepherd’s delight, a long blue dawn,Lives have been, and now life is a breathing of darkness,The Pharaoh sleeps in his lacquered tomb,Divested of effort, his hands renouncingThe deeds of a lifetime, as an autumn oak,Lets the whispering leaves whirl gratefully downwards,The brocaded fabrics of its rich old age.

DuskGreen to my dusk has quietly comeAs light’s recess might strand a starAnd I am evened with the pulse of peace,Trees, water, ebbing thrusheries are;Flowers on the evening print their pure desire,Purples and reds that answer fleshAs dew is the answer unto fire,Swan on the water, drift of whiteOr flexed attentiveness, his hoarseThroat like an oak root’s fibrous riftSwells with the mystery its nurse,I am not there or what is IIs all commuted into pervious touchOf substances that breathe and crowdThe limits of the earth and sky.

Where Was that Orchard?Where was that orchard, in or out of the senses?Unremembered, more crowded than drifting cities,Smoking with dusk-ripened pungence of apples,Stabbed with red scent from nasturtiums peppery under the fences.Where was it? A telegraph-pole with a bright bulb of bird-song,Stripes the blue vagueness and lights it,A wall is a motionless lashing of fibery coils opposed to my hand.All the detail there but gone the event that incites it,Only pure God left; the limning, the last of the lime-glowClinched in small clouds, a remote perfect canyon,Burns out on the skyline. In my senses I knowHere I am, I have mated, there is no other earth than this union.

MorningWhy under the packed red pine trees in their trance

Do the silence and the morning sky slowly dance

238 Anthropology and Humanism Volume 37, Number 2

As though no thought had ever risen, ever riven

The blind sweet texture; nothing needed being forgiven?

Why in my animal heart, dilated with compassion

For all the ruin we have made of glimmering passion,

Do knowledge like crocuses leap golden from their wax

Or larks above to their bit of sky like a curling flower of flax?

The Vetch of that River: An AllegoryLet the sword be softness; let the vibrantDark purpleBlossomWith the soft underlipGrow carefully upwardLike an opening hand,Or thousand blossomsBurn slowly like conesOf myrrh in the twilightBeside the river

Measure Past MeasureWith the clearness but none of the cloy of honeyThe feel met the look of the eveningTells the heart something,Emits from a slit in the membraneNot passion, vast glory,But measure past measure, plethoraOf mild, rich existence. Such life as enlivensAround rock pools the serious faces of childrenSelf-assured and forgotten.

Michelangelo’s EntombmentMan and woman looking at each otherOver the body of life’s death,Assured at last, in red the raiment,Glad of the Interval, the vitalDawning body, the Christ between them,Free at last.

Vision Most HolyVision most holy, nigh, live-light, so mild,Animate crystal, infinite, local,Pulsate, warm without warmth,Knowing me as permeant—Me the thin shell—Not the face.Neither personalBeyond nor behind.Not light—for my light the most beautiful was outside me,Not darkness—for this is the reality of Darkness.

Turner Poems 239

All Death to the Occulted GoldAll death is the occulted gold of the creature,Glimmery, fathomless, as leaves in the autumn,Left at last, at the ebbing, afire on the foreshore,Splashed with the menstrual crimson of Meaning,In Time—gold of the climax,Like the sun on a hill-top,A last flare from the waters,Hinting what’s coming, too golden for eyesight,Pure for the hearing, sweeter than touchings—Winter and night, their truest meanings.

The LochThe sea was running in strings of silver,

The wind exploded in our faces,And over the loch the sun’s first sulphur

Smoked on an island’s lofty places.

All things glowed with a vibrant silence,Moment and memory dumb with meeting,

Sweet and breathless was the balanceOf heart and dark red mountain greeting.

DancingNothing comes but coming

Nothing goes

But going,

Only dancing gets to God

The Glowing.

WinterWhat am I?A Winter that will not sleep,A fish that would sing,An actor that would Be,A desert that would bloom,A star that longs to be rid of its frozen shining.

What am I when touch is dead?Dry copulation, a barrenFig tree rich in leaves butFecund only with grit, a skyOf swollen clouds that cannotRain,A numb kind of fleshThat were its nerves flowingWould be merelyPain.

Is there a throughway hereMy vitality understands,


Inwards where roots containThe wet ebb of last year?AshennessArdityLamp gone black,The fountain that uttered the flowerGone slack,Charcoal powdered with frost—Your hour.

Pebbles and cardboard everywhere—A sea like black ice on the sexual parts,Seagulls reduced to beggardomLike men,All outwardnessWithout favor,SaltThat has lost its savor.Save me from thisBut deny me it not.

What are the winter ways of life wherebyDecay comes all firm flowers again,Where mere decease is molded into growth,Where true rock bottom can be touched and braced

Against by the diver shoot?Freeze me to simpleness again, annulMy heavens turning hellsThrough all regret, those roses nowMere thorny roots of flowerless will,Kill me and let me be.

Smash all the pulpy overgrowthOf one dead cycle of experience,Leave but essential root, the crucial sparkUnindividualized, unspecialized, the mate of Will,Not Will itself, that mortal dream.

Give me the other tongueThat Silence is,That no-song of a nightingaleWhose madrigals are death and frost,The black pulsations of the cold,The numbness and the emptiness,The frost-giant’s forge where gods are smashed,That of them a new man be made.

Give me the other eyes,The fibrous ones,The cups and cellars of the plasmic wineThat sometimes stirs like a bird’s small heart,Between the fingers of the night.

Give me the other lifeInverted comic, back from sex

Turner Poems 241

Recoiled into a sleeping singleness,The listening, all-essential life,Hearted with outwardness and allIts painted cloudy fountainousBlisses, but blind to them—Give me my hard Necessity,My other Peace.

I Love You as Leaves Fall AsleepI love you as leaves fall asleepIn the dark magic of desire,I love you as the owls come outIn the sweet, hostless, virgin fire.O comfort me, for aware of youThere never was another night,Oh, answer me, and the small blue starsTake on their other, royal light.

RemorseO, she should be living with lambs and turnipsAnd churning the butter and driving the bullAnd loafing at evening in a green orchardWatching the owlets float down from the mill.

O, she should be spangled with pretty white daisies,And milk the white heifer and feed the white hens,And feel the white morning arriving, arrivingFresh and mysterious over the fens.I’ve broiled her with dishes and toiled her with childer,My bonny bright girl, oh what can I doTo make her forget the buttergold marigolds,The smell of the byre, the soak of the dew?

I Could WeepI could weepFor no reason but nightAnd the welt of the wavesOn the groyne.I could weepFor no reason, no reason,But darkness antique,For antique old darkness,For silence and sleepFor no gull in the darkAnd no child in the street.I could weep, I could weep,At the glowless blue nightAnd the dreams—Or the time when the nightAnd the day were togetherAnd the seeing and the dreamingWere my one sweet childhood

I could weep.


Could We See ThemCould we see themAs they would beIf we saw them,Oh, they would beGreen as the grasses seen in childhoodDowning the bare throat of a wild wood,Red as the essence of a poppyThe blood of a cornfield and as happy,Blue as the lightnings of a cornflowerOr wisdom in her very own power,If we saw themAs they can beAll the powers that in man be.

The Psalm of UncertaintyUncertainties, dark-atoms of a life,Whip-cord of truth, tracks of the pioneer’s cart,The misty yellow on a warm black udder,Pathways of silence through dogmatic riot,Scent of the faint, pink cornflowers round a home—Uncertainties.How they spatter my page with clues to directions,Pointers that call for unerring patienceTo follow unerringly, they require bliss to foment themTo that incandescence that is the Lord’s finger.—Uncertanties,The dear friends of all my life, the riverOf speed wells and dragonflies, the mother of blueness;—They will not be flattened.Is it boldness or patience I lack?Shall I call on God?And thus break the connection?Shall I continue to cite these elusive, unsteady, impalpable rumors?I am uncertain as Truth is, pregnant with the unutterable, butCondemned to utterance and death until Time bring her hour of labor.

Shall I essay a songTo while the time away?And fritter depth away in height?Suppose I bide a lifetimeAnd die dumb?—Uncertainty,You great sword of the world—Sword is not what you are,You are the wound also,I see that there is to be no songFor youAnd yet—It’s like the meeting of a man and woman—A mute stonelike relapse upon each other,Maybe for hours, and thenVeins of rose-grain in them like marbleTurning to conduits of the All-Life.

Be patient, everyone, this tedious confessionIs just as necessary as geology

Turner Poems 243

To the final meaning,The final fact.You say you wanted poetry from me?Change your ideas about poetry—Only certainties make songs,And I wait like stone for uncertainty.Prayer, be aubade,Be morning-colored, tentativeAnd undistracted by your own delight,Offshoot of light who yet are light.Can you imagine a dazzling made water,A maternity without seed, a concave glory,A tenderness that includes, yet is shy?I cannot speak plain sense, do I have to,Must you be shrewd until you die?Uncertainties, the ways we came here,The deftness, the power that has grace enough to yield,And patience enough for brotherhoodAnd sisterhood and weddings of all kinds.That is politics, the illumined side of art,And religion, the sun and sum of allOur revealed everyday life.

If This Be WorldEyes must have lids if this be worldAnd visions darknessesIf this be world,And only world can be beloved.

And TimeHas sides that leave for lostA million, brilliant denizens,And every truth is tempted hereAnd winter follows fruitBut only world can be beloved.Oh, lusterless and oceanlessWithout You, Lord, my days appear,I call and call in the salt, salt, vergeAnd all my reveries convergeOn what sustained me yesteryear.And this is world,This bitterness.And then the movement unto Man—Bewail together it is bestIt is a kind of fractious rest,But man-with-man is but a needAnd not itself the stir in seed,Yet if together all men cry

You will reply,I only know that this is worldAnd only world can be beloved,Oh, let me love and be beloved.

Seagulls: Portree HarborThrough those blue waters discords wander,Blemishes purer than those chords of lightCommingling what the worlds have put asunderInto a conscious quivering white,


Seagulls and spume, the froth of passionCalmer and deeper than the gaze of saints,Dipping and swaying, always a commotionPurposeless, repetitive, always brokenDancing on the dangerous blue ocean;And darker as the dusk grows, and darker grows the mind,Waves of great dark glory boil ceaselessly behindThe eyes, and over them they sail,The same, sharp, steady, lizard-eyed, lucumones,The demon white discoverersGrave in the tireless gale.

The Dragon-Fly LarvaI saw you, little Satan,Cleaving up so tensely curvedCleaving through the yeast,The broth of tiny bodies,In the amber pond,Like the bow of tense-drawn ebony.I saw you, little Satan,With your grey metallic maskLike the diabolic vizorOf a Japanese assassin,Cleaving up to take the air inWith the fine hairs of your tail,And your concave body, palpitant and silveredWith its contact with the air.Little devil, with your lustingHunger, you will growTo a great big lovely Lucifer,A racing, sapphire glow,A morning star of soft destruction,So keep faith, you little dragon,With your monstrous pride below.

In the Silent Beautiful KnowledgesIn the silent beautiful knowledgesWhere softness surprises in depth of rockWhere warm, brown feathers in clattering saplingsNesting, are caught by the gleam in a glade,Where at night, in the cold, in the oscillant rainOn the lee of a tree, under ragged cover,Lover finds out the feel of lover,In these silent beautiful knowledgesWhere the hidden in hidden pathways goesLike the tendrils that utter an ultimate roseCreeping under the bramble wrack,Gentle rebellions with adamant rootsPenetrate, woo out the wonder from Doubt.

In Central AfricaLeaves of lusterless green waxHumble in harsh thunderstormsThatch our travels, and large birdsWith underwings like altarclothsOf heavy crimson and blue backs

Turner Poems 245

Endlessly gigantic antsGnaw the termite slaves they dragIn buzzing ebon files alongRed-clay footpaths, while the sunBrutally its focus slants,Till mid-day kills the swallow’s song.

The forking waterfall all nightBroiders our dreams with gleaming sound,Cicadas vacantly sustainOne idiot note, all they have learntIn aeons, and the broken whiteOf moonlight bickers with the rain.

1951

In Northern RhodesiaThe city propped up with copperThat is a blood-machineIs going to come a cropperBecome a lurid scene,Where men with hides like the lilyWill run about like sheep,And men from PiccadillyWill lose a good night’s sleepMuttering “It isn’t funnyTo lose all your bloody money.”

Tell of the PeopleBelong to me the true red tongue

That shall talk forth the indrawn meaning,Man’s inmost meaning, yes, his darkest heart,

Yes that, But yet most friendly among friends,Flush with his lineaments, the very vowels of talkBy wells or workshops, lit by crackling shellsIn all these times of wars, the very shape of love,

The coverlid of love’s embrace but lostInto two separate shadows when the kiss is spent.Oh man’s untainted running into man, his gold

Shine on the secret river, threading deathThrough long blind histories, the hopeOf being human-heard most heretoforeIn the sweet sunset language of laments,All cadences, no words. Yes, tongue,Tell of the glister of the common self,Tell of the people, the enmillioned pointWhereon the stars—white sonorous silencesOf meditation and the murmuring worldsOf leaf and flesh are poised, yes, tongue,Speak steadily and not afraid of fate,Of mystery torn open in all eyes,Of glory heard as words along the road.

1952


Prophetic MoonlightThe moonlight like a God of goldFriendly and self-indulgent swungOver the hill-hedge, perfectlyTiming his entrance, a suave songOf yellow light, the latest numberOut of his near eternity, he croonedTo the low landscape banded byZambezi’s silken sash and quiet with wonder.I ponder at this lazy powerThe people and the forests haveThis earth-soft scented moonswept depthOf feeling, this incessant pourOf silver music through it like twin bellsIn hunter’s hands, unintrospective, fullOf impact on the membrane of the mind,And wondered what its instancy foretells.

1952

July 1958O infamy of the tall red housesO lechery of the long green carsO world of the taps and telliesO world of the spiteful wars!

I cannot say how much I reject youI cannot express how I long for the rain,Just the rain on the roads with the copper beechesAgain and again and again and again.

And now I long for the souls of peopleTo be everted like peony flowersIn subtle innocence undulatingFor not too many hours.

Can I go back again to my sadnessSo vast it can only comfort meMy sadness that fertilizes heavenGendering true eternity?

For the high hills must for ever be tenderThough their bloom be rocks and the waters scarTheir lean blue flanks and they never rememberWho their fiery parents are.

Give me a reed let me write on waterMany a word that must swirl awayFor I do not care that anyone cons themEnough that my trouble should say its own say.

For nothing uttered is ever unendingOnly the frail tongue itself is the swordTo open the oyster of that UnknowingWhich is the very self of the Word.

Turner Poems 247

Do I hide myself from the hope of a hearing?What does it matter if no man hears?If the soul pronounces its word exactlyDoes it fall on a deaf god’s ears?

Could I Unfettered BeCould I unfettered beSo long unmanifested,Self’s chrysalis snapped,

And my long drift of denial lunge to a mill-race crested,I could see from the iris’s center, the wild gold of being,

It would ripen the rind of wonder;All would shine out like feathery hill grass, sunshot after thunder,The sun’s remote yellow dancing would be back of my restedAssurance in other Man, my fused-with yet separate brother.Lament not, O inself, virgin of summer,

The power, the round gold,Will consume to itself all death to the limit,

You will see your tree then, I promise,With the softness, the flare, the quiver

If mercy upon it, the oldGap gone ‘twixt you and the summit.

Who Weeps: To ArtistsWho weeps in the lanterned land? WhoDreams summer away and sees it not?Who loves the tender lie, the fragrant duskOf cypress-surrounded waters, womenElusive as the haunted silencesOf kingfishers and fauns of porphyry?Who is his black-swan drowsy park perceivesRose clusters bleeding on the dark slow watersAnd hugs the melancholy grace even against his eyes?Drugs and dream, and bliss afloat on pain:O elder son of man, you thrust out your blind mighty brotherDunging your self-enclosure with his sweat of innocence,Those dripping roses emblem your brother’s heartWhich is your own heart, bleeding tears, where his bleeds curses,For never can your body cry down its unison with his,Despite your dreams wide waving barriers.The bread you give, you give in vain, can bread conjoinThe inbeat and the outbeat of the one red human heart?Do not give gifts in guilt, in mercy and in freedom give yourself.O open world, O sense of separate wells of loveliness,Lifted by the same under-ocean into sunshot dancing.O night and serpents of destruction, death and the lapse of blossom,Sweetness and bitterness of the wild exposed adventure,O man self-blinded and man blind by birthTouch one another and see God.

Saturn’s Target—For EdithA god with astonished blowpipe before birthTransfixed the brilliance that you were,Lest unimpeded you should shed on earthThe hostile splendor of a star.


And so your heart dismayed with painInfused with death the bloom of lightDenoting you, invoking bitter rainTo share with you its lost delight.

Believe the dart, an innocence condemned,Simple assurance of your powerIn love, not lack of it, my friend,And wear its anger like a flower.

Turner Poems 249

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Could We See Them