2.10.23

General observations on Merrill’s "The Changing Light at Sandover," from Ch. 8 of "JAMES MERRILL: an introduction to the poetry" by Judith Moffett

Beginning about 1955, when Merrill and his friend and lover David Jackson first moved to Stonington, they often diverted themselves with a Ouija board . . . described [as] “a smooth wooden board on which had been printed the alphabet, the Arabic numerals, and the words YES and NO. . . .” The board is used to get in touch with the “spirit world”; the mortals below ask questions, the spirits reply by spelling out messages with a pointer on which each player allows the fingers of one hand to rest lightly. . . .

Some pairs of players, without consciously controlling the pointer, get very much livelier results than others do; and for a time JM and DJ (in the board’s shorthand) made a regular parlor game of their extraordinary ability to summon the souls of the dead. . . . The two grew ever more fascinated with the phenomenon; as to what it meant they remained in the dark. But the game had its disquieting, not to say sinister, aspects. Where in fact were these messages coming from? Should the whole affair have become so seductive that for a time DJ and JM found themselves living more within the spirit world than in their own?

. . . “Why,” wonders DJ early in the Mirabell Lessons, “did They choose us?/ Are we more usable than Yeats or Hugo,/ Doters on women . . .?” An explanation ensues:

. . . LESSER ARTS NEEDED NO EXEGETES:
ARCHITECTURE     SCULPTURE     THE MOSAICS & PAINTINGS THAT
FLOWERED IN GREECE & PERSIA CELEBRATED THE BODY.
POETRY     MUSIC     SONG INDWELL & CELEBRATE THE MIND . . .

NOW MIND IN ITS PURE FORM IS A NONSEXUAL PASSION
OR A UNISEXUAL ONE PRODUCING ONLY LIGHT.
FEW PAINTERS OR SCULPTORS CAN ENTER THIS LIFE OF THE MIND.
THEY (LIKE ALL SO-CALLED NORMAL LOVERS) MUST PRODUCE AT LAST
BODIES     THEY DO NOT EXIST FOR ANY OTHER PURPOSE

. . . homosexuals, being poorly suited to make children, are well-suited therefore to make poetry. Ephraim [the first book of the epic]—and all that follows where he led—makes sense as the child of JM’s and DJ’s love and pro/creativity, conceived through their union at the Ouija board.

“Jung says—or if he doesn’t, all but does—/That God and the Unconscious are one,” we read in Ephraim, Section U. To theorize that in The Changing Light at Sandover two unconsciouses, linked skillfully by long practice, have played God by creating a cosmic vision still leaves a great deal unexplained. How, for instance, did DJ and JM know that Nabokov was dead—news that reached them first via the Board? More centrally, what is it these two do that others fail to do, which yields such astonishing results? When we leave JM at the close of the Coda, nervously preparing to read the completed trilogy to the heavenly host assembled (one auditor per letter of the alphabet), his situation is both so familiar in its Proustian stance and thematic preoccupations, and so outré in its total concept, as to baffle and defy any simple explanation. Even if the two did make all of it up unconsciously, an experience has befallen them scarcely less amazing and wonderful than if, like the prophets of old, they had heard God’s voice address them aloud. And if God and the Unconscious are one—? As Merrill has observed, “if it’s still yourself that you’re drawing upon, then that self is much stranger and freer and more far-seeing than the one you thought you knew.” Put another way, in another place: “If the spirits aren’t external, how astonishing the mediums become! Victor Hugo said of his voices that they were like his own mental powers multiplied by five.” He adds that his time among the spirits has “made me think twice about the imagination,”—a reminder that Section S of Ephraim begins where this essay may properly conclude:

Stevens imagined the imagination
And God as one; the imagination, also,
as that which presses back, in parlous times,
Against “the pressure of reality.”