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