BECOMING GOD
A Philosophical Background to Reading Conrad Aiken
by Dr. Ian Kluge

NOTE: The following article is taken from the introduction to Ian Kluge's "A Reader's Guide to Conrad Aiken's 'Preludes for Memnon'" (World University Press, 1998).

While the particulars refer to this poem, the discussion of Aiken's use of Heraclitus, Kant, Hegel and Schopenhauer is of use in studying Aiken's other poetry. "Preludes for Memnon", published in 1935 and the eighth of Conrad Aiken's long poems, is a long meditative poem in which the narrator explores the metaphysical and psychological consequences of his belief that we inhabit a universe subject to ceaseless change. He undertakes these explorations in the form of a dramatic monologue with a lady whose presence may be real or imaginary and with whom he is having personal difficulties about an infidelity on his part. The two have apparently decided to meet to discuss these matters in the library of a home, possibly theirs, late one winter evening. As in a fugue, these two strands - the narrator's explanation of his infidelity and the philosophical explorations - work together because the narrator attempts to justify his duplicity in terms of his metaphysical beliefs and their consequences for human psychology. This leads to interesting and often humorous contrapuntal effects, as the reader, and most likely, the lady, realize that whatever the intellectual virtues of his highly sophisticated philosophical arguments, they also serve his rather selfish personal agenda: he wants his infidelity to be accepted, perhaps even praised, and if not accepted, then excused, and if not excused, then forgiven; moreover, he wants her back and most especially, he wants her back in his bed.

Part of the challenge not to mention the fun of studying "Preludes for Memnon", is seeing through his impressive philosophical arguments to the stunningly crass personal motives that drive them. This poem surely represents the longest, most sophisticated and outrageous 'line' ever given to a wronged woman. As we make our way through the poem, we gradually form a portrait of the narrator's flawed personal make-up: a highly intelligent, suave, witty and intellectually astute mind found in the character of a self-centered sexual opportunist. Yet, even this incongruity serves the intellectual development of the poem for one of the narrator's most important ideas is that virtue and vice, good and evil, the noble and base, the pure and filthy are so intertwined in the universe and in human nature that we can never truly separate them. He effectively combines this view with his argument that faithfulness of any sort is an illusion, a sheer impossibility in a universe in which everything is constantly changing. Consequently, he has a rather shameless attitude towards his infidelity: it was as natural, and from a cosmic view, every bit as moral as his current change to wanting her back! Consistency is not a virtue in his view of the world.

The greatest challenges to reading "Preludes for Memnon" do not come from the loose structure, the wealth of imagery, the free verse so unusual among modern poets, or the simultaneous personal and philosophical levels on which the poem moves. The greatest challenge to reading this poem is the unstated by nonetheless indispensable philosophy which underlies the narrator's dramatic monologue. Until this is understood, at least in outline, the poem is bound to remain a sport, a beautifully written enigma, a florid, perhaps anachronistic, example of late nineteenth century decadence written by a contemporary author.* It is imperative, therefore, to examine the narrator's philosophy.

"Preludes for Memnon" is not, of course, a technical work of philosophy. However, reading it requires at least a passing acquaintance with the main ideas of the four philosophers whose ideas are absolutely indispensable in understanding "Preludes for Memnon", and, indeed, all of Aiken's poetry: Heraclitus, Kant, Hegel and Schopenhauer.* "Preludes for Memnon" does not, of course, examine their ideas critically from a rigorously logical and philosophical point of view. Rather, the poem explores the consequences of their ideas when imaginatively applied to the actual problems encountered by human beings: the discovery of an identity; the development of a stance or attitude towards the world; one's relationship to the cosmic order in which we find ourselves; the meaning of good and evil; the nature of truth and how it may be known; love and loyalty; our relationship to our ancestors and death and the meaning of death. Aiken's concern with their ideas was, so one might say, less technical and more existential.

That Aiken was influenced by more than these four philosophers was already obvious to Houston Peterson whose "The Melody of Chaos" appeared in 1931. Peterson provides a long list of influences, including, among others Descartes, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, James, Pierce, Darwin, Freud and, of course, Emerson. All of these thinkers played their role in the historical process of shaping Aiken's thought but not all of them are necessary to understand the nature of the philosophy that emerged. This is especially true of Freud and Darwin whose contributions, while highly significant in the historical development of Aiken's ideas, essentially do no more than provide supportive scientific evidence for a philosophy whose parameters are already well-defined by Heraclitus, Kant, Hegel and Schopenhauer. Whether or not Aiken actually got the idea of change being the only constant from Heraclitus's fragments is beyond the scope of this study, but one thing is certain: Aiken completely accepted the Heraclitean view that everything in this universe is endlessly and relentlessly subject to change. 'Everything' is not being used rhetorically here but literally. Each natural object, living creature and above all, each memory, identity, thought, feeling, opinion and discovery is constantly changing into something else. Heraclitus said that no man may step twice into the same river because by the time of the second step, both the river and the man have changed. Aiken radicalizes this statement: no man or woman may have the same identity twice, think the same thought or have the same feeling twice; no man or woman may kiss the same person twice, nor may anyone see, feel, love, appreciate, hate, hear, touch, taste, imagine or dream anything twice.

This radicalization of Heraclitus' dictum leads to eight consequences, all of which are accepted by Aiken's narrator in "Preludes for Memnon".

First: Because we live in a universe of ceaseless change, all things, including human beings are continually dying and being re-born at every moment. The narrator accepts this as a metaphysical truth and not as a mere poetic sentiment. Death is a necessary - and wonderful - thing.

Second: the quest for any kind of stability and permanence in identity, truth, love or anything else is futile and misguided because it violates our basic nature as perpetually changing entities. Disloyalty, betrayal, change of mind or heart are all inevitable and natural occurrences and should bear no stigma. Those who stigmatize them are simply hypocrites who fail to understand their own nature.

Third: there can be no rest. Because there is no final stopping place, no heaven, every rest is only a pause before a new beginning. This will go on forever both for the body and the mind.

Fourth: there is no final truth about anything - indeed, 'truth' as conventionally conceived is a chimera. There are only momentary viewpoints adopted as go through our endless changes. This last element gives the narrator's philosophy a distinctive post-modern cast.

Fifth: the ubiquity of change makes it impossible to adhere to moralities based on such conventional categories as truth, loyalty, identity. A transvaluation of values is needed. We must re-interpret old values and beliefs in light of this fact or invent new moralities. The narrator of Preludes for Memnon does both. He re-reads certain Bible passages in radically new ways and tries to invent a morality in which his infidelity is not only justified but perfectly moral.

Sixth: the fact that everything constantly changes means that stable, solid, enduring 'things' in the conventional sense do not exist. Everything is always in process and, therefore, 'not one thing' nor quite 'another thing' but always something in-between. There is a natural and wholly unavoidable vagueness about the identity of things and human beings that allows the narrator to call them 'nothing'. The narrator's numerous puns about 'nothing' must be read with this consequence in mind. Things are also 'nothing' because they are not only in process but are, in fact, process itself. A process is not a 'thing' in any conventional sense of the word.

Seventh: Because all things - including humanity - are in process, they all share the same essential nature or essence: processes and, in particular, processes in evolutionary development. This fact becomes the basis for the narrator's use of the doctrine of microcosm and macrocosm: human beings are a smaller, 'micro' version of the process at work in the vast macrocosm. Humanity is a natural child of the universe.

Eighth: The only enduring identity human beings have is their essential identity as parts of the cosmic process. Any attempt to cling to stable and enduring identities in the conventional sense is not only doomed but also a violation of the only law their is: change. The Heraclitean trend in Aiken's thinking receives support from the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, particularly from Kant's theory of mind and the resulting epistemology. Kant did not believe that the stimuli from the external world came to the mind in any organized and coherent fashion; rather, the mind receives a barrage of stimuli (in who knows what order) and then actively organizes these stimuli into an intelligible and sensible world picture. Even time and space do not exist 'out there' but are simply two of the categories into which the mind organizes its data to create an image of the world.

The same is true of causality. Kant accepted Hume's argument that even the continued sequential appearance of events - for example, letting go of a ball and its falling - does not prove causality in any logically rigorous sense; it proves merely that one kind of event tends to follow another. Causality - the notion that the ball drops because I let go - is a notion invented by the mind to explain why things happen. Naturally, Kant also believed that such 'secondary qualities' as color, texture, smell and taste are also invented by the mind. ** In other words, 'reality', the 'world', and the 'cosmos' are creations of the human mind which never perceives what the world is 'really' like but only the images of the world as shaped by its own activities. Kant gives the name 'noumenon' to whatever kind of 'reality' lies on the other side of an image created by the mind. He also refers to a 'noumenon' as the "thing-in-itself", a term actually used by the narrator in Section XVI of Preludes for Memnon. The world as it appears to us, he calls the phenomenal world. Kant also makes it clear that the noumenal world of things-in-themselves is eternally unknowable and that human beings are, so to speak, 'trapped' within the phenomenal world created by their own minds.

Like many before and after him, Conrad Aiken seems to have accepted Kant's theory of the mind along with its epistemological and existential consequences. Five of these consequences play a pivotal role in "Preludes for Memnon". First: If the mind creates the world from a barrage of raw stimuli, then man or the mind is obviously God, the creator of the world and the whole universe. This does away with God as a metaphysical, that is, independently real, entity, and establishes God as a psychological entity - each of us! Each human being is a god. All references to God in Preludes for Memnon must be read in this psychological way. Second: 'Beneath' or 'beyond' the phenomenal world-image created by our mind lurks an ever unknowable, mysterious and, thereby, potentially threatening noumenal world about which we can say nothing. The unavoidable presence of this 'dark', enigmatic noumenal realm haunts the narrator of Preludes for Memnon. Third: Applying Kant's theory of mind to other human beings, reveals that they too must remain perpetual mysteries to us because they too are creations of our mind which takes stimuli coming from 'somewhere' out there and organizes them into an image of other people. What those others are 'really' like in-themselves is a part of the unknowable noumenal realm that always surrounds us. This natural unknowability of others in-themselves is intensified by the fact that the organizing process takes time and so the image we create of others - and the universe itself - is always as they were and not as they are now. We inevitably live in the past. Fourth: Applying Kant's theory of mind to ourselves means that we are always mysterious to ourselves insofar as our own self-image is also a creation of the mind. Such being the case, we should no cling too tenaciously to our so-called 'identity' because the fact is that the only real identity of which we can be sure is that of a fragment of the cosmic process. We can - and should - re-create ourselves as often as possible to harmonize ourselves with the cosmos. Fifth: Human beings are inevitably trapped within their own minds and are, therefore, doomed to a psychological and metaphysical loneliness for which no remedy exists. Kant's theory of mind and the consequences of Heraclitus' belief that all is flux harmonize on three central issues.

In the first place, both leave humanity lost in a fundamentally unknowable, mysterious and potentially threatening universe in which no turn of events can ever be absolutely ruled out. In that sense, all existence is radically contingent; there can be no guarantees about anything or anyone and consequently, there can be no final safety or assurance of any sort. This is because both philosophies imply that what we see is emphatically not what we get: beneath the appearance of stability there is only change and process; beneath the phenomenal images we create, there is an unknowable noumenal realm.

Both philosophies also suggest that we are continually dying and being re-born. In Heraclitus' philosophy, this is because we are subject to constant change; in Kant's, we are always dying and being re-born because the mind is constantly having to re-create our identity or self-image in response to new stimuli coming from the external world and from within ourselves.

Finally, both philosophies embody a strong scepticism about human knowledge. They clearly suggest that the quest for any kind of permanent, ultimate knowledge is futile, in Hercalitus' case because everything is changing and in Kant's because we can never get beyond our own self-created phenomenal images. Intellectual certainty is a chimera and with it moral and religious certainty as well. The consequences of these beliefs are felt throughout Preludes for Memnon, either in the form of explicit statements or in attitudes expressed by the narrator. Randomly selecting a page, I read: The world is intricate, and we are nothing. The world is nothing: we are intricate. Alas, how simple to invert the world Inverting phrases! (L,1,1-4) These lines plainly illustrate scepticism about the attainment of final, true and absolutely certain knowledge. If simply by changing words we can change the world, how can we say we really know anything about that world? Truth, at least in its conventional sense, is precisely that which cannot be changed. Again, randomly selecting another page, I find, "We are destroyed / [d]aily" (XLIII,1,7-8), a statement referring to our constant deaths; later in the same stanza, the narrator tells us to "mistrust" (XLIII,1,11) the world and everything in it, reminding us thereby of his fundamental scepticism.

There is, of course, a rather glaring logical contradiction between Heraclitus' dictum that reality is a process and Kant's dictum that the thing-in-itself cannot be known. If reality cannot be known, one cannot make any statements about its nature - or conversely, one can make virtually any statements one likes about it since all of them may plausibly reflect aspects of the truth. The narrator's philosophy deals with this contradiction by accepting it and making it an integral part of itself. This is why he can contradict himself so easily throughout the poem; his very contradictions sustain and illustrate the world-view he promulgates. The narrator goes even further to make self-contradiction an integral part of his philosophy by adopting Hegel's dialectic. Hegel, too, was a Heraclitean of sorts who viewed the world in terms of processes and not stable 'things', in terms of 'becoming' rather than 'being'. Indeed, one might say that he refined Hercalitus's theory by specifically characterizing the cosmic flux as a dialectical process in which things change and eventually turn into their opposites. Any statement and its opposite are true. That being the case, the narrator has complete philosophical justification for his blatant self-contradictions and even lies. As he says, "Truth is a lie when worshipped as the truth; The lie a truth when worshipped as a lie." (XL,Pt.II,1, 10-11) This attitude obviously feeds back into his scepticism about what we can really know, just as dialectical change into opposites strengthens the idea that the cosmos is a place of boundless change.

There is an additional logical consequence of Hegel's dialectic: if something eventually becomes its opposite, then the potential for being that particular opposite must pre-exist within it. In a sense, each 'thing' is already its opposite, though not in any obvious manner. This secret potential identity remains hidden - at least for a time - but nevertheless exists and awaits the right opportunity to activate and reveal itself. Applied to human beings, this leads to the inescapable conclusion that beneath all virtue we will find vice; that fair and foul are as closely related as two sides of one coin; that the demonic and the divine are, in some sense, one and inseparable - in short, that all claims to pure virtue, honesty, love, and justice are only half-truths and, thereby, lies. There are, in fact, neither saints nor any absolutely evil and corrupt human beings. This view of human nature, already implicit in Hegel, is supported by the writings of Sigmund Freud with whose works Aiken had an early and extensive acquaintance. Freud held that the ego is, in fact, only a small part of the mind, a sort of island floating on the wild and unfathomable ocean of the id, the seething home of our instincts, desires, fears and memories. Just as the foundations of an island extend deep into the sea, so the roots of the ego are close to the anarchic and utterly amoral id. Since virtues belong to the ego, it follows logically that they are somehow connected to and inseparable from the id whose raw power is simply beyond good and evil and knows no shame. Virtue and vice are intimately connected though the ego, our consciously assumed identity and, denials notwithstanding, even through the super-ego, our parentally-trained conscience.

Hegel added one further qualification to Heraclitus' theory that the entire cosmos and all its contents are processes: the concept of order. The changes we see and experience in ourselves are not random but rather, teleological. They strive towards a goal and are, therefore, orderly and have direction and meaning. Indeed, Hegel saw all of nature and human history as a single story, namely the story of how the Absolute - or God - progressively reveals itself and its powers through material nature and the history of mankind. In other words, change is goal-directed and purposive evolution both at the over-all grand macrocosmic level and at the individual microcosmic level. Each individual thing is, in its own way and to the limits of its own capacity, constantly changing to be better, more and new. In the language of the narrator of "Preludes for Memnon", each thing strives to be god. Having achieved this goal, having become god, each being immediately sets out on a new quest to become a new god.

Humanity's only unique virtue is that we are conscious of this struggle and other beings are not. Aiken's reading of Darwin's "The Origin of the Species" and "The Descent of Man" reinforced these Hegelian ideas in his mind. In the former, he found additional evidence for the notion that all living beings are engaged in a process of becoming something more, something better - god - while the latter re-enforces the Freudian view that even our highest behaviors have 'low' animal roots. Man, in this view, is no more or less than any animal and differs from them only because he is conscious of this fact. Kant's theory of mind leaves human beings in an highly uncomfortable position: if we create reality in our minds and if we can never get beyond our own creations, then we, for all intents and purposes, are locked into, trapped, in a world of our own creation and, therefore, inescapably lonely both metaphysically and psychologically. Ignorance about anything but ourselves is another inescapable consequence of Kant's view. The trouble is that such a situation is rarely if ever acceptable to human beings who have a natural desire for communication and knowledge as well as for genuine intimate contact.

The philosopher Schopenhauer thought he knew a way out of this prison and his answer harmonizes with the Heraclitean foundations of Aiken's thought. Schopenhauer suggested that escape was possible if we turn inward instead of out. If we adopt an attitude of radical subjectivity and explore our own nature thoroughly, we will find working within ourselves the same Will, the same creative power at work throughout the entire cosmos. The connection between the two philosophies becomes clear as soon as we substitute the word 'process' for 'Will': like everything else, we are fragments or examples of the cosmic 'Process' or Will. It follows, therefore, that to understand and gain real, absolute knowledge about other beings and the universe in general, we need only explore and understand ourselves. Genuine knowledge, contact and communication are possible if we understand the Will or 'Process'. The narrator of Preludes for Memnon is aware of Schopenhauer's view, referring at one point to the "inisistent question of the will-to-be" (XLVIII,3,7).

Schopenhauer claimed that the best way to understand the Will is to think of music. A little reflection reveals that music is constant change since, if it stops changing, it stops being music. It exists for its own sake and represents nothing but itself and it has no necessary final goal and could go on forever even though, for the sake of practicality, compositions end. The cosmos is, in short, a vast musical composition. If we want to understand things, we must, therefore, view them as musical 'compositions'. The narrator of "Preludes for Memnon" makes a similar discovery. Standing in front of a mirror, he examines a small glass statue and wonders how he can express what this thing really is. "Merciful heaven / [g]ive me a language that will say this thing" (XVI,2,1-2) he exclaims, and then, after further ruminations, he cries out, "The thing itself - by God the thing is music." (XVI,34,2; italics added).

In one outburst, he combines the philosophy of Kant - the"thing itself" (ibid) - with the philosophy of Schopenhauer - "the thing is music" (ibid; italics added). Later he adds, ... "And the thing is music. It is a sound of many instruments - Complex, diverse, an alchemy of voices - Brass melting into silver, silver smoothly Dissolving into gold; and then the harsh And thickening discord ..." (XVI,4,6-11) Still further on in this section, the narrator says that if the lady touches him "I become music, chaos, light and sound - I am no longer I: I am a world " (XVI, 5,6-7) Through her, he becomes aware of himself as the same music that makes up all the "world" (XVI,5,7) with which he consciously identifies.

With this outline of the narrator's philosophy in "Preludes for Memnon", the reader has the intellectual tools to explore not ony this magnificent poem but also Aiken's other major poetical works.

NOTES

 * A number of critics tend towards this view, notably Hoxie Fairchild in "Religious Trends in English Poetry", Volume 5. ** John Locke in "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding" also dismisses the secondary qualities as unreal in any metaphysical sense.