Introductory Note:

A Reader’s Guide to "Preludes For Memnon" is a section by section and verse by verse study of one of Conrad Aiken’s most famous, and, along with "Time in the Rock", most difficult and misunderstood long poem.

The purpose of this book, and its already started companion, A Reader’s Guide to "Time in the Rock", is to stimulate Aiken studies by explicating Aiken’s philosophy of consciousness and by

making suggestions and pointing out interesting projects for those interested in advancing the study of Aiken’s work.

At the beginning of Preludes for Memnon, the protagonist narrator finds himself in a psychological limbo where none of his previous certainties are of any use. He seems to be waiting for a lady whose feminine presence haunts the entire poem even though it is impossible to tell whether or not she is ever actually present or only a presence in the protagonist’s mind. As he waits, the protagonist suddenly experiences an explosion of contents from his inner depths, an event which marks the beginning of the real action of Preludes for Memnon: the protagonist’s feelings, reflections and explorations of mind, identity and the role of humankind in the cosmic order. He first discovery is that he and everything in and around him are "dedicated to death" (I,4,13).

The introductory stanza to Preludes for Memnon,establishes not only the time and place of the poem but also the protagonist-narrator’s situation in life. He informs us of the time in language that coordinates the season, that is, the outer time of year with his own inner, psychological time: "Winter for a moment takes the mind" (I,1,1). This coordination of inner and outer, or, the mutual reflection of macrocosm and microcosm* is reinforced later in this stanza when the protagonist tells us, "The mind too has its snows..." (I,1,11). While the outer world is enduring winter, the season between growth and harvest, the protagonist is also ‘in between’, in transition, suspended, as it were, between two phases of his life, in which all of his former personal and philosophical certainties have been thrown into question and doubt.

However, unlike the external winter, the winter within is not necessarily a protracted period of time - "Winter for a moment takes the mind" (I,1,1; italics added) - suggesting that the entire poem may, in fact, only be a clumsy verbal transcript or, in computer language, a ‘de-compression’ of only a few instants of understanding, feeling and inner exploration. As the rest of Preludes for Memnon makes clear, time, in the ordinary sense of the word of ‘clock time’, has little, if any, usefulness in regards to the serious philosophical and psychological issues facing the protagonist, and, by extension, all human beings.

The protagonist’s use of military language in the first two thirds of this stanza reveals that he knows such transitional times can be frightening and dangerous: "icicles guard the wall" (I,1,2). Even the arrival of spring, "[w]ith a single crocus in the loam or a pair of birds" (I,1,6) has threatening undertones; spring, he says, might "engage" (I,1,5) winter, as if in combat. Looking out of the window, the protagonist also notices that the walls are "bayoneted with ice" (I,1,12). Clearly, the protagonist is preparing himself for some kind of mental conflict in the near future.

The sober and somewhat ominous mood set by these military images is reinforced by imagery related to darkness, ice and snow:

Winter is there outside, is here in me:

Drapes the planets with snow, deepens the ice on the moon,

Darkens the darkness that was already darkness.

(I,1,8-10)

The protagonist’s situation increasingly grim situation is dramatically emphasized when he says that winter [drapes the planets with snow, deepens the ice on the moon" (I,1,9). He further reinforces his grim mood by referring to the "slippery paths" (I,1,11) of the mind and the "ice-encased" (I,1,12) leaves. In the context of the military imagery used, even the "keen sparkle of frost on the sill: (I,1,4; italics added) takes on a threatening tones, since bayonets also sparkle keenly or sharply.

The drawing room in which the protagonist finds himself helps darken the m ood of the first stanza. Thinking of the lady - whether she is really there or only an imaginary presence we cannot know - he mentions the way in which she touches "the cold treble" (I,1,16; italics added) on the piano, the sound of "[f]ive notes, like breaking icicles" (I,1,7; italics added) and the subsequent "silence" (I,1,17).

Whether or not the lady is actually present throughout Preludes for Memnon remains unclear. The protagonist tells us that she will arraive when "the wind blows from Arcturus" (I,1,14) but this, in fact, is nothing more than one of the clever ambiguities to which he treats his audience. Because the star Arcturus is an impossible distance from earth this phrase could mean that the lady will never arrive, that his relationship with her is over and that, appearances to the contrary, he addresses her only in his imagination. However, this phrase could just as well mean that she will, indeed, arrive, and that her arrival is miraculous (from Arcturus) and a sign of hope. Such ambiguity is, of course, wholly appropriate for a protagonist who finds himself in the uncertainties of being ‘between’ moments, seasons, and perhaps, lovers.

*The ancient mystical doctrine of the microcosm and macrocosm is generally interpreted to mean that humankind is the microcosm, the ‘small universe’ which reflects all the laws and processes at work in the macrocosm, the ‘large universe’. Consequently, by studying ourselves, it is possible to gain understanding about the universe around us. Furthermore, it means that whatever events happen in one must somehow be reflected in the other, a belief that finds expression in such Shakespearean plays as Julius Caesar wherein Caesar’s murder is foretold by a variety of storms and supernatural signs. See Julius Caesar, Act 1, Sc 3.

**The situation is not, however entirely hopeless as indicated by the possible arrival of warmer spring weather and the references to summer with its "hot grass; or autumn with a yellow leaf" (I,1,7).

Like Stanza 1, Stanza 2 begins by coordinating the inner and outer, the microcosm and macrocosm:

The alarm clock ticks, the pulse keeps time with it,

Night and the mind are full of sounds...

(I,2,1-2)

The protagonist paces in the drawing room in which there is only an "imaginary fire" (I,2,3), peers into the snowy darkness outside the window with its "imaginary view" (I,2,4), awaiting the lady’s arrival. He listens carefully to the street sounds, "the knocking of chains on a motor-car" (I,2,6) and "the tolling/Of a bronze bell dedicated to Christ" (I,2,7). The latter sound has ambiguous meaning: it can be a hopeful sign beckoning him to salvation, and perhaps, comfort for his troubles, or, since the bell is outside in the darkness, it can be sign of loss, of past and now unattainable faith and comfort.

This moment of staring into the dark is the protagonist’s last moment of peace for the remainder of the entire poem. It is not the lady who suddenly arrives but instead

...the uprush of angelic wings, the beating

Of wings demonic, from the abyss of the mind!

The darkness filled with feathery, whistling wings.

...

The deep void swarming with wings and the sound of wings,

The winnowing of chaos, the aliveness

Of depth and depth and depth dedicated to death.

(I,2,8-14)

In short, the protagonist is confronted by a volcanic explosion of good and evil - "angelic wings" (I,2,8) and "wings demonic" (I,2,9) - from the limitless depths, "the abyss" (ibid) of his unconscious mind. This chaotic explosion is not only frightening but also - as one would expect with the protagonist’s love of ambiguity - exhilarating, for it presents him with "the aliveness" (I,2,13), the vitality and energy that he discovers is locked away in the mind of each human being. Accessing this energy, however, is not easy. To do so we must face the fact that our unconscious depths are "dedicated to death" (I,2,14), that is, perpetual change and transformation which requires a constant dying from one state or situation into another. This presents the narrator, and indeed, all human beings with an enormous challenge: we must face the necessity of abandoning our hopes for achieving stability and permanence of identity, knowledge or understanding. We live in a cosmic order in which everything inside or outside us is subject to unceasing change.

Stanza 3 presents a detailed account of some of the unconscious contents that rush into the protagonist’s mind. The nature of the materials includes the "inconsequential" (I,3,1), the "ridiculous" (I,3,2), the "meaningless" (I,3,3), memories (I,3,3), the "absurd" *I,3,4), the ordinary or "quotidian" (I,3,5), the aesthetic in the form of "Utamaro’s/Pearl fishers" (I,3,14) as well as a pot pourri of random objects from his life. He describes this chaos of contents as "the void, the night" (I,3,15), that is, the very stuff of which his unconscious mind is made. Overwhelming and potentially threatening as these contents are, however, they also carry positive potentials, symbolized by the "angelic wings" (I,3,16)

The most interesting image in this stanza is that of memory, which

...like a juggler

Tosses its colored balls into the light, and again

Receives them into the darkness.

(I,3,3-5)*

This image not only leads to the opening theme of the next stanza but also introduces the audience to one of the protagonist’s favorite themes, namely the unreliability, the trickiness and even impish nature of memory. Memory is often no more than a performer entertaining us in various ways. Consequently, we cannot rely on memories to help us achieve a sense of identity since such memories are always somewhat contrived and part of a ‘show’ put on for ourselves.

*Aiken’s fascination with the image of the juggler finds its most sustained expression in his long poem, Senlin. The poem consists of the reveries and meditations of the juggler, Senlin, who, having failed to impress the audience by balancing two balls on each other, contemplates the nature and value of his existence.

In the first line of stanza four, the protangonist introduces the theme of identity which will haunt him through Preludes for Memnon. "What is the flower?" (I,4,1), he asks, and despite desperate and even heroic struggles, the protagonist can do more than achieve negative definitions.

...It is not a sigh of color,

Suspiration of purple, sibilation of saffron,

Nor aureate exhalation from the tomb.

(I,4,1-3)

According to the protagonist, a flower is not only what is appears to be in the common sense view, but also the very things just denied about it. It is these things too simply "because you think of these" (I,4,4). In the human mind, things are not only what they appear to common sense, but are also colored and defined by what we associate with them. This fact makes a clearly defined and stable identity difficult, if not impossible, to achieve because our associations with words or things can be endless. Furthermore, they become increasingly distant from the original and, therefore, increasingly abstract. As the protagonist puts it, a flower can become

...an emanation of emanation,fragile

As light, or glisten, or gleam, or coruscation""

(I,4,5-6)

In the end, the flower is no more than " creature of brightness and as brightness brief" (I,4,7), enjoying only a few brief moments of being in our minds. It is, as protagonist says, "dedicated to death" (I,2,17).

If nothing else, the protagonist of Preludes for Memnon is persistent. Undaunted by his failure to identify and define the flower, he turns his attention elsewhere, asking, "What is the frost?" (I,4,8). Here he has even less success than with the flower. Previously, it was the identity of the flower that was in question but now the result of his efforts throws his own identity into question. He lists all the things that frost is not, and discovers

Yet it is these because you think of these,

Frost and flower, the bright ambiguous syllable

Of which the meaning is both no and yes.

(I,4,11-13; italics added)

Ironically, the struggle to identify something as simple as flowers and frost, costs the protagonist his own sense of identity. He has merged with these things, become one with them, has lost sight of the boundaries distinguishing self from not-self. The distinctions between inner and outer, between the perceiving subject and the perceived object have been blurred along with the distinction between the actor and the acted upon. The quest for certainty in identifying one small thing, leads him to discover the fundamental and inescapable ambiguity of all human and non-human identity.

*All words have two meanings, a denotation, or dictionary definition, and a connotation, the ideas, feelings and images we associate with a word or thing. The protagonist discovers that in practice it is very difficult, if not impossible, to make a completely clean distinction between the denotation of a word such as "knight" - an armored warrior on horseback - and its connotations of chivalry, romance, mystery, dragons, St. George and even damsels in distress.

Consequently, the identities of things as we think of them are not nearly as clear or distinctly defined as we normally pretend.

The protagonist attepts - without success - to recover his usual sense of a single and stable identity by looking into a mirror. Instead, he discovers that the mirror itself is "distorting" (I,5,1) because by objectifying himself in it, by looking at himself as if he were someone else., he has become both an actor and the audience for his own performance. He has already blurred the distinction between self and not-self, subject and object and actor and acted upon, which are fundamental distinctions we must make in practical day to day living. Furthermore, having a sense of play, he inevitably succumbs to performing for himself. This show takes on a life of its own in which he begins by being merely "grandiose" (I,5,2) and ends by becoming divine: "The brow is noble, and the mouth is God’s." (K,5,4).

Unfortunately, matters are still more complex since the protagonist is not only a god, but, paradoxically, a rather pathetic and human god, lost, confused and perhaps even frightened, struggling to know his identity and origins, a god "who seeks his mother, Chaos -" (I,5,5). This merely mortal god, a mixture of all the opposites which work within him simultaneously, is

Confusion seeking solution, and life seeking death.

Here is the rose that woos the icicle; the icicle

That woos the rose. Here is the silence of silences

Which dreams of becoming a sound, and the sound

Which will perfect itself in silence.

(I,5,6-10)

Matters cannot, unfortunately, rest here either, because the mixture of opposites which, by his very nature, the protagonist is also happens to be "dedicated to death" (I,5,13; see also I,2,14), that is, to change and transformation. In effect, his very identity is this infinite mixture of opposites perpetually transforming itself into something else. This means that identity I no - as so often supposed - a thing, but a process.

Having realized that all things are "[d]edicated to death" (I,1,13), the protagonist first explores various ways of escaping awareness of this fact, and then, what this fact might mean for him and his lady personally.

Frightened by his discovery that the quest for a single, coherent and stable identity is hopeless, the protagonist flees to more pleasant thoughts and memories. He recalls pleasurable times and places he has been with the lady whose presence will continue to haunt him throughout Preludes for Memnon. They share "[t]wo coffees in the Espanol, the last/Bright drops of golden Barsac in a goblet,/ Fig paste and candied nuts..." (II,1,1-3). However, his attempts to escape fail; after discussing great writers of the past and the inevitable deaths of great contemporary writers, he drifts to thoughts of their own mortality. "What winding sheets for us[?]" (II,1,7) he asks and then, in a marvelous demonstration of morbidity, indulges in imagining what his lady might look like in her grave. To his own intense discomfortiture, however, he cannot be sure if he will be there beside her:

For there are dark streams in this dark world, lady,

Gulf Streams and Arctic currents of the soul;

And I may be, before our consummation

Beds us together, cheek by jowl, in earth,

Swept to another shore, where my white bones

Will lie unhonored, or defiled by gulls.

(II,1,14-19)

These lines reveal the gallows humor that characterizes the protagonist’s sensibility. The morbid double entendre on the word "consummation", leads to the rather grotesque, but nonetheless humorous image of two corpses lying together like two lovers - or, conversly, two lovers like two corpses. His vision of his own fate as a pile of bones neglected or bespattered by gull droppings also has a sharp self-condemning and self-satirical edge. Finally, the pun on the word "lie" introduces the theme of truth and untruth which plays an important role in later sections of Preludes for Memnon; in a world of perpetual flux which precludes the formation of permanent and clearly defined identities, there may not be much difference between truth and lie. An instant of time can transform one into the other as the truth of one moment becomes the lie of the next.

The protagonist’s gallows humor is no mere personal idiosyncrasy or decorative comic relief in what is obviously a serious philosophical poem. Since the deaths of the body, current identity and/or current beliefs are inevitable, one of our vital survival skills is a degree of detachment from death. Such detachment may well manifest itself as humor and a certain self-consciously playful indulgence in morbidity.

Inspired by his acute consciousness of death - he thinks of himself and his lady as going to "the wormworn house"(II,2,5) to make love - and having imagined his lady in her grave and his own own bones neglected and gull bespattered, the protagonist asks rhetorically, "What dignity can death bestow on us[?]"(II2,2,1). Then he recounts some of their undignified lovers’ behavior as if he were mocking them both. His mockery, however, is not wholly gratuitous. In a world of perpetual flux, dignity may be as difficult to achieve as truth. How can anything that is never itself for long, that may in an instant change into its opposite or become a parody of itself - as seen when the protagonist makes faces in the mirror - have an identity, let alone a dignified identity? Such social and ethical concepts either have no place in a constantly changing world or must be completely rethought.

The anodyne he suggests to soothe their fear of death is to "comfort our panic hearts with magic names" (II,2,13) of great writers but this inevitably returns him to his morbid images of lovers and graves. He suggests that they

Stare at the ceiling, where the taxi lamps

Make ghosts of light; and see beyond this bed,

That other bed in which we will not move;

And, whether joined or separate will not love.

(II,2, 15-17)

The protagonist discovers that despite all attempts at evasion, death and thoughts of death are unavoidable because all things and certainly all humans contain as part of their very nature "depth and depth and depth dedicated to death"(I,2,14).

Finally, the theme of truth and untruth appears again in (II,2) in the form of a diabolically clever pun. "Speechless, let us lie"(I,2,11) he says to his lady. As lovers he and the lady are not only lying down, but also lying (together in bed) even when they do not speak! Lies, like death, are an inevitable part of a constantly changing world.

SECTION III:

Unable to find peace from his acutely morbid consciousness of death, the protagonist hopes to find solace in sleep. He fails because he does not yet understand that change, death, and growth are all inter-related and necessary to one another. In a final desperate move, the protagonist seeks rest in the darkness and forgetfulness.

Stanza 1:

Having sought refuge from death in the pleasures of food, literature and love, the protagonist next seeks solace in sleep, but that too fails. His "dark spirit’s still unresting grief" (III,1,2) continues even after his eyes have closed.

...O God, God

What monstrous world is this whence no escape

Even in sleep? Between the fast-shut lids

This one tear comes, hangs on the lashes, falls:

Symbol of some gigantic dream, that shakes

The secret sleeping soul... And I descend

(III,1,3-9)

What he descends to is a shore strewn with shipwrecks, flotsam and bones, that is, more images of death, and somewhat ominously, "the cries of scavengers" (III, 1,15) that profit from others’ misfortune.

Stanza 2:

The "cries of the scavengers" (ibid) lead to the protagonist’s own cries of anguished despair at his failure to escape his acute consciousness of death even in sleep, for "between the close-locked lids of dream" (III,2, 1) death appears in some of its many forms.

The terrible infinite intrudes its blue:

Ice: silence: death: the abyss of Nothing,

(III,2,2-3)

These things are forms of death because in some way or another there are all forms of absence, be it an absence of specific identity as in the "terrible infinite" (ibid), the absence of living warmth, the sounds of life, or the absence that makes a void or abyss the frightening thing it is. In his despair, the protagonist calls on God to "[r]elease this shadow from its object, this object/ From its shadow."(III,2,6-7) because in his confusion he know longer knows whether or not he is, an "object" or the object’s "shadow, or alternately, a shadow thrown by some unknown object . In either case, he craves only freedom from this opposite that torments him. Since his prayer remains unanswered, he decides to flee into the darkness itself, from "dark to deepest dark, from dark to rest"(III,2,9), hoping thereby to find a peaceful refuge. In order to attain this refuge, he knows he must reject any "Theseus-thread of memory"(III,2,10) that could link him to the "torn world well forgot"(III,2,13) where he is tormented by the thoughts of death. Moral scruples torment him as well, for he does not want his soul back in a world "where she lies"(III,2,12) not necessarily by choice but because of the world’s constant change.

* This section alludes to Hamlet’s "To be or not to be "speech in which Hamlet considers suicide - sleep and death being the same in his mind - but rejects this option because of the dreams that may afflict him in the next world.

** Section III also alludes to the myth of Theseus who found his way out of the Cretan labyrinth back to the world with the ball of string given him by Ariadne. In Aiken’s ironic use of this myth, however, it is not the masculine Theseus who wants to escape but the protagonist’s soul, portrayed as feminine, that wants to remain trapped in the labyrinth away from the "torn world well forgot"(III,2, 13).

In this section the protagonist continues his flight from death consciousness, this time to the miraculous powers of music which brings "delight"(IV,1,2) into his death-haunted world. This quest is seems to be successful.

Stanza 1:

The quest for peace from his acute death consciousness having failed, the protagonist suddenly thinks of music as a possible haven because music harmonizes "all that chaos to one mood of wonder"(IV,1,3). However, there is still no escape from death. For things to be harmonized or brought into a new unity, their original, separate identities must disappear or die. Therefore, the "one mood of wonder" (ibid) suddenly changes into a "seed of fire"(IV,1,4) which destroys the entire "tinder world"(ibid) in a blaze that dissolves all distinctions between the inner microcosm and the outer macrocosm:

And instantly the whirling darkness fills

With conflagration; upspoutings of delirium;

Cracklings and seethings, the melting rocks, the bursts

Of flame smoke-stifled...

(IV,1,5-8)

While previously (Section III,2) the protagonist sought refuge in darkness, he now finds the world ironically "filled with light"(IV,2,9) "and then a silence" (IV,1,10) in which the still glowing world - compared to a fiery flower - slowly fades.* [opposites theme]

Stanza 2:

The protagonist’s sense of relief at first seems short-lived for the world’s ashes are haunted by a mysterious feminine being who looks for something she cannot find. Nevertheless, the mere act of looking lights "those ruins with her radiant madness:(IV,2,3) and brings with it a mysterious "brightness of the ineffable"(IV,2, 7).. With "her divine eyes"(IV, 2,6) and "angelic face" (IV,2,9) she wanders among the ruins of the world "blessing the emptiness / Hopeful at first, then hopeless, and at last / Weeping" (IV,2,9-11) as a deep, freezing silence sets in: the silence "rises coldly; / And all is still; the world, her hope and she."(IV,2,13-14).

Although the divine feminine presence appears to fail in her mysterious quest, one must not, however, assume that the protagonist has at last succeed in attaining the peace he longs for so ardently. By now it is already clear that Aiken’s vision of the world is dialectical and that opposites lead to each other. Out of darkness comes light, out of grief comes joy and out of death, more life and out of this moment of peace, a new disturbance.

* From a philosophical point of view, the theme of music is an important addition to "Memnon". Music is miraculous because even though fluid and always changing, it also maintains a coherence, a pattern, form or identity which survives the changes. In other words, music does what the protagonist of "Memnon" must eventually learn to do: maintain an identity amidst universal flux. Houston Peterson in The Melody of Chaos has pointed out the influence that Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea had on Aiken. Schopenhauer considered music the perfect image of the processes that make up the universe.

** The mysterious feminine presence is a multi-valent symbol for Aiken. In the first place, she represents the lady addressed by the protagonist in "Memnon". Second, she represents the protagonist’s soul ( Section III,2, 7-13) and, as such, is a principle or bringer of life. Third, she is an allusion to a very powerful image in some of Aiken’s other poems - the loving mother’s face hovering over the cradle.(See "The Coming Forth by Day of Osiris Jones" for example) Like the soul, a mother bestows life. Finally, she is an allusion to the goddess Isis who searched Egypt for the remains of her beloved husband, Osiris. Aiken’s familiarity with this story can be seen in "The Coming Forth by Day of Osiris Jones".

Through its striking imagery, this section reveals the epistemological complexity that the protagonists’s ruminations and explorations can attain. At the beginning, he reveals the Kantian bent of his thought when he realizes that he will never attain the pure peace he so desperately desires because the very act of experiencing this peace stands in his way. He finds that the "thing-in-itself" is forever unknowable. Not only is it unknowable - it cannot be affected by anything that we do because it is not a thing in the ordinary sense at all, but an idea, and, as such, literally ‘untouchable’. Making matters even more complex is his recollection of the fact that efforts to define things lead to an infinite regress of definitions. This leads him to conclude that everything is a symbol of something else, an idea already touched on in Section I of "Memnon". The protagonist begins to explore the nature of symbols.

Stanza 1:

"Despair, that seeking for the ding-an-sich,"(V,1,1)

In the first line of this stanza, the protagonist surrenders all hope of ever knowing things as they actually are in themselves. Neither our own feelings, the "feeling itself, the round bright dark emotion"(V,1,2) nor "the feathery swiftness / Of you and the thought of you"(V,2,3-4) are directly available to him. Obviously, he accepts Kant’s belief that it is impossible to know the "ding-an-sich", the ‘thing-in-itself’, because to know it means to perceive it and these perceptions are created when our mind processes the raw sensory in-put in a particular way, threreby stamping our own personal imprint on them - and destroying all hope of perceiving them as they are ‘in-themselves’ before our perceptual stamp altered them. In short, our own mental processes prevent us from ever knowing anything - ourselves included - as we really are!

Furthermore, attempts to know and define things lead us to the infinite regress problem already touched upon in Section I. To identify things, we link them with other things such as people, qualities or words, and, thereby, establish a sort of equivalence between them. In other words, to identify something, we also ‘identify’ it - assert its similarity to or sameness with - something else. The problem arises when we discover that in order to know that something else, we must identify it with something else still and so on infinitum. As a result, the protagonist is doomed to "fall / From chasm word to chasm word"(V,1,5) in his endless quest for the final defining quality - which does not exist. Language is no different than other aspects of reality insofar as it offers us no final and sure foundation on which to build our identity and achieve a sure sense of self. because each word leads to another word, speech is essentially representational or symbolic. Above all, this is true of poetry which is speech raised to its highest power: "If poetry says it, it must speak with symbol"(V,1,7).

Stanza 2:

The protagonist asks "What is a symbol?"(V,2,1) and lists specific examples of ordinary events that are symbolic. By ‘symbolic’ he means that each of the images presented is "less than these and more than these" (V,2,6), in short, is not limited to what it appears to be and, thereby, connected to an infinity of other things. This fact leads to another infinite regress. Symbolic knowledge has a three-fold structure, or as the protagonist puts it, it involves the "thought, the ghost of thought and the ghost in a mirror"(V,2,7) which represent the thing-in-itself, the thought of the thing and the thought of the thing being thought about. This structure can be repeated indefinitely in ever new series of three, the last term of one triad becoming the first term of the next: "the ghost in the mirror"(ibid) that is, the thought of the thought, followed by the thought of the thought of the thought, and finally, the thought of the thought of the thought reflecting upon itself! For the protagonist of "Memnon", who craves some unshakable certainty in his life, this regress is not only frustrating but frightening, for it means that the final knowledge he seeks is impossible to attain. In the Kantian view, a profound ignorance is inescapably structured into our lives.

Stanza 3:

The protagonist challenges us to experience the impossibility of knowing things in any exhaustive sense by instructing us to "[c]atch a beam in your hands, a beam of light"(V,3,1) and to [h]old it a moment, and feel its heart, and feel /Ethereal pulse of light between your fingers"(V,3, 3-4).Feeling the heart and pulse of a beam of light is his way of telling us to know the thing- in- itself. Obviously, we cannot do either, which is, of course, the very point he is trying to make.

Even if we could, our problems would not be solved since the released beam of light returns to in the darkness, the "mother of light"(V,3,6). In other words, things return to their origins which, as he has already learned, are their opposites where we lose them as surely as a beam of light disappears into the darkness. (See III, 2.) The disappearance of light into darkness, of things into their opposites is "the symbol of symbol, the clue of clue, the auricle of heart"(V,3,7), reminiscent of the "ghost of thought"(V,2,7) mentioned in the previous stanza. By its nature, this process has no end and any sort of final knowledge of anything is utterly impossible.

Stanza 4:

By means of the destructive imagery at the beginning of this stanza, the protagonist not only shares his frustration with this infinite regress but also points out that negative events - his frustration included - are also symbolic and, more importantly, cannot really destroy the thing-in-itself. Even destructive acts

... leave the silver core uneaten;

The golden leaf unplucked; the bitter calyx

Virginal; and the whirling You unknown.

(V,4, 5-7)

These lines raise a challenging question: if destructive acts cannot affect the thing-in-itself, the "silver core" (ibid) or the "golden leaf"(ibid), what exactly is the thing-in-itself? This issue is taken up by the protagonist in the next section, but at this point, the outlines of an answer are clear. The thing-in-itself is the identity of a thing which impossible to destroy because this identity is an idea, a "thought, the ghost of a thought, the ghost in a mirror"(V,3, 7). Ideas cannot be harmed by any act of physical destruction. Nor can they ever be exhaustively known since an idea can lead to an infinity of other ideas all of which are implicated in the first and thus, implicitly, part of it.

* This three-fold dialectic reveals the enormous influence of Hegel’s dialectical philosophy on Aiken. Houston Peterson, (The Melody of Chaos), Julian Symons ("The Poetry of Conrad Aiken" in Wake II) Hoxie Fairchild (Religious Trends in Modern Poetry) among others, have noticed this influence, though not always favorably. Furthermore, identifying the thing-in-itself as the idea of a thing reveals the pervasive influence of German Idealism on Aiken’s thought. Such influence was not unusual in the early twentieth century when, for example, such major American philosophers as Josiah Royce and John Dewey regarded themselves as Hegelians.

** For one thing to symbolize another means that they must share some similarities. This makes it clear that the protagonist of "Memnon" conceives of the universe as an infinite series of symbols or correspondences all in some way related to and reflecting one another, an image remarkably similar to what Tillyard *** called "the Elizabethan world picture". This would not be surprising in light of Aiken’s plainly stated preferences for Elizabethan, and above all, Shakespeare’s, poetry.

***E.M.W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture

Copyright 1997, Crimson Ark Publications.

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Ian Kluge may be contacted at iankluge@netbistro.com