Few of Conrad Aiken's poems reveal his concept of reality as readily and accessibly as "The Morning Song of Lord Zero", which, published in 1963, is  one of Aiken's last major poems, and, therefore, in regard to his thought, one of his most mature pieces. An ideal introduction to Aiken's work, "Lord Zero" features many of the themes, images and mannerisms found in the earlier works, among them playful eroticism: "Belly to belly and skin to skin/ o lift the latch and come right in" (CP, 968); the perplexities of identity: "How in this whole magnificence to find/ our own self-shaping and self-seeking phrase"(CP, 969); the addresses to a lover: "Look love the miracle is with us it is the body" (CP, 969) ; the intense, indeed almost mystical, body consciousness: "our own divine composing room" (CP, 969); the gothic imagery:" the goblin manifestations of All Souls' November" (CP, 968) and the imagery of leaves, stones, oceans and light. However, perhaps the best critical use of the poem is as an introduction to Conrad Aiken's ideas about the oxymoronic nature of reality.

 The phrase 'oxymoronic nature of reality' refers to Aiken's belief that reality is self-contradictory,  that reality transcends, conflates and confuses our carefully defined and limited intellectual categories and concepts. Aristotle's  axiom of non-contradiction, that A=A, is not so much untrue, as incomplete and, as such, does no justice to the natural complexity of the cosmos. Wisdom is the result of achieving a viewpoint that transcends such limited and partial thinking

 The first of notion that "The Morning Song of Lord Zero" undercuts is the antithesis of heroic/unheroic. Lord Zero begins by challenging our normal notions of what heroes are like. They  are ' somebodies', not 'nobodies' or 'zeroes'; they are  steadfast, unchanging, famous and famous and yet

  Gambler and spendthrift by nature
  chameleon soul whose name is Zero
  anonymous in headlines
  nameless in breadlines
  nevertheless I am your hero.
      (CP, 966; italics added)

Lord Zero then proceeds to make a shambles of our usual categories of gender and family by identifying himself  not only with all members  but also claiming to be more still:

  I am your jack-and-jill
  of all trades dubious brother
  panhandler father Cassandra mother
  and yet in the end, insidiously
  o indispensably and invidiously
  something more.
      (CP, 967)

The use of "insidiously" and "invidiously" is especially telling. In describing himself thus, Zero not only emphasizes his crafty, sly and wily nature which cannot be restrained or contained by our limited concepts but also his not unexpected - in light of the shambles he makes of our orderly thinking  -  talent for stirring up ill will and animosity. Clearly a trickster figure, Zero seems to laughing as he tells us that he is indispensable, vitally necessary to us, and, indeed, to the functioning of  the entire cosmos. He then re-emphasizes his  rather sharp humor by describing himself as a door-to-door salesman:

  Watch me sneak from door to door
  with tongue in cheek
  but ready with the o so adaptable speech
  I knock on each:
  listen to my sales-talk: love and honor
  courage, cowardice, virtue, vice
  belief and disbelief!
     (CP,966)

To Zero, our usual ethical categories such as  courage, honor, cowardice , virtue and vice are merely sales-talk that he adapts to each customer's needs and wants.
His mocking tone make it clear that these supposedly important categories mean nothing to him.,  and are, in fact, no more than commodities he peddles in order to achieve his ends.

 He also transcends our usual epistemological conventions by peddling "belief and unbelief", as if they were cheap products for sale by any clever traveling drummer. In this curt and mocking way, he simply writes off all our religious speculations about belief, faith and atheism. Later in the poem,  he picks up "some idiot surd of meaning" - which, as an "idiot surd" can have  no meaning - and finally tells us that the commonsense world in which we live is

  all familiar but also unfamiliar
  known and unknown, true and untrue

In short, everything is itself and its opposite,  a belief now characteristic of some schools of post-modern thought, but which, in Aiken's case is probably a result of his reading Hegel whose logic of change is based on the premise that A=A but also A= -A because an entity in change is both itself and not itself at the same time.

 Zero further describes himself as "your Greek-gift-bearing donor" (CP, 967) revealing,  through this allusion to the Ulysses' cunning trick of the Trojan Horse and the resulting slaughter, his insidious and invidious nature. Continuing in this allusive vein, he portrays himself as "your Cassandra" (CP, 967) because he foretells our doom - which is to die through perpetual change and through change to leave behind our limited, unchanging  concepts and beliefs.

 He also warns us not to call him "vox et praeterea nihil" (CP,967) 'a voice and also (moreover)  nothing' , that is, not to think of him as either 'something' or 'nothing'. With this statement he demonstrates his transcendence of our  usual metaphysical and ontological categories of 'being' and 'non-being'  and views himself as 'being and nothingness' and, to those still limited to our present state of evolution,  unimaginably more besides.

 Further on Zero conflates and confuses the religious categories of the sacred and the profane or vulgar, telling us that if we knock and there is no answer (a deliciously ironic allusion to Christ's "Knock and it shall be opened.") we should
 
  stoop and try the lock
  hoping still to find
  somewhere some day
  the sacred and the vulgar key
  to you and me.
    (CP, 967)

What he means is that if we want to understand ourselves (find the key) we may have to look lower , "stoop", to look at our material and animal natures where we shall discover not only our primitive and especially sexual animal roots ("the vulgar key") but also our understanding of "the sacred" as a sublimation of our animal impulses. This emphasis on beginning our knowledge of ourselves with the physical and biological is an important aspect of Aiken's thought. In "The Morning Song of Lord Zero" it is emphasized at the start of Part ii:

  Look love the miracle is with us it is the body
  the holy dwelling the acceptable machine
  our own divine composing room
  provided for us from the womb
      (CP, 967)

By conflating the sacred and the profane, Zero is, of course, challenging us to view ourselves and the world in a radically new way in order that we may see the vulgar roots and even vulgarity of the sacred as well as the sacredness hidden in the vulgar. By implication, Zero not only cancels the absolute distinction between  good and evil (as we have seen previously  when discussing the conflation of ethical categories)  but also between the material and the spiritual. Matter and spirit are neither opposites nor foes  but merely manifestations of something else such as change itself.

 Still not content with the shambles he has made of the tidy concepts by which we map our world, Zero proceeds to undermine the fundamental psychological distinctions of self/not self. Questioning the boundaries that establish our identities, he asks, "Can you remember what I remember?/ Are we of one substance? Are we of flesh or stone?" (967). What are the boundaries of self/not self in regards to personal memory, to our physical, fleshly distinctions and, even more radically, to  the physical distinctions between ourselves and such seemingly inanimate things as stones?

 Since, as he says, we are "brought by solar synthesis together" (CP, 967), perhaps the borders of identity are not as rigid as we think. We might be able to share at least some memories, not because we have lived through certain events together in an ordinary commonsense way, but because - as this article will show - we are all share the same metaphysical identity as cosmic processes.

 Lord Zero also conflates and confuses some of the more ordinary distinctions we make in daily life, such as those among the serious and the comic and erotic. Having stated that  the universe is a "glass topped hearse" (CP, 968) , Lord Zero breezily launches into a ribald song on the carpe diem theme:

  Belly to belly and skin to skin
  o lift the latch and come right in
  Brief is our measure, let us be merry.
       (CP, 968)
In this song, the pleasures and humor of sex are simply part of a natural continuum of concerns; the distinctions among them  are quite arbitrary and Zero enjoys himself playing with them.

 This playful - even mocking - tone is an important feature of "The Morning Song of Lord Zero" for it is the one attitude that can keep us balanced and sane in a world of unceasing change. If we take ourselves or anything else too seriously, we will lose the detachment required to survive in a world where nothing and no one are what they seem to be, where nothing and no one  stays what they are and where nothing and no one can find any solace or rest except in acceptance of these facts.
We are, and must be "comedians of the soul's capricious weather/obedient to who-knows-what[?]"(CP, 967)

 In Part ii of the poem, Lord Zero continues to make a shambles of the usual distinctions we make, though he does so more in simply passing through and not, as in Part i, by intent. He asks,

  How in this whole magnificence to find
  our own self-seeking and self-shaping phrase
  and so ordain our days?
     (CP, 969)

This innocent sounding question, of course, destroys the usual distinction between the creator and the created, for we are both and, therefore, clearly neither one or the other.

 In the following lines, Zero blurs the usually tidy lines distinguishing  inside and outside ("without, within"); between the observer and the observed, ("holy observed and holy observing");  part and whole ("leaf adoring tree and tree admiring leaf"); form and formlessness or chaos ("yet shape loving shapelessness and shapelssness shape"); belief and unbelief ("as unbelief worships belief").:

  And the intricacies begin:
  without, within
  holy observed and holy observing
  leaf adoring tree and tree admiring leaf
  shape loving shapelessness and shaplessness shape
  as unbelief worships belief !
      (CP, 969)

What confounds the normal distinctions between these things is the fact of 'intricacy', of complexity that makes it impossible to know exactly where one thing ends and another begins and reveals their complete interdependence.

 Later in part ii, Zero conflates the categories of pattern, that is, predictability, order  and chance, presenting  these  supposed opposites not as absolutely distinct and separate but as part of a greater process or dance.

  Lightly now, softly now
  inward now, outward now
  frowardness and towardness now
  dance and chance, as
  intricacy begins
  and again begins!
    (CP, 970)

By means of theater imagery, Zero also dissolves the distinction between the real and the unreal.

  Who needs a change of scene
  walks with the green
  into the unfolding world
  himself too unfolding
  the stage struck the lights change
  and the street grows strange
      (CP, 971)

What we call 'the real', is, according to Zero, no more than a stage setting for a current phase of our personal evolution. as we walk "into the unfolding world" (CP, 971)ourselves "too unfolding" (CP, 971) in time. This also implies that the distinction between self and world may not be as hard and fast as we usually suppose since both, in this image, seem to be unfolding into each other.

 Having established that for Aiken, reality is oxymoronic by nature, it remains to ask, "Why is reality like this?" The answer provided in "The Morning Song of Lord Zero" is simple and direct: the roots of this complexity are found  the body, which is, of course, itself part of reality and, therefore, participates in its oxymoronic nature.

 At the beginning of Part ii of the poem, we read:

  Look love the miracle is with us it is the body
  the holy dwelling the acceptable machine
  our own divine composing room
  provided for us from the womb
      (CP, 969)

Reflection on the image of the body as the "divine composing room" (CO, 969) makes it clear that when things are composed, put together, joined for a greater purpose, they are no longer absolutely distinct,  separate or isolated.  There are still distinctions between them but in sofar as they are part of a greater whole, they are also blended and not absolutely unconnected with one another. Such "blending" , of course, dissolves the rigid boundaries between our ethical, metaphysical and logical categories and leaves us with Aiken's vision of the oxymoronic nature of reality.

 Furthermore, it is in the body that "the intricacies begin" (CP, 969), that is, the complexities that blur the boundaries between things and ideas have their basis in our physical, biological being. The whole second stanza of Part ii is a poetic reflection of this view, in which, as this essay has already demonstrated, all sorts of opposites and unrelated things and concepts are joined together in the greater unity of a dance.

 Zero challenges us to see this complexity rooted in our material being:

  Look through your hands and see
  the blood against the sun
  look into the sea
  o mother mother
  where with our fanlike fins
  mind begins
  and intricacy begins:
     (CP, 970)
 

The mind, he says, developed in the womb of our evolutionary mother, the sea, and with the mind begins, not only "intricacy", that is, the bewildering and boundary-breaking complexity of reality, but also time itself:

  Song is our study
  this is our body
  see how the leaf comes
  as out of death come
  fresh the belief comes
  and time begins!
    (CP, 970; italics added)

What begins with time is the complexity of change and it is precisely change  that requires  the oxymoronic nature of reality since  in changing,  a thing is not only itself but also something else (A=A and -A).  In passing,  it is noteworthy that death in the previous quotation is portrayed as giving birth,  thereby illustrating the very interpenetration of opposites  under discussion.

 As part of the ironic structure of the poem (and irony may be viewed as  a form of oxymoron insofar as irony requires things normally distinct be seen, experienced and evaluated in light of one another), Zero intersperses it with the pleas to Azrael, the Hebrew angel of death. In Part i, a voice of unknown identity,  but probably intended as the voice of the common, unenlightened understanding of death,  prays, "Azrael pass thou not by/shade not this tree today" (CP, 967). In Part ii, this same unidentified voice addresses Azrael in an ironic counterpoint to the underlying idea of the entire poem:

  Azrael Azrael
  winged with thunder
  pass thou not by this day
  let no thing die
  ...
  see that this day no thing be killed.
      (CP, 971)

The irony of these prayers is that death and change are identical: for a thing to change and become something new, it must die to the way it is. Once we realize that living itself is change, it becomes clear that living and dying are  so deeply interconnected as to be, for all practical purposes, the same. Here, again, the oxymoronic nature of reality is revealed. To ask for the end of dying is to ask for the end of living, or, put in a more blatantly oxymoronic form, we must die to live and live to die! That is our inescapable destiny as beings who exist in this oxymoronic material cosmos.

 Lord Zero, however, does not adhere to what Marxists used to call "vulgar materialism", that is, materialism according to which matter is merely dead, inert mass without any potentiality for 'higher' development.  Logically, that makes no sense because, if as indicated by a previous quote (CP, 970),  the mind originates in nature, then nature must contain at least the possibility of mind, thought, feeling and so on, and, thereby, cannot be 'dead' or 'lifeless' in the conventional sense. As Lord Zero expresses it

  ...Dull would we be
  if we withheld the attribute divine
  from brick and stone and flesh
  and from the awakening and self-breathing tree
  the tree of heaven
     (CP, 969)

Lord Zero knows that logically, the part cannot contain any qualities that are not at least present as possibilities in the whole. The "attribute divine", that is, consciousness, is, therefore, also present in some degree in material reality. What reinforces this notion is the fact that part and whole in an organic unity are not absolutely distinct and , therefore, what is true of one, must, to some extent, also be  true of the other.  Consequently, reality cannot help but be oxymoronic.

 If the potential for consciousness is inherent in matter, then it also follows that the potential for life and all the additional chemical, biological, intellectual and spiritual complexities  that arise from life are also somehow potentially present in every atom and molecule. Life, of course, is often 'messy', making, like Lord Zero, a shambles of our tidy concepts and categories. This too reinforces the oxymoronic vision of reality.
 
 In Part iii of the poem, Lord Zero returns to an issue that informs virtually all of Aiken's poetic work and especially his long poems: the question of identity.
"Who are you? Who?"(CP, 972) are the first words of this section. The question is vital because if reality is truly oxymoronic, all of our conventional notions of human and personal identity are spurious, or, at most, of very limited temporary validity.

 Having asked the question, Lord Zero immediately dismisses two very common responses when this matter is raised: "fatigue" or "repetition". We are either over-tired when we pursue such issues persistently and deeply and will 'get over it' after a good night's sleep, or, alternately, we are simply 'stuck' in a particular line of thought we should overcome. Nor do questions of identity haunt us because of boredom or fear of change.

  but no; it is not repetition nor fatigue
  nor the prospect of sameness nor apprehension of change:
          (CP, 972)

The reason questions of identity haunt us is because these questions are an integral and inescapable part not only of the entire cosmos itself but also of our physical being. As Lord Zero says, having dismissed the obvious explanations for the persistence of these questions, we will "go forth to discover:"

  the hum of your heart-beat linking past and future
  as sunbinds with gold the leaves in the tree
  for the moment of sharing in which you partake
  as Socrates lifts his cruse of hemlock:
  acceptance and question in a single libation,
  celebration and farewell in a final gesture
  the first and the last taking of the breast:
 
  at every moment of the perpetual intersection
  of one with the other in bloodstream and firmament
  you are born again and again die
  only o phoenix to arise again in flame
  immutable mutable of sunlight
  again dripping from the shutter
  and humming in the heart of another morning:
        (CP, 972; italics added)

In these stanzas, Zero's language  clearly illustrates the oxymoronic nature of reality  and of our selves in which opposites, such as  "past and future", "acceptance and question" and "immutable mutable" are all in "perpetual intersection"(CP, 972). Because of this "perpetual intersection" of opposites occurring within us, our identities cannot help but be problematical, especially if we cling to conventional notions of identity in which we, supposedly,  "are" one stable thing now and into the future, and in which the rigid distinction between "me" and "not me" are accepted.  Lord Zero's essential message is that such notions of identity are simply inappropriate to the kind of cosmos/reality in which we live.

 The only appropriate concept of identity in this oxymoronic universe is one that allows us to accept the fact of our essential ambiguity because of the  "perpetual intersection"(CP, 972) of all things. We are not just one thing or another but both - and something  more. Furthermore, we must accept the fact that the universe itself is like this: that is why the landscape "is not as we had foreseen it" (CP, 973) and "there are hills before us but no mountains" (CP, 973). We are, as noted before,  creators of the world, but are also created which explains why "the waterfalls are not exactly those of the mind"(CP, 973)and why
 
  it is all familiar but also unfamiliar
  known and unknown true and untrue
  benign and perilous
     (CP, 973)

Unlike some contemporary New Age philosophers who share Aiken's view of an interpenetrative universe, Aiken does not accept the notion that we can completely "make" our own reality. We can - to an extent - but we should not delude ourselves that we human beings are entirely in control. True to his philosophy,  Aiken sees the situation as highly ambiguous, or, more precisely, oxymoronic: we can  "make"  our own reality - and can't  - for the simple and logical reason that the reality we "make" is intersected by the realities everyone and everything else is "making"! The oxymoronic nature of reality does not permit such comfortably clear-cut notions as "my" reality and "yours" and for this reason as well, reality remains forever mysterious and, in any ultimate sense, "unknowable". As Lord Zero says, in the last lines of the poem:

  and as we step into the meadow
  we feel the shadow that is not precisely a shadow
  the breath that is not precisely a breath. Death
  surely has not preceded our footsteps here
  surely does not follow us? The landscape
  opens unhesitatingly before us
  hills from rivers roll back
  pathways open to left and right

      -12-

  ...
  and as we move to what we do not know
  and can never rightly imagine
  all these things become the ambiguous language
  by which we come to pass
  and learn to see
  and mean
  and be.
    (CP, 973)

As if to re-emphasize his dominant idea one final time, even here, in the last lines of the poem, Lord Zero cannot resist the temptation to dissolve another conventional distinction, namely, that between words and things: "all these things become the ambiguous language/by which we come to pass"(CP, 973). This "ambiguous language", or, what this essay calls the "oxymoronic nature of reality" is the very essence of our being.

 Who, we must ask in closing this analysis of the poem, is Lord Zero? Quite obviously, given the oxymoronic nature of reality, he cannot be one thing only. The foregoing discussion makes it clear that Zero is a symbol for death and the process of dying and being reborn. He might also be seen as a symbol for the change or process that constitutes the essence of everything in the cosmos .In that sense, he is a symbol of the reader's essential identity as well, for the reader is also part of the restless and oxymoronic reality. From this point of view, reading the poem "The Morning Song of Lord Zero" is nothing less than an encounter with oneself, one's own essential nature! Even the distinction between reader and what is read and between author and reader has been dissolved in Aiken's oxymoronic universe.

 Finally, before closing, it remains to be pointed out that an essay such as this would not be possible were Conrad Aiken's poetry not capable of withstanding rigorous scrutiny both for its content and its form. It reinforces the often expressed sentiment that Conrad Aiken is the most under-rated and under-studied  Twentieth century poet writing in English. It is my hope that this essay will be another small step in remedying this situation.
       *         *        *
 
*All quotations in this article are taken from Collected Poems, (Second Edition, Oxford University Press, New York, 1970).