Goat Mother and Others: The Collected Mythos Fiction of Pierre Comtois (53 page)

“The Pallid Masque,” is copyright © 1968, Perseus Press Inc., 196 West Huston St., New York, NY, 10014. Caution: No part of this play may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written consent of the publisher. This play is fully protected in whole, in part, or in any form under the Copyright Laws of the United States of America, the British Empire including the Dominion of Canada, and all other countries of the Copyright Union, and is subject to royalty. All rights, including professional, amateur, motion picture, radio, television, recitation, public reading and any method of photographic reproduction, are strictly reserved. For amateur rights, apply to Dramatists Professional Play Service, Inc., 440 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10016. For stock rights, apply to Samuel Floren, Inc., 28 West 45th Street, New York, NY, 10036. For all other rights, apply to Perseus Press, Inc., 196 West Huston St., New York, NY., 10014.

Charles Vaughan was a haunted man, his works possessed by the pale eidolons of remembrance and desire, the ineradicable dualities of mind and body. Behind and between the words, you catch brief glimpses of the white specter of Cartesian doubt, the unquiet ghost of disbelief, deracinating the tangible, the finite, the contingent, the material, until it leaves the lone cogitator forsaken in the barren plane of his own consciousness.
Cogito ergo sum
: the spirit voice of skepticism is the mind’s I, the thinker thinking himself, trapped in the dark cage of the Self, calling forth into the indeterminate space he calls Other, only to hear the faint echo of his own voice.

Here we are listening to the voice of the phantom of solitariness, the anchorite soul, consumed by the desire to connect with-that-which-is-not-itself, immured in the isolation chamber of the Self.

After Descarte, a dark spirit of solipsism lodged in some of the brightest minds of the Age of Light. George Berkeley, the venerable Bishop of Cloyne, avowed the nonexistence of matter.
Esse est percipi
: to be is to be perceived. If it were not for the Mind of God, which perceives all things at all times, the world would be a ceaselessly metamorphosing universe of objects continuously coming into and out of creation depending upon the consciousness of individual perceivers. Hume exorcised the fantastic ideational teleology — the infinitely perceptive God — of Bishop Berkeley, then deconsecrated causality, casting doubt upon the possibility of knowledge itself.

All probable reasoning is nothing but a species of sensation. ‘Tis not solely in poetry and music, we must follow our taste and sentiment, but likewise in philosophy. When I am convinced of any principle, ‘tis only an idea, which strikes more strongly upon me. When I give the preference to one set of arguments above another, I do nothing but decide from my feeling concerning the superiority of their influence. Objects have no discoverable connexion together; nor is it from any other principle but custom operating upon the imagination, that we can draw any inference from the appearance of one to the existence of another.

There is an anecdote, perhaps apocryphal, about Dr. Johnson: once, while engaged in a debate with an adherent of Hume’s skepticism, he kicked a stone vehemently and declared, “thus I refute Hume!” By kicking the stone, Johnson thought (or at least hoped), to touch the metaphysical ground of reality — despite Hume, Johnson’s foot could not be fooled about the solidity and stability of Being. Kant, Hume’s most profound critic, if he had been present, would undoubtedly have told Dr. Johnson that we can never ultimately know the stone in itself, only our own limited knowledge about the stone. Kant’s Critiques saved the integrity of cognition, restored causality and codified the categories of the understanding, but at the terrible cost of significantly reducing the scope of all possible knowledge. From the high, desolate peak upon which man hoped to contemplate the plenary universe of created things, Kant leads him to the narrower vistas of the shallow epistemological plane/plain called Mind. Vaughan’s corpus is one of the authentic poetic voices of the Age of Epistemology — capturing the claustrophobia of consciousness, the ontological indeterminacy of the quotidian (the object is always, in some way, the creation of the subject), the incessant, mysterious influx of sense-impressions from the spatio-temporal manifold (after originating in the imperceptible, unknowable realm of things-in-themselves) into the synthesizing sphere of the a priori pure concepts of the understanding.

The subjective experience of cognition is captured in the very act of creating a poetic representation of itself. The metaphor of the Cretan labyrinth of thought — of the poet as both the architect of the maze and the monstrous Minotaur trapped at its center — is seamlessly melded to the figurative trope of the chambered nautilus of experiential awareness — that fatal burden of memory and finitude, the accidental exigencies of corporeity and transience, that the self perpetually constructs upon itself.

“Daidalos” inaugurates the period of Vaughan’s most profound exploration of the dichotomy between the Self and the Other, the seemingly unbridgeable gulf which now partitioned epistemology from ontology, and the problematic point at which they potentially met: language. More specifically, Vaughan’s poetry queried the uncertain metaphysical status of poetic discourse itself. Is literary language referential or figurative? Can the linguistic sign reconcile the schism between mind and body, between the spirit and the world? Vaughan’s work throughout the decade of the 1930s, can be seen as a series of poetic interpolations of the basic matter and position of words. Vaughan’s conceptual starting point for these investigations — indeed for all of his work — was the Post-Symbolist poetics of Mallarme and his great pupil Valery, whose Cimetier Marin (1920), had a profound effect on Vaughan’s own emerging poetics. In a letter to Valery, dated February 4, 1930, Vaughan presciently mapped the future course of his explorations:

The “infinite white spaces” of Mallarme, frigid and lifeless, symbolic of silence and death, began to dominate Vaughan’s poetry at this time:

Vaughan had begun his trek into the boundless polar landscape of Arthur Gordon Pym, his inquiry into the whiteness of the White Whale, where he would be called upon to paint a monochromatic portrait of the pale skull beneath the pallid Masque/Mask, and compose tone poems on the white noise of poetic aphonia:

The black branches, the prints in the snow are the calligraphic marks of the pen, the configuration of words the poet places before the vertiginous white abyss of the paper. But the words seem tainted by the fatal transiency of the objects they name, the branches are broken, the traces of the crows’ passage will disappear under new snows, and the “dark rictus amid white poppies” is the grinning skull beneath the skin. The word, the logos, is the instrument the poet uses to name the world, and the Logos is the rational order of that world, of the universe, which Plato called
nous
— the first principle (
arche
) of everything — the source of paradigmatic forms which emanate from the inelligible realm (
neotos topos
) before descending into the visible realm (
boratos topos
). The visible objects which compose the world are merely shadows projected upon the wall of Platos’ Cave, and poets, the metaphorizers of objects, are dispensers of illusion (
eikasia
). Only by escaping from the Cave in order to contemplate the bright light of the Logos, the pure forms of the
nous
, Plato tells us, can we hope to liberate ourselves from eikasia. Descarte retreated into his Mind to find the Logos, Nietzsche, coming after Hume and Kant, postulated that the Cartesian Mind is a cave upon which the Mind’s Eye/I projects its own shades:

For Nietzsche, the world is a text. “I am” is literally a figure of speech. In the triadic equation of object/poet/text, the crucial middle term, the Cartesian Mind or Kantian Pure Concept, becomes an impenetrable barrier between the Platonic
topoi
. The word (logos) refers only to itself. As does the Logos when it descends into the
boratos topos
and becomes incarnate: “And the Logos was made flesh, and dwelt among us…” (John 1:14). In embodying the indeterminacy of the text/world, the Logos itself subverts the possibility of a hermeneutics — the anagogic decipherment of the sign/object:

The Pallid Masque
, a one-act play written in 1930-31, is of vital importance for anyone who wishes to understand Vaughan’s obsession with the metaphysical uncertainty of the logos/Logos, and his dread of the immeasurable emptiness at the core of the Mallarmean
ptyx
. The protagonist, Melbourne, is a symbolic archetype of Vaughan’s radical interrogation of the word. His very name is an exemplar of the etymological (Etymology: a search for the “true ((
etumon
)) word ((
logos
))” methodolgy). Melbourne — mel-: Of a darkish color. Greek
melas
, black: MELANO-, MELANCHOLY, PSILOMELANE. Melancholy: Middle English
malencolie
,
melancholye
, from Old French melancholie, from Late Latin melancholia, from Greek
melankholia
, sadness, “(an excess of) black bile”: melas, (stem melan), black+khole, bile, and bourne: Middle English burne, variant of burn, BURN (brook). In other words, (in a universe of plurivalent textuality, words are inextricably compromised by other words) Melbourne is the dark stream, the carrier of the disease of consciousness, the Self’s anxious confrontation with negating Otherness, what Kierkegaard called the “Sickness Unto Death,” or despair; the black river (of bile, of ink) the poet draws from to make his words, the dark marks he uses to fix (stabilize, establish, repair, settle, decide, place) signs/objects upon the ontologically ambiguous whiteness of the paper; and the Styx, the dark (stygian) river of death, the inviolable waters by which the gods swore, or “gave their word,” as well as the bourn (French bourne, from Old French bonne, bodne, BOUND (limit): the terminal point of life’s dark stream and the boundary of the topoi. Melbourne is also a metonymy for Mallarme, the first poetic explorer of the Styx/
ptyx
: “
…nul ptyx/Aboli Bibelot d’inanite sonne,/(Car le Maitre est alle puiser des pleurs au Styx/Avec se seul object dont le Neant s’honore)
”—…no ptyx/Abolished bauble of empty sound, (For the Master is gone to draw tears from the Styx/With the sole object which Nothingness honors). Mallarme, who, upon nearing that stream, confessed, “And now, having reached the horrible vision of a pure work, I have almost lost my reason and the meaning of the most familiar words.”