“James Dickey’s Evolving Self and the Void” is reprinted from James Dickey Newsletter Volume Seventeen, Number Two (Spring 2001). The following information is given in CONTRIBUTOR’S NOTES in that issue:
RONALD BAUGHMAN , Interim Division Chair and Director of Graduate Studies in Media Arts, teaches English as well as script writing and a seminar in research at the University of South Carolina. He is a prolific writer of essays and longer works on Dickey, including Understanding James Dickey.
Although slight changes may occur with digitizing, page numbers herein replicate those in the initial publication. The copyright remains in effect, of course.
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James Dickey’s Evolving Self and the Void
James Dickey’s exploration of his literary Self evolved through three major stages. In his first five collections of poetry, the Self was the central perspective that served as an “informing principle” for what was experienced within the work. Beginning with his sixth collection, The Eye-Beaters, Blood, Victory, Madness, Buckhead and Mercy (1970), Dickey increasingly shifted his focus from a central, single voice to a divided perspective. Throughout The Eye-Beaters he frequently incorporated a dialogue with an alternate Self: dramatizing, for example, a middle-aged man engaged in an interior dialogue with a younger man—”O Self / Like a beloved son” or like a “brother”—as he examined his past and present. In The Zodiac (1976) and Puella (1982) he adopted personas distinct from the Self: assuming in The Zodiac the voice of Henrik Marsman, a drunken sailor-poet killed during World War II; and, in Puella, adopting the voice of a female sensibility “male-imagined.”
In his final three works, Alnilam (1987), The Eagle’s Mile (1990), and To the White Sea (1993), Dickey brings his exploration to its culmination as he dramatizes the Non-Self: the antithesis of his initial subject. In the final three works he achieves a circular “unity of opposites,” a concept drawn from his favorite philosopher, Heraclitus. The Dickey Self originates in the Void, moves into the world of human experience, and then in death returns to the Void as the Non-Self. Once joined with the Void, the Self is re-born or reincarnated, becoming—or dispersing into—everything, as Dickey most vividly reveals in the concluding lines of To the White Sea.
The Void is both repellent and attractive; it is, for Dickey, man’s equivalent of the heaven of animals, his ”personal kind of stick-and-stone religion” (79), as he identified it in Self-Interviews. Because one enters it through death, the Void is necessarily mysterious and terrifying. At the same time it is the dynamic beginning of a new creative cycle and a source for renewed life and art. The Void is connected to Dickey’s belief in reincarnation: ”to be dead / In one life is to enter / Another,” he declares in “Reincarnation (II)” (1964).
Frank Cahill in Alnilam confronts death and the Void through a dangerous ascent into the heavens in a training airplane, then chooses life, returns to earth, and finds a measure of balance within a human community. The main figures in The Eagle’s Mile seek release from earth’s ties as they are borne by eagles—through the imagination—into the heavens. Their efforts against death and the Void succeed but only momentarily. Joel Cahill in Alnilam seems to embrace the Void—his death in a fiery plane crash may be self-willed—for he realizes that in death he will become a mythic figure for his cadet followers. In To the White Sea Sergeant Muldrow, a brutal, murderous man, is also eager to reject ordinary human life and society in favor of rising into the Void and into a new life.
For all these figures the Void contains the potential for destruction and creation, for death and the beginning of new life. Dickey’s 1961 poem “In the Mountain Tent” portrays the Void as “The sustained intake of all breath / Before the first word of the Bible.” In Alnilam, Captain Claude
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Faulstick comments on the philosophical concept of “ex nihilo”—the assertion that the seeming emptiness of the Void actually contains the spark of life:
“I remember from some course at Oregon State the professor telling us that there was one law of nature that is absolute, and that is that there can’t be creation of something by nothing. [. . .] Ex nihilo. It means [. . .] out of nothing. [. . .]. It has nothing to do with God. The ex nihilo spark: it proved everything, it disproved everything. It couldn’t be and it was. And I’m here. That’s proof enough for me [. . .]. It’s the original spark, with no meaning; just a kind of impulse, but there’s no way for it not to be. It made the world, and if the world was made in any other way than that, I can’t imagine it.” (204)
Dickey revisits this theme in The Eagle’s Mile when his speaker announces in the poem “Eagles”: “I used to know the circular truth of the void,” a knowledge that he tries to regain by flying, ascending into the sky. In To the White Sea, the void is the mysterious “something” that cannot be expressed, the “thing” that cannot be uttered, as the American Zen monk explains to Sergeant Muldrow. The monk provides Muldrow shelter for the night and tells him that
”If you stayed here with us and learned to contemplate, learned to concentrate, learned to comprehend the meaning of the stones, you would never be unhappy. You would understand the secret of the void. That is the place of the spirit [. . .]. Pure emptiness. Nothing. Nothingness [. . .]. It’s a very creative nothing. If you ever get there, you’ll know what I mean. Or you won’t know, and that’s the best.” (193,196)
Though he scornfully dismisses the monk’s comments, Muldrow achieves precisely the state the monk describes: he eventually becomes the voice in the wind who is “Everywhere” and nowhere.
Significantly, these various depictions of the Void are strikingly similar to Dickey’s description in God’s Images (1977) of Creation, the beginning of life created out of the Void:
Sky. Translucent infinite acre. Anxiety of water, when the hand of God passes over it. Here in the sleep-turning void, the pain waves have not yet begun. These are the star laws, moon-turning. [. . .] What is coming? Sleep circles. River eyes dust terror. From now will come the enormous storms over the sad volcanoes, where lava flows to no purpose. From now will come the cooling of the crust. From this the great beasts will arise; this new place will be consecrated and fertilized by gigantic blood. [. . .] About it and its quiet fragile air there is water, fire. There is earth. [. . .] I can make the forest eagle circle over the green leaves. [. . .] The forest eagle circles. Come everything. I am afraid. Release. (n.pag.)
Dickey’s re-creation of God’s thoughts and purposes while creating life emphasizes the cyclical nature of the images, the circular motion of darkness from which comes life. Significantly, the first elements created are the ancient elements of life—air, fire, water, and earth—and the first visual design
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involves the heavens—the stars in their constellations. The most prominent life forms brought into being are eagles circling in the sky, the “infinite acre,” above earth’s “green leaves.” Man appears in this description only inferentially through suggestions of the fear and “gigantic blood” that will occur in the future.
Yet, in his 1961 poem “The Heaven of Animals,” Dickey describes himself—narrator and poet—as being “at the cycle’s center”; and in ”Reincarnation II” (1964), he places his speaker within the “Great / Circle.” At the center of the circle is the poet, the creative man, the highest form of human life, as Dickey believed, for he is the figure most “energized” and thus the one most alive and consequential. Dickey posits a strong belief in the superior person’s rising above the ordinary, a view gained from Heraclitus, who wrote: ”To me, one man is worth ten thousand if he is first-rate.” (Fr. 84) This view is variously embodied—for good or evil—in such characters as Frank Cahill; his son, Joel Cahill; certain speakers in The Eagle’s Mile; and Sergeant Muldrow.
Dickey used the circle and its center point as the controlling symbol of Alnilam. The novel’s title, which refers to the middle star in the three-star belt of the Orion constellation, gives special emphasis to the theme of centrality in the work. Frank Cahill, the novel’s protagonist, frequently identifies himself as being at the center of activity–”‘I am the center of this thing” (47)–around and through which all characters and actions are perceived, reported, and analyzed. The novel’s characters and action are earthly, imperfect mirrorings of the heavenly, perfected visual composition of the Orion constellation overhead: Frank is the seeker, accompanied by his dog, Zack; together, they reflect Orion, the starry hunter, and the dog star Sirius. Similarly, the revolutionary Alnilam group of cadets have adopted their name from the Orion constellation since, as Captain Lennox Whitehall explains, Alnilam is the name of “‘the star at the center of the belt of Orion. [. . .] It has to be a moving center. [. . .] It carries you with it, and yet it’s always the center. You follow. Everything follows, and holds together’” (154).
Frank Cahill and his son, Joel, are paired opposites. During his early years in Atlanta, Frank, who is associated with earth and water, had built an elaborate maze that he called the Honeycombs, a fortress-like amusement park featuring a large swimming pool. Joel, mysterious and elusive, is identified in terms of his natural talent for flying. His daring as a pilot leads to his presumed death in a fiery plane crash but elevates him to the status of legend. Joel’s association with air and fire complements his father’s identification with earth and water. Together they form the composite creative man, though with antithetical intentions.
Both father and son are charismatic figures who attract the interest and admiration of others. As one variety of creative man, Frank uses his imaginative powers for life and eventual reconciliation. For Frank, blinded at the age of fifty-four by diabetes, the darkness of the Void is both outside and within him. It is at once his burden and his inspiration. Throughout his quest for the son he has never met, Frank must rely on his imagination and memory-two elements essential to Dickey’s theory of creativity-to bring to life people and events outside himself: particularly Joel. As he moves through the Peckover Air Base, searching for information about his son, Frank realizes that he is literally the center-point of interest and activity. “‘I am where I want to be,’” he said to himself. “‘The openness
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and the woods and everything here including the air over it all is an enormous net organized around me; I move, it moves, takes shape and changes shape . . . but all flows in on me: an army of boys, on the ground, in the air overhead; they will come to me, any way I ask; they will fall to me from the air I am breathing’” (115).
Joel Cahill, on the other hand, is a messianic leader who uses his powers to create disorder and, finally, death for the Alnilam cadets and others. Joel never appears in the novel as an actual character; rather, he is a figure brought to life primarily through the narratives of others. He emerges as a ghostly voice from the Void, whose creative spark is destructive; his written words and recalled actions inspire his disciples to follow his example into chaos and death.
Importantly, both father and son aspire to great heights by flying, risking their lives-and in Joel’s case, losing his life–in order to gain consequential experience beyond the ordinary. Throughout Dickey’s works, flight is a seminal theme, for it is a means for man to reach physical and spiritual heights, to encounter the Void in its most dangerous and exhilarating aspects. Frank’s flight into the night sky brings him dangerously close to Joel’s fate. Instead of further risking his own life, Frank resolves to maintain a balance, a central position within his new-found society at the Peckover Hotel and the training base; Joel and his followers, the group of rebellious cadets, lose their sense of the center and end in disorder and death.
While Frank Cahill, the man of earth and water, makes a kind of peace with the Void by returning to the earth, the collective speaker in The Eagle’s Mile unceasingly aspires to transcend the limitations of an earthbound life, first through the sea and then through the air. In the collection’s initial poem, “Eagles,” the speaker seeks to regain “the circular truth of the void” he once knew. His quest to achieve such knowledge through liberating flight into the Void, to rise above earth and its confines, provides the central theme and imagery of this volume. The poems emphasize circularity, spiraling–walking the beach, sailing the ocean, attaining the curved motion of flight in air–that appears throughout these final three volumes. The literal action gracefully evolves into images of the eternal cycle, the oneness of opposites–the living and the dead, the solid earth and the fluidity of air. The speaker adopts in his imagination an affinity with the flux of the oceans and the flight of eagles, the emblematic envoys to and from the Void.
Throughout The Eagle’s Mile, Dickey constructs an ascending hierarchy of earth, water, and air as agents for transformation from one level to the next higher. The base element of earth is invested with contrasting characteristics: the speaker realizes his aliveness on earth while acknowledging that the finality of the grave awaits. In “Tombstone,” the earth’s hold on the speaker is seen primarily in terms of the “blank and stark” of the grave. While visiting the grave of a loved one, the protagonist realizes that “deep enough / In death, the earth becomes / Absolute earth.” The living stand above breathing in the “rectangular solitude / Risen over” the dead.
While the earth is fixed, the ocean is in a state of constant movement and change. The sea allows a degree of ‘trouble-free” release from the earth or provides a setting for a greater release; in “Moon Flock,” for example, while looking “Straight out over the night seas,” the protagonist tries to
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will a change within himself by straining “to grow wings,” desiring to “leap / Leap till he’s nearly forever / Overhead: overhead floating” in air.
The poet asserts in the poem “Air” that air is “much greater than sea–/ More basic, more human than sea” or than the fixed, solid earth; for air contains the “high lucidity / Of vigil.” The speaker imaginatively achieves ascent into the air and a transformation into a creature of flight when the Night Bird, in the poem of the same name, surrounds him with his wings and talons, lifting him from earth to become part air: “You are sure that like a curving grave / It must able to fall / and rise / and fall and that’s / Right, and rise.” Here the imagery of falling and rising reinforces both the dangers and promises of approaching the Void. In ”Eagles” the large, soaring raptor “makes of air a thing that would be liberty / Enough for any world but this one.” The speaker aspires for a spiritual connection with the eagles in flight: ”I speak to you from where / I was shook off [. . .] when that bird rose / Without my shoulders: Leave my unstretched weight, [. . .] up from the human down- / beat [. . .] / Go up without anything / Of me in your wings, but remember me in your feet / As you fold them.”
Throughout his career Dickey longed for man to transform his shoulder-blade wings into real wings and duplicate the flight of angels or large, powerful birds. If one could fly above the earth, he might gain release from the “absolute earth” of the grave and ascend into the dangerous but creative and renewing power of the Void. The Eagle’s Mile provides almost endless examples of a speaker pursing this quest. It is fully accomplished only in Dickey’s final novel.>
To the White Sea focuses on Sergeant Muldrow’s arduous journey to escape his Japanese enemies after being shot down over Tokyo during World War II. Muldrow must travel, undetected, from Tokyo to Hokkaido, the northern-most island of Japan. To achieve this seemingly impossible feat, he models himself after nature’s predators, ascending the ranks of predatory beasts until he rises to the great raptor birds at nature’s summit.
To evade detection by human beings, Muldrow hides his identity with masks of various kinds, including a “suit” of swan feathers, and adopts the lessons of camouflage he learned as a boy while hunting in the wild Alaskan Brooks Range. He adapts the survival techniques of the lynx and the rabbit by “disappearing” or blending into his natural surroundings; he becomes “invisible” while wondering what “it would be like to be a ghost” (101). He thus begins to enter the Void and creatively use its resources and its inspiration for his literal salvation from the human enemy.
Reaching Hokkaido, Muldrow moves beyond the threatening human landscape to a snow-covered barrenness where he encounters a solitary, hermit-like old man, a caretaker of large birds of prey. The old man and Muldrow form a bond based solely on their attraction to the birds. When a bird lights on his forearm after a hunt, Muldrow assumes the bird’s power, “a tremendous force, a power that I couldn’t even guess at, heartless and right” (265). As he gains greater empathy with the birds, Muldrow undergoes a transformation, an exchange of identities with them.
I began to transfer my feelings–or soul, or spirit, or whatever you want to call it-to them, because they did more than any other creatures for the wish I had that was most
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like me. [. . .] The great thing about the birds, especially if they’re predators, is that anybody who loves them and understands how they operate gets to be like them; his mind, his imagination, can fly with them, and the birds know it [. . .]. I don’t think God himself could ever want anything more. (265-266)
In the final scene of the novel, Dickey creates an extraordinary first-person account of one who dies, ascends into the air and into the Void, and then achieves the transition from death back into life. The visual arrangement of the scene emphasizes the circle, as armed Japanese men surround Muldrow’s cabin. When he steps outside, he is killed in a blaze of gunfire:
I was in the place I tried to get to. I had made it in exactly the shape I wanted to be in, though maybe just a little beat up. But the main thing was that I had got to the landscape and the weather, and you can remember me standing there with the bullets going through, and me not feeling a thing. There it was. A red wall blazed. For a second there was a terrific heat, like somebody had opened a furnace door [ ... ]. But the cold and snow came back. The wind mixed the flakes, and I knew I had it. I was in it, and part of it. I matched it all. And I will be everywhere in it from now on. You will be able to hear me, just like you’re hearing me now. Everywhere in it, for the first time and the last, as soon as I close my eyes (275).
Muldrow experiences the moment of moving from life into death, into the Void that brings him into a new life: “there was a terrific heat” but immediately the snow and cold return “and I knew I had it. I was in it, and part of it. I matched it all. And I will be everywhere in it from now on.” Muldrow transcends into the Void and in an almost simultaneous spark moves into a new existence as he becomes “Everywhere in it”-the alpha and omega, “the first time and the last.”
The post-Deliverance career of James Dickey has often been disparaged, particularly his puzzling final works which, certain critics have claimed, demonstrate his squandering of talent and loss of vision. Yet these works are, in fact, a powerful fulfillment of Dickey’s career and completion of his vision. The concept and imagery of the writer’s engagement with the Void in these three works help dramatize both his literary and personal triumph over death.
Dickey was haunted by the subject of death which became an omnipresent theme in his life and his writing. He believed that his very existence depended on the deaths of others, as a child, as a young combat soldier, as a mature poet and novelist. In his later years, his own impending death moved from being a literary trope to a personal reality. Alnilam was published when he was sixty-four, The Eagle’s Mile when he was sixty-seven, and To the White Sea when he was seventy. He confronted the terrors and mysteries of his impending death through his art, as he did all subjects of his life. As a result, he anticipated entering the Void, merging with the Non-Self: and then, like Muldrow, attaining a new life, a spiritual consciousness that is “Everywhere in it.”
