Visions from
San Francisco Bay
by Czeslaw Milosz
Book Review by Arthur Quinn
1983
Czeslaw Milosz' Vision from San Francisco Bay --- a collection of
essays first published in Polish in 1969, almost a decade after he
arrived at Berkeley --- has been the most neglected of his works translated
since he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980. At first glance this
neglect is surprising, for this book will be for most American readers the
best introduction to Milosz' work as a whole. Here, in a series of short,
clear essays, Milosz presents more plainly than anywhere else his view of the
human condition. But it is precisely this view of the human condition that
explains the neglect Milosz' vision of our predicament is enough to make any
comfortable reader wince.
To be sure, Visions from San Francisco Bay was
widely reviewed. And all the reviews I read were positive, respectful,
sometimes enthusiastic, always full of good cheer. It was the good cheer that
got to me. The reviewer in the San Francisco Chronicle liked the book
because in it one could learn the Great Man's response to highways,
underground newspapers, sidewalk preachers, supermarkets. Reading that review
was like watching Milosz himself be trimmed and put under cellophane for
supermarket display, somewhere between the capers and fresh salmon.
The best of the reviews --- and a careful, intelligent
review it was --- bore the title "The Devil and Mr. Milosz." But
here was that good cheer again, the demonic voices evoked by Milosz
rechanneled to sound amusing, as if from George Bernard Shaw or The
Screwtape Letters. Milosz was being neglected with attention.
Visions from San Francisco Bay itself offers a
description and explanation of this strange process, with respect not to
Milosz himself but rather to the great California poet Robinson Jeffers.
Milosz believes that Jeffers failed to be taken seriously by his
contemporaries because he tried to break through "the invisible web of censorship."
"One must recall that he was neglected by people who placed great value
on meat, alcohol, comfortable houses, luxurious cars, and tolerated words as
if they were harmless hobbies."
Make Milosz' work a mere exercise in autobiographical
expression; make it an intriguing commentary on the vagaries of 20th-century
history; make it a convenient opportunity to express ringing support for
Solidarity; or to praise the remarkable range in modern poetry; but when
Milosz says that the demonic is at the core of contemporary life, when he
asserts that the highest function of discourse is exorcism, or that poets
should pray that "good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their
instruments" --- well, then he must be speaking figuratively. It would be
indecorous to take him at his word. Such a way of talking must be for so
sophisticated, so sensitive, so accomplished a man only a harmless hobby.
Visions from San Francisco Bay could have been the
title of one of those lovely coffee books, produced by the Sierra Club,
perhaps filled with Ansel Adams-style photographs of early paradise. Milosz,
in fact, does have much praise for the western American landscape. Yet he praises
it while at the same time confessing that he finds "something oppressive
in the virginity of this country." Milosz praises beautiful landscapes
for making him experience oppression.
The hostile beauty of the earth is central to Visions
from San Francisco Bay. In Death Valley, or the Sierra, or in a redwood
forest where eagles circle above chasms of mist, Milosz sees an alien, inhuman
place, a place in itself neither good nor bad, however tempted we might be to
find comfort in its apparent beauty.
The European landscape can easily be imagined as humane, as
but a stage for human strivings, shaped by human values. The American West
does not permit such comforting delusions. "Both here on the West Coast,
and elsewhere in America, one is faced with something that is impossible to
define by allusions to the 'humanistically formed imagination,' something incomprehensible
in regard both to the forms taken in by the eye and to the connection those
forms have to the lives of human beings."
If we wince at being told that, Milosz assures us he winces
as well. Nonetheless, he insists that in this discomfort we are coming close
to the heart of the European immigrant experience so often romanticized. In
leaving their homeland, the immigrants had, if unwillingly, broken through the
cocoon of constantly renewed interdependencies that had shielded them from the
world in itself. In America they could for the first time see it for what it
was, in and of itself, an alien and indifferent thing. They could taste
"the elixir of pure alienation" and in their loneliness understand
the human condition.
Or this at least seems to have been Milosz' own experience.
"Now I seek shelter in these pages, but my humanistic zeal has been
weakened by the mountains and the ocean, by those moments when I have
gazed upon the boundless immensities with a feeling akin to nausea, the wind
ravaging my little homestead of hopes and intentions."
But Milosz himself, like any human being, and unlike the
impersonal chaos called nature, cannot and will not dispense with valuation.
An indifferent universe, indifferent in itself, is to him an evil universe. He
finds precedent for this dark conclusion in the old Manichean heresy which
taught that the little good in this world was trapped there as if in exile,
yearning for escape. And this conclusion Milosz finds empirically confirmed
not just in the horrors of modern history but in the teachings of modern
evolutionary biology.
"Obviously the struggle with Evil in the Universe is
an old one.... Yet, never was the position of those who defend the idea of a
hidden harmony more difficult, never was Manichean ferocity more aggressive
than when the nineteenth century observed that the suffering of living matter
is the mainspring of its Movement and that the individual creature is
sacrificed in the name of a splendid and enormous transformation without goal
or purpose."
Some species rise, others fall, as do human families, and
nations, and whole civilizations. There may well be an internal logic to these
transformations, a logic which when viewed from sufficient distance has its
own elegance, harmony, grace. And our reason tempts us to be enthralled by
this superhuman splendor; but when so enthralled we find difficult to
remember, except perhaps as an element of an abstract calculus, the millions
of individuals, the millions upon millions, who unwillingly paid for this
splendor in pain and blood.
The call of nature --- survival of the fittest --- and the
call of history --- the strong do what they will, the weak what they must ---
are a single song, a siren song that would have us lose our sense of
"dread and repugnance for the impersonal cruelty built into the structure
of the universe." And this song governs our world.
Hell is the subjection of the human to the inhuman, of the
personal to the impersonal, of the living to the dead, of the concrete to the
abstract. In Hell the elemental wonder at mere existence is lost; everything
becomes a case, an instance, a symptom. And so we must not mistake philosophy
and science for allies in our struggle against the inhuman. They by their very
nature attempt to reduce the world to a bloodless ballet of categories.
For him philosophical systems are only worth studying
"in order to dismiss them." And science? "Had I a liking for
the sciences, perhaps only a sociology which examines the self-confident
social sciences would satisfy me. Fortunately, I do not, for I would then have
used the grab of a scientific shaman to conceal my own preferences and
biases."
And what of the great achievements of technology, which at
least in its benign applications has alleviated human sufferings and otherwise
made human beings less dependent upon the vicissitudes of impersonal nature?
About even these achievements Milosz has deep doubts. He suggests that these
could well be the subtlest ploy of the demonic. "The greatest trick of
this continent's demons, their leisurely vengeance, consists in surrendering
nature, recognizing that it could not be defended; but in place of nature
there arose a civilization which to its members appears to be Nature
itself, endowed with nearly all the features of that other nature."
Technology itself now dwarfs the individual into
inconsequence, and far more effectively because now he is being dwarfed by
what appear to be the products of his own collectivity. And we feel reduced to
"impotence, evasion, a solitude with phonograph music and a fire in the
fireplace." Unless, that is, we are willing to assert what seems absurd,
both to others and to ourselves.
We must assert the primacy of the living, the concrete, the
personal, however vulnerable, ephemeral, or inconsequential seem to our mind's
eye. Milosz prefers to see the continent in this way, as a concrete thing. And
he claims to offer this vision only as his personal preference. He does not
hope to prove his preferences, because proof always involves abstractions, and
the devil will always win at his own game. But Milosz can continue to assert
unyieldingly, against the devil and the devil's syllogisms, his own
preference. Even at the risk of embarrassing the reader and himself. Even by
his persistent use of the outmoded language of demonology.
If the world sacrifices the individual with apparent
indifference, if reality seems governed by abstract laws, who is
responsible for this travesty? There must be persons behind all this ---
concrete, living persons who are devoted to deluding us. And these persons
have traditionally been called evil spirits.
Milosz will always strive to speak in the language of the
concrete, the personal. He speaks the language of poetry, the language of the
essay. "The only thing we can do is communicate with one another."
To communicate our concrete presence, our uniqueness, to love one another. And
thereby to help one another resist the seductive voices of the demonic.
"Whenever I take up my pen which itself pretends to knowledge, since
language is composed of affirmations and negations, I treat that act
only as the exorcism of the evil spirits of the present."
Left to itself, language will pretend to knowledge, reduce
the concrete to propositions. And hence it must be handled with a certain
sense of danger. Language is a contradiction, at once sound and idea --- as
are human beings, at once person and body. And so Milosz will begin his poem.
"As Poetica?": "I have always aspired to a more spacious form/
that would be free from the claims of poetry or pros/ and would let us
understand each other without exposing the author or reader to sublime
agonies." Such a communication of individuality, or uniqueness, is not
possible except through the meditation of a language full of claims. The
communication can be achieved only by turning this language against itself, by
self-contradiction, by the sublime agony of attempting to transcend language
itself. There is no art of poetry except on that ends in a question mark. And
the only poem Milosz has written in praise of reason is called "An Incantation."
So much of culture, so much of the invisible web of censorship,
is devoted to masking "man's fundamental duality." To mask the
duality and thereby free people from the necessity of choice. Milosz' work is
devoted to unmasking that duality, to making his readers admit the
contradictory nature of their own experience. For Milosz, no less than for
Simone Weil, "Contradiction is the instrument of transcendence."
Contradiction forces us to choose, assert our preferences,
to make an "arbitrary choice, not subject to verification." We must
recognize that we are living within the contradiction; it is not a
"background against which to play out our tragicomedies." Our
personalism, our humanism, if such we choose, will scarcely be comforting. It
will be a "piety without a home," a piety that allows us "fortunately
no safe superiority." (Superiority would come only if we knew we were
right.) Perhaps this half-ironic piety is best summarized in the title of the
essay: "An Essay in Which the Author confesses That He is on the Side of
Man, for Lack of Anything Better."
Actually he also confesses he is on the side of God. Who
presumably is a bit better. But Milosz' God is not the God of philosophers or
theologians. "I desire a God who would love me and help me, who would
save me from the nothingness of death, to whom I could each day render homage
and gratitude. God should have a beard and stroll in heavenly pastures."
Only a thoroughly anthropomorphic religion can "resist the exact sciences
which annihilate the individual."
k k k k k
Now I must confess. In presenting the summary of Visions
which you have just read I have violated the spirit of the book, and perhaps
even served the demons. Better to neglect the work of Milosz altogether than
to present it as an easily communicable system of ideas.
To say that the choice for Milosz is a choice between
abstract and the concrete, between logic and contradiction, is to state the
choice wrongly, for it is to state it in abstract terms. The choice for Molisz
is never between ideas, world views, philosophies; it is rather always between
persons. At the cosmic level Milosz may think the choice is between a bearded
God and sophisticated demon. But in the small world of Vision from San
Francisco Bay it is a choice between Milosz himself and the great,
neglected Robinson Jeffers.
Jeffers was in his way as unyielding as Milosz. He saw
essentially the same contradiction as Milosz, the same dualities at the heart
of human experience --- and saw, too, the absolute necessity of choice.
Jeffers just chose contrarily, and celebrated the impersonal. Jeffers'
god was pure motion, and he seemed to consider consciousness itself an unforgivable
flaw.
Jeffers wrote in the language of poetry, a language which
when understood forces dialogue. And so Milosz, as he wandered
Monterey and wondered at this fellow poet's life, found himself forced into
dialogue. The result was "To Robinson Jeffers," the only poem in Visions
from San Francisco Bay and its centerpiece.
Milosz addresses the alien Jeffers, the dread but somehow
still present Jeffers: "If you have not read the Slavic poets,/ so much
the better. There is nothing there for a Scotch-Irish wanderer to seek."
And he describes the forbidding world Jeffers praises: "Prayers are not
heard ... Basalt and granite./ Above them a bird of prey. The only
beauty." And having conjured up such an overwhelming presence, he doubts:
"What have I to do with you?" and even seems to despair: "Oh,
consolations of mortals, creeds futile!" But he finally finds within
himself the power, although qualified, although momentary, to contradict:
And yet you do not know what I know.
The earth teaches
more than does the nakedness of
elements. No one with
impunity
gives himself the eyes of a god....
Better to carve suns and moons on
the joints of crosses
as was done in my district. To birches
and firs
give feminine names. To implore
protection
against the mute and treacherous might
than to proclaim as you did, an inhuman
thing.
----------
Quinn, Arthur. "Books: Visions from
San Francisco Bay, by Czeslaw Milosz."
California Monthly. 93, No. 6 (June-July 1983),
pp. 12-13.
Visions from San Francisco Bay
at amazon.com
[Return to Czeslaw Milosz page]
