by  Dr. Ian Kluge
 

The poetic works of Conrad Aiken are informed by his life-long dedication to the exploration of human consciousness and its evolution. As Aiken’s earliest writings demonstrate, these - and the two corollary issues of identity and poetry as the means of evolving consciousness -   pre- occupied him from the very outset of his career. As early as 1917, in an essay entitled "The Mechanism of Poetic Inspiration", Aiken writes that mediocre poets, as opposed to superior ones, "do not extend the field of our consciousness in any new direction" (Collected Criticism, p.40).  This statement clearly implies not only that poetry and consciousness are inextricably linked but also that the task of poetry is to extend, expand and evolve consciousness into hitherto unattained and unexplored regions of mind and thought. A poet, in other words, is an explorer who invites readers  on an inner voyage of discovery to become more conscious and, thereby, learn their true identities. Interviewed by Richard Wilbur near the end of his life, Aiken  - in a display of remarkable intellectual consistency - still maintained this evolutionary  vision:

Of course I do believe in the evolution of consciousness as the only thing we can   embark on, or in fact.  Willy - nilly, are embarked on...
(The Paris Review, Vol.11, No.42, Winter-Spring, 1968, 119)
 

However, a  study of Aiken’s poetry soon runs into an odd difficulty: Aiken never  explicitly defines the term "consciousness". Fortunately, Aiken’s prefaces and, above all, his major poems offer an excellent starting place for remedying this situation. Even a cursory reading of his long poems makes it clear that introspection, reverie, dreams,  interior monologues and soliloquies dominate the action of these works. In other words, almost all the action happens within the protagonists who are all embarked on  an inward journey of exploration,  involved in deep debate with themselves, or engaged in  monologues wherein the female listener functions almost exclusively as an  audience for the speaker’s philosophical ruminations.

Reading the prefaces and poems leads to an inescapable conclusion: although Aiken never formally defined consciousness, a single, clearly conceived notion of consciousness underlies his earliest - and as shall be shown - his later work. The degree to which introspection, interior monologues and soliloquies dominate Aiken’s poetry shows that the definition of consciousness underlying Aiken’s major  poems is Locke an. Consciousness, as Locke writes,  is  "the perception of what passes in a man’s own mind" (Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 11, I.19). Certainly exploration and expression "of what passes in a man’s own mind"(ibid)  pre-occupies the vast majority of Aiken’s protagonists and narrators. In other words, for Aiken the primary meaning of ‘consciousness’ is ‘self-consciousness’.

The prefaces Aiken wrote for his his early verse symphonies (later collected as The Divine Pilgrim) clearly reveal his implicit defintion of consciousness as self-consciousness.  The first of these prefaces, written in 1916 for "The Jig of Forslin" informs readers that the "central theme" (CP,1018) is

the process of vicarious wish fulfilment by which civilized man enriches his
circumscribed life and obtains emotional balance. It is an exploration of his
emotional and mental hinterland, his fairyland of impossible illusions and
dreams...
(CP, 1018)

This remarkable preface does several things. In the first place, it clearly focuses attention on the inner, mental and emotional, life of the protagonist instead of on outward events. Indeed, from the poem itself,  readers cannot know whether or not any external events ever actually take place. As well, this preface points out that dreaming, imagining, and "vicarious wish fulfilment" (CP, 1018) are among  the methods by which the extension or evolution of consciousness may be achieved. These activities  increase the protagonist’s  self-knowledge as he  learns more about the various facets of his character. Such self-knowledge, of course, not only creates increased awareness or consciousness of one’s self, but  is also an integral part of discovering one’s own identity. The preface to "Forslin" also makes it clear that imaginative activities, in other words, the arts, play an integral part of  attaining and extending consciousness.

Finally, the preface to "Forslin" also explains the poetic method by which Aiken plans to pursue these goals. Consciousness is inherently unstable and for this reason "the attempt has been made to release these typical dreams, or vicarious adventures, not discretely, but in flux. "(CP, 1018). Moods, feelings, images and thoughts all shift as Forslin, the failed juggler, explores his own mind and emotions in a desperate bid to understand where his life has gone wrong and why he feels he is such a miserable failure. The flux of consciousness naturally lends itself to the techniques Aiken employs in this as well as all of his other major poems: sudden shifts of perspective, mood, thought, imagery, dreams, attitude, action  and perception as well as a wide variety of poetic techniques. The preface refers to "harmony and counterpoint" (CP, 1018) and states that

[c]acophonies and irregularities have often been deliberately employed as contrast.
Free rhythms, and rhymeless verse, have been used, also, to introduce a variety of
movement. Mood and movement, in general, have been permitted to fluctuate
together...
(CP, 1019)

Aiken’s next preface, to "The Charnel Rose" in 1918,  informs readers that "[e]motions, perceptions, - the image stream of the mind which we call consciousness - these hold the stage" (Collected Poems, p.1017). This one statement - the rest of the preface explains the poetic method of the poem - also draws attention to the inner focus of Aiken’s poems as well as the theme of consciousness and the problematic nature of consciousness, which, as an endlessly changing flux or "stream" of images, feelings, fears and dreams, makes it difficult if not impossible to discover or create a stable identity. Indeed, earlier in this preface, Aiken clearly indicates that in his view, humans, by their very nature,  are restless and driven creatures:

This theme [of "The Charnel Rose"] might be called nympholepsy -
nympholepsy in a broad sense as that impulse which sends man from one
dream, or ideal, to another, always disillusioned, always creating for adoration
some new and subtler fiction.
(CP, 1017)

Here, too, the role of creativity, imagination, art or "fiction" in our inner processes is clearly evident insofar as  humans are perpetually "creating for adoration some new and subtler
fiction" (CP,1017; italics added). The word "adoration", moreover, draws the reader’s  attention to the religious and/or metaphysical dimensions of this endless search. Man, this passage seems to imply,  needs to worship and adore something, even if he must create it himself: if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him. This adoration, this forward movement towards the adored is what drives - or rather draws - the evolution of consciousness forward.

However, a caveat is required: the fact that man has an impulse to adore, to love and to worship, must not be interpreted to mean that God necessarily exists. Like Pope, who writes, "Know then thyself, presume not God to scan/The proper study of mankind is man" (An Essay On Man, II,1-2), Aiken restricts himself to the empirical facts: man has  an impulse to adore but this impulse alone does not tell us whether or not the object or adoration is necessarily real. It could be merely "some new and subtler fiction"(CP, 1017). Whether or not the objects of adoration or desire are metaphysically real makes no difference to Aiken, who explores the workings of and issues related to human consciousness solely in the light of this impulse.

In 1919, at the request of Harriet Monroe, Aiken also wrote an appendix to "Senlin", the fourth long poem in  "The Divine Pilgrim". In this appendix, Aiken  not only elaborates at length on the poetic method of his verse symphonies, but also takes up the theme of consciousness:

The theme is the problem of personal identity, the struggle of the individual for an
awareness of what it is that constitutes his consciousness; an attempt to place   himself, to relate himself to the world of which he feels himself to be at once an
observer and an integral part.
(CP, 1029)

The epistemological problem  regarding the nature of the knower and the known makes itself apparent here, as it does in the preface to "The Pilgrimage of Festus". The problem itself is simple to understand though solutions to it lead to devilishly difficult consequences: how can a knower relate to and know - become conscious of -  himself in a world of which he is a part and in which his increasing  knowledge continues to change him and, thereby, since he is a part of the world, the world as well? There seems to be an infinite regress of changes in which no knowledge is ever stable.  But if knowledge is not stable, that is, is not true, how can there be knowledge at all? And if there can’t be knowledge or self-knowledge, how can there be an identity and "an awareness of what it is that constitutes his consciousness"(CP, 1029)? What are the limitations of human knowledge - indeed, what is knowledge? For almost sixty years, Aiken explored and struggled with these questions, concluding in the end, that the exploration and struggle themselves matter more than any particular answer we might find.

The limitations of human knowledge and the  impulse to adore also receive mention in Aiken’s 1921 preface to "The Pilgrimage of Festus". Festus, the world weary protagonist looking for new worlds to conquer, discovers that

the possibility of knowledge itself is limited: that knowledge
is perhaps so conditioned by the conditions of the knower that it can have
but a relative value... [H]e comes, not unhappily, to the conclusion
that knowledge is inconclusive. To what, precisely, in the world
can one devote one’s instinct-to-adore? Beauty is inseparably
bound up with ugliness... No answer is provided, but Festus finds
himself at the end as at the beginning charmed by the prospect of self-
exploration.
(CP, 1023 -1024)

This passage draws  attention to a number of important  issues related to consciousness and its evolution. The first, and most obvious, is a perplexing question in regards to identity: if, as Aiken states,  knowledge is conditioned by the knower, what will becomes of self-knowledge? Indeed, how can there be self-knowledge?  How can the perpetually restless and changing self ever attain any final knowledge - or consciousness -  of its own perpetually restless and changing self? Knowledge, as Festus discovers "is inconclusive" (CP, 1024). That being so, how can we have - let alone  know and be conscious of - our  identity?   Is it even possible to answer the question, "Who am I?" with any finality or certainty? The perplexities continue. If we cannot have any final self-knowledge, can we really be conscious since self-knowledge and consciousness seem closely related? And what does it, then,  mean to ‘evolve’ our consciousness? Does it mean anything more than simply becoming aware of more of our minds? Is it merely a quantitative evolution? Further,  if beauty is "inseparably bound up with ugliness" (CP, 1024), what is the role of art  - the creation of beautiful things -  in the evolution of consciousness? And finally, if the impulse to adore is what moves us onward in the evolution of consciousness,  what is it precisely that we  are adoring?
Almost thirty years later, Aiken wrote another set of prefaces for the poems of "The Divine Pilgrim". These new prefaces, written in 1948 and 1949,  show that Aiken’s  basic view of consciousness as self-consciousness, as well as his views on the evolution of consciousness, the quest for identity and the role of art  were, in all fundamental aspects, unchanged. In the 1948 preface to "The House of Dust", Aiken writes about the nature of consciousness, the evolution of consciousness and the problems of our multitudinous identities:

... the entire poem is really an elaborate progressive analogy between the city,
seen as a multicellular living organism, and the multicellular or multineural
nature of human consciousness. Progressive, because as I say the movement
is intermittently but steadily from simple to complex, from physiological to
psychological; and, in the end, from the relatively simple levels of consciousness
to those in which it attempts to see and understand the world, or macrocosm, on
the one hand, and the consciousness or microcosm, that sees the world, on the
other. Implicit in it, therefore, is the theory that was to underlie much of the
later work - namely, - that in the evolution of man’s consciousness, ever-
widening and deepening and subtlizing his awareness, and in his dedication
of  himself to this supreme task man possesses all that he could possibly
require in the way of a religious credo: when the half-gods go, the gods arrive:
he can, if he only will, become divine."
(CP, 1021)

 Aiken adds a post-script to this preface: "The original preface to "The House of Dust" was lost many years ago. The present one however is a fairly accurate summary of it."(CP, 1021) This demonstrates clearly that Aiken was well aware of the intellectual continuity underlying his work.

The 1949 preface to "Senlin: A Biography" also reveals the conceptual continuity that unifies Aiken’s poetic works. Senlin, he writes focuses on the

fascinating problem of personal identity which perplexes each of us all his life: the   basic and possibly unanswerable questions, who and what am I?, how is it that
I am I, Senlin, and not someone else? ... [F]or Senlin discovers that he is a whole
gallery of personalities, rather than one.
(CP, 1022)

Aiken’s last preface, also written in 1949, for  "Changing Mind" shows a clear relationship between his interest in consciousness and its evolution with the role of the artist in that process. Initially, Aiken explains how the poem is concerned with  issues of identity, in this case, the protagonist’s perplexities in "seeing himself resolved into his constituent particles: and this with a purpose, that his increased awareness may be put at the service of mankind."(CP, 1023). The best way to render this service is by being an artist or poet. Of this poem’s protagonist, Aiken writes:

Not only does he inherit the ordinary basic unconscious memory of Senlin -
also inherits the complete private situation of a highly complex and self-conscious   contemporary individual whose neuroses have made it necessary and desirable
that he should be an artist. He must make his experiences articulate for the
benefit of others, he must be, in the evolving consciousness of man, the servant-
example, and in fact he has little choice in the matter. He is himself simply a part
of that evolution.
(CP,1025)

These statements clearly demonstrate Aiken’s belief that the artist must not only explore his own consciousness but also serve humanity with works of art that will help others do the same. If the artist does not explore and  know himself, how could he genuinely help others  accomplish this task? The true artist has no choice but to be deeply autobiographical for the contents of his own consciousness are all he or she has to offer. This can be achieved by becoming an artist who must "make his experiences articulate for the benefit of others, [who] must be, in the evolving consciousness of man, the servant example..."(CP, 1023).

In addition to outlining the artist’s role in the evolution of consciousness, this preface  also outlines Aiken’s views regarding the artist’s social responsibilities  in the world. Through the self-sacrifice of  making his struggles and pains available to others through his works, the artist helps readers gain the insights and  vicarious experiences they need to become more conscious themselves.

Aiken’s other prefaces and notes to such later poems as "The Coming Forth By Day of Osiris Jones" and  "The Kid", make it clear that his concern with identity and consciousness continued unabated. "The Coming Forth by Day of Osiris Jones", based on the rituals described in The Egyptian Book of the Dead, deals with Jones’ "memory or consciousness"(CP, 1030) and how Jones is remembered, that is,  identified by the objects and people of his life.  "The Kid" portrays not only the true, "prototypical American" (CP,1033) but also the restless spirit inherent in all who are engaged in the evolution of consciousness. He symbolizes "those pioneers who sought freedom and privacy in the ‘wide open spaces’, or the physical conquest of an untamed continent, and those others, early and late, who were to struggle for it in the darker kingdoms of the soul."(CP, 1033) Kin to Tennyson’s Ulysses, the Kid cannot stop moving because neither he nor we  have any other identity than our movement, our evolution, our passing through and leaving behind places, times and former states of being.

Turning from the prefaces to the poems shows that Aiken’s definition of consciousness as self-consciousness is readily apparent from the earliest works to the last. Virtually all of his major long poems from "The Charnel Rose"(1915) to "The Morning Song of Lord Zero"(1963) feature intensely introspective, even narcissistic protagonists. In "The Charnel Rose", the protagonists’s nympholeptic pursuit of a mysterious female figure comes to us entirely through his  impressions, feelings and thoughts. There is little, if any evidence, to suggest that his pursuit is outwardly real; indeed,  the protagonist is so intensely focussed on himself that he has an almost pathological inability to maintain, for more than a few moments,  a steady vision of anything outside of himself.

But at times it seemed,
Walking with her of whom he subtly dreamed,
That her young body was ringed with flame,
Hover of fire,
And that she went and came
Impalpable fiery blossoms of desire,
Into his heart and out of his heart again
With every breath and every breath was pain.
And if he touched her hand, she drew away
Becoming someone vast; and stretched her hair
Suddenly, like black rain, across the sun
Till he grew fearful...

("The Charnel Rose", II,1,15-29)

The protagonist is  utterly desperate because he is constantly and completely overwhelmed by his feelings, ideas and imaginative perceptions:

To shape this chaos of leaderless ghostly passions -
Or else be mobbed by it - there was the question,
Dry leaves above him whispered the slow question,
Black ripples on the pool chuckled of passion
And through the windows drifted his own white face,
(ibid., II,3,8-12)

Indeed, the protagonist of "The Charnel Rose" , despite his moments of turning outward towards the ‘real’ world, never successfully escapes the inexorable gravitational pull of his psychological underworld. He is a sort of ‘failed’ Orpheus unable to resist for long the lure of Pluto’s realm.

To muse in the afternoon by a convent wall, -
Here, at the bottom of the a vast blue well of sun;
To watch the lizard breathe and crawl,
And know yourself the world and lizard in one:
Let us lose ourselves and all we meditate
To melt, through dream, in the timeless dream of fate.
(ibid.,IV,5, 1-1-6)

Moments later he reduces the external world to "an old recollection"(ibid, l.12)  that "dissolves in darkness" (ibid, l.13)  and eventually concludes that "[w]e must escape this temporal flesh and place," (ibid,. l.26) and "forget them all./I must forget this sun, - myself , - this wall."(ibid. l.36) and turn inward again:

Here, then, at last, grown weary of long pursuing
We find the perfect darkness!
(ibid, l.37-38)

Unfortunately, the pursuit simply continues there too, where finds himself "a part of the maniac laughter of chaos;/Rebellious chaos of unfulfilled desire."(ibid, l. 46-7)

"The Jig of Forslin"(1916), the second long poem in "The Divine Pilgrim",  begins with Forslin, defeated in his attempts to achieve circus fame by balancing two balls on each other, reflecting on the course of his life:

In the clear evening, as the lamps were lighted
Forslin, sitting alone in his strange world,
Meditated; yet through his musings heard
The dying footfalls of the tired day
Monotonously ebb and ebb away
And heard the dark world slowly come to rest.
Bow, as the real world dwindled and grew dim,
His dreams came back to him...
Now, as one who stands
In the aquarium’s gloom by ghostly sands,
Watching the glide of fish beneath pale bubbles -
...
He did not know if this were wake or dreaming...
(The Jig of Forslin, I,1,1-15)

In the course of these reflections, Forslin not only reviews what has happened to him in his career as a juggler but also imaginatively explores other, in large part unrealized and often grotesque and bizarre dimensions of his mind. In doing so, he struggles with the question of identity: "[t]he lights return/And we have silently changed... To what, to whom?"(ibid, III,3,l. 34-5); "Am I one or a million men?"(ibid, IV,4, l 7-8). He also speculates about the nature of consciousness: "We dream our dreams but dream forever waking,"(ibid, V, 2, l .6) and the endless evolution of consciousness through an infinite regress of dreams and dreamers:
We hold them all, they walk our dreams forever,
Nothing perishes in that haunted air,
Nothing but is immortal there
And we ourselves, dying with all our worlds
Will only pass the ghostly portal
Into another’s dream; and so live on
Through dream to dream immortal.
(ibid., V,8, 31-38)

First appearances to the contrary,  "The House of Dust" (also written in 1916) also repeats the inward turning stance observed in  "The Charnel Rose" and "The Jig of Forslin." The protagonist, a sort of Diogenes figure  identified as "the inquisitive dreamer of dreams" ("The House of Dust", I, 1, 6) and "the eternal asker of questions" (ibid, I,1,8) stands on a city street. He plans to go around asking people their dreams:

"I will ask them all, I will ask them all their dreams,
I will hold my light above them and seek their faces.
I will hear them whisper, invisible in their veins....
(ibid, I,1,11-13)

He is interested in peoples’ inward lives, but more importantly, his  pursuit of this quest,  soon makes it clear that the outer events are little more than prompts for his own thoughts, feelings, dreams, memories and reveries.  Indeed, the outward city in which he seems to be acting and the inward city of his mind have merged into and blurred one another:

And, growing tired, we turn aside at last,
Remember our secret lives, seek out our towers,
Lay weary hands on the bannisters, and climb;
Climbing, each to his little four-square dream
Of love or lust or beauty or death or crime.
(ibid, I,5,37-41)

The identity of the outer city of concrete  and the inner city of consciousness, is of course, is precisely what Aiken focuses on in his preface to this poem: "the entire poem is really an elaborate progressive analogy between the city, seen as a multi-cellular living organism, and the multicellular or multineural nature of human consciousness"(CP, 1021). The fragile and yielding nature of our identity and consciousness that make such a blurring of distinctions possible, is expressed in one of the protagonist’s  beautiful lyrical outbursts:

Weave, weave, weave, you streaks of rain!
I am dissolved and woven again.
Thousands of faces rise and vanish before me.
Thousands of voices weave in the rain.
(ibid, I,6, 54-57; italics added)

A similar blurring of identities occurs in "Senlin: A Biography" (1918) which, like "The Jig of Forslin",  begins with Senlin alone in his room

Senlin sits before us, and we see him.
He smokes his pipe before us, and we hear him
("Senlin: A Biography", I,1,1-2)
Before long, however, the seemingly clear identity of Senlin dissolves into the environment in which he finds himself.

Has Senlin become a forest? Do we walk in Senlin?
Is Senlin the wood we walk in, - ourselves, - the world?
Senlin! we cry...Senlin! again...No answer
Only soft broken echoes backward whirled...

Yet we wold say: this is no wood at all,
But a small white room with a lamp upon the wall;
And Senlin, before us, pale, with reddish hair
Lights his pipe with a meditative stare.
(ibid, I,1,31-34)

The rest of the poem is a series of imaginative adventures, memories and reveries as Senlin, and the reader, by invitation, explores the intricacies of Senlin’s own mind.

"The Pilgrimage of Festus" (1921), the last poem of "The Divine Pilgrim", begins with what may well be called Aiken’s meditative stance: a lone person, usually, but not always in doors, having reached a critical juncture in life, stands or sits observing both his own feelings and the surrounding world.

And at last, having sacked in imagination many cities
And seen the smoke of them spread fantastically along the sky,
...
Festus, coming alone to an eastern place
Of brown savannahs and wind-gnawed trees
Climbed a rock that faced alone to the northward
And sat, and clasped his knees.
("The Pilgrimage of Festus", 1,1,1-10)

Eventually, after pleading and tempting solicitations from  various voices, Festus does what virtually all Aiken’s protagonists do - begins a new inward journey of self-exploration;  he "joyously into the world of himself set forward/Forgetting the long black aftermath of pain." (ibid, I,1,73-4; italics added).

Aiken’s next major work , "Preludes for Memnon" (1931) , wastes no  time in establishing the usual  meditative stance. After the introductory stanza in which the boundaries between inner and outer, the mind and the world are blurred  - "Winter for a moment takes the mind"(CP, 498) -  readers find themselves in a familiar situation:

The alarm clock ticks, the pulse keeps time with it,
Night and the mind are full of sounds. I walk
From the fire-place with its imaginary fire,
To the window, with its imaginary view.
darkness, and snow ticking the window silence,
And the knocking of chains on a motor-car, the tolling
Of a bronze bell dedicated to Christ.
And then the uprush of angelic wings, the beating
Of wings demonic from the abyss of the mind.
("Preludes for Memnon", 1,1,17-26; italics added)

The meditative stance in "Memnon" differs from that in "The Divine Pilgrim" insofar as in the earlier poems, the protagonist takes the initiative and chooses to enter his mind while in the later poem, the angelic and demonic forces of the mind rush upward to engulf the protagonist. The essential situation, however, remains unchanged.

"The Coming Forth by Day of Osiris Jones" (1931) is also an inward journey, albeit one in which the usual framework of a meditating character and a specific  location have been removed, leaving readers with the sheer play of the objects of one man’s  consciousness. The deliciously ironic twist in this poem is the fact that the protagonist is dead! Where Jones is readers are never told, but the substance of the poem, the activities of memory and consciousness and the testimony of the important objects of his life,  takes places on

...a stage of ether, without space, -
a space of limbo without time, -
a faceless clock that never strikes;

and it is bloodstream at its priestlike task, -
the indeterminate and determined heart,
that beats,  and beats, and does not know it beats.

             ("The Coming Forth by Day of Osiris Jones", Stage Directions, 9-14)
These differences aside, the essentials remain as before: the exploration and play of a man’s consciousness, in a setting that is, as in so many of Aiken’s long poems, ambiguously located in both the inner and outer - and perhaps, as "Jones" suggests, in neither: "darkness without term or form, that sinks,/between two thoughts "(ibid, 17-18).

In "Landscape West of Eden" (1935), the location of the meditative stance is moved to the deck of a ship, and - unusual for Aiken - the protagonist has companions, who are not, however, being Adam and Eve, companions in the ordinary sense. The dialogue, in other words, is what one would expect from Aiken: an imaginary inner dialogue with various personified ideas, beliefs, feelings  and attitudes.:

It was of a deck, the prow of a ship, uplifted
by the wide wave of blue and whiteness, swung
towards the star-side by a long wave from the west,
then earthward dropped. And there, I, not alone,
westward facing,

and with me the two children,
Eve and Adam, from Eden come with flowerbuds,
               ("Landscape West of Eden",I,1-7)

The rest of the poem features the protagonist’s dialogues with various aspects of himself
as he struggles to achieve a vision of the evolution of consciousness, symbolized by  a westward journey. The protagonist also struggles to find a way of integrating the low, obscene, and even evil aspects of his and all human nature  - symbolized by Lillith - into a coherent sense of identity and a viable weltanschauung.

Like "The Coming Forth by Day of Osiris Jones", "Time in the Rock" (1936) does without the lonely rooms  that form the usual framework of Aiken’s ‘meditative stance’. The poem opens with a moment of a transformative vision - "And there I saw the seed upon the mountain/but it was not a seed it was a star" ("Time in the Rock", I, 1,1-2) and then plunges readers directly into the flow and dialectics of the mind:

and thus beneath the web of mind I saw
under the west and east of web I saw
under the bloodshot spawn of stars I saw
under the water and the articulate laughter
the coiling down the coiling in the coiling

mean and intense and furious and secret,
profound and evil and despatched in darkness,
shot homeward foully in a filth of effort
clotted and quick and thick and without aim
spasm of concentration of the sea
(ibid,  I,4,1-5; I,5,1-5)

"Time in the Rock", significant parts of  which are concerned with the issue of obscenity and evil already taken up in "Landscape West of Eden", pursues the exploration of consciousness in what is essentially a long  monologue covering a wide variety of metaphysical, ethical, evolutionary, religious  and psychological issues.   Even though she is explicitly addressed on occasion -  "Woman, woman, let us say these things to each other / as slowly as if we were stones in a field" (ibid, IV,1,1-2) - the woman listener remains more than anything else, a background,  or, alternately, a stage on which the play of the protagonists’s consciousness precedes. The fundamental stance is still inward.

Because "A Letter from Li Po"(1955) is an extended soliloquy, a profound and complex revelation of a character’s deepest feelings and insights, it too exhibits the inward focus of Aiken’s other work. Soliloquizing requires, above anything else, a state of fine attunement to one’s own inner states, though, ostensibly, the discourse may seem to be about the external world.  Indeed, in a soliloquy,  the primary use of  images and references to the outer world is to express, to clothe feelings  and deep personal  insight. Of course, one of the major ideas in "A Letter from Li Po" is that man, word and world are ultimately one and that the binary distinction of  inner/outer
is inadequate to express our relationship to the universe. The fact remains, however, that Aiken chose to present these ideas in a soliloquy - an inwardly focussed work - when he might just as well have chosen a play (as in "The Coming Forth by Day of Osiris Jones"), a narrative work such as "Punch: The Immortal Liar" (1921) or "John Deth" (1929-30), or  a  historical work like "The Kid"(1947). A similar remark can be made of  "The Morning Song of Lord Zero"(1963). At first reading this poem does not seem especially inward, but in fact, it  shares the inward nature of Aiken’s other work  insofar as it is a long philosophical self-revelation by Lord Zero.

Adopting ‘self-consciousness’ as Aiken’s operative definition of consciousness, makes it possible to see and explain certain developmental trends in Aiken’s poetry. It seems clear, for example, that the inward focus of Aiken’s work became less intense as his career advanced,  especially after he returned to America in the years just prior to World War 2. He wrote more poems like "The Soldier" "The Kid" and "Brownstone Eclogues" in an effort to forge links between his original inward vision and the outer, more public world of vast historical but also simple and common events. Such an outward turn should not be surprising, it being , in fact, a consequence of Aiken’s Locke an definition of consciousness. If consciousness is first, foremost and fundamentally self-consciousness, how can humans escape solipsism? Are we not imprisoned in our own minds because of the very self-centered basis of consciousness? And if that is the case, are we not also permanently imprisoned in our identities as well? Indeed, how can we ever come to know others at all?  Is it possible to avoid this seemingly inescapable fate? Aiken’s struggles with these questions and the conclusions he finally reached constitute the essence of his development as a poet.

 REFERENCES

Conrad Aiken, Collected Criticism, Oxford University Press, 1968
Conrad Aiken, Collected Poems, Oxford University Press, 1970
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