Robert Sward, Rosicrucian in the Basement
(Black Moss Press)
Jack Foley
[T]he Rosicrucian Mystery was one of Divine
Rebirth...It sought...that hidden knowledge which Masonry and several
early aspects of the Secret Tradition in Christian times supposed to
have been lost with Adam. In a word, the mystical character of the
Fraternity founded ex hypothesi by Christian Rosy Cross cannot be questioned by
criticism. Unfortunately it had many imitations in the past, as it has
at this day, to confuse research, while there is evidence also that on
many occasions it lost sight of its own real or highest purpose...As
Orpheus in pursuit of Eurydice, the Candidate for Exaltation goes down
to recover the buried sense of the Divine Word...; and--also like
Orpheus--he is in each case put off with an inevitable shadow, for he
returns bearing in his hands that which he possesses already in heart or
head.
--Arthur Edward Waite, A
New Encyclopaedia of Freemasonry
Robert
Sward’s new book, Rosicrucian in
the Basement, is the latest offering from a man whose career began
in the late 1950s and who has published a great many books, mostly
poetry, over the past forty years. He is a well-known poet, but he is
not as well-known as he should be. Sward’s poems are often comic, but
they are never only comic. They are the product of a restless, spiritually
adventuresome sensibility occasionally masking itself as a stand-up
comedian. In his Gale Research Autobiography
(Contemporary Authors Series,
Volume 13) he describes himself as “Born on the Jewish North Side of
Chicago,”
bar mitzvahed, sailor, amnesiac, university
professor (Cornell, Iowa, Connecticut College), newspaper editor, food
reviewer, father of five children, husband to four [now five] wives....
He
adds that critic Virginia Lee called his writing career “a long and
winding road.”
I
first encountered Robert Sward’s work in the early 1960s. I was a
student at Cornell University, where he was teaching. “Uncle Dog: The
Poet at 9” was the title poem of the book I bought (or, possibly,
stole):
I did not want to be old Mr.
Garbage man, but uncle dog
who rode sitting beside him.
Uncle dog had always looked
to me to be truck-strong
wise-eyed, a cur-like Ford
Of a dog. I did not want
to be Mr. Garbage man because
all he had was cans to do.
Uncle dog sat there me-beside-him
emptying nothing. Barely even
looking from garbage side to side:
Like rich people in the backseats
of chauffeur-cars, only shaggy
in an unwagging tall-scrawny way.
Uncle dog belonged any just where
he sat, but old Mr. Garbage man
had to stop at everysingle can.
I thought. I did not want to be Mr.
Everybody calls them that first.
A dog is said, Dog! Or by name.
I would rather be called Rover
than Mr. And sit like a tough
smart mongrel beside a garbage man.
Uncle dog always went to places
unconcerned, without no hurry.
Independent like some leashless
Toot. Honorable among scavenger
can-picking dogs. And with a bitch
at every other can. And meat:
His for the barking. Oh, I wanted
to be uncle dog--sharp, high fox-
eared, cur-Ford truck-faced
With his pick of the bones.
A doing, truckman’s dog
and not a simple child-dog
Nor friend to man, but an uncle
traveling, and to himself--
and a bitch at every second can.
The
poet who wrote that had been reading E.E. Cummings--and one noticed
that--but, at the same time, there was something striking and new about
what he was doing. You wouldn’t know from that poem (or from the book)
that Robert Sward was Jewish--those themes came later--but the North
Side of Chicago is right there. The speaker of this poem is clearly a
city-dweller--nothing pastoral in his vision. Who had ever had thought
to write a poem about a garbage truck--and about a mean, “tough”
dog, no “friend to man”? Indeed, the speaker identifies himself not
with the man but with the animal: “I would rather be called Rover /
than Mr.” The speaker, a child, has no power, yet he sees power in the
figure of that dog, and he wants it. Power is to have “your pick of
the bones” and “a bitch at every second can.” Power is to be
self-sufficient, to belong “any just where / [you] sat.” Power is
the capacity to be noticed in a situation in which almost everything
around you is garbage. The poem is comic but edgy, problematical; mythic
but contemporary; alert but accepting: this, it seems to say, is the way
the world is. It is not a world of beauty but a world of power, a world
in which some people have things and others do not. And it is a world in
which power manifests not in the commonly accepted and respectable (“I
did not want to be Mr.”) but in something else--something nonhuman.
One thinks a little of Robinson Jeffers’ vision in “Roan
Stallion”--another poem in which power and animal are to some degree
equated:
I say
Humanity is the mould to break away from, the crust
to
break through, the coal to break into fire,
The atom to be split.
Tragedy that breaks man’s face
and a white fire flies out of it; vision that fools him
Out of his limits, desire that fools him out of his
limits,
unnatural crime, inhuman science,
Slit eyes in the mask; wild loves that leap over
the walls
of nature....
At
the same time, of course, the only genuine power the poet has is the
power of words, and “uncle dog” is a symbol of that as well.
Family
is an issue lightly touched on in “Uncle Dog”--the dog is an animal
but it is also an “uncle.” In Rosicrucian
in the Basement, family, along with the author’s Jewishness, is at
the very center of things. The “Rosicrucian” is Sward’s podiatrist
father; there are also poems to the poet’s children and to his mother.
As in “Uncle Dog,” the poet is less a participant than he is a
witness: it is others who
behave extravagantly:
“What’s to explain?” he asks.
He’s a closet meditator. Rosicrucian in the
basement.
In my father’s eyes: dream.
“There are two worlds,” he says,
liquid-filled crystal flask
and yellow glass egg
on the altar...
This is his secret.
This is where he goes when he’s not making money.
The way to the other world is into the basement
and he can’t live without this other world.
In the Gale Research Autobiography
Sward describes his father as handsome--“a cross between Charlie
Chaplin and Errol Flynn”--and “ambitious and hard-working,” a
“workaholic.” In Rosicrucian
in the Basement, the father blossoms into a full-fledged eccentric,
a visionary adrift in a world which doesn’t comprehend him:
“There are two worlds,” he says lighting
incense, “the seen
and the unseen, and she doesn’t understand.
This is my treasure,” he says.
Like
uncle dog, Sward’s father is a comic version of the poet--but the
terms have changed a little. Sward’s father quotes Rilke (albeit
unknowingly):
“We of the here-and-now, pay our respects
to the invisible.
Your soul is a soul,” he says, turning to me,
“but body is a soul, too. As the poet says,
‘we are the bees of the golden hive of the
invisible.’”
“What poet, Dad?”
“The poet! Goddamnit, the poet,” he yells.
Like
his father, Sward, “the podiatrist’s son,” “lives in another
world.” (Sward’s mother died in 1948 at the age of 42; her last
words were instructions to “keep [Robert’s] feet on the ground.”
It was only after her death that the father became interested in
Rosicrucianism and the world of the “invisible.”) But the young man
is not so certain of his father’s assertions. When his father says,
“As above, so below”--the famous formula attributed to Hermes
Trismegistus--the son answers, “I’m not so sure.” The word
“below” is partly ironic since the podiatrist father is always
talking about feet--“God has feet like anyone else. You know it and I
know it”--and because the father carries out his rituals in the
basement. Yet it is also a serious assertion about the relationship
between the world of the senses and the “other” world. Sward’s own
impulses led him away from both Rosicrucianism and his family’s
Judaism to the East. “In 1969,” he writes, “I began taking yoga
classes with a former British army officer who had spent twenty years in
India studying meditation. I went to yoga retreats with Indra Devi,
Swami Radha, Muktananda, and others. I studied Sanskrit. I read and
reread...everything...I could find on Eastern literature and
religion.” In “Prayer for My Mother,” one of the most moving and
accomplished poems of the book, written in a version of Charles
Olson’s “projective verse,” Sward is accused of being a “Jew who
got away,” a “sinner.” But Rosicrucian
in the Basement also contains a celebration of one of Sward’s
masters, “the biggest party animal of them all”:
Seven years I hung out with him,
even flew to India, meditated
in his cave
chanting to
scorpions, malaria mosquitoes
so illumined they chanted back.
(The
guru’s status as “animal” is important here. He represents a
“phallic god, / god in the shape of a dick, / godfather / con man.”
He is “trickster, / magician, / master cocksman.” One might add
perhaps, “dog.”)
In the Gale Research Autobiography
Robert Sward writes,
I had inherited my mother’s large, hazel-brown
eyes and so was nicknamed “Banjo Eyes,” after the singer [one would
perhaps more accurately say comedian] Eddie Cantor. Friends joked about
my name: “The Sward is mightier than the Sword.” And because I had a
zany imagination, I had only to say, “Hey, I have an idea,”and other
eight-year-olds would collapse laughing. I was regarded as an oddball,
an outsider. I had few friends.
Robert Sward learned early that the comic, the “zany,” was a
mask by which one could assert oneself--through which one would be
listened to. Here, the mask remains, but it is at the service of an
essentially visionary impulse: “the vision, the life that it
requires.” The word “dream” haunts this book. Sward remains
simultaneously “not so sure” and utterly certain:
For two, maybe three, minutes
I saw two worlds interpenetrating
jewels into jewels,
silver suns, electric whiteness,
World ‘A’ and world ‘B’
one vibrating blue pearl,
world like a skyful of blue suns
Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh!
The concluding words of the book are “Snap out of it”--an
affirmation of the “not so sure”--but the burden of Rosicrucian
in the Basement is a Romantic vision of the artist caught in a world
from which he has only momentary respite. If contradictions abound--this
is a book of memory but Sward’s perception of himself as “Mr.
Amnesia” is important too--the central issue is transcendence, an escape
from contradiction: “There is no reply. / Arms around her, I caress her
wings.” Like the young man who wrote “Uncle Dog,” the sixtyish poet
situates himself in a relationship to an “other” who is closer to the
real than he is. But in this book it becomes clearer than ever that the
“other” is himself.
© Jack
Foley, May 2002
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