II

If we recall the tripartite structure of Lyacos' poem, and likewise of its major sources, we can see the conundrum The First Death seems to pose in better context.  The world of the Odyssey knows no heaven, but it is framed by an underworld to which Odysseus can gain access only by drinking from a blood-pit.  The connection between the world of the living and that of the dead is, consequently, one in which the vital source is also connected to ritual pollution and contamination.  The intercourse between the two realms is fraught with peril; in effect, it is a wager of mortality.  Redemption is not part of this equation; only the hero attracts the attention of the gods, in many cases fatally:  hence the phenomenon of tragedy.  The broken being to whom Lyacos introduces us at the beginning of The First Death and who moves through a terrain of the dead to a space suspended between a beseeched heaven and an apparent hell is thus pre- as well as perhaps post-Christian, a circling between hope and despair in which faith remains out of reach.  The only thing clear is that the First Death's subject cannot achieve "resurrection" for himself alone, and that the effort to do so evokes only a deity that intensifies his predicament, filling him with the spurious vitality of a lust whose contortions assume the aspect of agony.
        
We are thus presented with the necessity of the Other. The bridge that leads the subject toward his counterpart begins, paradoxically, with that very lust that denies him the status of anything but an object.  In Christian terms, lust is sin, but outside them it is as Freud, the still-presiding figure of our own age, describes it, an instinctual drive that seeks merely a locus of discharge.  Human relations, then, begin with an act that simultaneously establishes and denies them.
        
For Lyacos, sexuality is a point of origin-always, as in the poem's motion of circularity, to begin again and again-in which the self and the other are constituted simultaneously.  Again, we may choose a passage that expresses this with particular clarity, from Z213.  It begins with a baffled subject who has been "walking for long without purpose."  He does not know where he has come from or where he is going, nor can he recall his name although he supposes he must have one.  He instructs himself - or is instructed - to "Sit," and at the same time to try something again that he fears will not (cannot?) be accomplished.
        
This introduction segues without pause to a room in which the subject recognizes a woman who has been an object of desire.  It is a contemporary scene; there is a furnished room which voices penetrate from outside, and desire enacts itself in the form of a passive submission to a bodily event:


I laid with my legs stretched out together, arms glued to my body.  Like in a coffin.  And I stopped breathing for a while.  She began, I turned my eyes up to the ceiling.  White, a blank sheet two yards above us.  She asked me if I wanted slow or faster, I couldn't sense, told her a bit slower.  It felt as though an alien member was stuck to my body.  An alien member coming out of my body.  Back to front, like cleaning the barrel of a gun.  Front to back, now slower somewhat.  Her breasts were pressing forward.  She was looking down at her hand, waiting attentively.  I could feel it was squeezing me and then opening and relaxing. . . . the hard body on me.  For a moment you don't look anywhere, just feel, the body fills out, saliva starting in the mouth, the animal scratches inside and wants to get out, you want to get out, the animal thirsty pushes inside to exit your mind overflowing.  Overflowing between her fingers and surging and you move toward her breasts.  And then, then as if you didn't exist, as if the animal died and me that I came wholly inside her.  If I could stay like this, empty, empty and clean.  (99)

        
This passage suggests an experience of female ravishment, of the male body submitting to and then rising toward a "hard body" that simultaneously pleasures and masters it, that arouses and expels an indwelling animal that, like a succubus, strains for release and final purgation.  The description echoes that of Section V of The First Death ("I swell with lust, unhallowed I rise, in the recesses of your body I spill my blood"), but here the act of coition leads not, as in the former passage, to a final sense of "Despair," but to one of futurity, of possibility, in which the woman may be returned to and the liberating cycle resumed (101).

        
We are still, at this point, far from a properly human relationship, let alone the larger one of community.  The speaker of the passage doesn't have a name, though it's unclear whether he can't recall it or simply never had one. The woman he's with is similarly unidentified.  Their relationship is one of sexual conjunction, which is to say, an animal function. They do, however, share speech, and the scene around them is urban and even fastidiously civilized ("Trousers carefully on the chair").  What transpires between them on the essential level, at least for the male, is the expulsion of a primal animality that creates the space for a possible humanity, a death unto life.  The critical passage is, as so often in Lyacos, grammatically indeterminate:  "And then, then as if you didn't exist, as if the animal died and me that I came wholly inside her."  From "you" to "me" to "I" suggests an identity coming into finally possibility through a violent ontological passage.  The "animal" in the speaker does not die, nor is it permanently expelled, for we cannot physically exist without it as a component of our being.  It is, rather, set aside so that another space can be cleared within the speaker, the space for a person.
        
I take this scene to be particularly critical in the poem, because it suggests its process as a passage, by no means guaranteed or identifiable with a progress toward civilization, but rather as a constant toil, now advancing and now retreating.  Lyacos suggests this a bit further on in Z213 in the image of a "burnt out Lighthouse" (the capitalization is significant) that opens up on the prospect of a terminally decayed world:

        
your cities exhausted, the aged

children, the aching teeth of desire, the carriages full of
the drowned, the truth that tightens, around what
                                happened it tightens,
you say it, they gather together, a circle, the gallows, the
                                                trees,
the fruit that does not fall on the ground, the bodies that
                                broke from affection,
the friend you don't see and don't hear . . . (107)

        
In this densely concentrated passage, Lyacos depicts a condition that seems to have gone beyond hope, in which desire begets only aged children; a carriage - the image of passage - carries only the dead; truth has hardened into dogma; trees bear but, Tantalus-like, do not yield their fruit; bodies conjoin but no longer affirm; friendship is recalled but no longer attainable.  In the center of  the passage is a circle, a symbol of gathering and community that immediately assumes the grotesque form of a noose that, aligned with the "trees" that bear the fruit that does not fall-the bodies, perhaps, of the hanged?
        
This is the saeculum, the order of the world that cannot be its own salvation.  We are once again within Lyacos' synoptic vision of Scripture, one that does not separate the two Testaments but engages them as a continuous dialogue with each other.  The Hebrew Testament is the story of an unconsummated pilgrimage, in which a single tribe of people, distinguished from yet symbolic of all humanity, seeks a Promised Land, loses it through iniquity, regains it through renewed exile and struggle, loses it yet again, but never abandons the hope of a definitive return.  It is the single most abiding myth of the three great monotheistic religions, whose founding faith has, thus far and against all historical odds, kept it startlingly alive in the modern political world.  Lyacos adapts it to his own purposes, and universalizes it as an emblem of the human condition as such.  Judaism has no final eschatological dimension; there is no transcendence of history, but the People endure.  This connects Judaism with Hellenism, with its implicit notion of the cycle in which the human city waxes and wanes in a perdurable round.  We seek, that is, the final accounting which the New Testament promises us as a blessedness beyond time, but we remain in the saeculum, a condition in which hope rises and falls to define itself anew, and names are forgotten only to be reinvented.  
        
In the Hebrew Testament, the most potent symbol of this experience is the Tower of Babel, in which human aspiration exceeds its limits in the hope of provoking a final reckoning through supernal knowledge or empowerment.  This hope must necessarily be dashed, and all fall with it; as Lyacos puts it, "And let us be lost, perhaps better for us like that" (Z213, 129).  As this is a repeated experience on the collective level in the saeculum, so too it is on the personal one.  The latter portions of Z213 are preoccupied again with the problematic of individual consciousness.  Our inability to fix reality is, as Lyacos points out, a function of our most defining cycle, the biological one that alternates our lives between sleep and waking, memory and loss:


. . . you sleep, you wake up so many times, so often, you don't know when you are asleep and when you are awake, why be awake, now you may be asleep, what you remember you may remember in sleep, wake up in a dream, remember inside a dream, different memory other things you remember when you are in a dream, you have a different life in the dream, you remember who you are what you did, and even though you may not be the person you were when again you wake up you don't doubt who you are in the dream, even when you are changing and you are changing continuously, you don't wonder, things are naturally so, it is not strange, you are changing continuously, your body, around you, everything everywhere, you are somebody else, but you are the same, you are him.  (131, 133)

        
We are both more protean and more believable to ourselves in dream:  perpetual transformation seems our lot, and the labor of memory we resume when awake is only the poor substitute for the natural conviction we possess in dream, the sense of both world and self as a condition of flux.  Continuity is change, "God reeling up and down landscapes and buildings, knocks down, opens new roads, doesn't like it, changes again" (ibid.).  Or so it seems, for what appears change is only the changing face of continuity:  "His world is onefold, and you perceive neither seam nor contradiction."  This is the secret of divine unity, the unity that belongs to the Being without a name.  We may intuit it, but it is not the realm we inhabit, and even if we are "hiding" a true name in the recesses of our own being, one that we hope will truly define it, it is finally only "a name at the end of a series of names" (ibid.).  No human understanding prevails, and, even in this world seemingly enclosed by Scriptural vision, "Not even Scripture stands out" (139).
        
Z213 ends not with this solitude, however, but, in its penultimate scene, with the most primitive assertion of human community, a detailed depiction of the slow butchery of a lamb.  The lamb is the symbol of sacrifice par excellence, of course, but there is no sense of ritual here, merely brutal slaughter.  The coda to this, a single long sentence that starts without predication, appears to take the perspective of an animal hunted down to sheer exhaustion and surrender.  There is no moment of recognition between predator and prey as death (presumably) comes:  "you are feeling the blow, you open your mouth, you look at his mouth, you don't want to stand up any more" (147).
        
We are, perhaps, at a degré zéro here, in which life is reduced to a feeding frenzy in which the distinction between human and animal itself vanishes.  If, however, we must begin with the individual as one who fails to remember himself, so, Lyacos suggests , fraternity begins with the simple objectification of the other on the most primitive, even cannibalistic level, as a source of alimentation.  It is the labor of each day, individually and collectively, to go beyond this point, even if what is built is only a new Babel.