"Phantom V" by Don Paterson

Mea culpa re line 8: I confusedly combined both possible readings-- this is either acephalous hexameter or first foot anapest iambic pentameter.  

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-Write to me about classes! 

-The Error by Don Paterson

-Idealism, Nominalism, Transcendental critique

-Plato, Plotinus, Ockham, Kant

-Paterson's band, Lammas

-His many books

-Michael Donaghy

-Blank Verse by Robert B. Shaw, and the 3 Types

-Nietzsche's "Beyond Good and Evil"

-Pseudo-Dionysius and the Via Negativa

-Plotinus's plenum meets Nagarjuna's vacuum (sunyata)

-God as Eclipse (and my episode/poem on this idea)

-Auto-martyrdom on Yggdrasil

-Beholding the Nothing That Is

Text of poem:

Phantom V

We come from nothing and return to it. 

It lends us out to time, and when we lie

in silent contemplation of the void

they say we feel it contemplating us. 

This is wrong, but who could bear the truth.

We are ourselves the void in contemplation. 

We are its only nerve and hand and eye. 

There is something vast and distant and enthroned

with which you are one and continuous,

staring through your mind, staring and staring

like a black sun, constant, silent, radiant

with neither love nor hate nor apathy

as we have no human name for its regard. 

Your thought is the bright shadows that it makes 

as it plays across the objects of the earth

or such icons of them as your mind has forged.

The book in sunlight or the tree in rain

bursts at its touch into a blaze of signs. 

But when the mind rests and the dark light stills,

the tree will rise untethered to its station

between earth and heaven, the open book

turn runic and unreadable again,

and if a word then rises to our lips 

we speak it on behalf of everything. 

Transcript

Versecraft 5-8: “Phantom V” by Don Paterson

         Hey everyone, welcome to the show and to 2024. Thank you so much to those of you who have purchased a subscription or bought merchandise in the last few weeks, I am incredibly grateful. If you enjoy this episode and would like to contribute or show your support, please see my links in the show notes. Otherwise, keep on spreading the good news of Versecraft, and we’ll be placing Superbowl ads in no time. 

Also, now that the new year is upon us, Matthew of Sleerickets and I are going to try to start planning an online class in earnest, so if you have any suggestions or requests regarding poetic subject matter or pedagogical format, please send me a note at versecraftpodcast@gmail.com, I would love to hear from you. 

         Our feature for today, Don Paterson, is not only a virtuosic jazz guitarist but also one of the finest and most accomplished of our contemporary poets. I particularly admire his gift, exceedingly rare in our dull age, for philosophical verse. Consider the following short masterpiece, entitled “The Error”: 

As the bird is to the air

and the whale is to the sea

so man is to his dream.

His world is just the glare

of the world’s utility

returned by his eye-beam.

Each self-reflecting mind

is in this manner destined

to forget its element,

and this is why we find

however deep we listen

that the skies are silent. 

In just twelve short lines of rhymed trimeter, Paterson has presented an elegant articulation of a Nominalist, Idealist worldview, and then offered, based on these premises, both an explanation for why God appears to be absent from the world and an implicit injunction to engage in a transcendental critique of our consciousness in order to dislodge ourselves from existential malaise. It is, in my opinion, masterful. For more on Idealism, see my previous episode on Thom Gunn. For more on Nominalism, see the work of the last great Medieval philosopher, William of Ockham. For more on taking a transcendental view of the mind, see Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. I did consider making this poem the featured poem, but decided it was too short for my purposes. Don’t worry, though—today’s poem is just as intellectually juicy. 

Don Paterson, who has lived from 1963 into the gift of the present, was born, like Logan Roy and Angus McFife, in the city of Dundee, Scotland. With dreams of being a musician, he left school at sixteen and moved to London, where he first became a part of free jazz collective Talisker before forming his own successful Celtic-Jazz ensemble, Lammas. Shortly following his move, he also smitten with poetry after an encounter with Tony Harrison. 

After a year of intense literary study, and concurrent with his musical pursuits, Paterson began to write and publish poetry, and his success was explosive: his first collection, Nil Nil, won the prestigious Forward Prize for best first collection, and his second won both the even more prestigious T.S. Eliot prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Future collections would go on to win the T.S. Eliot prize for an unprecedented second time, the Faber Memorial Prize, and the Whitbread Poetry Award, among many others. After the success of his first book, Paterson acquired the position of poetry editor at Picador, where he remained for 25 years, and several years later began to work simultaneously as a professor of poetry at the University of St. Andrews, where he is now emeritus. He received the Order of the British Empire in 2008, and the Queen’s Gold Medal for poetry in 2010. 

In addition to many books of original poetry and translations of Machado and Rilke, Paterson has also written a mammoth volume of poetic theory entitled The Poem: Lyric, Sign, and Metre, several books of aphorisms, and, most recently, a highly acclaimed memoir entitled Toy Fights, which was released in the old year of 2023. If you’re curious to learn more about the works of this artistic polymath, please see my links in the show notes. 

Our poem for today, Phantom V, is, as you might expect, the fifth part of a seven-part poem entitled Phantom, an elegy for Paterson’s deceased friend, fellow poet, and former bandmate Michael Donaghy, who died prematurely from a brain hemorrhage at the age of fifty. In addition to the phantom of Donaghy, who haunts the grieving Paterson, the title refers to the painting and exhibition of the same name by artist Alison Watt which featured at the National Gallery in 2008, and which ekphrastically inspired several sections of Paterson’s elegy. 

Despite the thread of themes, images, and thought developments which runs between the sections, each one, as in T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets or Hart Crane’s Voyages, is a distinct poem in its own right. Part V is an existential, quasi-spiritual meditation on mortality, and is an excellent example of poetry as philosophical rhetoric— a use for poetry that has been much maligned by modern advocates of suggestive chaos, personal sentiment, or lyric purity, but which I—in the company of countless historical poets from the Greek tragedians to Wallace Stevens— find can be one of the most affecting and interesting roles that poetry can perform. The poem goes like this:

We come from nothing and return to it. 

It lends us out to time, and when we lie

in silent contemplation of the void

they say we feel it contemplating us. 

This is wrong, but who could bear the truth.

We are ourselves the void in contemplation. 

We are its only nerve and hand and eye. 

There is something vast and distant and enthroned

with which you are one and continuous,

staring through your mind, staring and staring

like a black sun, constant, silent, radiant

with neither love nor hate nor apathy

as we have no human name for its regard. 

Your thought is the bright shadows that it makes 

as it plays across the objects of the earth

or such icons of them as your mind has forged.

The book in sunlight or the tree in rain

bursts at its touch into a blaze of signs. 

But when the mind rests and the dark light stills,

the tree will rise untethered to its station

between earth and heaven, the open book

turn runic and unreadable again,

and if a word then rises to our lips 

we speak it on behalf of everything. 

         Other than the consistent iambic pentameter, the formal qualities are limited here—the whole poem is one stichic passage of blank verse. In other words, a single paragraph of unrhymed iambic pentameter. In his very worthwhile study, Blank Verse, Robert B. Shaw identifies three main styles of blank verse: the Shakespearean, which is characterized by lush variety of rhythm, diction, and register; the Miltonic, which is characterized by stateliness, sonorousness, and enjambed sinuousness; and the Wordsworthian, which is characterized by mellow, meditative, conversational qualities. Since the 19th century, the Wordsworthian style has largely predominated, and here, we see that Paterson is working in the Wordsworthian tradition not only in his style but in the poem’s function as a psycho-spiritual meditation. Paterson, however, possesses little of Wordsworth’s sentimentality or naïve optimism, and pushes the meditative blank verse idiom in a darker, more cerebral direction, more in the spirit of Coleridge, who is one of his idols. 

         As I said, this poem is assertively iambic, with a few substitutions thrown in here and there. One interesting thing we notice when we scan this poem is that Paterson sometimes gets a certain rhythm stuck in his ear when he is composing, and that rhythm re-emerges several times in close succession. For instance, the poem is perfectly iambic until line 5, where we encounter an acephalous line. We then see acephalous lines crop up again in lines 8 and 10, and never afterward. In line 11, we have our first line with a first foot anapestic substitution, and then we see this same choice in lines 13, 15, and 16, and never afterward. 

         We have two irregular lines of note. Line 8 not only has a first foot anapestic substitution but is an extrametrical line of hexameter. This is appropriate given the large scale of what is being described: “There is something vast and distant and enthroned.” Line 10 is by far the strangest: “staring through your mind, staring and staring.” You can either scan this as a line of trochaic pentameter, which in this un-catalectic form is quite rare in blank verse, or as an acephalous, feminine line of iambic pentameter with a fourth foot trochaic substitution.

         As one last note, we may be tempted to scan the beginning of line 11 as a minor ionic: “like a black sun.” We should not succumb to this urge however, as it not only causes the entire line to become irregular and extra-metrical, but a much smoother anapestic reading is perfectly acceptable. 

Let’s now go back and read the first thirteen lines of the poem again:

We come from nothing and return to it. 

It lends us out to time, and when we lie

in silent contemplation of the void

they say we feel it contemplating us. 

This is wrong, but who could bear the truth.

We are ourselves the void in contemplation. 

We are its only nerve and hand and eye. 

There is something vast and distant and enthroned

with which you are one and continuous,

staring through your mind, staring and staring

like a black sun, constant, silent, radiant

with neither love nor hate nor apathy

as we have no human name for its regard. 

The first line, “we come from nothing and return to it” is pretty self-explanatory and borderline cliché, but it already tells us something interesting about the speaker’s worldview. Obviously, the speaker doesn’t believe in an afterlife, but more notable than this, the speaker proposes an ex nihilo genesis for our lives. We do not come from a prior substantial cause, but from nothing. This accords with Paterson’s idealist view espoused in the poem we looked at earlier. If reality as it is meaningfully understood is mentally generated, then before the mind exists there can only be nothing. 

Quickly however, this nothingness takes on the substantial and active role of a God-like figure, propelling the mind into existence by “lending us out to time.” Despite ostensibly insisting on a nihilist metaphysics, Paterson cannot help but think in theological terms. In the next lines, Paterson references Nietzsche’s famous quote from Beyond Good and Evil: “If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” What Nietzsche is pointing out is that if one spends too much time dwelling on or experiencing nothingness and meaninglessness, one is liable to become spiritually empty oneself. The existential hollowness and callousness which many soldiers develop after witnessing wartime atrocities is a good example of this phenomenon. 

Paterson however chooses to interpret the quote literally for his own purposes, and, like Plotinus, seeks to turn a dualism into a monism. The void is not some separate entity, or non-entity, that contemplates us. Rather, we are ourselves the void contemplating itself. We are “its nerve and hand and eye,” the experience machine by which nothingness escapes itself. 

Here Paterson has performed a nice bit of legerdemain. At first, we may have suspected that this poem was going to be a sort of treatise on nihilism. Now, however, we see that Paterson had theological intentions all along. His understanding of “the void” is not as pure emptiness and meaninglessness, but as a transcendental cause beyond being which creates reality and experiences life out of its own potency. Thus, Paterson’s position is a far cry from the unmoored existentialism of Sartre or Nietzsche, and is in fact much closer to the via negativa, the negative theology, of the Neoplatonic Christian mystic Pseudo-Dionysius: God so far transcends anything we can understand, is so infinitely beyond all creation, that it is better to speak of God as non-being than as being. The only way we can come close to God is to describe what God is not, and to enter a state of nothingness beyond all conception, a “cloud of unknowing” as a later medieval writer would put it, which is the closest thing to having a mystical experience of God. We are here close to the Buddhist concept of Nirvana, though with ultimately opposite metaphysics. 

From here, the theological imagery only intensifies. There is “something vast, distant, and enthroned/ with which you are one and continuous.” Here, the narrator espouses a panentheist view: God or Nothing is infinitely transcendent, but it is also thoroughly immanent—everything that exists is an expression of it. Because the speaker calls this God Nothingness, we can think of him as attempting to reconcile the claims of Neoplatonic and Buddhist metaphysics— God is Nothing in the sense that God is beyond all somethings, and we are an extension and expression of that Nothing, but also, thinking like a Buddhist, ourselves and everything in the world is ultimately non-existent in the sense that no thing has any essential, substantial, independent, or permanent status—all things are codependently emergent. For more on this, see the doctrine of Sunyata as espoused by Nagarjuna, the great philosopher of emptiness. For Paterson, Sunyata is compatible with his nominalism, his belief that categories of objects, at least as we understand them, are not real distinctions, but convenient mental fictions: “His world is just the glare/of the world’s utility/returned by his eye-beam.” 

Paterson goes on, continuing to substantiate and personify Nothingness into a deity. It “stares through your mind like a black sun, constant, silent, radiant, with neither love nor hate nor apathy as we have no human name for its regard.” With the imagery of the black sun, we have a kind of goth version of Plotinus’s solar metaphor, but it is apt, seeing as we are talking about a deity of nothingness. One of the reasons I wanted to talk about this poem was because I was struck by how both Paterson and I have independently conceived of a total solar eclipse as an apt symbol for God: An impenetrable darkness which nevertheless appears to radiate being out from it. See my episode, “The Eclipse of Meaning.” 

There is an interesting tension here between personifying language like “stares,” and “regard,” and the insistence that this deity is beyond human language or characterization. It is a poignant tension, demonstrating the perennial problem of trying to talk about the divine—it is so far beyond us that language fails us, yet we cannot help but use language to explain our ideas and our emotional relationship to our ideas, and so shape God into our own image. Then again, on the narrator’s conception, we are ourselves a form of divine nothingness, and so perhaps our attempt to understand God in human terms is not entirely wrong, merely limited, as it necessarily must be.  

Let’s now go back and read the entire poem once again:

We come from nothing and return to it. 

It lends us out to time, and when we lie

in silent contemplation of the void

they say we feel it contemplating us. 

This is wrong, but who could bear the truth.

We are ourselves the void in contemplation. 

We are its only nerve and hand and eye. 

There is something vast and distant and enthroned

with which you are one and continuous,

staring through your mind, staring and staring

like a black sun, constant, silent, radiant

with neither love nor hate nor apathy

as we have no human name for its regard. 

Your thought is the bright shadows that it makes 

as it plays across the objects of the earth

or such icons of them as your mind has forged.

The book in sunlight or the tree in rain

bursts at its touch into a blaze of signs. 

But when the mind rests and the dark light stills,

the tree will rise untethered to its station

between earth and heaven, the open book

turn runic and unreadable again,

and if a word then rises to our lips 

we speak it on behalf of everything. 

In the line, “your thought is the bright shadows that it makes,” we have not only an evocative inversion appropriate to the image of a black sun, not only a continuation of ecliptic imagery, not only an allusion to Plato, but also a couple of nice puns. Thoughts are “bright” in the figurative sense, in the metaphorical solar sense, and also reference our principal mental perception of reality, via light. We are shadows of this inverse sun, meaning not only that we emanate from it but that we are both its diminished likeness and a sign of it. More than “I think, therefore I am,” “I think, therefore the Nothing is.” Is being an especially active verb here.

         As in last week’s poem, we have the image of genesis as recreation: “it plays across the objects of the earth/ or such icons of them as your mind has forged.” This second line I have just quoted is the explicit statement of nominalism we have been waiting for. We note that the word “icons” has not only a semiotic denotation, but also a religious connotation. With the word “forged” we have yet another pun—the mind has either made its own icons of the objects of the earth, or else it has forged them, copied them from a higher source. We have suggestions of both Okham’s nominalism in the first reading of “forged”  and Plato’s essentialism in the second reading of “forged” – technically these are mutually incompatible beliefs, but they are richly united in this poem, and the combination offers a unique perspective, an oscillating insight. Here we have an example of how poetry can make philosophical statements undreamt of in academic philosophy. 

         In the next lines: “The book in sunlight or the tree in rain/bursts at its touch into a blaze of signs,” the speaker points out we can only perceive reality semiotically. As soon as we register something, we are immediately naming it, categorizing it, and making meaning out of it. This is what the great enthroned Nothing has programmed us to do—we are its instruments of cognition, the bright shadows which illuminate. Unfortunately for us, this automatic semiotic way of being is a handicap when it comes to understanding God or Nothingness. 

The speaker, however, is optimistic that we can reach a state of mystical negation, either in life or in death, as phantoms, wherein we become not only capable of cleaving to the Grand Nothing, but speaking as oracles on its behalf, the mouthpiece of the void.  “When the mind rests and the dark light stills,” “if a word then rises to our lips/ we speak it on behalf of everything.”        In such a state, we will see a tree not as a tree, but as the cosmic world tree connecting all things, like the Norse Yggdrasil. This is an image which is further suggested by the adjective “runic.” In the most dramatic and metaphysically rich story in Norse Mythology, a profound variation on the crucifixion, Odin, the greatest of gods, hangs himself from the world tree, making a sacrifice of himself unto himself, in order that he may grasp the runes of language. Here too, nothingness has sacrificed itself—becoming something—in order to enjoy the semiotic richness of being minds in the world. Just as light and shadow have been inverted, this myth is an inversion of the Christ story— God’s sacrifice is not in leaving behind embodiment, but in taking on embodiment. 

         If we lose someone we love, and believe there is no afterlife, we may take some comfort in the idea that nothingness itself is in fact unity with God—not death at all, but the source of life. Once God’s telescope into the world of things, in death we reassume the state of God beyond all things, transcendent, eternal, capable of infinite possibilities. There, we may behold, in Wallace Stevens’s words: “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” 

With all that we’ve learned and explored, let’s read through this poem one last time, as an old friend:

Phantom V

We come from nothing and return to it. 

It lends us out to time, and when we lie

in silent contemplation of the void

they say we feel it contemplating us. 

This is wrong, but who could bear the truth.

We are ourselves the void in contemplation. 

We are its only nerve and hand and eye. 

There is something vast and distant and enthroned

with which you are one and continuous,

staring through your mind, staring and staring

like a black sun, constant, silent, radiant

with neither love nor hate nor apathy

as we have no human name for its regard. 

Your thought is the bright shadows that it makes 

as it plays across the objects of the earth

or such icons of them as your mind has forged.

The book in sunlight or the tree in rain

bursts at its touch into a blaze of signs. 

But when the mind rests and the dark light stills,

the tree will rise untethered to its station

between earth and heaven, the open book

turn runic and unreadable again,

and if a word then rises to our lips 

we speak it on behalf of everything.