Depth Theology, poems by Peter O’Leary.
University of Georgia Press (ISBN# 0-8203280-6-5); 72pages. $16.95.
In the exhaustive Notes and Acknowledgements of this volume, Peter O’Leary instructs that his crib from Jung’s colleague Eugen Bleuler’s term "depth psychology" is venting its purposes towards an altogether different league of meanings: "I take depth theology, then, to be a religious knowledge of the unconscious." This definition, as opposed to what credibly could be construed as an unconscious knowledge of the religious, concerns projecting a semi-articulate, suggestive tapestry of discourses and particles of indeterminate symbols which merge theological concerns with ontological ciphers. In the course of these luminous poems, O’Leary delves into the exegetical and the irresolvable, the gnostic and the poetic, dream, myth, and the psychological transports through which run perceptions riddled by an accessing, yet ill-defined spiritual force, which itself is the supreme riddle. It is this force — immanent and external, anterior and after all — that visits those areas of experience which are taken as empirically constituted and transfigures the supposed phenomenon of the life of the mind.
If we are to look at O’Leary’s definition as a full-bodied thesis, its supposition would seem to repudiate or invert William James’s argument in The Varieties of Religious Experience that religious belief or sensibility is predicated on the incursions of subliminal regions of the mind into primary consciousness and, therefore, religious experience can be naturally explained. That is, there is no spiritual essence but there is a biological need to imagine so. However, O’Leary is a surveyor of the spiritual identity, not a theologian, imagining operating systems for interpreting the guises of religious and social aspects, advancing queries and conjectures rather than promoting determinations.
The poems in Depth Theology are not so much articles of faith as they are questing icons, monuments to their lines of questioning. In fact, I count over fifty questions across this volume, highlighting an open-endedness reminiscent of Yeats in his middle and late periods, where the subject matter demands scrutiny but also the poet’s abjuration of anything but partial knowledge of his subject. Such uncertainty is often heroic and restrains the poetry from shallow philosophizing or decision-making. "The angel said," runs a line in "Plasmic Like a Gel of Oxygen, "Why asketh thou thus after my name, knowing it is secret?”
There is the sense that O’Leary is addressing the mystery of religion and the unconsciousness with containers of questions, each an aggregate of surfaces, materials, and histories to contemplate evermore the meanings to be extracted. Mystery deliberated, mystery examined but never excavated. Sir Thomas Browne in his urn burial would approve. We can see then how his effort to afford a religious knowledge of the unconscious is a probing, making the conditions to comprehend meanings rather than categorically espousing hard truths about theology, life, or poetry, for that matter. The final lines of "The Revival of the Religious Sciences" brilliantly capture this task:
We’ve spent millennia chasing the outward world, hapless
experts at exploring it. We need now to look inside. In exchange
for any lost progress, I will give you one hundred years of inwardness, a century
of the soul’s spiral movement, labor,
prayer, reading, inner energies coalescing from lower domains,
a private flaming ministry, the most Miltonic knowing.
That knowing is of course the will to know, the conviction to undertake the mysteries.
I once assumed O’Leary to be a religious poet but that designation seems less appropriate now, particularly in light of this volume. Reverence, revelation, fervid or implicit faith are absent, or nearly so, and the gesture again and again is towards sculpting spaces for imagining how the substantial world and its spiritual designs function together. Affinities with the Metaphysical poets are everywhere apparent, especially in how O’Leary transmutes the concrete and the immaterial into one another, physics becoming a spiritual matter and spirit becoming a scientific element. "Gravity as the Combine of Light through Time" begins, "God exists in centrifuge, wholly ionized air smelling of rosin. Thunderheaded." while"The Staff of Life" from the cycle Three Sceptres , ends: "America/requires literature of combustion as/barbaric as it is scientific. Gnosis is a moving/fluid converted to power."
The scientific and metaphysical mutations of the poems and the hybrid energies they impart help render a recognition of the interplay of the incarnate and the invisible, the sacred and secular frequencies to which we are attuned or which are sunken below our senses. Some of the titles too, pseudo-scientific framings of their religious and unconscious aspects, serve as micro-taxonomies of meaning, emblems of poems meaning to mean, indeterminateness seeking space and the consolation of determinateness.
When, in "Narrative of an Inefficient Combustion," the narrator broaches, "Is trickery insight? Is prayer an inward slogan?", the ruminant is recording mystery without trying to solve the question of faith except through encompassing it. All of these poems record mystery with dutiful rigor and radiate absorbing insights about the process of thinking through behaviors of mind and spirit. Combining spiritual biographies, various world histories, naturalist minutiae, linguistic inventories, questions upon questions, holy quotations, these poems are often narrative in form if not nature. Most achieve their formidable effect through bricolage techniques, stop-start interrogations, broken lines, and bracing juxtapositions, beliefs and beings evolving each other, both overlapping and overtaking the other’s domain of importance and spaces in the poems. The lines are sinuous, rarely personal, and pursue a vatic tone at times, although this poet-vates always walks under a bright cloud of unknowing.
The sheer density of the materials and the vision that underlines them makes for difficult poetry but all the better: there is great beauty in the kind of difficulty which is experienced here. Abstruseness lends itself to clarity as the images and statements distil and cohere themselves in their transactions with the reader who comes to the work ready to participate in the mystery and hermeneutical enterprise O’Leary evokes. The notes are a bit much, proceeding as they do with long explanations of references and lines. Such expansive commentary is frequently unnecessary, seeing as the subjects and rhetoric of the lines grow their own independent life within the poems themselves.
Beyond this small criticism (especially since this is no critique of the poetry), I admire Depth Theology for its complexity, its profound delvings into arrangements of religious life and spiritual flights, its reaching after meaning without upsetting the mystery. After all, as "Thyrsis" shows, meaning cannot be absolute: "Hail, meaning:/converse with thyself. A god’s privacy is massive." So too this volume, a massive contribution to contemporary American poetry. Hail, O’Leary!