The Vortex

I.

Canoes glided through the forest of dead trees. In the fourth month of the Aztec year, before the onset of the rainy season, they would go up to the Hill of Stars to find the tallest, straightest, most beautiful tree. They carefully tied its branches so that none would break, chopped down the tree without letting a leaf touch the ground, and carried it, singing and dancing, to the center of the city. There, in the courtyard of the Templo Mayor, it was stood erect, its branches unbound, before an image of Tlaloc, god of rain. Four smaller trees were placed at the four corners of the plaza, and ropes hanging with bright pennants were slung from each to the center tree, whose name was Our Father, or He Who Has a Heart. Around the trees they created an ephemeral garden of bushes, flowers, and rocks.

Into this garden the priests carried a shrouded litter containing a girl of seven or eight. She was dressed in blue, the color of the lake on which the city, Mexico-Tenochtitlan, had been built. She wore a headdress of red leather, with blue feathers sprouting from the top. Long songs were sung in her honor.

Then the tree Our Father was bound again, and carried to a canoe. The girl was carried to a canoe, and hundreds or thousands got in their plain or ornate canoes and set out on the lake, playing music, toward Pantitlan, a mysterious and dangerous whirlpool caused by an underground drain.

Near the whirlpool, they unbound the tree Our Father and thrust it standing into the lake, known as Our Mother. There it was left to stand until it rotted, and as the ceremony had been performed year after year, that part of the lake was a forest of dead trees. The priests took the girl from the litter, slit her throat with a small knife used for killing ducks, let her blood flow into the water, and then threw her into the whirlpool, with gifts of jewels, stones, necklaces, and bracelets. In silence, canoes glided through the dead trees home.

II.

“The image is not an idea.” In 1914, Ezra Pound names the tendency of certain avant-gardists in London: “It is a radiant node or cluster; it is what I can, and must perforce, call a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing. In decency one can only call it a VORTEX. And from this necessity came the name ‘vorticism.’”

Pound first used the word six years before, in a poem, “Plotinus”: “As one that would draw back through the node of things, / Back sweeping to the vortex of the cone, / Cloistered about with memories, alone / In chaos. . . // I was an atom on creation’s throne.”

Plotinus says (in the Thomas Taylor translation that Pound read) that the enlightened soul returns to its origin, which is a whirlpool. It is suspended in the center “from which the circle proceeds,” and is in bliss, for “life in the intelligible world consists in the energy of the intellect.”

Allen Upward, 1922: “The physical basis of a whirlpool is water, or water and rocks. But no combination of water and rocks will produce a whirlpool unless there is also present an energy derived from neither. . . . It is on the question of energy that everything turns. The difference between a whirlpool and a pool is the whirl.”

III.

Pound wrote a note on the manuscript of the poem “Plotinus” that “the ‘cone’ is I presume the ‘Vritta’ whirlpool, vortex-ring of the Yogi’s cosmogony.” The idea comes from “a certain Hindoo teacher whose name I have not found.” The Hindoo teacher was Yogi Ramacharaka, whose books the young Ezra gave to his girlfriend Hilda Doolittle, and whose Hatha Yoga he mentioned in an early poem, “Moeurs Contemporaines V.” Pound was still talking about those books fifty years later in the St. Elizabeths asylum; H.D. still remembered them fifty years later in her memoir End to Torment; a hundred years later they are still in print in the same blue bindings.

Yogi Ramacharaka, the author of Advanced Course in Yogi Philosophy and Oriental Occultism, 14 Lessons in Yogi Philosophy, and eleven other books, did not exist. He was the invention of William Walker Atkinson, a lawyer born in Baltimore in 1862, who lived mainly in Chicago, and died in California in 1932. He was active in the New Thought movement– a version of Eastern Spirituality designed for Christians– edited the magazines New Thought, Advanced Thought, and Suggestion; founded the Psychic Club and the Atkinson School of Mental Science, both of them down the hall from the Psychic Research Company; and wrote scores of books under his own name: among them, one called Practical Mental Influence: A Course of Lessons on Mental Vibrations, Psychic Influence, Personal Magnetism, Fascination, Psychic Self-Protection, etc., etc., Containing Practical Instruction, Exercises, Directions, etc., Capable of Being Understood, Mastered and Demonstrated by Any Person of Average Intelligence.

Others, but not Atkinson, later said that he wrote the Yogi Ramacharaka books with a guru named Baba Bharata, whom he had met in 1893 at the World’s Parliament of Religions during the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Baba Bharata was the disciple of the real Yogi Ramacharaka, who was born in India in 1799, traveled on foot to visit the libraries of lamaseries and fast in mountain fastnesses, and who, at age 66, found his philosophy. He took on an eight-year-old disciple, and together they retraced Ramacharaka’s journey. At 94, he sent his pupil out in the world to spread the teachings, and Baba Bharata arrived in Chicago, where his lectures at the Parliament met with great success, although there is no record of any Baba Bharata or any original Yogi Ramacharaka.

The second Yogi Ramacharaka, despite some occasional brief excursions to the lost continents of Lemuria and Atlantis, must have been compelling to read in the early 1900's. Here was an authentic Indian sage– Atkinson’s name does not appear in the books– presenting, in quite readable prose, a thoroughly modern and universal Hinduism, one without strange gods and practices, and moreover one whose beliefs were confirmed, not repudiated, by the latest scientific discoveries. Much of his book Lessons in Gnani Yoga is devoted to evolution, as well as astronomy, crystallography, microbiology, and other new developments in the sciences. Passages of his Raja Yoga (1906) now read as a previous incarnation of Pound’s ABC of Reading (1934), as when the Yogi claims that “the great obstacle to the proper use of the Will, in the case of the majority of people”– Pound would say obstacle to writing well, among the majority of poets– is “the lack of the ability to focus the attention.” To overcome this, he offers an exercise in concentration. Take an ordinary thing, such as a pencil. “Allowing the mind to pursue any associated by-paths. . . think of the thing in question from the following view-points: (1) The thing itself. (2) The place from whence it came. (3) Its purpose or use. (4) Its associations. (5) Its probable end.” Ramacharaka’s pencil multiplies into 10,000 things in the Cantos, but the method is the same. Both ABC and Raja Yoga tell the same anecdote of the naturalist Louis Agassiz instructing a student to look closely at a single fish for weeks until the fish rotted away.

IV.

“The gyres! the gyres!” Yeats exclaims. “Things thought too long can be no longer thought, / . . . ancient lineaments are blotted out. / . . . / Empedocles has thrown all things about.” Empedocles said that, in the beginning, all things were formed by the forces of love and strife, and they were mixed in a vortex, some with more love in them, some with more strife, in infinite combinations. Aristotle complained that if elements were united by love and separated by strife, how could they be separated into themselves in a vortex? Turning and turning in the gyre, how could things fall apart? Simplicius said that Aristotle didn’t understand Empedocles at all.

The pool is not the whirl. The vortex of Empedocles’ contemporary, Anaxagoras, is centripetal. In the beginning everything was one, and at rest for an infinite time, until Mind (Nous) put the great vortex in motion. Turning in the gyre, things became themselves, each containing something of every other thing. Then the Mind, like Descartes’ God, withdrew to let the world be. Socrates complained that this was too materialistic and mechanical. Simplicius said that Socrates didn’t understand Anaxagoras at all.

The Greek vortical theory of creation has its major poetic expression a few hundred years later in Lucretius. Chaos was eternally in a whirl of motion until the moment when (as Rolfe Humphries translates) “a strange kind of turbulence, a swarm / of first beginnings” combined and separated the elements into the stuff of the cosmos. Lucretius says that it all happened by pure chance.

According to Aëtius, when the universe was created by the vortex, and the heavier elements came together to form the earth, and the lighter rose to form the ether, “hook-shaped atoms” interlocked at the circumference to form a skin, like the caul of a foetus, around it all. The whole universe is still waiting to be born.

V.

Yogi Ramacharaka writes: “Mind-substance in Sanscrit is called ‘Chitta,’ and a wave in the Chitta (which wave is the combination of Mind and Energy) is called ‘Vritta,’ which is akin to what we call a ‘thought.’ In other words it is ‘mind in action,’ whereas Chitta is ‘mind in repose.’ Vritta, when literally translated means ‘a whirlpool or eddy in the mind,’ which is exactly what a thought is.”

The first and still most important articulation of the philosophy of yoga is Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra, probably composed in the 2nd Century. Its second line is four words: yogah citta vritti nirodhah. Yogah is yoga; nirodhah means to stop. Citta has been the subject of thousands of pages of explication over the centuries. It is essentially the mind in its total, non-specified, non-individualized sense: consciousness, perception, psyche, knowledge, awareness, intelligence, are absorbed by it, and do not define it. Vritti is a whirling– the whirl without the pool– and it is a metaphor for the functioning or processes of an individual mind. Patanjali says there are five vritti: valid cognition (through direct perception, inference, or the testimony of others, including reading); false knowledge or error or ignorance; abstraction or imagination; sleep (a vacant state of mind); and memory. Yogah citta vritti nirodhah. Yoga stops the vortices of the mind.

Coleridge’s lifelong metaphor for the mind was a spiral staircase he had seen in a baronial mansion as a child: “a magnificent staircase, relieved at well-proportioned intervals by spacious landing-places, this adorned with grand or showy plants, the next looking out on an extensive prospect through the stately window, with its sidepanes of rich blues and saturated amber or orange tints; while from the last and highest the eye commanded the whole spiral ascent with the marble pavement of the great hall, from which it seemed to spring up as if it merely used the ground on which it rested.” His metaphor for the imagination was a snake, as Hazlitt described it, though contemptuously, “with undulating folds, for ever varying and for ever flowing into itself, –circular, and without beginning or end.” Coleridge wrote: “The common end of all narrative, nay of all Poems, is to convert a series in to a Whole: to make those events, which in real or imagined History move on in a strait Line, assume to our Understandings a circular motion– the snake with it’s Tail in it’s Mouth.”

The story is told that Patanjali was an incarnation of the world serpent Shesha. He descended in the form of a small snake into the palm of the great grammarian Panini. Pata means “to descend”; anjali, “palm.” Patanjali was himself a vortex.

VI.

Melville’s Ishmael speaks of the “opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie,” as a lookout at the top of the mast: “There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God. By while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch, slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever.”

Hart Crane: “Bequeath us to no earthly shore until / Is answered in the vortex of our grave / The seal’s wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.”

The Cartesian universe is mainly matter, is endless, and the whole universe is literally in flux, in a kind of fluid. Within it are infinite worlds revolving around their suns, each world and sun spinning, and within them infinite vortices of matter, one within the other, to the infinitesimally small. Emerson wrote that Descartes “had filled Europe with the leading thought of vortical motion as the secret of nature.” Newton, in old age, complained bitterly that despite his proof that gravity moves the worlds , people still believed Descartes simply because Descartes had said it.

Or perhaps because the Cartesian vortices were more beautiful, were the stuff of dreams in ways that Newtonian gravity was not. Blake had written: “What was once imagined is now proved.” Equally, what was once proved could now be imagined. Against Descartes’ Cogito, Pound’s letterhead read: J’AYME DONC JE SUIS, I love therefore I am.

VII.

On five successive summer nights in the 17th century, Bernard le Bouvier de Fontenelle strolls through moonlit gardens with a beautiful Marchionesse, whom he does not name, discussing the stars. He records (or invents) their conversation in a book called A Discovery of New Worlds. On the fifth night, they turn to the vortices, for which the English translator, no less than Aphra Behn, uses Descartes’ word, tourbillons: “I see,” says the Marchioness, the universe to be so vast that I lose myself. I know not where I am. . . What is the universe thus divided into tourbillons, confusedly cast together? Is every fixed star the center of a tourbillon, and it may be full as big as our sun? Is it possible that all this immense space wherein our sun and planets have their revolution is nothing but an inconsiderable part of the universe? . . . This confounds, afflicts, and frightens me.”

“And for my part,” says le Bouvier de Fontenelle, “ it pleases and rejoices me. When I believed the universe to be nothing but this great azure vault of the heavens wherein the stars are placed, as it were so many golden nails or studs, the universe seemed to me too little and straight. I fancied myself to be confined and oppressed. But now when I am persuaded that that this azure vault has a greater depth and vaster extent, that ‘tis divided into a thousand and a thousand different tourbillons or whirlings, I imagine I am more at liberty, and breathe a freer air; and the universe appears to me to be infinitely more magnificent. . . . You can represent nothing so August to yourself as this prodigious number of tourbillons, whose center is possessed by a sun, and that makes the planets turn round him. The inhabitants of the planets of any of these infinite tourbillons see from all sides the enlightened center of the tourbillon with which they are environed, but cannot discover the planets of another. . .”

“You show me,” says the Marchioness, “so vast a prospect that my sight cannot reach the end of it. I see clearly the inhabitants of our world. And you have plainly presented to my reason the inhabitants of the moon, and other planets of our tourbillon or whirlings. After this you tell me of the inhabitants of the planets of all the other tourbillons. . . . What shall become of us in the middle of so many worlds? . . . I see the earth so dreadfully little that hereafter I shall scorn to be concerned for any part of it. And I admire why mankind are so very fond of power, so earnest after grandeur, laying design upon design, circumventing, betraying, flattering, and poorly lying, and are at all this mighty pains to grasp a part of the world they neither know nor understand, nor anything of these mighty tourbillons. For me, I’ll lazily contemn it, and . . . when anybody shall reproach me. . . I will with vanity reply, ‘Oh, you do not know what the fixed stars are.’”

“As for me, who know ‘em,” says le Bouvier de Fontenelle, “I am very sorry I can draw no advantage from that knowledge, which can cure nothing but ambition and disquiet– and none of these diseases trouble me. I confess a kind of weakness in love, a kind of frailty for what is delicate and handsome. This is my distemper, wherein the tourbillons are not concerned at all. The infinite multitude of other worlds may render this little in your esteem, but they do not spoil fine eyes, a pretty mouth, or make the charms of wit ever the less. These will still have their true value, still are a price in spite of all the worlds in the universe.”

VIII.

In two weeks in 1901, Allen Upward– erudite occultist, pulp novelist, gossip columnist, colonial judge in Nigeria, diplomat, spy, and ultimate suicide, who had first urged Pound to read Chinese poetry and whom Pound declared an Imagist though Upward complained he had no idea what that meant– wrote a 300-page “Open Letter addressed to the Swedish Academy in Stockholm on the meaning of the word IDEALIST.” It is unlikely they ever replied. Five years later, the letter was published as a book, The New Word. Its structure, according to the author, is that of a whirlpool churning, though often contentiously and tediously, through much of human knowledge. (Among many other things, it proposes, long before Leakey, the African origin of humankind.) Halfway through the book, he has a vision: “The ideas of those great learners who had explored Everything before me on my behalf, those vortices of Descartes, those whirlrings in the ether, all seemed to come together...”

What Upward sees is a waterspout. It is, he says, “a brief-lived tree. A cloud is whirling downwards, and thrusting out its whirlpoint towards the sea, like a sucking mouth. The sea below whirls upward, thrusting out its whirlpoint towards the cloud. The two ends meet, and the water swept up in the sea-whirl passes on into the cloud-whirl, and swirls up through it. . . not only does the water swirl upward through the cloud-whirl, but the cloud swirls downward through the sea-whirl. . . pure strength whirling in on all sides and swirling out again.” It is “the first beat, the one from which all others part, the beat which we feel in all things that come within our measure, in ourselves, and in our starry world.”

The first description of a waterspout in English appears in 1697, in William Dampier’s A New Voyage Around the World. Dampier, a poor farmer with insatiable curiosity, decided early on that the way to see the world was to become a pirate. He circumnavigated the globe three times, hoarding his journals instead of booty. He was the first Englishman to land on Australia and report on its aborigines; he rescued Alexander Selkirk, who became Robinson Crusoe, and separately, the unnamed Miskito Indian who became Friday. Darwin consulted his books; Coleridge admired his prose; he introduced the words “barbecue,” “chopsticks,” “posse,” and “rambling” as an adjective into the language. He was the first in English to describe an avocado.

On the 30th of November, 1687, in the Celebes Sea, he writes: “A Spout is a small ragged piece of Cloud hanging down seemingly about a Yard from the blackest part of it. Commonly it hangs down sloping, or sometimes appears with a small bending or elbow in the middle. I never saw any hang perpendicularly down. It is small at the lower end, seemingly no bigger than one’s Arm, but still fuller towards the Cloud from where it proceeds. When the Surface of the Sea begins to work, you shall see the Water for about 100 Paces in Circumference foam and move gently around till the whirling Motion increases. And then it flies upwards in a Pillar about 100 Paces in Compass at the bottom, but lessening gradually upwards to the smallness of the spout itself, until it reaches the lower end of the Spout, through which the rising Seawater seems to be conveyed into the Clouds. This visibly appears by the Cloud’s increasing in bulk and blackness. Then you shall presently see the Cloud drive along, although before, it seemed to be without any Motion. The Spout keeps the same Course as the Cloud, and still sucking up Water as it goes along, they make a Wind as they go. Thus it continues for the space of half an Hour, more or less, until the sucking is spent. Then, breaking off, all the Water which was below the Spout, or pendulous piece of Cloud, falls down again into the Sea, making a great noise with its fall, and a clashing Motion in the Sea.”

IX.

In “Midnight, Forecastle,” the strangest, nearly incomprehensible chapter of Moby-Dick– a cacophony of voices that points the way towards Dos Passos and the Cantos– a Nantucket sailor says: “I heard old Ahab tell him he must always kill a squall, something as they burst a waterspout with a pistol– fire your ship right into it!” Dampier mentions this common belief, but dismisses it: “I never heard that it proved to be of any Benefit.” You can’t shoot a vortex.

Upward’s waterspout, a double vortex of perpetual motion where upward becomes downward and downward upward, is the same double cone that Yeats received from his “instructors” as the image that explains everything, if only we could understand. Yet his (or their) pages of diagrams of the gyres, as presented in A Vision, with their labels of “Subjectivity,” “Objectivity,” “Will,” Creative Mind,” “Mask” and “Body of Fate” represent a kind of aphasic science of answers and no questions, or a kind of poetry that is only prosody.

While Yeats was writing A Vision in the early 1920's, Upward returned to the vortex for an essay called “The Nebular Origin of Life”: “The outstanding characteristic of the cell is its cellular energy.” This energy is derived from both the “chemical energy of its material constituents” and something else: an “organic energy” or a “living matter” that is the “whirl” of Upward’s whirlpool. These whirls were created at the creation of the universe as things he calls “vorticells,” fluid and ever-changing vortices of energy that evolved into life.

What was once imagined is now proved. Yeats’ double gyres and Upward’s vorticells turn into Crick and Watson’s double helix of DNA three decades later. The primary basis for life is indeed a waterspout, the entwined snakes of kundalini energy, or the ones around the Caduceus, emblem of medicine. Pound, in his 1914 essay “Vorticism” had written: “One does not want to be called a symbolist, because symbolism has usually been associated with mushy technique.” Yet to hold “a belief in a sort of permanent metaphor is, as I understand it, ‘symbolism’ in its profounder sense.”

X.

For contemporary observers the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions was the event of the decade, or the century, or even, for the Indologist Max Müller, “one of the most memorable events in the history of the world,” although he did not attend. It was the world’s greatest gathering of the world’s religions– the only thing similar was convened by the Mughal emperor Akbar in the 16th century– and the first widespread accounts in the West of Asian religions from the Asians themselves. (The Transcendentalists depended on German Romanticism for their knowledge of India; later reports had mainly come from converted hybrid American Theosophists.) Even more, the Asians tended to represent reformist, “modern” versions of their faiths. Swami Vivekananda described the goal of Hinduism as the uniting of a human soul with the universal consciousness of a universal god: “Man is to become divine, realizing the divine, and, therefore, idol or temple or church or books are only the supports, the helps of his spiritual childhood, but on and on he must progress.” The dream of the Parliament was that the world was on the verge, in the coming century, of a single world religion to unite East and West, science and tradition. The Sinhalese Buddhist Anagarika Dharmapala explained Buddhism as a “transcendental metaphysic embracing a sublime psychology,” and nirvana as “eternal peace in the vortex of evolution.”

The star was the Bengali Vivekananda, with good looks, eloquence in an English accent, and traffic-stopping orange robes and orange turban. On long speaking tours, and with the foundation of his Vedanta Society, he became the first Indian popstar guru. But his message was not only a new, universal Hinduism that essentially eliminated the Hindu gods, but was also anti-British (as an Indian nationalist), anti-missionary, and sarcastic about Christianity: “If the Hindu fanatic burns himself on the pyre, he never lights the fire of Inquisition.”

More gurus followed Vivekananda, and the missionaries and other Protestant groups fought back, feeding into the general anti-immigrant and specifically anti-Asian climate. In 1914, a popular book was Elizabeth A. Reed’s innocuously titled Hinduism in Europe and America. Reed– in a pattern now repeated by Western Islamicists– had gone from reputable scholar to crusader: “Swamis are constantly advocating Krishnaism on both European and American soil. They know their own official works are the exponents of the character of the boy thief, the dishonorable warrior, the licentious lover, and all of the unspeakable obscenity connected with even his public worship.” With stories of wives and mothers enthralled by their gurus into suicide, madness, depravity, and abandonment of their families, she warned: “Let the white woman beware of the hypnotic influence of the East.” [One year later, as counter evidence in the prevailing climate, Pound included the Anglo-Saxon poem “The Seafarer” in his volume of Chinese translations, Cathay, to contrast the barbaric Britons with the exactly contemporary refinements of T’ang Dynasty China.]

Reed’s book was a solo in the choir that led to the Immigration Act of 1917, which created the Asiatic Barred Zone, forbidding immigration to the U.S. by all Asians except Christian Fillipinos. It remained in place until 1965, and along with Asians it banned "all idiots, imbeciles, feeble-minded persons, epileptics, insane persons; persons who have had one or more attacks of insanity at any time previously; persons of constitutional psychopathic inferiority; persons with chronic alcoholism; paupers; professional beggars; vagrants; persons afflicted with tuberculosis in any form or with a loathsome or dangerous contagious disease; persons who have been convicted of or admit having committed a felony or other crime or misdemeanor involving moral turpitude; polygamists, or persons who practice polygamy or believe in or advocate the practice of polygamy; anarchists" and many more. “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” Or more exactly, the best lack passionate intensity, while the worst are full of conviction.

XI.

The Huai Nan Tzu, a Taoist book from the 2nd Century BCE, says that “before the heavens and the earth took shape, there was an abyss without form and void, the Supreme Light. The Tao began with Emptiness and this Emptiness produced the universe. The universe produced ch’i [the vital breath] and it was like a whirlpool swirling between two banks.” As the pre-Socratics simultaneously– the Huai Nan Tzu comes from older sources– maintained, the lighter elements rose to become the heavens, and the heavy elements condensed to become the earth. In China, however, heaven and earth combined to become the Yin and Yang, themselves, as in the familiar symbol, a wheel or spiral turning.

In China, however, the beginning was not the beginning. The Huai Nan Tzu repeats Chuang Tzu, who repeats Lao Tzu, who is repeating. . . no one knows . . . that there was a beginning, and there was a time before the beginning, and there was a time before the time before the beginning. Before there was Being there was Non-Being, and there was a time before Non-Being began, and there was a time before the time before Non-Being began.

Wyndham Lewis: “At the heart of the whirlpool is a great silent place where all the energy is concentrated.” The Mevlevi Sufis, the so-called Whirling Dervishes, recreate the creation of the universe as spinning planets revolving around the sun; their raised right hands receive the spirit from God and their lowered left hands turn it into matter. Each believes that the axis on which he spins is his own inner Ka’aba, the Black Stone of Mecca, which itself must be circumambulated. Wyndham Lewis illustrated the vortex in the Vorticist magazine Blast with a teetotum, a cone with a vertical axis. Pound translated the title of the Confucian book, the Chung Yung (normally known as the Doctrine or the Practice of the Mean) as The Unwobbling Pivot. Every vortex has an axis, a tree, or even, in the Vedic creation myth, a mountain by which the Milky Ocean was churned and turned into the universe.

Yogi Ramacharaka, in his small book of excerpts, The Spirit of the Upanishads, quotes the Atmapurana (not a Upanishad, but no matter): “The swimmer, having safely carried many to the other side of the stream, is drawn into the whirlpool, and is carried beyond help. Those, on the other side, who feel grateful for his help, pity him; others pass on in indifference. The Wise man caught into the whirlpool of words and technicalities, has the pity of those who having reached the other side of all words and all forms feel yet grateful for his help.”

XII.

The whirlwind, the whirlwind out of which Yahweh speaks to Job, that carries Elijah to heaven, and from which Ezekial’s vision wheels and monstrous cherubim appear, is in itself invisible, made visible by what it whirls; it is pure power. Among the Plains Indians, it was believed that a buffalo, before fighting, paws the earth, kicking up dust, as a prayer to the whirlwind for strength. The whirlwind is a cocoon, the cocoon is a whirlwind: actual cocoons were worn on headdresses, and ornamental cocoons made of buckskin and beads. In Arapaho, the word for whirlwind and caterpillar is the same. The whirlwind is a cocoon; a cocoon is transformation; whirlwinds are the souls of the newly-dead ascending; shamans ride on whirlwinds; the way out of the world, or into another world, is through the vortex.

Blake: “The nature of infinity is this : That every thing has its / Own Vortex; and when once a traveller thro’ Eternity / Has passed that Vortex, he perceives it roll backward behind / His path, into a globe itself infolding like a sun, / Or like a moon, or like a universe of starry majesty. . .”

Blake drew Jacob’s ladder as a spiral staircase going through the moon leading to heaven. Dante’s Hell was a vortex, and its opposite, the spiral path along Mount Purgatory leading to heaven. Bunyan’s pilgrim progresses on a spiral path to the Celestial City, and the Indian hero, Shaktideva, in the Ocean of Story, sailing toward the City of Gold, is the only survivor of his ship, as he grabs a branch of a banyan tree growing mysteriously out of a vortex in the middle of the sea.

The folds in the cerebral cortex are called gyri. Pound ends one of his last Cantos (CXIII) with the line: “but the mind as Ixion, unstill, ever turning.” It is an image not of restless curiosity, but of the ruins of one’s life. Ixion was considered the first Greek to murder one of his own kinsmen, setting a trap of a pit of burning coals when his father-in-law came to collect the bride-price. Zeus allowed him to come to Olympus to purify himself of this crime, but there he attempted to seduce Hera, Zeus’ wife. Pindar says: “his arrogance drove him to extreme delusion.” Zeus bound him to a wheel of fire, forever turning in the Underworld.

XIII.

Somewhere far to the east of the Japan Sea and north of the equatorial fishing grounds– it’s hard to know exactly where, for Ahab had smashed the quadrant and a lightning storm had reversed the compasses– the Pequod meets its fate: “And now, concentric circles seized the lone boat itself, and all its crew, and each floating oar, and every lance-pole, and spinning, animate and inanimate, all round and round in one vortex, carried the smallest chip of the Pequod out of sight.” Last to go down, is of course the heavenly tree of the mainmast, “a few inches of the erect spar yet visible,” and with it the American Indian Tashtego and with him, symbolically if unbelievably, a sea-hawk he has inadvertently nailed to the wood.

It is likely the Pequod went down in, or on the fringes of, the North Pacific Gyre, a vast stretch of ocean created by the California Current running south, the North Equatorial Current running west and then north, and the Kuroshio Current running north and then east. The Gyre is one of the dead places on the planet, on the same latitude with the Sahara and Gobi deserts, and the equally lifeless Sargasso Sea. Commercial fishermen don’t bother to go; merchant ships rarely cross it, for it is on the route to nowhere. The Gyre is filled with garbage that has drifted from Japan and the west coast of the U.S.. A scientific expedition trawled for a few days and pulled in a ton of debris: plastic hangars, drums of chemical waste, tires, television sets, basketballs. There are bright-colored plastic pellets in the transparent jellyfish that proliferate there; six pounds of plastic for every pound of plankton. On the uninhabited nesting islands, the stomachs of decomposing albatrosses are a mass of bottle caps and bits of bleach bottles, action figures, plastic twine, styrofoam peanuts, shrink wrap, and the splinters of compact disk cases.

Edgar Allan Poe begins his “Book of Truths,” Eureka: A Prose Poem, with the image of a man standing at the summit of Mt. Etna whirling around as quickly as he can to see at once, and as one, the sublimity of the panorama. Poe proposes his book to do the same, in a dizzying succession, for the “material and spiritual universe.” By the end, he has invented, in 1848, the idea of the black hole. Due to the “vorticial movements” of “individual portions of the Universe,” it is, as he says in italics, “excessively obvious” that everything in the universe will ultimately collapse into one entity, which he imagines as a sphere. All the stars and planets will be one, all people will be one, and everything will be one with the “Spirit Divine.” The vortex is the end of time. T.S. Eliot, “East Coker”: “Whirled in a vortex that shall bring / The world to that destructive fire / Which burns before the ice-cap reigns.”

The vortex is the beginning of time. In one version of the Aztec creation myth, Quetzalcoatl, as God of Wind, blows a conch shell horn over a pile of bones to create mankind. A conch is a vortex you hold in your hand. In Nahuatl, the same word means “to whirl” and “to give life to.” They believed there were certain poems that were born on a tree of flowers in paradise, that came whirling to earth.