[In the following essay, Johnson applies Bachelard's theories of “felicitous” space to the Appalachian experience, focusing on the work of Jim Wayne Miller's The Mountains Have Come Closer.]

The exploration of “felicitous space” undertaken by Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space becomes especially poignant when applied to the Appalachian experience. In Appalachia the oneiric house is frequently a rotting cabin in a remote “holler” that loggers or coal miners have abandoned. More often than not only a foundation or decaying chimney remains to mark a homeplace, or, lacking these easily recognizable artifacts, only a bed of daffodils or a hardy apple tree that the careful observer can identify as evidence of earlier habitation. “Abandonment” is a luxury peculiar to rural America, owing quite simply to our culture's emphasis on mobility and to the vast amount of land available for habitation. A deserted cabin in the mountains of Tennessee is different in its essence, however, from the abandoned farm on the Great Plains or the hunter's shack up the canyon from the ghost town in Colorado. Because little productive, arable land as accessible as most old prairie homesteads tended to be lies fallow for extended periods, the farm on the plains is probably still being worked, even though the farmhouse might stand empty. And the hunter's shack was built to shelter a transient. Even the inhabitants of what is now the ghost town were transients, rootless seekers of fortune, their facades of permanance notwithstanding.

For the people of the eastern mountains, a region continuously inhabited by descendants of the original white settlers for over two centuries, the mountain cabin is the homeplace, and because of the circumstances described above, the effect of its abandonment is especially profound, having both personal and societal implications. Unlike the European, whose oneiric house might have been moved away from, might even have been demolished, the Appalachian can take no comfort in cultural evolution. The European's house might have been built on the ruins of four or five earlier cultures, a fact which argues not for impermanence but for continuity. Thus, when the European recreates the oneiric house in his revery, his nostalgia—though poignant—is tempered by knowledge that the distance between past and present is almost wholly chronological.

When the Appalachian remembers the oneiric house, on the other hand, such revery often carries with it a sense of deep loss and dislocation. It frequently engenders grief for the loss of “primal sympathy,” but it also provokes a gnawing awareness of the renunciation of a way of life.

The Appalachians' obligation to re-claim their heritage through the recreation of the oneiric cabin is one of the basic themes of Jim Wayne Miller's The Mountains Have Come Closer. The volume might be read, in fact, as a Bachelardian manifesto (in the most positive sense of the term) applied to the Appalachian setting. In three of its key poems, “Abandoned,” “Born Again,” and the ultimate piece, the lengthy “Brier Sermon—‘You Must Be Born Again,’” Miller insists that we “inhabit oneirically the house we were born in,” that we can resurrect ourselves through the imaginative recreation of that house and the dreams we experienced in it.

A sense of loss pervades The Mountains Have Come Closer, a feeling of homesickness in the fullest meaning of the term. This feeling extends beyond the loss of childhood things and places to include the emotions one had in and about those places. In “Down Home” (28), for example, Miller's speaker describes how he

          kept meeting feelings like
old schoolmates, faces whose names he'd
forgot. He came on feelings he could
enter again only as a stranger might
a house he'd once lived in; feelings like
places changed almost beyond recognition: a
once green pasture field grown up in
pines too thick ever to enter again.

After noting that he could reclaim only some of those feelings, he laments his inability to grasp others. He concludes by admitting that

          he
didn't live here any longer. He was
settled in a suburb, north of himself.

The equation of home and self is made explicit here. Physical distance and psychic distances are the same. Homesickness is longing generated by the absence of familiar, comfortable surroundings, but it is also nostalgia for the emotions we experienced in those environs and anxiety over the loss of those emotions. “Not only our memories, but the things we have forgotten are ‘housed,’” says Bachelard (xxxiii). “Our soul is an abode. And by remembering ‘houses’ and ‘rooms’ we learn to ‘abide’ within ourselves. Now everything becomes clear, the house images move in both directions: they are in us as much as we are in them. …”

“Turn Your Radio On” (21-22) reiterates the sense of disaffection and homesickness found in “Down Home” and defines as clearly as any piece in the volume the “right relation” between the land and those who live on it. In an urban setting, Miller's alter ego finds it difficult to “hear his own thoughts.” They come only intermittently, through static as if broadcast from a distant radio station. Struggling to maintain his equilibrium, he pores over photographs from an old shoebox, focusing on an image of his grandparents “sitting in split-bottom chairs” on the front porch of their mountain farm:

Weathered and home-made like the chairs they sat in, and like the house
and barn, so comfortably in place, they looked like one another.
Something about the way they sat spoke to him through his own           thoughts
all the way from the mountains, like a powerful transmitter: this place
belongs to us, their faces said, we belong to it.

Having established the possibility for renewal in this unifying vision of his grandparents and their “place,” Miller's speaker explores in poem after poem his efforts to maintain contact with this physical and spiritual home. Most of these poems measure the distance he has come from the homeplace and record the losses he has incurred as a result of his journey; however, most hold out the possibility for bridging that distance, recouping the losses.

“Born Again” (37) is his most explicit statement of the method one uses to restore and maintain connections. The poem is almost a Bachlardian formula, its first three stanzas taking in turn the senses of hearing, touch, and sight.

Each sense translates perceptions, or imagined perceptions, into links with a mountain past. Sometimes “his whorled ear became a sea-shell / and he heard only correspondence: wind streaming / through the tops of trees was a far off waterfall,” for example. A hunter's horn became the “baying of coonhounds,” and all these imagined sounds take on a peculiar concreteness, “standing as solid as a barn on a ridge / in the clear air of afterstorm.” At times, when his past is particularly elusive, he must content himself with objects (these too imagined) symbolic of that past: “a rusty hinge,” “a plow point,” “a bent nail.” In even more difficult times, “his memory clouded” and he would have to wait until his “weather cleared” enabling him to “see some long lost day / as plainly as if it were a shiny quarter / … on the bottom of a pool,” or a “tin-topped barn / in Sunday morning sunlight.”

The poem concludes with an affirmation of the memory's need “to be born again / and again / and again,” the repetition affirming Bachelard's notion that “in reverberation, we find the real measure of the being of a poetic image, in this reverberation the poetic image will have a sonority of being” (Bachelard xii). While repetition alone can never ensure such “sonority,” it serves in this case as an echoing reminder of the images already established, and of their effect on the poet.

Occasionally the speaker's perceptions of his loss overwhelm the imagination's ability to find solace in memory's recreations. “Abandoned” (46) records such an occasion, when

          his mind flew black as a crow
over hundreds of coves and hollers
fallen silent since the people were swept
out like rafted logs on spring's high water.

In those moments his life “would stand / empty as an abandoned house / in one of those forgotten places” (italics mine). Here the symbol of cultural dislocation and dissolution collapses into the vehicle of the simile. The house is not a structure from memory inhabited by spirits from the past. Instead, it becomes a metaphor for the life that seeks to incorporate those memories but at this moment cannot. Bachelard writes that poetic images “[give] us back areas of being, houses in which the human being's certainty of being is concentrated, and, we have the impression that, by living in such images as these, in images that are as stabilizing as these are, we could start a new life, a life that would be our own, that would belong to us in our very depths” (33). In this poem, however, the house image underscores the futility of some efforts to found one's present and future on a remembered past.

During these periods of frustration, Miller's speaker

… thought there was nothing left
but the life of a half-wild dog
and the shelter of a junked car
turned on its back in a ditch, half
grown over with honeysuckle.

The combined effect of these two images of the feral dog and the abandoned car is especially powerful. One image represents the domestication settlers brought to the mountains, the other the technology which carried those settlers away. Both are, in this instance, being overtaken by wildness, a fact which argues against Miller's attempts to reassert the past being seen as simple primitivism or easy romanticism. The ideal he posits is one of nature partially tamed by hard work and treated with more respect than reverence. It is an ideal as old as Vergil's Georgics, in which man's works are also constantly endangered by the relentless onslaught of the forces of nature.

“Abandoned” concludes with Miller's reiteration of the abandoned house image he introduced in the poem's second section. Here the speaker's life, during moments when his attempts to reintegrate himself with his past are frustrated, is equated with

          the house
seen once in a coalcamp in Tennessee:
the second story blown off in a storm
so stairs led up into the air
and stopped.

Bachelard writes that “the space we love is unwilling to remain permanently enclosed. It deploys and appears to move elsewhere without difficulty; into other times, and on different planes of memory” (53). This observation is supported by a quotation from Jean Laroche's “Memoires d'été” which describes a house that is “‘Every morning recaptured in dream / Every evening abandoned / A house covered with dawn / Open to the winds of my youth’” (Bachelard 54). Both the observation and its illustration expand upon an earlier assertion that “the well-rooted house likes to have a branch that is sensitive to the wind, or an attic that can hear the rustle of leaves” (Bachelard 52). But the house with which “Abandoned” concludes is not conversant with the winds which sweep over it. It has been ravaged by those winds, its psychic energy drawn off and dissipated, and left a truncated shell, an apt metaphor for the life of a poet cut off from his past, uncertain of his future.

The momentary disillusionment (the term should be taken in its most literal sense) of “Abandoned” lends credibility to Miller's case, arguing for a struggle toward reconciliation, not an easy, romantic return to nature.

“Brier Sermon—‘You Must Be Born Again’” (52-64) emphatically declares, however, that the return can and should be made. Twelve pages long, the “Sermon” is by far the collection's most ambitious piece, and, standing at the end of the volume, it carries the most weight rhetorically. The poem is also the first piece directly attributed to “the Brier” that I have dealt with in this essay. “The Brier” is Miller's alter ego, the enlightened Appalachian who laments what is happening to the world that nurtured him. Although he is not clearly identified, he seems to be speaking in most of the other poems in the volume as well.

The Brier takes as his text “You must be born again,” although he very quickly establishes another text which provides the image patterns to support the first. This is Christ's assertion that “In my father's house are many mansions,” although Brier quotes only the introductory adverbial phrase, suggesting the complete idea but giving solid emphasis to house which becomes synonymous with heritage. But while he is constantly expanding the cultural implications of his father's house and how his listeners must come home again, the reader never loses sight of the house as memory, a literal base from which all these extended meanings derive. In exhorting his “congregation” to “go home,” Brier testifies to his own straying as an example of how the lost can find their way. He says:

I left my father's house. Oh I was moving.
But I noticed I wasn't getting anywhere. I was living in somebody else's
house.
I kept stepping out somebody else's door
and the roads I travelled kept winding, twisting, had no beginning, had
          no end.
My own house, heired to me by my foreparents,
was right there all the time
yours is too
but I wasn't living in it. Well, I went home.
And when I stepped out of my own front door
when I knew where I was starting from
I knew where I was going.
The only road I could go was the road
that started from my own front door.
—In my father's house, that's what the Bible says.

Bachelard explains the kind of dislocation Brier describes here by saying that “we reach a point where we begin to doubt that we ever lived where we lived. Our past is situated elsewhere, and both time and place are impregnated with a sense of unreality. It is as though we sojourned in a limbo of being” (59). Ironically, it is dreaming, firmly grounded in memory, that reestablishes reality.

It is difficult to quote individual passages from this poem without creating the impression of more or less straightforward polemic on Miller's part. Nothing could be further from the truth, however. “Brier Sermon” incorporates the major elements of a mountain camp meeting, but tempers them with humor, irony and secular wisdom. The poem as a whole amply illustrates the Brier's point that accepting one's past does not imply limiting one's future. Accepting foreparents does not mean one has to “think ridge-to-ridge, / the way they did. / You can think ocean to ocean.”

Miller's strategy throughout the poem represents sophisticated “ocean-to-ocean” thinking. The Brier, like many lay people in rural America, is moved to preach, but he goes to a street corner in town on a Saturday morning, not to the church on Sunday. Across the street from the Greenstamp Redemption Store, he exhorts passersby to return to their father's house. The genius here lies in the poet's secularization of the ritual, his divesting both the father's house and the notion of rebirth of exclusively religious connotations and remythologizing them in terms of personal and cultural resurrection. By insisting on a return to the father's house, Brier invites his listener to retrieve “the best part of yourself,” the spirit. Being born again is

          like becoming a little child again
but being grown up too.
It's the best of both.
It's being at home everywhere.
It's living in your own house.

The allusion in “becoming a little child again” illustrates how deftly Miller has turned the tables here. Just as conventional ministers take advantage of their congregations' shared experiences to reinforce the Christian message through parables and personal anecdotes, Miller's Brier depends upon his auditors' thorough knowledge of the Bible to intensify his secular sermon. The result is not so much a secularization as it is a redirection of spirit. His listeners can transform the Christian concept of “my father's house” to the memory of a real place. They can then incorporate the idea of home as found in such hymns as “Softly and Tenderly, Jesus is Calling,” which invites the sinner to “Come home, come home,” into an expanded context of memory as refuge. The process involves the transference of the two poles of the metaphor. In Miller's vision the house is an imagined, respiritualized hermitage very like the home offered in the traditional hymn or homily.

The Brier ends his discourse by blessing the nearly empty street corner where his listeners have stood. They have deserted him. He steps behind a motor home, and when it pulls away, he is gone. Again Miller anticipates and undercuts any criticism that would suggest his speaker is espousing an easy primitivism and advocating a life limited to well water and organically grown corn. Brier is a modern man, at home anywhere because the house of his father has become a living part of his imagination.

The Mountains Have Come Closer explores the implications of the loss of home for the rural Appalachian. Through his collection of poems Jim Wayne Miller demonstrates the universal application of Bachelard's The Poetics of Space. The Appalachian cabin—the homeplace—is undeniably Bachelard's oneiric house, transplanted to the hollers of Tennessee and North Carolina. Abandoned literally or figuratively, it calls his reader back to inhabit it once more, and Miller says the reader can take possession of it again in order to recreate the past and imagine the future. Whether that repossession is accomplished or not, the rotting cabin, the solitary chimney, and the green line of daffodils among the berry canes are haunting presences on the mountain landscape.

Works Cited

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon, 1969.

Miller, Jim Wayne. The Mountains Have Come Closer. Boone, NC: Appalachian Consortium Press, 1980.