SOURCE: Zamir, Shamoon. “Artist as Prophet, Priest, and Gunslinger: Ishmael Reed's ‘Cowboy in the Boat of Ra.’” Callaloo 17, no. 4 (fall 1994): 1205-35.

[In the following essay, Zamir delineates the major thematic concerns and influences behind Reed's seminal poem “I Am a Cowboy in the Boat of Ra.”]

I

In 1963 Reed published “Time and the Eagle,” a somber poetic meditation on the burden of history upon the Afro-American people. Its studied and effected sense of tragedy and pathos make the poem unique in Reed's published oeuvre, a body of work almost entirely satiric in nature. While Reed's exclusion of this poem from his collected poetry rightly acknowledges its status as apprentice work, “Time and the Eagle” provides an invaluable point of departure for understanding Reed's poetic development. This development can be charted as a radical shift in the relationship of self to history and as a struggle between passivity and agency. These are the first two out of eight verses from Reed's poem:

I

The shackled Black, being torn in innocence;
Molded his advent through cyclical time.
Surging, flowing, rising, falling time.
Begatting contraries which fuse and breakaway
like fire, water, wood and metal.
In the ashes of the bird, a new egg and the moon
Bring a second coming.
Golgotha and the knocking at the tomb
Comes with the blood of the moon.

II

The dog of the moon bays with the tide,
And cacophony of each age of madness.
Each gloomy age has its dying Gods and is
Marked by the scaly sea creatures.
Each rope dancing age made the demon
Pact and is marked by the heavy winged
Bird, who soars and dives like the
Rhythm of the blood tide.
Each age, an interminable ceremony,
As time flows in heroes, Gods, scaly
Heavy winged creatures.(1)

The poem was published just a year after Reed's arrival in New York from Buffalo. In 1963 Reed was only just starting out on his writing career, and “Time and the Eagle” is one of his earliest published works. Looking back on his years in New York, Reed later claimed that he went there thinking he “was going to be a W. B. Yeats”² and that he was “writing visionary poetry” during his early years in the East Village.³ “Time and the Eagle” is a confused adaptation of “The Second Coming” and “Leda and the Swan” that reads almost like a parody.⁴ As yet there is little in the poem that is not immediately derivative of Yeats, but the groundwork for Conjure: Selected Poems, 1963-1970 (1971), Reed's first major collection of poetry, and related works from the same period, is laid here. Reed is attracted to Yeats's deterministic poetics of history and borrows the Irishman's symbols of cyclicality, contrariety, and violent annunciation as a framework of prophecy. The “interminable ceremony” recasts the “ceremony of innocence … drowned” from “The Second Coming,” as the “cacophony of each age of madness” refigures Yeats's “Mere anarchy … loosed upon the world.”⁵ The eagle and the egg as signifiers of the violent birth of a new age are taken from Yeats's interpretation of the myth of Leda's rape by Zeus. Yeats's swan incarnates the immutable force of history; the violation engenders further history and myth. Reed's adaptation of Yeats's bird symbolism is as yet vague. It is clear that Reed has studied A Vision together with the poetry. “I imagine,” writes Yeats in A Vision, “the annunciation that founded Greece as made to Leda, remembering that they showed in a Spartan temple, strung up to the roof as a holy relic, an unhatched egg of hers; and that from one of her eggs came Love and from the other War. But,” he adds, “all things are from antithesis. …”⁶ The Virgin and the dove are replaced by Leda and the swan: “The new birth is to be … a welter of blood and pain, full of the screams of the new birds of prey. …”⁷ In Reed, “The heavy winged bird swoops down / Upon a yard of innocence and kills.”⁸

“I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra” (1968), Reed's most frequently anthologized poem, is a comic reworking of “Time and the Eagle.” It moves towards the transformation of passivity into agency. The heroization of the poetic persona is dramatized within the struggle for mastery between satire and prophecy within the poem. In the “Foreword” to Conjure Reed offers himself as America's “son, her prophet” and proceeds to quote from Madame Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled: “Philo Judaeus makes Saul say, that if he banishes from the land every diviner and necromancer his name will survive him.” Reed adds, “if the government ever created a Bureau of Prophecy, Saul and his cronies would certainly stack it.”⁹ If the combination of satire and prophecy seems at first incongruous, it should be familiar from Blake. As Northrop Frye notes, “condemnation is only part of the satirist's work. … the great satirist is an apocalyptic visionary like every other great artist, if only by implication, for his caricature leads us irresistibly away from the passive assumption that the unorganized data of sense experience are reliable and consistent, and afford the only means of contact with reality.” But “satire is not necessarily revolutionary in itself, though its hostility to the world of its time may be pressed into revolutionary service. … a poet cannot depend on satire alone if he wants to show his revolutionary sympathies and point out what such revolutions signify.”¹⁰

The Blakean analogy is invited self-consciously by Reed. When he synthesizes the multiple personas of his poem prior to the final showdown into the figure of the poet-priest, or the artist as necromancer, the poet-priest's call for his ritual paraphernalia refers the reader to Blake's Milton:

bring me my Buffalo horn of black powder
bring me my headdress of black feathers
bring me my bones of Ju-Ju snake
go get my eyelids of red paint.
Hand me my shadow.

(C [Conjure: Selected Poems, 1963-1970] 18)

Here are the corresponding lines from Blake's preface to Milton:

Bring me my Bow of burning gold:
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!(11)

Reed's invocation of Blake at a climactic point in the poem—when the cowboy Horus announces his return from exile—establishes Romantic literary structures as necessary interpretive frames for Reed's poem: Milton is a paradigmatic text of Romanticism's exploration of the imagination's struggle against duality and its quest for resolution through the higher synthesis of culture—in Blake's case through the restoration of prophetic vision. This process of consciousness is commonly dramatized by the Romantics in terms of the Homeric journeys away from and back to home, the Iliad and the Odyssey serving as the respective halves of the dialectic.¹² Reed simply substitutes the Nile voyage for the Mediterranean one. But while Reed organizes his poem by referring to the Romantic plot, the sequence of his poem is as a partial inversion of this plot, concluding in a New World configuration that is not easily assimilable into Romantic synthesis.

Reed's poem offers variations on the theme of culture clash organized within an overarching plot of exile, return, and renewed war. Two other frames overlap with this larger structure. The return of the exiled hero is also the resurfacing of the repressed and the suppressed. The urge towards the psychologizing of history borders on the Spenglerian and remains true to the politics of the 1960s counter-culture in the context of which the poem takes shape. And the drama of departure and journey home narrativizes the dialectic of dualism, of unity lost and regained, that is the central plot of Romanticism and undergirds its obsession with immanent teleology and a metaphysics of integration, laying the foundations for the modern divided self¹³—a fragmentation described most notably in the Afro-American context by W. E. B. DuBois. The processes of duality and synthesis are staged both as the irresolvable confrontation of satire and prophecy and as a dialogue amongst poets. Reed engages the poetics of Blake and Yeats, resisting the conflation of the two and finding in this differentiation both a range of possibilities and a set of closures for the black poet. The Nile journey of “I am a cowboy” is also an Afro-American recasting of Whitman's “Passage to India” (1871).

In the midst of the Second World War, the Afro-American poet Robert Hayden had questioned the possibility of the transcendental vision even in Whitman's own time. “Middle Passage,” a long section of an uncompleted book on slavery and the Civil War, imagined the “Voyage of death, / voyage whose chartings are unlove” that was part of Whitman's reality.¹⁴ Continuing an Afro-American dialogue with Whitman, “I am a cowboy” was one among many revisions of Whitman's prophecy of America undertaken by American writers in the 1950s and 1960s. Like Reed, many poets attempted to retrieve the idealism of the frontier myth in the age of the New Frontier when that idealism had been significantly tarnished. Inevitably, the attempted recuperation simultaneously acknowledged the strength of the contemporary barriers to the Romantic dream of spiritual and cultural synthesis and the recovery of unity in “Passage to India.”¹⁵ In 1956 Allen Ginsberg had used the verse-line of Whitman to voice the end of the dreamed-of garden of the New World. In the apocalyptic parody of Howl, “Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies!” are all “gone down the American river!”¹⁶

II

Reed's poem retells an ancient Egyptian myth of divine conflict as a wild west showdown. The outlaw gunman, once “vamoosed from / the temple” and now fighting for “the come back of / Osiris” (C 17,18) is the exiled Horus who returns to avenge the murder of Osiris, his father, at the hands of Set, the brother of Osiris. Osiris, the black fertility god and culture hero who, according to Plutarch, civilized Egypt through the power of his songs, introducing agriculture, the observation of laws and the honouring of gods, is sacrificed in a manichean drama to the forces of chaos. Horus's aim is to restore cultural and political order.¹⁷ Although never named as such in the poem, the cowboy is clearly identifiable as Horus. According to the myth, even while Horus was under the protection of Isis, Set managed to have him “bitten by savage beasts and stung by scorpions.”¹⁸ Reed alludes to this in the poem's first strophe (“sidewinders in the saloons of fools / bit my forehead”). Having obtained magical powers of transformation from Thoth, Horus fought the battle against Set from the boat of Ra.¹⁹

But the poem's persona is multiple in its identities. As one who “bedded / down with Isis” (C 17), the cowboy is also Osiris; as the “dog-faced man” (C 17) he is Anubis; later he appears as “Loup Garou” (C 18), a Vodoun loa of the fierce Petro cult of Haiti; he is also an African priest and necromancer demanding his “bones of Ju-Ju snake” (C 18); and a gangster calling his “moll” (“C / mere a minute willya doll?” [C 18]). The quotation that provides the epigraph to “I am a cowboy,” taken from the Rituale Romanum and endorsed by Cardinal Spellman, insists that “the devil must be forced to reveal any such physical evil (potions, charms, fetishes, etc.) still outside the body and these must be burned” (C 17). But the devil, the poem demonstrates, is more slippery. The liturgical book of the Roman rite and the cardinal are over-confident in their belief in the mimetic abilities of the Word as a guarantee of that alliance of logos and law that has been an alibi for conquest. In Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969), Reed's second novel and a work closely tied to “I am a cowboy” in its preoccupations, John Wesley Harding explains to the cattle baron Drag Gibson: “I got so strung out behind the Bible, that I went on to study law. Got my degree in jail. I've always been on the side of the Word, killing only those who were the devil incarnate—you know—black fellows.”²⁰ Spellman, among America's most prominent Catholics and a favorite target of Reed's, combined his social work with energetic support for McCarthy and the Vietnam war.²¹ Taking up the challenge of the Rituale Romanum, “I am a cowboy” appears to trace the imminent return of all that would be exorcised or repressed. The poem follows the pattern of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; this is Reed's Bible of Hell. Like Blake's “Mental Traveller,” it threatens the revival of pagan forms and the decline of Christianity. And like Blake, the poet-prophet becomes the satiric advocate of the “Devil's Party” against the priestly order and its books of law. Used for the administration of sacraments and blessings as well as for conducting processions and exorcisms, the Rituale Romanum's authority depends to a large extent on its formulas being followed with minimal variation.²² The history of this liturgical text from the 16th to the 20th century represents precisely the attempt at codification that Reed and Blake resist and which Reed parodies in his poem “Neo-HooDoo Aesthetic.”²³

The rapid, seemingly gratuitous proliferation of personae in “I am a cowboy” does more than resist the confessional or lyric voice in Afro-American poetry and the politics of identity and interiority these modes represent. Reed's illusive shape-changers recognize with Emerson that reality is “the endless passing of one element into new forms, [an] incessant metamorphosis.” It is upon this ground that Emerson concludes that “all thinking is analogizing, and it is the use of life to learn metonymy,” or, as Lawrence Buell explicates, “the inter-substitution of images for the same principle.”²⁴ This principle of identity is not a stable self in Reed, any more than it is in Emerson. Rather it is that Manichean duality that is a universal description of the world in the occult and which allows all heresies to crowd at one pole as a community of identity. Here Transcendentalist Neo-Platonism and Reed's counter-cultural melange of Vodoun and Yeatsian theosophy find alignments.²⁵

In a move characteristic of the 1960s, Reed conflates Vodoun and gnostic traditions into a subculture of heresy as a reservoir for his poetic mythology. In Yellow Back Radio Reed identifies his Vodoun hero with a gnostic idea of the devil and his uprising with that of the Albigenses and Waldenses (YBR [Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down] 164-65, 151). Black Diane from the novel re-appears in the poem as “Pope Joan” (C 18), a woman who, disguised as a man (it is fabled), became pope sometime between the 9th and 11th centuries.²⁶ Reed associates Joan with the composite figure of Ptah, the creator god of Memphis, and Ra, the great sun god,²⁷ but moves her quickly into the personae of a gangster's moll and a ritual assistant to an African priest. The same year that Reed's novel was published, Gary Snyder wrote of a “great subculture of illuminati … a powerful undercurrent in all higher civilizations … which runs … without break from Paleo-Siberian Shamanism and Magdalenian cave-painting; through megaliths and Mysteries, astronomers, ritualists, alchemists and Albegensians; gnostics and vagantes, right down to Golden Gate Park.”²⁸ Reed's continued identification of the appearance of ancient gods in a Chinese American novel as “Cantonese Hoodoo”²⁹ and of Kabbalistic traditions in his own work as “Jewish Vodoun”³⁰ suggests that “Hoodoo” is for him a term of general inclusivity. “Old country writing, backwoods writing, medicine shows, nineteenth century speeches,” like genres of popular fiction and Afro-American folklore, are part of “a subculture in American literature that never makes the institutions” (S [Shrovetide in Old New Orleans] 133). This subculture is a repository of all those cultural histories excluded from that version of cultural history installed by “Egyptologists who do not know their trips” and “School marms with halitosis” (C 17). (Pope Joan is also a card game in which one of the cards, the nine of diamonds, is removed from play.)³¹

Such conflations are congenial to the mythology of the devil within Afro-American folk traditions. In this folklore “Satan or the Devil is not a personification of evil or of the demon in man; he is almost a comic figure, a scapegoat for human failings and errors.” The reimagining of Satan is in part a resistance to the missionaries' forced identification of trickster gods of African descent (such as Legba or Labas) with their own devil.³² At the same time that these gods had their complexities partially distorted within Christian manicheanism, the Christian devil emerged as a personification of a process of cultural hybridization that stands against the Church's extension of imperial control through religious indoctrination. Following Blake's heretical model, Reed takes the New World devil hero as the upholder of the poet-prophet's vision.

III

The second stanza of Reed's poem dramatizes a struggle between contending representations of history. It is cultural, not political history that is at stake here, and the site of contention is the artist's consciousness and his work.

School marms with halitosis cannot see
the Nefertiti fake chipped on the run by slick
germans, the hawk behind Sonny Rollins' head or
the ritual beard of his axe; a longhorn winding
its bells thru the Field of Reeds.

(C 17)

Reed's “school marms” are descendants of Yeats's “kind old nun in a white hood” in “Among School Children” who teaches her students a stale, uninspiring curriculum:

The children learn to cipher and to sing,
To study reading-books and history,
To cut and sew, be neat in everything
In the best modern way …

(Yeats 215)

The “momentary wonder” of the children is only aroused by the appearance of the “sixty-year-old smiling public man” (Yeats 216). The “school marms” in Reed's poem represent a perpetuation of that ignorance about other cultures personified by the untrustworthy “Egyptologists” in the previous stanza (C 17). Specifically, they are oblivious to three things: “the Nefertiti fake,” “the hawk behind Sonny Rollins' head” and “the ritual beard of his axe.”

The famous bust of Nefertiti in Berlin is dismissed as a fake here because its features are so conspicuously “high yellow.” While the bust remains one of the best known pieces of Ancient Egyptian sculpture, the features of the Queen, Reed seems to suggest, are acceptable precisely because they hide any trace of the ancient history of cultural exchange between Egypt and West Africa. As Reed points out in the foreword to Conjure, “Egypt is located in Africa, you know, even though certain Western Civ. fanatics pretend that it lay in the suburbs of Berlin” (C vii). It is due to the invisibility of this history that the school marms cannot “see” the Nefertiti bust as a fake. This elliptical relativization of Western European aesthetics reconfirms the deathly image of the “Ledean” woman (Maud Gonne) in “Among School Children.” The “present image” of the once beautiful woman floats into the poet's mind as a “Quattrocento” painting, “Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind / And took a mess of shadows for its meat” (Yeats 216).

The “hawk” behind Sonny Rollins' head is a more complex pun at the center of the staged dialogue between Yeats and Blake in this poem. It is Reed's counterpoint to Yeats's falcon, swan and golden bird. The figure of the bird is a multiple symbol of order, art and history in Yeats. The familiar Yeatsian vacillation between history as necessity and the terror of change, evident in “Leda and the Swan,” is more succinctly captured in “A Second Coming” where the divorce of the falcon and the falconer, whose union is a symbol of equilibrium, results in the famous collapse of the center and the nightmare of “things fall[ing] apart” (Yeats 187). The bird as symbol of order reappears at the close of “Sailing to Byzantium” as a supreme work of art (“such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make”) that will gather up the aging poet out of historical time (“what is past, or passing, or to come” becomes the song of the golden bird) “Into the artifice of eternity” (Yeats 193-94).³³

Having lived through two revivals of spiritualism in Europe, Yeats had found many confirmations of myths and stories learned at any early age. He knew The Book of the Dead and “the great falcon that hovers over the God Horus.”³⁴ Reed's hawk, however, is more than the recollection of this falcon (or hawk), the animal from of both Horus and his protector Ra. The witty move from Egyptian iconography to the famous profile of Sonny Rollins extends the cultural continuity between Egypt and West Africa, suggested earlier in the poem, to Afro-America. And as the unraveling of the pun on hawk will show, it is significant that the personification of this continuity is a jazz musician. The startling coincidence of familiar Egyptian relief paintings and the musicians' portrait constructs Rollins as an image come to life, stepping off the wall, in a subtle revision of the “sages standing in God's holy fire / As in the gold mosaic of a wall” in “Sailing to Byzantium” (Yeats 193). It is to these sages that the aging poet, sensing his divorce from the sensual life, calls to come “And be the singing-masters of my soul” and “Consume my heart away” (Yeats 193). Yeats seeks an escape from history. “The poet,” Harold Bloom concludes, “is asking for transfiguration.” But the flight “is not so much from nature as from a new dispensation of the young.”³⁵ But Reed seeks no such transcendent “tangible analogue” of eternity³⁶ and the conflation of Horus and Rollins announces just such a new dispensation.

The shore from which Yeats sets sail “is no country for old men” (Yeats 193). The image of the “tattered coat upon a stick” (Yeats 193) reappears with dismissive levity in “Among School Children”:

Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;
Soldier Aristotle played the taws
Upon the bottom of a king of kings;
World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras
Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings
What a star sang and careless Muses heard:
Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.

(Yeats 217)

But Reed is interested neither in a conflict of young and old, nor in the hackneyed universalism of the dialectic of bodily decrepitude and art's eternity (though he would most likely twist Yeats's sense and take the old clothes upon a stick as the flag that marks the end of a cultural race for the famed Greeks). Against Yeats's elegaic turn to an idealized vision of Byzantium in the age of Justinian (c. A.D. 550) as a response to generational discontinuity, Reed offers a vital, living tradition. For Reed, Yeats's feared anarchy becomes a new order. In its association with Rollins, a leading exponent of hard bop, “hawk” resonates with the names of other jazz musicians: Coleman Hawkins, “the first noted ‘traditional’ jazz musician to play with the young bebop revolutionaries”³⁷; Charlie ‘Bird’ (or ‘Yardbird’) Parker, the most celebrated of these revolutionaries, and most obviously Sun Ra and his Arkestra, major exponents of the free jazz movement in the 1960s. (The name of saxophonist Sonny Rollins, of course, echoes that of Ra [Sun-ny Ra-llins, American pronunciation]). Rollins and the figures that cluster around him in “I am a cowboy” encapsulate an entire musical history (indeed a musical genealogy if not an ornithology) from pre-be bop jazz to free jazz. No fingering upon a fiddle-stick here.

In the end Reed's own idea of jazz is perhaps no less utopian than Yeats's idea of Byzantium. It becomes in the poem a container for community imagined as the dialogue of living tradition within the visionary consciousness of the artist. During performances Sun Ra and the Arkestra dress in robes and ceremonial head-dress, and the lyrics of their songs evangelize Sun Ra's particular blend of mysticism and space-age consciousness. In 1967 Sun Ra gave a concert in New York's Central Park with about a hundred players, singers and dancers and a large crew of light and sound technicians; the concert was a tribute to “Nature and Nature's Gods.”³⁸ In 1970 the Arkestra toured Europe and, at the Berlin Kongresshalle the concert included a light-show, bizarre costumes, dancing girls, a fire-eater, “songs extolling the ‘joys of space travel,’ a march through the audience (a la Living Theater), and Sun Ra's pretended star gazing with a telescope through the solid roof” of the hall.³⁹ Critics and audience, for the most part, were either perplexed or furious at both concerts. As Ekkehard Jost argues, the critics' reaction “revealed an ignorance of the cultural background in which this kind of ‘musical theater’ is rooted, a background that has as little to do with the stupid flashiness of Broadway shows as it does with the intellectually calculated surrealism of Mauricio Kagel's ‘instrumental theater’”: “The roots of this show lie rather in the origins of Afro-American music: in the rites of the Voodoo cult, a blend of magic, music and dance; and in the vaudeville shows of itinerant troupes of actors and musicians, where there was room for gaudily tinseled costumes and the stunts of supple acrobats, as well as for the emotional depths of blues sung by a Ma Rainey or a Bessie Smith.”⁴⁰ And Berendt, enlarging this catalogue, brings home the point that the label of “avant garde” is finally inappropriate for an artist like Sun Ra:

Sun Ra's music is more than just avant-garde, free big-band jazz. It certainly is that, but behind it stands the whole black tradition: Count Basie's Swing riffs and Duke Ellington's saxophone sounds; Fletcher Henderson's “voicings”; old blues and black songs; African highlife dances and Egyptian marches; black percussion music from South, Central and North America, and from Africa; Negro show and voodoo ritual; trance and black liturgy—celebrated by a band leader who strikes one as an African medicine-man skyrocketed into the space era.⁴¹

The blend of traditional and avant-garde elements in this music calls into doubt the usual definitions and usages of both terms—as Jost's comments on the initial response to Sun Ra indicate, the perception of his music as a destruction of jazz, or as “anti-jazz,” often depended upon the listener's own ignorance rather than on the music's alleged discontinuities. Both Reed and Sun Ra are uncomfortable with the label “avant garde” when it is applied to their work, and here the coinage of “inter-galactic” and “myth” terminology by the latter, and of “neo hoodoo” by the former, are attempts to “change the joke and slip the yoke.” Concerning the music of Archie Shepp and Cecil Taylor, and the differences of his own music from theirs as he conceived it, Sun Ra said in 1970 that “they were doing their thing, but they were not talking about Space or Intergalactic things … They were talking about the Avant Garde and the New Thing.”⁴² In “if my enemy is a clown, a natural born clown,” one of the poems in Conjure, Reed writes:

i called it pin the tail on the devil
they called it avant garde
they just can't be serious
these big turkeys.

(C 53)

In his The Theory of the Avant-Garde, Renato Poggioli argues that the modern artist's alienation from society is also an “alienation from tradition”: “In contrast to the classical artist, who had recourse to tradition as a stable and recurrent series of public epiphanies, the modern artist works in chaos and shadow, and is overcome by a feeling that language and style are in continual apocalypse.”⁴³ But, as Gerhard Putschogl's discussion of tradition and innovation in jazz suggests, Poggioli's equation of the avant-garde with historical discontinuity does not seem to apply to Afro-American art. “The stereotyped equation of tradition with reaction,” he writes, “is generally not applicable to Afro-American culture. [Archie] Shepp defines the term avant-garde … in a ‘strictly historical sense’. … This is a major reason why the tradition is a point of reference for the black musicians of the sixties.”⁴⁴

The interdependence of tradition and innovation has been referred to above in Blakean terms as an idealized image of community embodied paradoxically in the figure of the individual prophetic artist. In Milton the later Blake moves from the earlier idea of “Poetic Genius” to an idea of the artist as representative of a brotherhood that is also a body of poetry, what Leonard Deen has called “identity-as-community” and what elsewhere in Blake is personified by the creative genius Los:

Blake's prophecies show a community of “Eternals” falling asunder, but surviving and recreating itself through the love and labors of the figure he calls “Los”. … For Blake the community may not only act or recreate itself in the individual person: it may be that person, as Jesus is for Blake the community of mankind. Identity is community. For Blake, community achieved as a conversing in paradise is Jesus; struggling to create itself, it is Los.

… Los not only signifies but also embodies and enacts “divine humanity” and the ideals and salient characteristics of Blake's own poetry; and identity-as-community describes the form of a body of poetry as well as an ideal of brotherhood.⁴⁵

It is this dual sense of community as a body of work and a brotherhood of individuals or artists that is also captured in the pun on the hawk behind Sonny Rollins' head. And out of all the jazz musicians Reed conjures up, it is Sun Ra who best embodies the full resonances of Blake's meaning. The mythological affiliations of his name with the Egyptian sun god make him kin to Blake's Los whose name is most likely the sun's name in reverse.⁴⁶

IV

Reed's version of identity-as-community is generated in the context of historically specific social collapse. In 1973, after his move to the West Coast, Reed recalls that “walking down St. Mark's Place in New York's East Village [he] was often able to observe key members of several generations of the American ‘avant-garde,’ before breakfast, or chat with Archie Shepp, Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, Bill Dixon, Albert Ayler, Cecil Taylor, and members of a splendid generation of young painters” (S 111). All the men named were musicians of free jazz or the new music. But all, except Ayler, were also members of the Jazz Composers' Guild, a mutual aid organization initiated by Bill Dixon. Umbra, a group of Afro-American poets to which Reed belonged in the early 1960s and with which Dixon had some contact, saw the “new musicians as representing a kind of strength and poetry of the black experience” with which they “strongly identified.”⁴⁷ But while the “new music” became a major resource for Afro-American writers at this time, the history of the Jazz Composers' Guild also provided a pointed social parallel to the fragmentation and collapse of many art groups in the 1960s.

Dixon, one of the musicians Reed mentioned in his 1968 interview, was one of the first to set up a mutual support organization along more traditional lines than Sun Ra's Arkestra. He organized the now famous ‘October Revolution in Jazz’ of 1964 which brought together most of the leading free musicians of that time for a series of concerts at the Cellar Cafe on New York's West Ninety-Sixth Street. The idea for the Jazz Composers' Guild grew directly out of the experience of the concerts. Dixon wanted to create an organization that would protect jazz musicians and composers from economic exploitation, and he opened the door to white musicians as well as to blacks.⁴⁸ The members agreed to turn down work unless it was considered advantageous to the Guild as a whole, and contracts for concerts and recordings were to be negotiated with the Guild rather than with the individual musicians. Due to internal differences, the Guild collapsed, but it was to set a model for organizations that followed after it. According to Taylor, the Guild did not survive because its members “lacked a social consciousness. … If certain members had shown themselves strong, more loyal to their promises, if their actions matched their ideas, the Guild would exist today.”⁴⁹

The idealism implicit in Reed's turn towards a Romantic model for artistic practice cannot be read as a disavowal of history; it was in fact a recognition of the political limits of experiments such as the Jazz Composers' Guild that sought to explore democratic models within severely embattled cultural spaces. In the conclusion of his chapter on Sun Ra and his book on free jazz, Jost writes that “the politically accentuated reminiscences in the music of the Art Ensemble, Don Cherry's efforts toward ‘musical world peace’ and Sun Ra's mysticism dressed in the costumes of a utopian minstrel show, all represent levels of consciousness that can by no means be reduced to the equation ‘free jazz = Black Power.’ Nevertheless, there is in the style changes manifest in the music … a tendency that is probably tied up with the change of consciousness that took place in the Sixties among the black population.”⁵⁰ While Jost is overly cautious about the political nature of free jazz and could easily have added the names of Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane to his list, he is right to resist the potentially reductive readings of Frank Kofsky's Black Nationalism and the Revolution in Music (1970) and Philippe Carles and Jean-Louis Comolli's Black Power / Free Jazz (1971). This is not to discredit either of these excellent studies but to suggest that free jazz may reveal a path not coterminous with or identical to that of the Civil Rights movement or Black Power.

At the same time, resistance to this easy equation has led some cultural theoreticians into extreme fantasy as the only means by which to retrieve the radical potential of this art. Jaques Attali for instance believes that “Free jazz was the first attempt to express in economic terms the refusal of the cultural alienation inherent in repetition, to use music to build a new culture. What institutional politics, trapped within representation, could not do, what violence, crushed by counterviolence, could not achieve, free jazz tried to bring about in a gradual way through the production of a new music outside of the industry.”⁵¹ This escapism testifies to its own impotency. Attali burdens an exemplary cultural moment with a political weight it cannot sustain; there is no confrontation of society's organized power, control and violence here. Nathaniel Mackey's comments on the political nature of collective improvisation (note that Attali takes improvisation as the formal counterpart of the economics) state the matter more realistically: “black music—especially that of the sixties, with its heavy emphasis on individual freedom within a collectively improvised context—proposed a model social order, an ideal, even utopic balance between personal impulse and group boundaries.”⁵²

The attraction to collective improvisation as a utopian model was indeed strong among Afro-American writers in the 1960s.⁵³ For one who both listens to jazz and reads Blake, there are obvious cross-overs between the two. For in Blake (and other Romantics) there is a complex balance of individuation and unity; community arises not through common denomination but through the aggregate of difference: “The poet as man aims at a society of independent thinkers, a democratic ‘republic,’ but on the smaller and more intensive scale of community. The poet as prophet seeks to create a community of prophets, a New Jerusalem.”⁵⁴ Blake seeks not the regaining of Eden in the present but the full potential of creative imagination in the fallen world. The poet-prophets form an apostolic succession, and through them history is turned back to its sources in myth, divided humanity is transformed into community.⁵⁵ This is the third cultural blind-spot of Reed's school marms.

The “ritual beard” of Sonny Rollins' “axe” holds Reed's ambivalent transitions between sacrifice and performance in the poem; in the terms of the Blakean scheme, poetry and art, and not the priests, are the sources of culture. But Reed does not clearly sustain that distinction (just as he does not explicitly distinguish between priest and prophet). The musician and his instrument and the priest and his ritual tool are intertwined. “Ritual beard” again refers not only to Rollins' physiognomy but also to the pictorial analogy between the curved shape of beards in Egyptian (Assyrian?) iconography and the form of the saxophone (“axe” is jazz slang for the saxophone). In the second stanza of the poem the cut of the axe initiates the reader into the community of tradition and the “longhorn winding / its bells thru the Field of Reeds” completes the synthesis. The dance of the Sidhe, the ancient gods of Ireland, in the wind, and the poetic refiguration of the “philosophic gyres” as the “winding stair” of the tower of Thoor Ballylee in Yeats now resurface as a different motion of history and myth.⁵⁶ For one, the meandering movement of the cattle looks ahead to the mythic west of the Chisholm trail in the fourth stanza. Rollins' saxophone (the “long horn” with the open “bell” of its mouth) threads its own voice with the music of other players of the reed instrument configured as a vibrant synchronic “field”: “Tradition, in a word, is the sense of the total past as now.”⁵⁷ The sounding of the bell may well reach to the boxing ring in which the Afro-American boxer Ezzard Charles is defeated later in the poem, but the competition in this stanza is something altogether different; the “cutting sessions” among the improvising soloists in jazz clubs perform a finer marriage between the group and self. The “Field of Reeds” is also the Egyptian Elysium and the Nile bank where the Horus child, like Moses, was hidden from Set, and Rollins is finally identified with Osiris, the god crowned with horns who weighs the hearts of the dead in Fields of Satisfaction that are the after-world.⁵⁸ These dizzying metamorphoses are gathered up as the domain of the artist's active imagination in the pun on the author's name.

That these transformations should occur within Ra's boat or Sun Ra's jazz Ark continues the Blake analogy. In Milton the “Tabernacles” (Blake's “holy place for an ideal”)⁵⁹ of Osiris, Isis and Horus (Orus in Blake) float on the Nile during the night, “till morning break & Osiris appear in the sky” (Blake 138). But it is at the climax of the poem that Ololon, the spiritual form of Milton's Emanation from which the poet has been divorced, descends in “the Moony Ark” heralding the restoration of the poet and her mystical union with Jesus, the wedding of love and wisdom that will bear man, like Noah's Ark, across the Sea of Time and Space, across the expanse of history:

Then as a Moony Ark Ololon descended to Felphams Vale
In clouds of blood, in streams of gore, with dreadful thunderings
Into the Fires of Intellect that rejoic'd in Felphams Vale
Around the Starry Eight: with one accord the Starry Eight became
One Man Jesus the Saviour. wonderful! around his limbs
The Clouds of Ololon folded as a Garment dipped in blood
Written within & without in woven letters: & the Writing
Is the Divine Revelation in the Literal expression:
A Garment of War, I heard it named the Woof of Six Thousand
Years.

(Blake 143)

The marriage of the Starry Eight (Milton's Humanity and his seven guardian angels)⁶⁰ and Jesus restores Milton's divided self and his imaginative powers. The successor Blake faints on his garden path at the sight of this vision, and as he recovers, the Lark, Los's messenger and Blake's bird-symbol for “the new idea which inspires the entire poem,”⁶¹ heralds the new dawn (Blake 143).

By contrast to Blake, Reed's hawk descends towards the start of his poem, just as Blake's prefatorial invocation is echoed in the final movement of “I am a cowboy.” The reversal of the narrative movement of Milton is significant; Reed's poem is structured as an inverted epic. The three stanzas that follow the second one consider the failure of synthesis. Isis, like Leda, gives birth to war, and the ringmanship of Ezzard Charles is defeated. The fifth stanza then acknowledges the exile of art. This pattern is in fact closer to Blake's satiric meditation on the impossibility of art and the failure of Los in a fallen world in The Book of Urizen (1794). In reversing the transcendent sequence of Milton, Reed dramatizes the pressures of history and the social upon the ideal of the synthetic imagination. In Blake the aquatic Polypus symbolizes human society because some forms of this animal are “colonial” organisms of individuals.⁶² Ololon, descending to find Milton, must first enter “the Polypus within the Mundane Shell … [the] Vegetable Worlds” (Blake 136). “Human society,” S. Foster Damon explains, “must be taken into account before the creation of art is possible; or, as Blake puts it, ‘Golgonooza cannot be seen till having passed the Polypus / It is viewed on all sides round by a Four-fold Vision / Or till you become Mortal & Vegetable in Sexuality’” (Blake 135).⁶³ This full humanity is never imagined in Reed. The Afro-American poet attracted to an idealist aesthetic finds himself caught between American Transcendentalism's rejection of the relevancy of society and Romanticism's dialectic of self and society, and this dilemma becomes the central political drama of his work.⁶⁴

V

Following Yeats's occult model for a poetics of history, Reed's poem figures history as the incessant alternation of conflict and coniunctio. This pattern is already present in the larger narrative of the poem where war is a prelude to the restoration of order. But each stanza repeats the drama as an almost independent unit. While the Horus-Cowboy narrative of exile and return shapes the poem, an over-emphasis on the overarching structure of the poem can undermine the experience of local transitions and image by image progression.⁶⁵ The links between (and within) stanzas follow no principle of logical or historical connection. The violent juxtaposition of diverse materials which disrupts the linear flow of narrative is held together by formal principles derived from Yeats's poetics.

I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra. I bedded
down with Isis, Lady of the Boogaloo, dove
down deep into her horny, stuck up her Wells-Far-ago
in daring midday getaway. ‘Start grabbing the
blue’, I said from top of my double crown.

(C 17)

The rapid transitions in this third stanza are representative of the procedures of the whole poem and extend the flamboyant punning of the poem into a collagist aesthetic. A pun reminiscent of the sexual innuendos of blues lyrics allows Reed to leap from Egyptian mythology to nineteenth-century America and from an image of sexual union to a history of political and economic conflict, a parody of the rape of Leda by the Swan, used here to engender North American history. Isis's “Wells-Far-ago” is a distortion of the name of the Wells Fargo company, established in 1852 by Henry Wells, William G. Fargo and associates, founders of the American Express. The company carried mail, silver and gold bullion and provided banking services. “In less than ten years,” Alvin F. Harlow explains, the company had “either bought out or eliminated nearly all competitors and become the most powerful company in the Far West.” Wells Fargo later extended its operations to Canada, Alaska, Mexico, the West Indies, Central America, and Hawaii, as well as the Atlantic coast.⁶⁶ The economic monopoly of Wells Fargo parallels the monotheism of Judaism and Christianity which not only banished other gods (Osiris and the Voodoo loa) but also suppressed its own heretical traditions. The outlaw cowboy's cry, “start grabbing the / blue,” is slang for “put your hands up” but also refers to “blueback,” an archaic term for a bank note of Confederate money, so called for the contrast of blue ink on its back with the green ink used on the Northern “greenback.” With Horus speaking from the “top of [his] double crown” in the next line, the blueback carried by the Wells Fargo Company can be taken as a symbol of the division between North and South in the “United” States. This is confirmed by the double crown as symbol of a unified Egypt in Egyptian iconography, and one of the manifestations of Horus was “Har-mau,” or “Horus the uniter,” upholder of the unity of northern and southern Egypt.⁶⁷ The aggressive lover of Isis is of course Osiris (the “longhorn” in the previous stanza refers, among other things, to the horned crown of Osiris, and the rather obvious sexual pun on “longhorn” and “horny” completes the link). The product of this intercourse is Horus, whereas in Yeats the rape leads to the birth of Helen and Clytemnestra, Love and War. The outlaw Horus initiates the fall of the Confederacy and the rise of the Union, while Leda hatches the fall of Troy and the ascendancy of Greece. The same pattern is repeated in the next stanza.

I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra. Ezzard Charles
of the Chisholm Trail. Took up the bass but they
blew off my thumb. Alchemist in ringmanship but a
sucker for the right cross.

(C 17)

Here each sentence is a yoking together that, like the rest of the poem, brazenly defies the facts of history. The conjunction of Ancient Egypt and the American West is, by this point in the poem, familiar. The cowboy then appears as the Afro-American heavyweight boxing champion from the early 1950s riding the famous 19th-century cattle trail that stretched from south Texas to Kansas City.⁶⁸ His transformation into a musician, linking back to Sonny Rollins in the second stanza and to the “Lady of the Boogaloo” in the third, is aborted by gun law. The last sentence is a characteristically condensed pun, welding together boxing and alchemy—again, confrontation and synthesis. Not only is the allusive hero's boxing prowess weak, but his “talismanic rings [are] no match for the symbols of Christianity.”⁶⁹ The alchemist's dream of coniunctio, of the philosopher's stone, is defeated. The ring, occult symbol for such unity and wholeness but also representative here of the boxing ring, encapsulates the balance of conflict and coniunctio throughout the poem.⁷⁰ But this very balance is shattered by a blow from the cross, a re-match between the gnostic traditions and Christianity in which the later once again emerges as victor. After being knocked out by “Jersey” Joe Walcott in seven rounds in Pittsburgh in 1951, Charles was never able to make a successful comeback in boxing. He was defeated again by Walcott in 1952 and by Rocky Marciano in 1954.⁷¹ In the next stanza the artist-hero accepts that an “outlaw alias copped my stance” but the exile is only a temporary set-back: “Vamoosed from / the temple,” he explains, “i bide my time” (C 17).

Yeats had adopted the idea of war and conflict as agents of renewal largely from his occult studies.⁷² But unlike in Blake, there is in Yeats no progression through the interplay of contraries, no transcendence of that image of history. War becomes the only possible form of the world, “a dramatic universe where conflict is the dance-form of life.”⁷³ Dance is, of course, like the bird, Yeats's multivalent symbol of order and chaos. In the dream of the beggar Billy Byrne in “Under the Round Tower,” dance and conflict imagery is related to sexual imagery (Yeats 137-38).⁷⁴ And Reed's Isis, in the midst of sexual union and physical conflict, appears as “Lady of the Boogaloo.”⁷⁵ Referring to Yeats's characteristic techniques as they are evident in Billy Byrne's dream, Hazard Adams writes that, “with the building up of a mass of metaphorical suggestion, Yeats's multiverse, like Blake's, becomes a single macrocosmic metaphor, a universe. All things finally relate themselves to all other things in a unified vision.”⁷⁶ This is also an accurate description of the procedures of “I am a cowboy.” But Adams continues: “The difference from Blake lies in the fact that conflict becomes the form of the only world Yeats knows, not simply, as in Blake, the delusion to be transcended.”⁷⁷ This too is ultimately true of Reed. The danger for a satirist like Reed, who is also attracted to the possibilities of the poet-prophet, is one of entrapment within a closed system that psychologizes history as the unchanging clash of antinomial forces. The static nature of this model makes it fundamentally ahistorical as a poetics of history. The prophecies of a new age simply become predictions of repetition, so that the poet aspiring to vision can too easily become a mere magician. And the satirist, requiring perpetual conflict as a necessary condition for his art, is hard pressed to sustain a vision of identity-as-community or to fulfill the prophetic quest for polis.

In Milton Blake distinguishes between “Mental War” and “Corporeal Strife.” Immediately after those lines from Blake's preface which Reed parodies and invokes, the poet declares:

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In England's green & pleasant Land.

(Blake 95-96)

Later in the poem Blake distinguishes Mental Fight from actual war. The “Four Elements” that are “Gods of the Kingdoms of the Earth” are caught “in contrarious / And cruel opposition: Element against Element, opposed in War / Not Mental, as the Wars of Eternity, but a Corporeal Strife” (Blake 130).

The intellectual war and hunting that goes on in heaven, which is of course a mental state in Blake, not a place beyond the sky, is the proper contrary form of those dreadful “negations” known as war and hunting in nature. Yeats thinks of that symbolized by the sphere as things-in-themselves, which fall into antinomies in experience. Blake's heaven is the life of intellect itself, which proceeds by dialogue and contrariety.

… this difference leads Yeats to an ironic welcoming of violence, while Blake was always horrified by war, which he regarded as the result of the repression of true contrariety.⁷⁸

As in Blake's preface to Milton, the poet-priest of “I am a cowboy,” after calling for his “Buffalo horn of black powder,” his “bones of Ju-Ju snake” and other ritual instruments, launches his mental war against the cultural domination of Set, an archetype for all forms of religious, ideological and cultural monisms in Reed's mythology:

I'm going into town after Set
I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra
look out Set                    here i come Set
to get Set                                   to sunset Set
to unseat Set                    to Set down Set
                                                            usurper of the Royal couch
                                                            imposter RAdio of Moses' bush
                                                            part pooper O hater of dance
                                                            vampire outlaw of the milky way

(C 18)

The return of the outlaw cowboy is in fact the return of art to the arena of effective cultural struggle since earlier in the poem the exile of the outlaw hero is defined as the exile of art:

                                                                                          Vamoosed from
the temple i bide my time. The price on the wanted
poster was a-going down, outlaw alias copped my stance
and moody greenhorns were making me dance;
          while my mouth's
shooting iron got its chambers jammed.

(C 17)

It is the poet's voice, the “mouth's / shooting iron,” that is silenced. Despite his obvious parodic and comic intent, Reed's obsessive use of the rhetoric of aggression can sometimes be misleading.⁷⁹ But Reed takes care in many of his works to forestall such readings. The exchange between the slave 40s and Raven Quickskill, the artist-hero, in Flight to Canada (1976) offers just one example. When the militant 40s tells Raven Quickskill, “you take the words, give me the rifle,” Quickskill replies that “words built the world and words can destroy the world.” Quickskill eventually learns that a flight to Canada is a false promise of freedom; for him “freedom was his writing. His writing was his HooDoo.”⁸⁰ The unjamming of the “mouth's / shooting iron” narrativizes the release of the creative and playful potential of language and simultaneously stages this release as a moment of self-genesis for the poetic persona. But what does genesis mean for Reed and his personae?

VI

The action of “I am a cowboy” begins to turn in the seventh stanza. Though still in exile, the poet no longer has his mouth's shooting iron jammed. He is now writing “the mowtown long plays for the comeback of / Osiris” (C 18). Just as the climax of Milton is moved to the opening verses of Reed's poem, so Blake's prefatory invocation to his truncated epic is echoed towards the end of “I am a cowboy” (in the eighth stanza). By ending his narrative where Blake begins his, the point at which the poet calls for inspiration to arm him for the task of Mental War, Reed deliberately ends in limbo. The battle is yet to come or it is perpetual; in any case, the Afro-American poet is uncomfortable about projecting resolution.

The return of the exiled hero is no longer imagined as Horus's revenge. Instead of the more familiar and culturally more distant mythology of Egypt, Reed now turns to a New World transformation of African folklore and works his own syncretic changes upon it. In the eighth stanza the sexual union of Osiris and Isis is re-formulated in more traditional occult and astrological terms as the coniunctio of Pisces and Aries. But the product is “the Loup Garou Kid,” “Lord of the Lash,” not Horus, a “half breed son,” a reincarnation of the Afro-American divided self, not an incarnation of national unity (C 18). In occult and astrological lore, Osiris and Isis are taken to be representatives of the Sun and Moon respectively, and so as the father and mother of “sublunary nature” who, “by their conjunctions renew all life in its generations, and at their oppositions bring forth that which is generated.”⁸¹ The Loup Garou Kid is, of course, literally generated out of dramas of union and opposition in the course of the poem. The union of Pisces and Aquarius appears to be the first successful coniunctio in the poem, an alchemical wedding of “the prototypical male and female opposites—identified in alchemical symbolism as sulfur and mercury, or Sol and Luna, or king and queen.”⁸² But this is clearly not the case since the “half breed son” is not the reunited, complete man. Loup Garou in fact represents only the masculine half of the conjunction: where, in Blake, the female Ololon descends in the “Moony ark,” Reed's cowboy rides in the solar barge. In an 1896 letter Yeats wrote that “we belong to the coming cycle. The sun passes from Pisces into Aquarius in a few years. Pisces is phallic in its influence. The waterman is spiritual so the inward turning soul will catch the first rays of the new Aeon.”⁸³ The counter-culture, too, was obsessed with the Aquarian Age and its promise of the transformation of human consciousness.⁸⁴ In parts of his aesthetic formulations Reed is clearly sympathetic to the Yeatsian prediction of an inward turn, the metaphysical country behind the eyes, but with Loup Garou he makes the representative hero of the age a figure of aggression and outward confrontation.

Loup Garou, derived from the French, is the name given to werewolves and vampires in Haiti. Though the werewolves can be male, loups garous are more commonly known to be female vampires who suck the blood of children, as they are generally in West African societies.⁸⁵ Most significantly for Reed, loup garous are associated with the Petro, not the Rada cult of Vodoun.⁸⁶ Petro is, in Maya Deren's words, “a New World answer to New World Needs.”⁸⁷ Where the loa of Rada, a cult of Dahomean origin, are generally protective, guardian powers, the Petro loa represent aggressive action, a response to the history of enslavement and violence: “For it was the Petro cult, born in the hills, nurtured in secret, which gave both the moral force and the actual organization to the escaped slaves who plotted and trained, swooped down upon the plantations and led the rest of the slaves in the revolt that, by 1804, had made of Haiti the second free colony in the western hemisphere, following the United States.”⁸⁸ Loup Garou is, then, an appropriate choice of protagonist in a poem that satirically masks its own complex cultural kinships behind a polarized drama of cultural slavery and revolt. (The parentage of Reed's hero is, once again, telling here since Pisces is the “symbol of confinement and restraint, the fishes being tethered together,” and Aquarius one of the aerial signs, a symbol of freedom.)⁸⁹

“The crack of the slave-whip,” Deren reminds the reader, sounds constantly in Petro rites like “a never-to-be-forgotten ghost.”⁹⁰ Reed's hero is also “Lord of the Lash” but Reed, with his characteristic penchant for the humour of the incongruous, reincarnates a now-forgotten hero from B-movie westerns in the grim shadow of the Petro cult. According to The Film Encyclopedia, Al La Rue, a.k.a. “Lash” La Rue, was

Born on June 15, 1917, in Michigan. Cowboy hero of miniscule-budget Hollywood Westerns of the late 40s, known as “Lash” for his principle weapon, a 15-foot bullwhip, which he used on his enemies with great skill. His film career was brief and unmemorable. He later performed in carnivals and toured the South as a Bible-thumping evangelist, preaching the gospel and contemplating astrology and reincarnation. He had several brushes with the law, answering charges of vagrancy, public drunkenness, and possession of marijuana. He claims to have been married and divorced 10 times.⁹¹

At the start of Yellow Back Radio, run out of too many towns, Loop Garoo has joined “a small circus” (YBR 10).

Following the syncretic principles of New World religions, Reed takes the transformation of African vampire folklore one step further than it has already been taken in Vodoun. The Petro Loup Garou is reborn as a North American cowboy (and in recent years a new cowboy loa has in fact appeared in Brazil), though this is not quite accurate; rather, he is reborn as a popular culture idea of a cowboy and much more. La Rue stands at the other end of American mythology from Will Rogers. The bundle of paradoxical collisions represented by La Rue's career, like the heterogeneity of Vodoun, rather than the deceptively sanitized Christian imperialism of his more famous colleague, stands as the true groundwork for a usable indigenous mythology. It is in his vertiginous blend of New World religion and an Emersonian mythology of Americana that Reed discovers weapons for his Mental War against cultural exclusionism.

VII

In Blake the female Ololon returns to Milton and is gathered up around Jesus. Reed does not follow this occult sexual law, the merging of male and female, the return of the Shekinah to God.⁹² The Afro-American offspring of Pisces and Aries is instead a divided self, a “half breed son.” Reed significantly erases all elements of the female from the mythology of loup garous and transfers the figure into a classical American male mythology of self-regeneration through violence.⁹³

Those 1960s poets who adopted the gunslinger as hero in their re-engagement with Whitman dramatized the ambivalent potential of the Transcendentalist self.⁹⁴ While the conflictual poetic narratives made explicit the blurred boundaries between Whitman's trans-continental visionary journey and the violent history of Manifest Destiny, the hero wrapped in the aura of the six gun mystique was at the same time himself a reincarnation of what Quentin Anderson has called the “imperial self.” In the 1950s and 1960s writers adopted the figure of the outlaw as representative for the creative artist. The outlaw was an ideal actor in the dramatization of the antagonistic relationship between self and society, but the myth of the Western outlaw contained within it an ambivalent resolution of this conflict through acts of violence.⁹⁵ Emerson had accepted war as a function of self-reliance and a permanent condition of nature, suggesting that self-reliance was in fact initially a stance against society.⁹⁶ While the emergence of the outlaw as artist-hero in the 1960s was also part of an oppositional stance, the literary anarchism could not escape a degree of association with the logic of the then prevalent consensus ideology that offered itself as the end of ideology.⁹⁷ The interest here is in Reed's turn to the gunslinger as hero as an acceptance of the unavailability of the prophetic model of resolution in the late 1960s. The alternative of satiric narratives, based on occult rather than dialectical models, maintains double consciousness as an arena of perpetual conflict. Reed's persona takes the moment of conflict as the bridge to the triumph of satire in the vacuum left by the failed Blakean brotherhood of artists. While the final showdown between the Cowboy and Set, initiated as a new beginning at the end of Reed's poem, must still be seen as a continuation of Mental War, the poetic rhetoric there leaves little room for a possible mutuality through art. This turn in the second half of Reed's poem is part of a much broader problematic in Reed's work that is not easily absorbed by sympathetic understanding.

The “I” of “I am a cowboy” is a descendent of the expansive and incorporative selves of Whitman and Emerson. Reed's cowboy hero, confronted with the double-consciousness of a divided self, adopts a strategy of inflation, an “unrealistic aggrandizement” of the ego.⁹⁸ This process is part of the “shifts from communal modes of self-validation to a psychic self-reliance [that] have always been part of magic and religion, and perhaps of action itself,” and have characterized classic texts of American literature.⁹⁹ The transition from the Blakean notions of artist and community to the model of the gunslinger reverses the transition from sacrifice to performance in the second stanza and reincarnates the artist as sacrificial priest. This section examines this shift as the site of the imperial self's fullest manifestation and Reed's use of the possibilities of immanence in magic as the vehicle of this appearance.

In the sixth and seventh stanzas Reed repeats the wedding of Afro-American music, Ancient Egyptian religion and another classic scene of western mythology, but the movement now, unlike that of the second stanza, is from performance back to sacrifice:

I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra. Boning-up in
the ol West i bide my time. You should see
me pick off these tin can wippersnappers. I
write the mowtown long plays for the comeback of
Osiris. Make them up when stars stare at sleeping
steer out here near the campfire. Women arrive
on the backs of goats and throw themselves on
my Bowie.
I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra. Lord of the lash,
the Loup Garou Kid. Half breed son of Pisces and
Aquarius. I hold the souls of men in my pot. I do
the dirty boogie with the scorpions. I make the bulls
keep still and was the first swinger to grape the taste.

(C 18)

Compare this to the take-over of Video Junction by Loop Garoo and the children in Yellow Back Radio reported by “the shotgun messenger from the Black Swan Stagecoach”:

Everybody dead except for the kids up in the mountains dancing and smoking injun tobaccy and some women arriving on a shindig on the backs of obscene goats. Without no floogers on. Nekkid. Was bettern a topless. One of them hookers had knockers on her that was biggern a helliummed grapefruit. Three black cowboys were seated on tree stumps drinking from some wooden bowl and grinning. One of 'em was playing the slide trombone.

Then everybody got on the ground. They was gnashing their teeth and rolling over each other and the air got all hot and funky. Finally they took some woman and put her on a platform on a log, then this one black cowboy took a Bowie and jugged the woman in the chest. She didn't even yell but said some furriner jaw-breaking word, exquisite exquisite, said it over and over again.

(YBR 55)

A little later in the chapter Loop chants a black mass, conjuring up the devil, Vodoun loa and “his personal Loa, Judas Iscariot, the hero who put the finger on the devil” (YBR 61-64).

Dionysus descends too easily here. The parody works within the terms of a discourse it seeks to subvert. The obvious sexism (as with the “school marms” and Isis) and show of phallocentrism are facile alternatives to Yeats's anxieties about sex and age. Reed's emotions of excess come as easy as Yeats's losses. The implied construction of this Yeats as representative of the sterility of Western culture (Blake notwithstanding) offers the instant gratification of cliché. To be sure the heathen rites are Cardinal Spellman's worst nightmares made flesh, the Afro-American adopting his stereotypical association with the devil not as a mark of condemnation but as a sign of his status as fellahin, but the satiric resurfacing of the repressed uncritically maintains the counter-cultural psychoanalytic model as political arena. The 1960s were witness to the fact that, without adequate social forms to hold it, the erotic release of the Bacchae was likely to result in disaster not revolution.¹⁰⁰ This is where malign priests like Charles Manson stepped in. Reed is forced to revert from the controls of art to the repetitive regeneration of violent sparagmos. The eroticism of the famous “mowtown long plays” heralds the return of the Bacchus prototype, the Egyptian god of viticulture. The trombone playing artist stands on the periphery, providing accompaniment for the hallucinogenic orgy; this is Reed himself, a one-time player of that instrument.¹⁰¹ In “I am a cowboy” and Yellow Back Radio this is Eros's reply to Logos. While the ecstatic ceremony of “I am a cowboy” may restore the “limb scattered” Osiris of “Time and the Eagle,” transforming the poetic hero from passive to active agent, and may be compatible with the patterns of artistic regeneration in Blake, perpetual sacrificial renewal is finally antithetical to the visionary sense. Blake's “The Mental Traveller” rejects the delusions of determinism for the potential of spiritual progress. As Hazard Adams has detailed, when Yeats wrote of Blake's poem in the first version of A Vision, he isolated the single pattern of the poem as the myth of “the perpetual return of the same thing”: “Yet the myth must include the Traveller himself, the visionary who comprehends delusion. The Mental Traveller finds his way out of the circle and affirms that man may discover something more than the ‘perpetual return of the same thing.’”¹⁰² Unlike the Spenglerian Yeats, Blake asserts “that the cycle whirls to a vortex instead of rolling endlessly in space. That is, one proceeds toward vision if one rejects the idea of history as a simple straight line for the idea of history as cycle. But one attains to vision only when one sees time as a point.”¹⁰³ In his vacillation between vision and satire the anarchist poet finds himself attracted to the magical powers of the priest as model.¹⁰⁴ But Sun Ra's captaincy of his Ark is finally incompatible with the fully democratic experiment of the Jazz Composers' Guild, and it is telling that, unlike Melville's Pequod, it is the Arkestra, not the Guild, that has survived. While it is true that Sun Ra embodies the spirit of Los, he also steps into a stance ultimately antithetical to Blake and to Whitman by confusing the roles of prophet and priest. Not only does Sun Ra gather up the multiplicity of tradition and innovation in his music into his performance persona of ritual priest and utopian prophet, he presides as priestly leader over the famous, strangely monastic community of his Arkestra. A unique phenomenon in the history of jazz, the members of the Arkestra have often lived together as a commune, following not only Sun Ra's musical leadership, but also his esoteric mystical teachings and his self-help (even dietary) doctrines.

Also in the 1960s, the Jewish American poet Jerome Rothenberg takes the shaman as a figure for the poet. Extending the sense of shamanism as a “technique of ecstasy” and of the shaman as a “technician of the sacred” in Mircea Eliade's cross-cultural study of the phenomenon,¹⁰⁵ he argues in 1968 that “the shaman can be seen as a protopoet, for almost always his technique hinges on the creation of special linguistic circumstances, i.e., of song and invocation.”¹⁰⁶ Himself moving between various “primitive” cultures and contemporary poetic forms, Rothenberg is interested in “a common (shamanic / not priestly) pattern.”¹⁰⁷ In a 1984 interview, pushed to define this delicate politics more fully against the developments of the preceding decades, Rothenberg acknowledges the susceptibilities of the archaic poetic model inside contemporary culture. Discussing the increased preoccupation with Dionysian release in American society, the growth of the Daemonic in popular culture, and figures like Jim Jones, he senses the dangers of a malign spill-over into poetic and social explorations seeking release from established frameworks into the unknown: “These are powers of the mind and they still remain—and some of the worst of its is probably a result of their release in what has been an extremely repressed, repressive culture”; “If shamanism depends somehow on a one-to-one relationship—the presence of the shaman and the other—then I don't think you can deal with it in mass-communication terms. I think it is ultimately irresponsible to try and do so and that was the tremendous failure of such as Timothy Leary …”¹⁰⁸ Such strategies become, in fact, a disastrous over-compensation for the lack of social integration that distinguishes the modern poet from the shaman.¹⁰⁹

At the end of “I am a cowboy,” the returning hero seeks to chase out Set, the “imposter RAdio of Moses' bush” (C 18). In Yellow Back Radio Loop's magic is directed as invasive noise within existing mass media and communication systems. In both instances the artist-magician aims simultaneously for his own immanence within the circuits. While there is no nostalgic dismantling of technology here, the media extensions of the human offer an effective diffusion of magical control. The “Old Woman” who runs the talk show in the town of Yellow Back Radio leaves town after “the Loop Garoo Kid came in there and put some bad waves into her transmitter.” She explains that “the ‘demons of the old religion are becoming the Gods of the new,’ cause he put something on her that had her squawking like a chicken” (YBR 83). Chief Showcase, referring to this and other incidents, explains the power of “nigger words—… how they move up and down the line like hard magic beads out riffing all the language in the syntax” (YBR 129). Within Reed's dramatization of cultural wars in terms of information theory paradigms, the “nigger words” are forces of anti-chance, not entropy; they create new meanings as they dissolve existing ones.¹¹⁰ Examining literature in the light of theories of negentropy in information theory, physics and biology, William Paulson acknowledges that the supposition of self-organization from noise in literature depends to some degree on romantic notions of literary autonomy but suggests that “romantic autonomy itself can now be reread in the context of contemporary, non-vitalistic and non-teleological approaches to the autonomy of organisms.”¹¹¹ Reed's easy moves between romantic models of the artist and contemporary technological frameworks is similarly suggestive. Along with the destruction of Video Junction, Loop Garoo is concerned “with the serious business of closing every conceivable repair shop available to Yellow Back Radio, whose signals were needless to say becoming very very faint” (YBR 118). But the Pope realizes that Loop wants to broadcast his own “strange fixes” (YBR 119) without interference. Not surprisingly, Loop's hideout is a cave under “the Peak of No Mo Snow” (YBR 155), snow, of course, being the term for the effect of deteriorated image quality on television or video tape.

Reed is an admirer of Marshall McLuhan. In the late-1960s he reiterates the vision of a heterogeneous global village:

With a televised technology tribalism and separatism are impossible. Given what McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller have shown us, you can't be a separatist. … Once You become an international mind-miner it's all over. That's where the Afro-American artist is today: John Coltrane going to Ali Akbar Khan, Afro-American ragas, Bill Dixon doing science-fiction music, Sun Ra into Gustav Holst.¹¹²

And commenting on the title of his second novel, Reed explains that he “based the book on old radio scripts in which the listener constructed the sets from his imagination—that's why radio, also because it's an oral book, a talking book; people say they read it aloud, that is, it speaks through them, which makes it a loa” (S 134).¹¹³ “Given only the sound of a play,” McLuhan writes, “we have to fill in all of the senses, not just the sight of the action.”¹¹⁴ For the Catholic McLuhan, the transformation of human consciousness promised by the technologies of the global village will be the modern day second coming. It is in this sense that George Steiner is correct in stressing that “McLuhan is [Blake's] successor over and over again.”¹¹⁵ Reed's singling out of musicians whose work is marked by a cross-cultural imagination acknowledges as much. But in his explanation of his novel's sources in orality and radio he uncritically extends his meaning into the processes of possession. McLuhan, however (and despite his own religiosity), knows that within the magic of “the tribal drum” of radio “the old web of kinship” can begin “to resonate once more with the note of fascism.”¹¹⁶

As Richard Poirier has argued, there is in a great deal of American literature a crisis of failure at that point in the work when the author attempts to externalize the ideal consciousness (the “visionary eye”/I) of his hero, “tries to insert it, to borrow William James's metaphor, into social and verbal environments that won't sustain it. And the crisis is confronted not only by the heroes but also by their creators when it comes to conceiving of some possible resolution to the conflict of inner consciousness or some suitable external reward for it.”¹¹⁷ The point at which Loup Garou emerges and takes on the mantle of the priest-magician is such a moment of crisis for both protagonist and author in “I am a cowboy.” It is also the point at which we can most fully grasp those principal forms of the self in Reed that permit Yeats, Transcendentalism and Vodoun to perversely cohabit in the same body.

Terence Diggory has recorded the very significant impact of American poetry on the work of Yeats and of the subsequent engagement with Yeats in the work of several American poets. Yeats was initially attracted to Whitman as a poet who spoke to shared concerns of nationhood. But after his failure to establish the national theatre and a communal tradition through the recuperation of ancient Irish legend and folk beliefs, Yeats found in Emerson and Whitman poets who “had discovered in the self an alternative to tradition that was at the same time a new source of tradition.”¹¹⁸ This is what Diggory calls “the tradition of the self,” a tradition fundamentally different to the Romantic tradition of self-expression:

For Wordsworth, the self was given or, at most, discovered; for Yeats, the self was created. In the process of being created, the self becomes distanced or externalized. It is literally ex-pressed, but not as in romantic expression, because Yeats's externalized self differs from the internal self where it originated. Once externalized, the self is viewed not as the poet's content but rather as a form to be entered into; it is the mask or antiself that must be pursued throughout life.

Though it has roots in Blake's Four Zoas and Shelley's Alastor, Yeats's postulation of a dual or even multiple self marks another signal divergence from romantic self-expression, since that theory demands an identity between what is expressed and what is contained in the poet's true self. The romantic desires harmony between subjective and objective experience, a harmony that Yeats could preserve only by expanding the definition of the self to include what appeared to him as quite disparate modes of experience. Subjectively, Yeats felt himself to be the creator of the world, but, objectively, he felt himself the helpless victim of the world's intransigence. By granting a measure of truth to both selves, Yeats could adopt a heroic stance in his poetry without diminishing the obstacles he faced.¹¹⁹

From its inception in 1917 onwards, the philosophy of A Vision was formulated in the context of World War I and its aftermath, the Russian Revolution and unending insurrection, guerrilla warfare, civil disobedience and civil war in Ireland that destroyed that class of landed gentry which was Yeats's symbol for civilization and tradition.¹²⁰ Yeats's response to the times was the assertion that “a civilization is a struggle to keep self-control,” an act of “an almost superhuman will” that is doomed to failure within his own deterministic system: “The loss of control over thought comes towards the end; first the sinking in upon the moral being, then the last surrender, the irrational cry, revelation. …”¹²¹ This paradox of “superhuman will” and determinism is what Diggory is referring to in his contrasting of the duality of “creator” and “helpless victim.” As Diggory goes on to argue, it is through the tradition of the self and its use of the mask that the poet attempts to overcome his sense of passivity and victimization before the forces of history.

… Yeats was able to retain a sense of inspiration as coming from outside—a sense demanded by the feeling of helplessness before the world—and yet to know also that his inspiration came from himself, since there was also a self that was outside. To enjoy the sanction of external authority and yet to recognize that authority as the self is the definitive experience of the tradition of the self.¹²²

Reed's personae are his masks. Through them he too enacts the drama of dual or multiple selves caught between the constraints of history and the promise of heroic action and self-genesis. The imperial self retrieves its own projected self as its sanction and inspiration. It is through this poetic device that Reed overcomes the experience of history as absolute fate in “Time and the Eagle.” What Diggory refers to as subjective and objective experiences in Yeats, Anderson, in connection with American poetry, calls “the two imaginative modes” of the “imperial self,” “incorporation” and “agency.”¹²³ “But,” as far as Yeats's work is concerned, “English romanticism checked [his] American Adamic impulse, freeing him to conceive a poetry distinct from either of its sources. The tradition of the self grows less distinctively American as Yeats shapes it to accommodate the communal concerns that he shared with the English romantics.”¹²⁴ These concerns may be among the principle reason why an Afro-American writer may be attracted to the romantic tradition. And Yeats, as the poet who mediates between this tradition and the Transcendentalist tradition of the self in the context of colonialist politics, understandably engages the attention of Afro-American poets. While Reed turns, at the start of his poem, to Blake for a model of communitas, he cannot sustain this collectivity and increasingly incorporates Yeats into the more traditionally American and anarchist patterns of the “imperial self.”¹²⁵

Notes

1. Ishmael Reed, “Time and the Eagle,” Umbra 1.2 (December 1963): 5.

2. John O'Brien, Interviews with Black Writers (New York: Liveright, 1973), 170.

3. Ishmael Reed, Shrovetide in Old New Orleans (Garden City: Doubleday, 1978), 5. Hereafter cited parenthetically as S.

4. Before coming to New York Reed had written a short story that was a parody of the second coming. The story was called “Something Pure.” It was never published and is now lost. See Henry Louis Gates, “Ishmael Reed,” in Thadious M. Davis and Trudier Harris, eds., Afro-American Fiction Writers since 1955, Dictionary of Literary Biography (Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1983), 33:219-32.

5. The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Vol. I, The Poems, rev. ed., ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 187. All subsequent quotations from Yeats's poetry are from this edition and page numbers will be cited in the text.

6. W. B. Yeats, A Vision (1937; New York: Collier Books, 1966), 268. Compare also page 214: “The bird signifies truth when it eats, evacuates, builds its nest, engenders, feeds its young; do not all intelligible truths lie in its passage from egg to dust?” The poem “Leda and the Swan” does not mention eggs of Leda, hence my argument for the likelihood of Reed's having read A Vision. The bloody tide and the bloodied moon are also common Yeatsian images.

7. Northrop Frye, “Yeats and the Language of Symbolism” (1954), Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World Inc., 1963), 225.

8. Reed, “Time and the Eagle,” 6.

9. Ishmael Reed, Conjure: Selected Poems, 1963-1970 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1971), viii. Hereafter cited parenthetically as C.

10. Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (1947; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 200, 202.

11. William Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David E. Erdman, rev. ed. (New York: Doubleday, 1988), 95. Hereafter cited parenthetically as Blake.

12. M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (1971; New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1973), 191, 223-24.

13. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, 177-83.

14. Hayden, Collected Poems, 51. On the composition of the poem and its place in the uncompleted project, see John O'Brien, Interviews with Black Writers (New York: Liveright, 1973), 118.

15. For a reading of “Passage to India” in the context of the Romantic plot of dualism, see Martin Bickman, American Romantic Psychology: Emerson, Poe, Whitman, Dickinson, Melville, 2nd ed. (Dallas: Spring Publications, 1988), 32-37.

16. Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems (San Francisco: City Lights, 1956), 18.

17. See George Hart, A Dictionary of Egyptian Gods and Goddesses (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), 151-67.

18. New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology (1955), cited in J. M. Linebarger and Monte Atkinson, “Getting to Whitey: Ishmael Reed's ‘I am a cowboy …,’” Contemporary Poetry 2.1 (1975): 10. Linebarger and Atkinson identified the Horus myth in the poem.

19. See M. A. Murray, Ancient Egyptian Legends (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1913), chapter viii, “The Battles of Horus.”

20. Ishmael Reed, Yellow Back Radio Broke Down (Garden City: Doubleday, 1969), 115. Hereafter cited parenthetically as YBR.

21. John J. Delany, Dictionary of American Catholic Biography (New York: Doubleday, 1984), 546. See also Reed's poem in Conjure, “for cardinal spellman who hated voodoo” (58).

22. “Besides the rites, it also contains rubrics that must be followed, hymns that may be used, and formulas employed in parish records.” G. J. Sigler, “Roman Ritual,” New Catholic Encyclopaedia, Vol. 12 (New York: McGraw Hill, 1967), 523-24.

23. Sigler, “Roman Ritual,” traces the various attempts to codify the rituals of the church from the Liber Sacerdotalis compiled by Albert Castellani in 1523 through various revisions in the 16th and 17th centuries to the most recent and definitive revision in 1952. Only minor changes have been made since (524).

24. Lawrence Buell, Literary Transcendentalism: Style and Vision in the American Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973), 175. The first two quotations are from Emerson.

25. The metamorphosis of personae in Reed's poetry also serves self-creation, and insofar as this entails an externalization of the self in a “mask,” it is very much part of the drama of duality and of Reed's attraction to Yeats. But more of that later.

26. C. M. Aherne, “Fable of Popess Joan,” New Catholic Encyclopaedia, 7: 991-92. See also Lawrence Durrell, Pope Joan, translated and adapted from the Greek of Emmanuel Royidis, (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1960) for further information and bibliography. Pope Joan was discovered only when she gave birth during a procession between the Colosseum and St. Clements in Rome.

27. For Ptah, see Hart, A Dictionary, 172-77.

28. Gary Snyder, Earth House Hold (New York: New Directions, 1969), 105, 115.

29. Joseph Henry, “A MELUS Interview: Ishmael Reed,” MELUS 11.1 (Spring 1984): 85.

30. See interview with Reed in the present issue of Callaloo.

31. See Robert H. Abel, “Reed's ‘I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra,’” Explicator 30.9 (May 1981): item 81, n.p.

32. James Haskins, Witchcraft, Mysticism and Magic in the Black World (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974), 9, 50.

33. Geoffrey Thurley, The Turbulent Dream: Passion and Politics in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1983), 174-79, summarizes the debate about Yeats's use of “artifice.”

34. T. R. Henn, The Lonely Tower: Studies in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats, rev. ed. (London: Methuen, 1965), 215.

35. Harold Bloom, “from Yeats,” ed. William H. Pritchard, W. B. Yeats: A Critical Anthology (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 335, 337. Bloom notes that one cancelled line in an early draft of the poem reads “I fly from nature to Byzantium” and another applauds the city as the place “where nothing changes” (335).

36. The phrase is from Arra M. Garab, Beyond Byzantium: The Last Phase of Yeats's Career (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1969), 20.

37. Joachim Berendt, The Jazz Book, trans. D. Morgenstern and H. and B. Bredigkeit (1953; Westport: Lawrence Hill, 1975), 77.

38. Tam Fiofiori, “Space Age Music: The Music of Sun Ra,” Negro Digest 19.3 (1970): 25.

39. Ekkehard Jost, Free Jazz (1974; New York: DeCapo Press, 1981), 191.

40. Jost, Free Jazz, 191.

41. Berendt, Jazz Book, 359, my emphasis.

42. In Jost, Free Jazz, 181.

43. Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde (1962; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), 127.

44. Gerhard Putschogl, “Black Music-Key Force in Afro-American Culture: Archie Shepp on Oral Tradition and Black Culture,” History and Tradition in Afro-American Culture, ed. Gunter Lenz (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1984), 268. However, the emphasis on historical research and the exploration of cross-cultural materials in the work of many “white modernists” clearly challenges both Poggioli and Putschogl. We can no longer conceive of the avant-garde in terms of a perpetual historical discontinuity as Poggioli's emphasis on futurism, early surrealism and dada perhaps allows him to do. Nor can we accept the idea that an attachment to tradition is an exclusive preserve of “ethnic” modernists.

45. Leonard Deen, Conversing in Paradise: Poetic Genius and Identity-as-Community in Blake's Los (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1983), 1.

46. The sun is also “the axis upon which the entire Voodoo cult turns.” See Milo Rigaud, Secrets of Voodoo, 8-9.

47. Tom Dent, “Umbra Days,” Black American Literature Forum 14.3 (1980): 108.

48. “Rosewald Rudd, John Winter, Mike Mantler, Burton Greene and Paul and Carla Bley … were the charter members of the Guild, together with Sun Ra, Archie Shepp, John Tchicai, Cecil Taylor and Dixon himself.” Valerie Wilmer, As Serious as Your Life: The Story of the New Jazz (London: Allison & Busby, 1974), 214. Most of my information on the Guild and Dixon is taken from Wilmer, 213-15. See also Robert Levin, “The Jazz Composers' Guild: An Assertion of Dignity,” Downbeat 32.10 (May 6, 1965): 17-18, and Dan Morgenstern and Martin Williams, “The October Revolution: Two Views of the Avant Garde in Action,” Downbeat 31.30 (November 19, 1964): 15, 33.

49. Jean-Louis Noames, “Le System Taylor,” (interview), Jazz Magazine No. 125 (December 1965): 33. My translation. The history of the Jazz Composers' Guild must have been an all too familiar story to Reed since it closely paralleled the history of Umbra, the poetry group to which he belonged. There is no space here to examine the history of Umbra. For further information, see Michel Oren, “A '60s Saga: The Life and Death of Umbra,” Part I, Freedomways 24.3 (1984): 167-81. Part II of this study appeared in Freedomways 24.4 (1984): 237-54. Together the two parts comprise the most sustained social and literary history of Umbra to date. See also Dent, “Umbra Days,” 105-08 and Lorenzo Thomas, “The Shadow World: New York's Umbra Workshop & Origins of the Black Arts Movement,” Callaloo 4.1 (October 1978): 53-72. Thomas' article, like Dent's piece, is a useful source because written by a former member of Umbra. Reed gives his own brief account of Umbra in the introduction to 19 Necromancers from Now, xx-xxi.

50. Jost, Free Jazz, 199, my emphasis.

51. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music (1977; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), trans. Brian Massumi, 138. Attali is discussing the Jazz Composers' Guild, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the Jazz Composers' Orchestra Association and other similar mutual-aid organizations that developed around the free jazz scene.

52. Nathaniel Mackey, “The Changing Same: Black Music in the Poetry of Amiri Baraka,” Boundary 2, 6.2 (1978): 368, my emphasis. For Attali's comments on improvisation, see Noise, 142.

53. See LeRoi Jones, Black Music (New York: Quill, 1967), 194-95.

54. Deen, Conversing in Paradise, 12.

55. Deen, Conversing in Paradise, 9.

56. For the Yeats references, see The Wind Among the Reeds (1899) and The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933). For Yeats's own glosses on the key images in these books, see Yeats 592, 599.

57. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964; New York: Signet, 1966), 263.

58. For Osiris, see E. A. Wallis Budge, Osiris: The Egyptian Religion of Resurrection (1911; New York: University Books, 1961, two vols. bound as one), 50; for the afterworld's nomenclature, see Rudolf Anthes, “The Mythology of Ancient Egypt,” Mythologies of the Ancient World, ed. Samuel Kramer (Garden City: Doubleday's Anchor Books, 1961), 19. Shadle, “Mumbo Jumbo Gumbo Works,” has remarked on some of these references previously (129-30).

59. S. Foster Damon, A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake (1965; rev. ed., Hanover: University Press of New England, 1988), 395.

60. Damon, A Blake Dictionary, 307.

61. Damon, A Blake Dictionary, 234.

62. Damon, A Blake Dictionary, 332-33.

63. Damon, A Blake Dictionary, 333.

64. For this contrast between Transcendentalism and Romanticism, see Quentin Anderson, The Imperial Self: An Essay in American Literature and Culture (New York: A. Knopf, 1971), 5.

65. Buell, Literary Transcendentalism, 173-74, makes the same point about Whitman's poetry.

66. Alvin F. Harlow, “Wells, Fargo and Company,” Dictionary of American History, rev. ed. (New York: Charles Scribner and Sons, 1976), 7:267.

67. Hart, A Dictionary of Egyptian Gods and Goddesses, 89.

68. For Ezzard Charles, see “Ezzard (Mack) Charles,” The New Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol. II (15th ed., 1974), 763. For a brief note on the Chisholm Trail, see The Encyclopaedia of Americana, Vol. 6 (New York: Americana Corp., 1973), 608-09.

69. Abel, “I am a cowboy,” n.p.

70. The imminent return of the outlaw in this stanza is laden with the same desire that awaits the day when Osiris will “be scattered over 100 ghettoes” (C 4). But in his recurrent satire of Christian atonism, Reed never acknowledges that the Osirian sparagmos is identical to Christian mythologies of regeneration through sacrifice. In the dreamed of restoration of the alchemist's ring, Osiris and Christ are interchangeable. “In Christian alchemy,” M. H. Abrams reminds us, “the Philosopher's Stone was held to correspond to Christ, the Messiah of Nature, who has the apocalyptic function of restoring both fallen and divided man and the fallen and fragmented universe to the perfection of their original unity” (Natural Supernaturalism, 160).

71. Encyclopaedia Britannica Vol. II, 763.

72. Fahmy Farag, The Opposing Virtues (Dublin: The Dolmen Press, 1978), 6.

73. Hazard Adams, Blake and Yeats: The Contrary Vision (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1955), 199.

74. For the dance as order and equilibrium, see “The Double Vision of Michael Robartes” (170-72) or “The Song of the Happy Shepherd” (7-8).

75. Compare also the other dance references in the poem: the “winding” motion of the saxophone in the second stanza; the forced “dance” in the fifth; and the dance music of the “mowtown long plays” in the sixth.

76. Adams, The Contrary Vision, 178.

77. Adams, The Contrary Vision, 178.

78. Hazard Adams, “The Seven Eyes of Yeats,” in William Blake and the Moderns, ed. Robert J. Bertholf and Annette S. Levitt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982), 6.

79. See for example Madge Ambler's “black power” reading of the poem. Ambler, “Ishmael Reed: Who's Radio Broke Down,” Negro American Literature Forum 6.4 (Winter 1972): 125-31.

80. Ishmael Reed, Flight to Canada (New York: Doubleday, 1976), 82, 89.

81. Sepharial, New Dictionary of Astrology (New York: Doubleday, 1976), 82, 89.

82. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, 160.

83. Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks (1948; New York: E. P. Dutton, n.d.), 121.

84. Theodore Roszak, Unfinished Animal: The Aquarian Frontier and the Evolution of Consciousness (1975; London: Faber & Faber, 1976), 3.

85. Alfred Metraux, Voodoo in Haiti, trans. Hugo Charteris (1959; New York: Schocken Books, 1972), 300.

86. Metraux, Voodoo in Haiti, 89; Hurston, Tell My Horse, 180.

87. Maya Deren, The Voodoo Gods (London: Paladin, 1975), 65. Originally published as The Divine Horsemen (1953).

88. Deren, Voodoo Gods, 66-67. Deren also notes that “it is still true, and extremely significant, that wherever Vodoun has been especially suppressed (at the insistence of the Catholic Church) it is the Petro rites that become dominant (66). Petro combines African and Indian elements (68-70) and we remember that in Yellow Back Radio Chief Showcase is the ally of Loop Garoo.

89. Sepharial, Dictionary of Astrology, 84, 7.

90. Deren, Voodoo Gods, 66.

91. The quote and the information on La Rue are from Mark Shadle, “Mumbo Jumbo Gumbo Works: The Kalaedoscopic Fiction of Ishmael Reed,” Ph.D., University of Iowa, 1984, 151. La Rue also made a pornographic film called Hard on the Trail.

92. See the section on “The Sexual Law” in Denis Saurat's Literature and Occult Tradition: Studies in Philosophical Poetry, trans. Dorothy Bolton (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1930), 94-121.

93. See Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973).

94. The exploration of the outlaw in the works of writers as diverse as Gore Vidal, Samuel R. Delany, Charles Olson, Michael McClure, Michael Ondaatje, and Jack Spicer, as well as other relevant materials from the post-war period are examined in Chapter 6 of Stephen Tatum's Inventing Billy the Kid: Visions of the Outlaw in America, 1881-1981 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982). Two works not mentioned by Tatum are particularly revealing companion pieces for both “I am a cowboy” and Yellow Back Radio: Ed Dorn's long poem Slinger (1975), the first two books of which appeared in 1968 and 1969, and Jerome Rothenberg's “Cokboy,” part one of which appeared in 1972 and part two in 1973. There is, unfortunately, no space here to pursue a dialogue among these works.

95. Tatum, Inventing Billy the Kid, 117, 123, 146.

96. Frederick Ives Carpenter, Emerson Handbook (New York: Hendricks House, 1953), 149-50.

97. Cf. the comments on the ideological biases of historians at this time in Tatum, Inventing Billy the Kid, 140-41. On the relationship of the American concept of representative selfhood and consensus ideology to the mythology of the expansive frontier, see Sacvan Bercovitch, “The Rites of Assent: Rhetoric, Ritual, and the Ideology of American Consensus,” in Sam B. Girgus, ed., The American Self: Myth, Ideology, and Popular Culture (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1981), 9, 13.

98. Bickman, American Romantic Psychology, 83: “The double consciousness can be collapsed into a condition that has been called ‘inflation,’ where the ego confounds its own aims and powers with those of the entire psyche. The process can result in an unrealistic aggrandizement of the ego and in a sense of power not fully apprehended or controlled. Perhaps one of the reasons that Emerson's transparent eyeball passage in Nature is such an easy target of satiric and critical deflation is that it suggests this hazardous identification of the ego with the self. …”

99. Anderson, The Imperial Self, 237.

100. For an investigation of the 1960s' obsession with the Dionysian, see Eric Mottram, “Dionysus in America,” Other Times 1 (1975): 38-48.

101. Shadle, “Mumbo Jumbo Gumbo Works,” makes the identification (138). See also the interview with Reed in this issue of Callaloo where Reed talks about his early playing.

102. Adams, The Contrary Vision, 243.

103. Adams, The Contrary Vision, 244. Abrams notes that the return of the divided man to wholeness in Blake is dependent upon his breaking out of “what Blake calls ‘the circle of Destiny’—the cyclical recurrences of pagan history—into a ‘Resurrection to Unity’ which is the full and final closure of the Christian design of history” (Natural Supernaturalism, 260).

104. Although Yeats dissociates the artist and magician, and, like his mentor Blavatsky, rejects the priests as model, his sense of the relationship of art and magic is not always clear. See George Mills Harper, Yeats's Golden Dawn (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), Chapter 8; and Ellmann, Yeats, 56-57, 90-91.

105. Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964).

106. Jerome Rothenberg, “Pre-Face,” Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poetries from Africa, America and Oceania, ed. Rothenberg (1968; Garden City: Anchor Books, 1969), 424.

107. Rothenberg, “Pre-Face,” 440.

108. Gavin Selerie and Eric Mottram, The Riverside Interviews 4: Jerome Rothenberg (London: Binnacle Press, 1984), 31, 32.

109. For a consideration of this social distinction between modern poet and shaman, see Kevin Powers, “A Conversation with Jerome Rothenberg,” Vort 7, 3.1 (1975): 146-47; Fedora Giordano, “Translating the Sacred: The Poet and the Shaman,” in North American Indian Studies: European Contributions, ed. Pieter Hoverns (Gottingen: Edition Herodot, 1981), 109-22; Michael Castro, Interpreting the Indian: Twentieth Century Poets and the Native American (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1983), 122.

110. On the principles of information theory, see Jeremy Campbell, Grammatical Man: Information, Entropy, Language and Life (1982; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), especially 11-12. William R. Paulson explains that noise, the collective term for all causes of interrupted and altered transmission, “may be the interruption of a signal, the pure and simple suppression of elements of a message, or it may be the introduction of elements of an extraneous message … or it may the introduction of elements that are purely random” (The Noise of Culture: Literary Texts in a World of Information [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988], 67.)

111. Paulson, The Noise of Culture, 121.

112. Walt Sheppard, “When State Magicians Fail: An Interview with Ishmael Reed,” The Journal of Black Poetry 1.2 (1969): 73. And in the late-1980s he continued to hold a positive, McLuhanite sense of the possibilities of technology. See also the interview with Reed in this issue of Callaloo.

113. Regarding the other elements in the title, Reed explains that “Yellow Back” was the name given to old, popular Western novels after their yellow covering. “Broke Down” is a “takeoff” on Lorenzo Thomas' poem “Modern Plumbing Illustrated” (1966). “When people say ‘Break it down’ they mean to strip something down to its basic components. So Yellow Back Radio is the dismantling of a genre done in an oral way like radio” (S 134).

114. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 264.

115. In Gerald Emanuel Stearn, ed., McLuhan: Hot & Cool (New York: Dial Press, 1967), 242.

116. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 259.

117. Poirier, A World Elsewhere, 29.

118. Terrence Diggory, Yeats and American Poetry: The Tradition of the Self (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 5.

119. Diggory, Yeats and American Poetry, 5-6. The externalized or dual self, of course, refers to Yeats's ideas of the antithetical and primary selves. See A Vision, 71-72.

120. A. G. Stock, W. B. Yeats: His Poetry and Thought (1961; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 176-78.

121. Yeats, A Vision, 268. The urge behind A Vision is the conservative's anxiety to stabilize history through the construction of a system in which poetics is finally sacrificed to metaphysics. Yvor Winters hits the mark when he writes that Yeats's was a “medieval method” masquerading as “Mallarmean method.” Winters, “from Forms of Discovery” (1967), W. B. Yeats: A Critical Anthology, ed. William H. Pritchard (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 272.

122. Diggory, Yeats and American Poetry, 6.

123. Anderson, Imperial Self, 241.

124. Diggory, Yeats and American Poetry, 7.

125. This same development can be traced over a longer period in the novels. Although the first two novels subscribe to an anarchist individualism, in Mumbo Jumbo, The Last Days of Louisiana Red, and Flight to Canada, Reed returns to narratives of community in the form of mutual aid organizations. But the later novels abandon this attempt and return to a less optative version of the masculine heroism of the earlier novels.