Sparkle, Assassin

Introduction

Although questions have been raised about the violence in Ted Hughes’ work, he has been presented and accepted mainly as a nature poet. The purpose of this book is to show that the animal or nature aspect of his poetry is very often only a mask for a totally different agenda and world of meanings. That Hughes is, in fact, a poet of the occult, of the left hand path, of the deepest, darkest, most lost and abandoned subjectivity; and that only a time which largely accepts the materialist picture of meaninglessness, emptiness and randomness could have been so blinded to what is in his work and raised him so high in estimation.

I wouldn’t call Hughes a decadent poet; barbaric is more like it. And I think it is possible to show that Hughes’ meaning and intentions are really far worse than even ‘barbaric’ suggests. Of course, as quotations from his critical supporters prove, there are always those for whom worse is better.

Like many readers I sort of know something about the lives of Hughes and Sylvia Plath and it would be absurd to pretend that things I am saying about Hughes’ work are not also about the man. Nevertheless it isn’t his biography as such that interests me. It is what he put into the world as a writer that is the subject of this book. So now I will go further and say not only is Hughes not a nature poet in any way that phrase has ordinary meaning, he is largely not a human poet either. His hellish strangled oppressive dark deeply damaging voice is the voice of the non-human elemental energies which he was so keen to contact and his connection with which is so praised by his critical supporters. At best his voice is that of a confused and tortured human being lost in the world of unmeaning; a world expressing implacable hatred of the sun and stars. The word ‘reactionary’, because it will be understood politically, socially, can hardly describe Hughes’ opposition to the meaning and destiny implicit in the existence of our planet and of our whole human endeavour. But: Hughes is a cosmic reactionary.

I wouldn’t have been able to write this book if I hadn’t made a spirit-journey myself, met the same hell and destructive beings, rejected the powers and false light they offer and crossed the abyss that Hughes remained in. Normally one doesn’t go round making such statements. But, faced with the onslaught that Hughes’ work represents and which he articulates so well, it is necessary to speak clearly and make accurate descriptions; and to connect the roots of darkness in his work with a great deal else that is infiltrating our lives socially, culturally and politically. We this planet, whether we know it or not, live in a spirit war whose outcome further down the road will be either the life or the death of ourselves as true human beings. The twentieth century was the beginning of the time of our freedom. One consequence of that is it matters more than ever what we think, how we understand and imagine what kind of beings we are.

One could only call Hughes a great poet, I think, if one has sympathies with the kingdom whose voice he was. But he certainly expressed the world he was caught in with great force and with revealing depth imagery. What one can see scattered everywhere in our deracinated and deteriorating cultural life is in Hughes concentrated and its backside revealed as nowhere else.

Any person whose intention is to clarify consciousness so that it can express good will is bound to meet, tangle with (even for a while lose out to), dark powers. It’s not just unavoidable, it is necessary. But when they come to write, it is the voice of a person we should hear, the voice of the human representative, who is now in a position to report and describe what they have met with and overcome. If a person hasn’t done this, their time to speak hasn’t come yet. That is the ethics of serious writing. To pour unprocessed negativity on the world (as in Hughes’ Crow for example) in guise of shocking and waking people up, performing self-exorcism, or acknowledging one’s ‘dark brother’ ­– that is to have allowed oneself to become an unresisting conduit. The human endeavour is to meet the ugly, malevolent and hellish, learn to stand in its presence, and hold it in a steady gaze of such quality that the dark is dissolved and its energy released. It can then be used by a focussed consciousness on behalf of good will.

That is the task. It might take years. It might take lifetimes. But no matter how one may burn to speak, or how much one may think one has accumulated wisdom and powers with which to amaze the world and acquire followers (it is very easy to acquire followers), one does not publish until the material has been rendered into shape and tone that makes it daylight-available; useful to others. As part of process, part of a person’s own freeing, we may pour hellish horrible and harmful things onto paper. It is a way of finding out what is there. But that is not creation; not victory. It is research. This doesn’t mean that in a play or a story, even in a collection of pieces, we can’t represent darkness in various forms. But if the intention, if the author, is healthy, the opposing powers are held in place by the mood, meaning and overall shape of the work. Anything less (and the world now is full of this less, in all arts and media) is surrender, secret worship, sometimes open advocacy of the inhuman.

The encroachment of evil into the human world increased in intensity all through the last century. We had the pervert states of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. But it was only really since the Sixties that, in the West generally the world of the mind began to become seriously darkened. That is, in the artistic, literary and entertainment worlds. It has been darkened by materialism for at least one hundred and fifty years.

Now for the first time in human history, certainly in the history of high civilisations, we have a poet, a prophet, a proposer of a ‘new divinity’, who fully in the open, honoured, respected and accepted went into (summoned?) the darkness and returned with no light, but with buckets of blood, death and spirit-negation to pour over the world. To make sense of what goes on in Hughes’s work, I make, as the book goes along, a description of the meaning and shape of our time. It is necessary as well to look at many unpleasant things from the deadliness of materialist reductionism to the inadequacy (I am being polite) of Jung and the idiocy of Graves’s The White Goddess (not feeling polite).

Hughes Territory

Ted Hughes, born in 1930 in Yorkshire, decided early on to reject all the major currents of the civilisation he was born into. His desire was to find and develop another way of being, of relating not just to nature but to the larger, the cosmic world. To pursue this he studied and recommended shamanism, explored the cabbala, used the ouija board, practised hypnotism and certain kinds of meditation, and performed invocations and summonings. He absorbed very fully the work of Jung and The White Goddess by Robert Graves. As poet laureate he thought that the English were a people, possibly a tribe, that would be incomplete without its sacred head, the monarch. In the actual long historical drive of the English and the other parts of Britain towards individuality and democracy he showed no interest at all. In fact he thought all that had been a mistake. The Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment meant nothing to him. The massive darkness at work in the century he lived in, as expressed in Communism and Nazism, he does not deal with or refer to, though he wrote a considerable amount of prose. He said that what he wanted was the elemental, the non-human, to find ‘a divinity in the darkness’, and he sought means to make such connections. Quite how far he went, what his actual practises were are not, as far as I have seen, fully known or described. But hints and references are everywhere in his poetry and prose, particularly in Birthday Letters.

You could say that, basically, what he wanted to do was magic. Although Hughes himself and his critical supporters say that the point of the shamanic journey is to undergo deep rending change and bring back healing knowledge, Ted Hughes, despite all his recorded agonies, did neither. He did not succeed in his atavistic quest, and there was no chance that he could have. At the heart of his endeavour was a refusal to be a conscious modern person, alive in a complex of potentials, forces and influences that can be investigated and accepted or rejected. Resolutely his whole life, with all the determination of a powerful personality, he pursued a path that doesn’t go anywhere good any more. As a result he got into deep trouble. His poetry expresses the hell of it from his first to his last days.

What makes Hughes worth writing about is the fact that he was in one way a tremendous poet. His capacity to express his inner life and the influences he was subject to in vivid imagery and symbol is phenomenal. The fact that he didn’t understand or that he wrongly interpreted what he was putting down on paper is another issue. The view that he gives into the darkness and the power and forces at work in human life in our time is not available anywhere else that I know of. Another matter of importance is that the meaning of what his poetry actually contains has been recognised by hardly anyone. The reason for that is that the intellectual and literary class of Britain and America is very largely Darwinian, materialist and atheist. It is one of the wonders of our time that they maintain this position while displaying real interest in literature, ideas, and culture generally. How do they reconcile these two things, materialism and the realm of ideas and meaning? Well, they don’t. They do not make that effort. As a result they can’t see or interpret what is before their eyes. That also is an effect of darkness.

The twentieth century saw dark ideologies take over or attempt to take over whole continents. We had Nazism and Marxism, the atavistic eruption of Japan into the world. Those forces were either defeated physically or have now collapsed. The powers that inspired them have not gone away. What I call, for simplicity’s sake, ‘the darkness’ desires to close down the world, to abort the human venture, which cannot proceed except in freedom. The violent revolutionary wing of Islam is now one of the bearers of that force. Their programme and actions proceed from inner nightmare. They are not alone of course. The British and American governments, for example, have also committed blind criminal folly. It’s not my job to recount the daily news, though I will point briefly here at the barrenness of contemporary art, the blood and weirdness in our werewolf, zombie, monster and alien movies. These things and other such are not random. They rise from a certain configuration of being that we are in. This is a specific time in our evolution. Through the work of Hughes and others and selections from my own writing I attempt to characterise some features of it.

Bon voyage!

1. Some Quotations

For many people who may only have read some anthology pieces Ted Hughes is probably thought of as a poet of wild nature, of vivid natural life. I bring in some quotations here to show the range of what we are dealing with in his work.

Peter Orr asked Hughes: ‘Is there a consistent ‘you’?… Hughes replied: ‘Not really, no. I tend to suspect that my poems are written by about three different spirits’. (1963)

From the beginning Hughes is searching for a way of reconciling human vision with the energies, powers, presences, of the non-human cosmos. (Keith Sagar, The Art Of Ted Hughes, p4)

The subject was suggested to Hughes by an Ouija board. The Ouija spirit liked poetry … and one hot day wrote a poem about ‘a cool little spirit that wanted to live in the bottom of icebergs’ … The second part virtually wrote itself and seemed to Hughes to be the Ouija spirit’s revision of the first part – and very much better. (Ibid., p39)

What do I know about truth? As if simple-minded dedication to truth were the final law of existence. I only know more and more clearly what is good for me. It’s my mind that has this contemptible awe for the probably true, and my mind, I know, I prove it every minute, is not me and is by no means sworn to help me … But those others! I relax for a moment … and they are in complete possession. They plunge into me mercilessly, exultantly. There is no question of their intention or of their power … The strength melts from me, my bowels turn to water, my consciousness darkens and shrinks … (‘Snow’ from Wodwo, 1967)

I’m always aware, when I’ve ‘finished’ a piece, of being utterly defeated and excluded – as if I’d been shoved aside by somebody I do not like one bit. Yet it seems to be the only way I can do it. (From a letter to editor William Scammell, Nov 1990, Hughes age 60, in the Introduction to Winter Pollen, collection of Hughes’ prose)

Hughes quoted: ‘Any form of violence – any form of vehement activity – invokes the bigger energy, the elemental power circuit of the Universe’ (ath, p32).

These were the months when Ted hypnotized her so that she could sleep, months when he made lists of possible subjects for her to write poems about … (They) were also the months of trying Ted’s exercises: deep-breathing, concentration on objects. Hypnosis was another way of reaching remote layers of consciousness: it was practised by both Ted and Sylvia. (Linda W. Wagner-Martin, Simon and Schuster, p165)

He has said that he thinks of his jaguar poems not only as descriptions of the animal but also as ‘invocations of a jaguar-like body of elemental force, demonic force. It is my belief that symbols of this sort work.

New art awakens our resistance in so far as it proposes changes and inversions, some new order, liberates what has been repressed, lets in too early whiffs of an unwelcome future. But when this incidental novelty has been overtaken or canonised, some other unease remains … An immanence of something dreadful, almost (if one dare say it) something unhuman. The balm of great art is desirable and might even be necessary, but it seems to be drawn from the depths of an elemental grisliness, a ground of echoless cosmic horror. (Winter Pollen, p91)

—

Now I know I never shall

Be let stir.

The man I fashioned and the god I fashioned

Dare not let me stir.

(‘Prometheus On His Crag’, cp, p285)

Hughes, writing to Ann Sexton on the danger of favourable reviews: ‘They separate you from your devil, which hates being observed.’ (from review of Letters of Ted Hughes by David Orr, New York Times, 16 Nov 2008)

… (Ted Hughes) had easy, immediate access to the sources of his inspiration, a permanently open hot line to his unconscious. Over the years, he kept the line open through a weird mishmash of astrology, black magic, Jungian psychology, Celtic myth and pagan superstition, and he encouraged Sylvia to do the same. Her sensibility was different from his – more urban and intellectual, more nerves than instincts – so a belief in shamans, ouija boards and the baleful influence of the stars didn’t come naturally to her.

But she was a fast learner and high achiever; anything he could do, she could do better. She was also determined to break through, as he had done, to the inner demons that would make her write the poems she knew she had in her. But when she did, the ghouls she released were malign. They helped her write great poetry, but they destroyed her marriage, then they destroyed her. (A. Alvarez: Ted, ‘Sylvia and Me’, Observer, Sunday Jan 4, 2004 – Google it)

We will be dealing throughout the book with the themes introduced above. But for now, at least we know who we have with us on the ship.

2. Animal Masks

Reading Hughes, one sees quite quickly that animals in his work continually appear as masks for other kinds of entities, and that he is extruding inner content onto the world, not describing it. The amazing thing is that he himself says, often, that that is exactly what he is doing, yet few, if any, have picked up on the fact.

Now it is the dream cries ‘Wolf!

… By day, too, pursue, siege all thought.

Now, lest they choose his head,

Under severe moons he sits making

Wolf-masks, mouths clamped well onto the world.

(‘February’, cp, p61)

… hunted

And haunted by apparitions from tombs

… and bang the river grabs at me

… an electrocuting malice

… trying to rip life off of me…(‘Earth-numb’, cp, p541)

This mute eater, biting through the mind’s

Nursery floor, with eel and hyena and vulture,

With creepy-crawly and the root,

With the sea-worm, entering its birthright.’

(‘Mayday On Holderness’, Lupercal 60c)

‘His voice is drowned by the animals’

(stage direction in Wodwo.)

… I was standing in a valley

Deeper than any dream(‘Ballad’, cp, p72)

‘Ghost Crabs’ (cp, p149) is maybe the longest poem presenting demons as animals:

… Our walls, our bodies, are no problem to them.

… (They) press through our nothingness where we sprawl on beds.

… These crabs own this world.

… They are the powers of this world.

We are their bacteria.

… my god’s down

Under the weight of all that stone…

I do not desire to change my ways,

But now call continually

On you, god or not god, who

Come to my sleeping body through

The world under the world; pray

That I may see more than your eyes

In an animal’s dreamed head …

(‘Crag Jack’s Apostasy’, cp, p84)

Hawk

I haven’t felt the need to write commentary on the quotations above. If they are taken seriously, the evidence is all there in Hughes’ own words. Now, though, we can look at a well known, anthologised ‘nature’ poem. ‘Hawk in the Rain’, the first poem in Hughes’s first book, presents a portion of the psychic condition that persisted with him his whole life. (p19, cp)

I drown in the drumming ploughland, I drag up

Heel after heel from the swallowing of the earth’s mouth,

From clay that clutches my each step to the ankle,

With the habit of the dogged grave, but the hawk…

It’s true the rainfall in the Pennines is twice the national average, but the man is only out for a walk, for God’s sake. The fact is, as nearly always with Hughes, what is going on is something else. The earth, the Ahrimanic forces, are pulling him down. The grave is mentioned.

And what is the opposite pole to that, that operates from above? – the Luciferic forces. The hawk acts as symbol of them: it’s why it is in the poem. It is described as ‘steady as a hallucination’. You would think that someone might have noticed that phrase before, including its author. A hawk, a real live being, out there, – ‘steady as a hallucination’?

After the hawk Hughes refers to himself again: ‘and I / Bloodily grabbed dazed last moment-counting / Morsel in the earth’s mouth …’

Now the rain is forgotten. This is no longer a sodden walk in the mud but something even closer to spiritual facts. He is bloodily grabbed. We have ‘morsel’, ‘mouth’: he is being eaten by the earth. (See chapter 4, Earth Swallowed, following; p30)

But in this poem even that which is high, the world of imagination and ideas (also of illusion) has to be brought down, so strong is the downdrag. Even the hawk, ‘the diamond point of will’, Hughes says, will ‘maybe’ meet ‘the weather coming the wrong way’ and come crashing down (doesn’t seem likely, but then this is a ‘thought hawk’), his ‘round angelic eye smashed’, ‘his heart’s blood’ mixed ‘with the mire of the land’.

So, the high being (‘angelic eye’) and associated faculties are brought down to the earth. That is what the poem is about. I don’t doubt there was a very wet day or that there was a hawk about, but everything has disappeared into Hughes’ omnivorous interior. I don’t want this to pass by lightly; I take the liberty of repeating: the hawk has his round angelic eye smashed; its heart’s blood is mixed with mire. It is classic Ted Hughes.

Hughes’ supporters present him as a hero of the inner journey. I think a brave person would eventually have thought: ‘Oh my God, look what the writing reveals is going on inside me. I’ll have to do something about it.’ That is not what happened.¹

Occult Background

Ted Hughes actively sought access to the ‘non-human powers of the cosmos’. He had no protection against them, because he didn’t want protection. They were what he was after. Rudolf Steiner, a Christian initiate, had the ability to see in the spiritual worlds and had this to say about such voyages in the unknown:

The dangers are these. Instead of perceiving objective reality in the spiritual world we would perceive only the effect of the fantasies which we ourselves take into that world; we take into it the worst that is in us – everything that is not in keeping with truth. Hence any premature entry into the spiritual world would mean that instead of reality, a man would see grotesque, fantastic images and forms, said by Spiritual Science to be a sight that does not belong to his humanity … It is always a sign that what are seen are fantasies if on rising into the spiritual world, animal forms appear … they appear because inwardly we have not a firm enough foundation.

(Background To The Gospel Of St. Mark, p90)

… it has been pointed out that a man sees these gods of the inner world according to his own nature … If … (a man’s) conceptions are bad, or ugly, or untrue he perceives a distorted image of this world of the gods; fearful demoniacal shapes and figures appear … if he saw them in images distorted by his own qualities, horror and terror might arise; he could be tormented, persecuted …

(The East in the Light of the West, p94)

At this point a dreadful possibility exists. A man may lose his experience and feeling of direct reality without finding any new reality opening before him. He is then suspended in a void. He seems to himself dead. The old values have disappeared and no new ones have taken their place. The world and man no longer exist for him. This is by no means a mere possibility. At some time or other; it happens to everyone who wishes to attain higher cognition. He reaches a point where to him the spirit interprets all life as death. Then he is no longer in the world. He is beneath the world, in the nether world. He accomplishes the journey to Hades. It is well for him if he is not submerged. (Occult Mysteries Of Antiquity, p53)

… Contrast this with an Imagination of Ahriman²: As he goes along he would like to capture space from time; he has darkness around him into which he shoots the rays of his own light; the more he achieves his aims the severer is the frost around him; he moves as a world which contracts entirely into one being, viz., his own, in which he affirms himself only by denying the world; he moves as if he carried with him the sinister forces of dark caves in the Earth. (Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts, p98)

… there lives, in the greedy desire of the Ahrimanic powers, cold hatred against all that unfolds in freedom. Ahriman’s efforts are directed towards making a cosmic machine out of that which he allows to stream forth from the Earth into universal space. His ideal is ‘measure, number and weight’ and nothing else than these. He was called into the Cosmos that serves the evolution of humanity, because ‘measure, number and weight,’ which is his sphere, had to be unfolded (Ibid., p147)

I realise that these passages from Steiner may be hard to deal with for many readers. Nevertheless I bring them in, in bulk, this early because they make sense of scores, hundreds, of things