"Something patterned, wild, and free": Robert Hayden's angles of descent and the democratic unconscious

African American Review, Winter, 2002 by Edward M. Pavlic

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, sprouting alike in broad
 zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among
 white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman,
 Cuff, I give them the same, I receive
 them the same. (31)

Hayden's Afro-Modernism responds to Whitman's call by searching out levels of experience and modes of perception in which figures of division cannot operate. It charts regions of dangerous possibility and seeks a vision which obeys the laws of a democratic unconscious. In "The Poet and His Art: A Conversation," Hayden describes "The Diver" as one of his most "deeply personal" poems, which he "consciously made rather obscure" (161). He explains that "the act of diving and the temptation the diver feels to really let go, to yield to death, really represent, are symbolic of something very personal. The entire poem is actually a metaphor" (161-62). Certainly, the romance of death might recall Keats, even Dickinson, but by the time he wrote "The Diver" Hayden was some twenty years beyond what he'd termed his "Keats period" (132). Instead, "The Diver" points toward a level of experience beyond rational compartmentalization. As Freud's view of the unconscious suggests, distinct but interrelated spheres of reality or experience obey different, even incompatible, structures. All movement between them involves transitions which warp data and frames of reference. In his posthumously published essay "Dream Work and Interpretation," Freud writes that the "governing rules of logic carry no weight in the unconscious; it might be called the Realm of the Illogical. Urges with contrary aims exist side by side in the unconscious without any need arising for an adjustment between them" (44).

Hayden seeks to establish and redeem connections by embracing a similar vision. In "The Diver," "lost images I fadingly remembered" continually invoke the failure of figures of division by joining rationally incompatible terms. Yet many of Hayden's critics attempt to re-inscribe the division: Hatcher, Wilburn Williams, and Maurice O'Sullivan all identify death with depth, and pit descent against life and the "measured rise" which begins on the final line of the poem. But Hayden's systematically irrational twinning of terms frustrates such decisions even as it recognizes the associated risks. Snead discusses how "the escape from division can take dangerous forms: madness.. . social exclusion ... or even death" (15). The descendental twinning of rationally incompatible qualities such as freedom and danger recalls Federico Garcia Lorca's notion of a non-rational, dangerously, even perilously free spirit, duende, at the core of the creative process.

In "The Poet and His Art," Hayden, a Spanish major at Detroit City College, claimed Garcia Lorca as an influence picked up along with Rukeyser, Auden, and others at an important stage in his development in the early 1940s (134). In his lecture "Theory and Function of the Duende," Garcia Lorca associates duende with depth, with the sound that "surges up from the soles of the feet," and with the sound of the "Delba, a variant of the Andalusian cante jondo (deep song)" (91-92). He continues: "These 'dark sounds' are the mystery, the roots thrusting into the fertile loam known to all of us, ignored by all of us, but from which we get what is real in art" (91). For Garcia Lorca, duende is the ever-changing essence of the creative impulse, "not the forms ... but the marrow of forms" (92). Emphasizing the ungraspable and improvisational nature of duende, he writes that it "is a power and not a behavior, it is a struggle and not a concept" by which to "help us seek .... there is neither map nor discipline" (92-93). I t "breaks with all styles, rejects all the sweet geometry one has learned," and "always presupposes a radical change of all forms based on old structures" (93, 95). In addition to its destabilizing qualities, Garcia Lorca associates duende with ever-present danger, death, and renewal: