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

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

As soon as the muse is aware of death, she shuts her door .... The duende, on the other hand, does not appear if it sees no possibility of death. If it does not know that it will haunt death's house, if it is not certain that it can move those branches we carry, which neither enjoy nor ever will enjoy any solace .... The duende wounds, and in the healing of this wound which never closes is the prodigious, the original work in man .... whoever beholds it is baptized with dark water ... and this struggle for expression and for the communication of expression reaches, at times, in poetry, the character of a tight to the death. (99-100).

In conclusion, Garcia Lorca writes: "The duende--where is the duende? Through the empty arch comes an air of the mind that blows insistently over the heads of the dead, in search of new landscapes and unsuspecting accents; an air smelling of a child's saliva, of pounded grass, and medusa veil announcing the constant baptism of newly created things" (103). Hayden's Afro-Modernist quest to "experiment with forms and techniques I have not used before--to arrive at something patterned, wild, and free" echoes Garcia Lorca's artistic engagement with duende (75).

In "The Diver," the images combine the risk of descendental movement with the forces of beauty and renewal which Garcia Lorca describes as the "constant baptism" in "dark water." The irrational combinations abound: "freefalling, weightless / as in dreams of wingless flight," the "dead ship, / carcass that swarmed with / voracious life," "drowned instruments / of buoyancy," "in languid / frenzy strove / as one freezing fights off / sleep desiring sleep," "fled the numbing / kisses that I craved." Every physical and psychological force vies with and accompanies its counter-force, resulting in the poem's shifting "dance of gilded / chairs" and its "eldritch hide and / seek of laughing / faces."

The images recall Hayden's diver's manifesto, especially those of withdrawal from entropic exchanges which, as Hatcher notes, went contrary to Hayden's social impulses. The Eliotic images of a social and cultural wasteland in "The Diver" become clear when read with awareness of Hayden's personal ambivalence about social and professional interaction: "Do not let . . . professional routine and academic trivia betray finer instinct. / Read and think more and talk less. Or not at all." The diver is drawn toward the enthralling dance of the dead. In ways that recall and invert Prufrock's impotence, Hayden's diver navigates the throes of sensuality, even necrophilia, as he "explored her . . . entered / the wreck, awed by her silence, / feeling more keenly the iron cold . . . probing."

In "The Diver," Hayden signals his simultaneous awareness of the need to embark and the pitfalls which occur on the internal quest. Yet his poetry never accepted a stable division between the personal/psychological and the political/historical. In a letter written to Hayden and dated May 6, 1975, Michael Harper voices his frustration with the tendencies of poets and readers to insist on the rationalized separations which Hayden's work disturbs. Confident that Hayden will understand his feelings, Harper describes his travels through the South, where he encountered "some mindless performances by our people, the students who don't read or think, but 'politic'--questions from the gallery about how poems relate to the people, and faculty catering to this nonsense, an attack on May Miller . . . [poets claiming they] could only write the political poem--consciousness is political!" (995). Hayden certainly agreed with Harper that "consciousness is political." But his poetry explores (as does Harper's) the modernist complexities which frustrate all such identities. The crossroads between public politics and the excavation of consciousness is a shifting and treacherous site of awareness and action.