"The art of the octopus": The maturation of Denise Levertov's political vision

As Candles in Babylon progresses, it anchors the imagination in people and things outside the conventional structures of perception which mediate their subjects' relation to the world. "The Art of the Octopus: Variations on a Found Theme" explores selective imaginative reflection as a "solitary dance" through which the self may choose which elements of the world to inhabit.

Since individuals are vulnerable to environment, they need a "home," a structure which places them in nurturing, familial relation with the world.2 Only out-of-the-way places provide shelter from the rushed, painfully invasive crowd and wearyingly "long streets" defining conventional commonplaces. Flexibility enables unique views within the confines of existing cultural edifices, however cramped, and expansion into an imagined royal house beyond the already built-up earth. That Levertov's octopus is not soft by nature, but rather vulnerable from having given up its shell, suggests the fluidity of the individual created through interaction with environment. The need for a protective home comes from an aggressively invasive environment.

Much of Candles in Babylon provides examples of homes created by inhabiting one's environment and thus rendering it familiar. "Two Artists" opens with sculptor Rosemarie Gascoigne's creation of a household from found objects, old nails arranged like flowers in a pot, feathers woven into one side of a picket fence to suggest enclosure, tiny turret shells placed in a bowl like millet, and a coat of arms made from carpenter's scraps. By bringing home cast-off and unusual objects, Gascoigne creates kitchen and hearth from an alien world, encouraging intimacy with the foreign by incorporating it into her everyday household. Such intimacy allows imaginative exploration of these objects in the interplay of similarity and difference between their qualities and those of the household objects for which they stand. The shells produce a "music of jostled brittleness" (57) different from the millet to which they are compared, awakening a delight in texture that embellishes physical utility. Simultaneously, domesticating the foreign expands the mind's range of interaction with its environment and thus overcomes isolation. Another artist, Memphis Wood, creates a similar interplay between artwork and raw material by combining brightly colored hanks of cloth in a pattern "never / disowning its origins" (58). Both artists enact the imagination's development from anchors outside it to reveal the importance of creating a cosmos of objects that encourages empathetic identification and pleasure.

IN contrast to such nurturing homes, contemporary culture produces an environment debilitating to the imagination. The final section of Candles in Babylon, "Age of Terror," criticizes the cultural organization of space currently mediating relations between individuals. Echoing the shivering flames of the title poem, "Talk in the Dark" shows isolated voices lamenting their condition as "flies on the hide of Leviathan," wanting to see "where my own road's going" but feeling powerless against an impersonal "history" (100). The threat of nuclear war is overwhelming. "Each day's terror [is] almost / a form of boredom-madmen / at the wheel and / stepping on the gas and / the brakes no good" (78). Because vital contact with such horror is unsustainable, empathy becomes apathy.