The End of Prophecy: A Response
James Karman

1. When I was given my instructions for this essay, I was told to use Robert Zaller’s paper as a springboard for my own thoughts-so that’s what I will do. I will begin, though, with a summary of the four main themes found in Robert’s essay.

1. “The Inhumanist” as a final sermon in which the anti-persona of Arthur Barclay from The Women at Point Sur returns as  Jeffers’s alter ego, the nameless old man.

2. “The Inhumanist” as a “heavenly meditation” wherein the old man, Jeffers’s double, seeks God and finds him in the fierce, unyielding forces of the  natural world.

3. “The Inhumanist” as the first major American poem to register the shock of the atomic bomb and thus to communicate a sense of “the nuclear sublime.”

4. “The Inhumanist” as an apocalyptic vision, rooted in the Bible and informed by the Puritan tradition-a vision, however, that sees the Day of Doom as one point on an ever-turning wheel of creation and destruction, not as the very end of time.

The importance of section XLV of the poem, which is described as the fulcrum.
The critical response to the book as a whole, which included deep-seated antagonism and widespread incomprehension.
The double axe itself-the implement-as key symbol and, in some ways, central protagonist.

4. Though Robert refers to the axe repeatedly throughout his essay, I’ll focus attention on one key passage.

. . . the Inhumanist is a thaumaturgic figure . . ., and even, at some points, tinctured with divinity. His axe, like Siegfried’s sword, is a magical implement, where not a divine figuration. . . . On one level, it symbolizes technology run amok, for Jeffers regards techne not as an aspect of human mastering but as a Promethean enterprise, epitomized in the sacred power of the atom that has now been “tricked down / into the common stews and shambles.” The Inhumanist himself, who shares the sins of the “transgressors,” cannot control the axe. Weary at last of the “violences” it has brought into the world, he flings it into the sea, but it instantly comes to life again, resurfaces, and returns to its “owner” . . .
The axe returns “tamely” to the Inhumanist after its act of carnage, like a faithful dog; but masterfully, too: it owns its owner, since he cannot dispose of it and it will not be separated from him.

6. That will be my final point, but to get there I would like to use Jeffers’s own statement concerning the axe-the one Zaller cites in the excerpt just shared. Here is the full text (from section VI):

7. Cutting oak fence-posts, he stopped to whet his axe edges. He considered the double-bladed axe: “In Crete it was a God, and they named the labyrinth for it. That’s long before the Greeks came: the lofty Greeks were still bushmen. It was a symbol of generation: the two lobes and the stiff helve: so was the Cross before they christened it. But this one can clip heads too. Grimly, grimly. A blade for the flesh, a blade for the spirit; and truth from lies.” (CP 3: 258)

8. I’ll return to each sentence in this prose paragraph in turn and comment on them.

In Crete it was a god, and they named the labyrinth for it.

9. I think it’s worth noting that Jeffers knew and understood the aniconic significance of the double axe (“labrys” in Greek)-that it was not just a symbol of divine power, it was a divine power: Labrayndeus, Axe God. “Labyrinth,” as he says, means “place of the double axe.” This particular god dwells in a unique kind of temple, a place of mystery and twisting paths. The labyrinth itself has its own vastly over-determined symbolism, but among its meanings are these: attaining realization after ordeals; finding one’s way to the deep center; initiation concerning the mystery of life, death, and rebirth; a rite of passage from the profane to the sacred; a confrontation with danger; a knot, a paradox, an answer to a riddle. (The riddle: “What is at the center of a labyrinth?” The journey to find out leads to a Zen-like answer: “You are.”)

That’s long before the Greeks came: the lofty Greeks were still bushmen.

10. Jeffers, as everyone here knows, is referring to the Minoan civilization which flourished in the second millennium B.C.-before the Greeks and before the Mycenaeans.
We should remind ourselves, though, that this was a goddess-based culture, as the evidence at Knossos attests. Votive figurines of snake goddesses, decorative moon symbolism on household objects, stylized bull horns everywhere-all point to a cyclical, feminine view of the world and a religion of eternal return.
In regard to the bull symbolism-which brings the ancient practice of bull sacrifice to mind-we should at least mention that in Part I of The Double Axe a bull is killed: Bull Gore.

It was a symbol of generation: the two lobes and the stiff helve: . . .

11. The double axe was indeed a feminine symbol par excellence, standing for life, death, and rebirth. In the hands of the Great Mother, the womb and tomb of the material world, it was a symbol of creative and destructive power.
It is essential to note here that late in “The Inhumanist,” as bombs are falling and the end of the world seems to be at hand, a young man, on the run, confronts the old man. After a brief exchange, the young man asks, “Are you laughing? . . . No one else laughs.” No, the old man says, “it was my axe. She has the last laugh.”
Yes, she does-and knowing the axe is feminine illuminates the deeper dimensions of its nature.

[S]o was the Cross before they christened it.

12. Jeffers, as we know, always thought of Christianity as one attempt among many to comprehend the primal mystery of life. Its central image-the crucifixion-perfectly expresses the notion of divine sacrifice that Jeffers believes  in, the agon that turns the wheel of space and time. But Christianity comes late to the notion; one finds it all over the world in different forms (Attis, Osiris, Adonis, Tammuz). And the cross itself, like the Egyptian Ankh, both point to earlier revelations.

But this one can clip heads too. Grimly, grimly.

13. The old man’s axe is violent and dangerous; people are afraid of it-and they are afraid of the man who wields it. In fact, the axe becomes increasingly agitated as the poem progresses and all the more uncanny. As Robert says in his essay, the axe laughs, yells, barks, neighs, and buzzes. At one point, when the old man is talking to a German scientist (section XXXVI, CP 3: 289-94), it begins to scream like an eagle, especially when the scientist says that God is dead. The old man has to huddle it against his thigh and then talk louder and louder to be heard. Eventually, the axe becomes so agitated he has to take off his coat to wrap and muffle it. Soon thereafter, it starts clipping heads-indeed, grimly: Vere Harnish in the sand, the two robbers which it kills by itself, the man of terrors (who turns out to be a spirit double), and finally, when the old man throws it into the sea, a giant octopus.

A blade for the flesh, a blade for the spirit; . . .

14. Here is where we begin to see the connection between the axe and Jeffers’s poetry.
Part I of “The Double Axe” (the poem, not the book) is titled “The Love and the Hate.” In a brilliantly orchestrated concatenation of symbols, Jeffers compares Hoult Gore to Christ. If “Anti-Christ” weren’t an already overloaded  term, one could use it for Hoult, because he functions as Jesus’s dark twin, his shadow, his opposite. From the first page, when the lupin are described as archangels, to the use of biblical patterns of speech throughout-“Father,     have mercy” (CP 3: 232); “Take it in remembrance of me. This is my body / That was broken for nothing. Drink it: this is my blood / That was spilled for no  need” (CP 3: 243-44); “You are my lord and my king” (CP 3: 245)-to the gruesome doubting Thomas scene, to the fact that Hoult’s mother is named Reine (“Queen” in French) and functions as a debased Mary, Jeffers creates the Christian primal scene, turned inside out and upside down. All for a point: “I am the only dead body that has had the energy to get up again / Since Jesus Christ,” says Hoult (CP 3: 241). “His whip was love, they say. Mine . . . fury.”

15. The love of Jesus, with all it contains in all of its forms and permutations,   and the hate of Hoult, with all of its merciless rage, are two sides of the same coin. Together, in the dense symbolism of the poem, they form one edge of the double-bladed axe: the love and the hate. That’s the blade for the flesh.

16. The blade for the spirit-the other half of the axe and thus the other half of the poem-is “The Inhumanist” or Inhumanism, with all it offers for a release from love, hate, and all the other manic passions, and with all it promises for an authentic experience of God.

17. What you get when you swing this axe and cut through the world’s illusions is-truth from lies.

18. This is the one thing that Jeffers prided himself on throughout his career. As he says again and again in different ways, “[t]o be truth-bound, the neutral / Detested by all the dreaming factions, is my errand here” (“The Great Sunset,” CP 2: 535).

19. He paid a price for this, of course. In “The Inhumanist” the old man is ac-costed by a person who screams, “You have betrayed us, you have betrayed humanity. You are one of those that killed hope and faith, / And sneered at Progress; you have killed the lies that men live by” (CP 3: 310). Jeffers heard this so often, he says it to himself in “Self-Criticism in February”(CP 2: 561): “If only you could sing / That God is love, or perhaps that social / Justice will soon prevail.” No, Jeffers declares, “I can tell lies in prose.”

20. Besides, as he says in “Triad” (CP 2: 309), the affair of the poet “who wishes not to play games with words” is “to awake dangerous images.” In another poem (untitled, CP 3: 445), he adds, “The poet cannot feed on this time of the world / Until he has torn it to pieces, and himself also.”

21. Self-sacrifice is central to Jeffers’s understanding of himself as a poet, as we know from poems like “Apology for Bad Dreams” (CP 1: 208). So it comes as   no surprise in “The Inhumanist” when the old man kills his double, the man of terrors, his younger self who lived in the world of love and hate, and says “No man has ever known himself nor surpassed himself until he has killed / Half of himself” (CP 3: 301). He then puts the body in a boat with two robbers, sets it afire, and pushes it out to sea. “The old man laughed with gray lips. ‘There,’         he said, ‘goes myself, my self-murdered half-self / Between two thieves.’” Exactly-think about this-what old man God would have said about his young double, Jesus.

22. The outspoken old man, free of the world but deeply fatigued, tired of the violence, tired of fighting for truth, tired of cutting himself to pieces, throws his weapon into the sea. After hacking an underwater creature, however, and roiling the waters with foaming blood, the axe makes its way back to the old man’s hand.

23. Several times in his poetry, Jeffers tempts himself with the possibility of throwing away his career, of not writing. In “Northern Heather” (CP 2: 413) he contemplates the benefits of silence. “[I]n the ebb of the mind / Between two poems, / When imagination is clearly a trap and all words / A noise about nothing,” the question occurs, “‘Why will you climb up the turrets of another folly?’” But, of course, the words come back on their own, the poems form themselves again. Like the axe that homes to the old man’s hand, the poems return (“The Day Is a Poem,” CP 3: 16) “crusted with blood and barbaric omens, / Painful to excess, inhuman as a hawk’s cry.”