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"Reddersburg" also fuels what may be the most remarkable poem in the
book: To say that "Alaska" is a symbolist poem in method, but the most
naked kind of spiritual autobiography imaginable, gives some idea of the
poem's originality.
"Alaska" takes place underwater. In keeping with the fluidity and
ghostliness of such a medium, the lyric
I
in "Caesarea" and
"Reddersburg" dissolves. Sometimes the speaker seems the representative
of a "chosen people" who, ironically, "know nothing of purity except the
word"; sometimes the voice of apocalypse; and sometimes a disembodied
seer who speaks of the poet's own spiritual agony as a kind of weightless,
substanceless limbo: "No visionary cycle ordered in the mind,! only the
chaos of what's glimpsed/ while sinking, sway and countersway,! the sea–
bent glimmer of disaster." These lines, which insist on randomness as op–
posed
to
visionary order, point up the central dilemma in "Alaska": the
poet's own despairing sense of himself as a latecomer to cultural traditions
which he can neither accept nor wholly reject.
Not surprisingly, his visionary impulses turn up only pale shadows of
the promised land: As a self-mocking seer, he dramatizes his failure to find
a ground of being not polluted by blood or violent excess. And yet his
visionary impotence implies a subtle critique of the disastrous mythology
of "the chosen people." As in "Caesarea" and "Reddersburg," Sacks feels
both attracted and repelled by cultural forces which form the self but also
contribute to the violence of history. And though ultimately he stands
against such violence, his desire for visionary intensity makes him long for
a poetry founded on the spiritual authority of O ld Testament prophecy,
but without Old Testament gore. Sacks longs to overbear history and
personality with visionary ardor and sec the soul untrammeled in its ec–
stasy. This is, of course, yet another mythology closed off to cultural
latecomers. As "Alaska" ruefully acknowledges, the chosen people and
their visionary spokesmen arc mired too deeply in history ever to be
clean.
However, the poet hints at states of being that, if not free of history
and personality, at least have the power to suspend their workings mo–
mentarily. In "Arizona" Sacks writes of an isolated pool of water in a
desert canyon. It functions also as an inner landscape, dry and hard as the
veld or Palestine, but cleansed by a long-receded flood. Surrounded by
stone, the sedimentary remains of earth's primal waters, the speaker
imagines swimming in the pool 3nd:
... looking up between
each sphere of light hung Illotionless
in its descent, until this
