Now I can’t remember where I was intending to go with any of this, so let me just say one word about The Song of Songs being surrealistic, and then I’ll disappear.
It is like David Lynch’s movie Mulholland Drive (2001), for the poem spirals in on itself, and its beginning and ending are lost in each other: it defies chronology. Something happens to the main characters, and that event inhabits a locale in spacetime, but it is impossible for us in the audience to know the exact whereabouts (or whenabouts) of this rub that caused such very real change. As it is with subatomic particles, we might tell the where, but, once we do, we lose the when, and vice versa.
In Lynch’s film, the rub is an actress losing or gaining her role or her life. In the Sublime Song, the rub is the lovers attaining the perfect state of togetherness. One of my biggest regrets about my own version of the poem is that I wrote the phrase “my woman, my wife” for what the King James translators chose to render as “my sister, my spouse.” At first, I assumed that “sister” was being used loosely to denote a female in general; but only after I had worked through my version of the whole poem did I realize that this concept of biological relation plays in it a part more literal than is seemly to a state of polite repose. Perhaps the translators might have even written the hyphenated compound “sister-spouse.” For, in the poem, King Solomon and the Shulamite defy time and escape to a realm that precedes or precludes their own parents. Or they become their own parents, or something like that. Like certain old Greek Gods, or Isis and Osiris. They achieve the ultimate lovers’ unity by breaking into a sphere where the borders of familial generation dissolve.
In chapter 3, verse 4, the Shulamite says:
I found him whom my soul loveth: I held him, and would not let him go, until I had brought him into my mother’s house, and into the chamber of her that conceived me.
Why would a woman bring her lover to her mother’s bedroom? In verses 9-12 of the same chapter, Solomon says:
Thou hast ravished my heart, my sister, my spouse [. . .] How fair is thy love, my sister, my spouse! [. . .] A garden inclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.
These are the parts that I regretted softening to read “my woman, my wife.” My version thus loses the emphasis on their siblinghood.
Also, at the start of chapter 5, the king refers again to his lover as his sister. (“I am come into my garden, my sister, my spouse . . .”) He dreams of consummating their passion while somnambulating (“I sleep, but my heart waketh”), before the lead-up to the steamy erotic scene that never occurs because Solomon vanishes. (“I opened to my beloved; but my beloved had withdrawn himself, and was gone.”)
In the first verse of the final chapter (8), the Shulamite makes this strange exclamation:
O that thou wert as my brother, that sucked the breasts of my mother! when I should find thee without, I would kiss thee; yea, I should not be despised.
What she’s saying is not so unsettling as it might first seem. Recall that her beloved is the king; thus the social strictures of rank and class leave the lovers unable to rendezvous freely – they can neither meet nor display their affection in the outside world without attracting unwanted attention – as it would invite gossip and scorn from the public. This is the ill effect of the morality inherited from the tree of knowledge, which caused everyone to be ashamed of nakedness. The Shulamite is wishing that she and her lover were siblings, so that they could embrace and kiss without breaking any sex laws. She continues, saying:
I would lead thee, and bring thee into my mother’s house, who would instruct me: I would cause thee to drink of spiced wine of the juice of my pomegranate.
So, again, she mentions returning to the place of her own origin. She and the king shall employ the voodoo force of their love to transport themselves backwards in time to the place where the Shulamite was conceived, and therefore eclipse the identity of their parents. As Prometheus stole the divine fire, the lovers shall usurp generational primacy. For, earlier (chapter 2, verse 3), the Shulamite said:
As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste.
This is the hub of the wheeled poem, upon which it spins. The Shulamite partakes of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil . . . Now shoot forward to the poem’s last chapter (8:5) to behold the aftermath of this climax:
Who is this that cometh up from the wilderness, leaning upon her beloved? I raised thee up under the apple tree: there thy mother brought thee forth: there she brought thee forth that bare thee.
It might not seem like much to read this as an isolated excerpt; however, when it is beheld in its full context, the revelation that this very tree is the one where the Shulamite was conceived (thus making her indistiguishable from her own mother, because the eternal realm is immune to temporality) – “there she brought thee forth that bare thee” – is as shocking and important to the audience as the conclusion of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980) when Darth Vader reveals the fact that Luke Skywalker is his son.
“Who is this that cometh up from the wilderness, leaning upon her beloved?” Solomon says, “I raised thee up under the apple tree . . .” So the Shulamite lies down with her lover during the same instant when her mother is conceiving her, causing the new conception to manifest an improved infancy for herself and her lover’s self – united, they constitute the regenerated OVERSELF.
Again, the lovers partake of the tree of knowledge, but the curse that their parents Adam and Eve inherited from this very act is now broken, as the Shulamite and Solomon reclaim their rightful roles from their fore-parents, zeroing out Original Sin and becoming the New Life.
If you literalize Whitman’s tropes, these lines from “Song of Myself” (sec. 33) condense the whole story:
Walking the old hills of Judea with the beautiful gentle god by my side; / Speeding through space . . . . speeding through heaven and the stars [. . .] / Carrying the crescent child that carries its own full mother in its belly.
P.S.
(Alternate ending)
Although Whitman’s recap is precise, Marcelin Pleynet offers (unintentionally, I presume) a more elaborate summary of the plotline of Solomon’s Song, while additionally taking into account my own rewrite, in the following excerpt from “(reread what is written) . . .” [John Ashbery’s translation follows the original French in leaving all three blocks of text without terminal punctuation.]
If we separate the mother the male or the female the femininity which remains is as much that which switches off and triggers cessation—that already decapitated couple disappears from what is nothing but in will power “the fire moving above the water” if I describe the day the mixed force of a light which comes out of the earth and advances rising into the beginning and into the end—everything is overturned where things occupy names constitutively but in the opposite direction slowing everything while preparing their “doesn’t stop remaining” to conquer itself
(two books are enough for writing)
With those who measure as they measure visible in those books recommended as full of meaning “don’t harm the earth or the air” if what rises doesn’t sink in you as the air turns into fire the number of books
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