‘In the Destructive Element Immerse!'

Turner Cassity titled his 1998 collection of selected poems The Destructive Element. Readers of Conrad will recognize the allusion to Lord Jim. In Chapter 20, Stein says to Marlow: 

“A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavor to do, he drowns—Nicht wahr? . . . No I tell you. The way is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up.”

 

In Chapter 35, Marlow recalls Stein’s observation like this: “‘In the destructive element immerse! . . . To follow the dream, and again to follow the dream—and so—always—usque ad finem [to the very end].’”

 

Stein has already diagnosed Jim’s “vivid and romantic nature,” identifying him as an idealist in an adversarial world. Cassity would likely endorse Stein’s conclusions. He is the least romantic of poets. His sensibility is skeptical, full of disdain for fashion and hypocrisy, and, always, very funny. Nowhere in his selected poems does Cassity use the phrase “destructive element,” except in his title, though you sense its presence everywhere, as in “Meaner than a Junkyard Dog, or, Turner’s Evil Twin”:

 

“Life, genetic outcome of a code

That has its blind spots, parallels what it is not—

An endless replicase of what it has destroyed

To be. Dumb corpse one carries, Siamese dark self

Whose only life is to embarrass, in our joint

Past where did we in aim diverge?”

 

Conrad and Jim do make an appearance in another of the collection’s new poems, “Double Passage on the Holland-Amerika”:

 

“Designed for long North River piers and not for cruising,

Nieuw Amsterdam takes up the dockside in San Juan.

And, as the crew comes off, it out-exotics it.

In 1954 no one, and least of all

The Netherlands, will own to hiring lascars. Not

Sumatrans? Dyaks? Javanese? The officers

Who tally-off the tourists are so spic and blond

They would be tarred as raving High Colonials—

Tar being white as well as black—if they were each

Precursors of a Peace Corps acting Gandhi out,

Or Angels of the Lord come down dispensing cures

I am a young man in the Army reading Conrad;

It’s almost more than I can stand: the full effect

Of earrings and of fish-heads, and of Tuan Jim

Before the fall, in the enjoyments of a weekend pass.

 

“In 1992 I am as old as Marlow.

Not to brag, almost as traveled. On a warm

Fall day in San Francisco, near as memory,

Nieuw Amsterdam sails in. Another of that name;

Lord Jim’s command is long since in the wreckers’ hands.

But as if answering a summons, here I am,

Again beside the pier. If who sought after youth

And fountain did not find them, it is possibly

Because it never dawned on them to ask in Dutch,

Or check the bilges. And as into Miramar

So long ago, the men head for their own time off.

They have had orthodontia, or a better diet—

All the fish, not just the head. The summer whites

Set off the half-caste, as the deep suntans the blond.

Must I re-read An Outcast of the Islands, or re-write it?”