'We Shuttle Back and Forth'

Metempsychosis is another word I learned from Ulysses. Up till then I used the more plebian-sounding reincarnation. In the fourth chapter, “Calypso,” Molly Bloom is in bed reading a novel, Ruby: Pride of the Ring. She encounters metempsychosis in the text and asks Leopold, who has been serving her tea and toast, what it means. She fumbles the pronunciation and Joyce later puts a pun in her mouth: “met him pike hoses.” The word shows up in three other chapters and is a theme -- ever-changing forms -- in the novel. 

In the Winter 2006 issue of Arion: A Journal of the Humanities and the Classics, the poet, painter and translator Nicholas Kilmer published “Fragments from a Correspondence,” a selection from the letters written to him by Guy Davenport between 1978 and 1983. Davenport had died the previous year. Kilmer is the grandson of the poet Joyce Kilmer, author of “Trees,” killed by a sniper’s bullet during the Second Battle of the Marne. Davenport knew as much about Ulysses (among other things) as anyone I have known. In a letter dated Sept. 6, 1980, he writes to Kilmer:

 

“Your theory of metempsychosis through things. It explains so much. I know drab people who have been tenement sinks and public water fountains in Arkansas. I may well have been the Wright Brothers Flyer No. 1. You know my theory that I'm a janitor in all my activities? I janitor, for instance, the Kenyon Review; and my writing is all simply the tidying up of the Modern Period, a bit of string here neatly rolled up, scraps of notes thrown away by Joyce, things dropped by Ez Pound. So I must have been a janitor sometime.”

 

Davenport is joking, sort of, but the theme of forms changing and evolving across time is recurrent in his essays and fiction. Among the aphorisms of the pre-Socratic philosopher Herakleitos he translated is this: “Change alone is unchanging.” And this: “Everything flows; nothing remains. [Everything moves; nothing is still. Everything passes away; nothing lasts.]” He borrows the title of his 1987 essay collection, Every Force Evolves a Form: Twenty Essays, from Mother Ann Lee, founder of the Shakers.

In a footnote to the excerpt from Davenport’s letter, Kilmer explains: “My theory of metempsychosis is that, all things having souls, we shuttle back and forth between animal, vegetable and mineral.”

 

[The Herakleitos quotes come from Davenport’s Herakleitos and Diogenes (Grey Fox Press, 1979; included in 7 Greeks, New Directions, 1995).