Languages, Human versus Animal (chapman)

Michael McClure with his chapbook Ghost Tantras explores poetry as a performative art, desiring to deconstruct language as we see it. What makes a word? What gives it meaning? How are we defined by the language we use? In porm 49, as he has with every other poem in the book and vice-versa, McClure throws animalistic sounds in between bona fide English words. He writes,

"SILENCE THE EYES ! BECALM THE SENSES !
Drive drooor from the fresh repugnance, thou whole
..................................................................................
Thy trillionic multitude if grahh, vhooshes, and silences
Oh you are heavier and dimmer than you knew
and more solid and full of pleasure. (1-2, 5-7).

The language McClure uses resembles something of preaching, of religious booming. Not a sermon, exactly, but there is something fantastical about the way he plays with it, using phrases like "becalm" and "thou," and lines six and seven are about about ignorance and superficiality, which sounds a much like old Catholic teachings: we are sinful and hedonistic by nature. Before that we are commanded to "drive droor from the fresh repugnance, thou whole..." as if we are to reject that part of ourselves. The animalistic words such as "droor" and "grah" and and "vhooshes" appear here to be treated like they are bad things, like they are undesirable, even if they are phrases invented by McClure. The second half of the tantra is all animal noises.

The way he does it here is interesting. It was said that the divide between the animal sounds and human language is much more sharply divided in this tantra, which is true to a degree, but the animalistic words do creep in between the English words. They are being talked about, but they are in there. There is "drooor" in the second line. Then there are three words dropped in line five, and then the poem falls off entirely into animal noises. McClure here is making a statement about faith: try as we might to drive ourselves away from our instincts, our nature which may be inherently evil or undesirable for whatever reason. Turn to God, turn to whatever, it doesn't matter, because this animalistic nature resides within us, it always will creep into our thoughts, our words, our actions, and is inevitable. We are not separated from the animals, we are the animals. Charles Darwin once said that our minds were one of degree and not of kind. Michael McClure agrees.