B.H Fairchild sets up the tension between the mythic undercurrent and the mundane object in the
title, contrasting “Occult” and “Midwest, the two main currents which will run through the body of the
poem. It is a poem fundamentally about imagery, about how the image becomes numinous and invested
with meaning. It is an explication of a personal mythology that runs through Fairchild's work, and as
the title poem of his collection serves as a type of key, or statement of intent, a means of deciphering
the other poems in the collection and Fairchild'ss work in general.
“Early Occult Memory Systems” invokes the Method of Locii, the Mnemonic devices of Classical
literature, expanded by Giordano Bruno and the Medieval alchemists. It speaks to the idea of a hidden
knowledge, of an esoteric system in which information is encoded in a “memory palace”, a real or
artificial place which is made to hold the information one desires to memorize. It is through this lens
that Fairchild views the images he invokes in the poem, as carriers of memory, as a “memory palace”
which can be unpacked through an intuitive understanding of the objects themselves. Objects are made
to hold memories, abstractions, personalities, etc.“of the Lower Midwest” grounds these arcane and esoteric systems in the specificity of the American
experience, of the sense of place and class consciousness that is inherent in American regional writing,
an understanding of oneself as provincial, of outside the slick surfaces of much of contemporary
American writing. Fairchild here allies himself with James Wright, and a school of writing which
believes in the invocatory power of the image as a means in itself, particularly the somewhat surrealist,
visionary, hallucinatory focus on images of American rural and Midwestern life. The indexing of these
objects and places, and the numinous personal mythography which resides within them serve as the two
poles the poem moves between. The interplay between these two currents is the backbone of the poem,
and of Fairchild;ss work in general. The ordinary is revealed to be wondrous, to be numinous with
meaning, the ordinary being a very specific experience grounded in class and the kind of politicized
pastoralism of American writers of the Midwest and south,
In the first lines we find this pairing in the first line, “deep in the backseat of his father’s Ford and the
mysterium of time” The physical particular location “his father's Ford”, and all of its implied statements
of class, of materiality, with “the mysterium of time”. Mysterium does double duty here, both
referencing Rudolf Otto's mysterium tremendum et fascinans, the concept of the numinous, the
holy and awful and reverent abyss of time, and the alchemical mysterium, or prima materia, the
imagined fabric of the universe itself. Fairchild situates the character/self of the poem the “son” firmly
in center of both. The first motion of this “son”, an attempt to stop the ceaseless motion of the world
“holds time in memory with words” This is as close to a manifesto as we will find from Fairchild, this
idea that time, and mortality and inevitability and death are held at bay through language and symbol,
“night, this night”, the “son” says meaning both night-as-symbol, Night as abstraction and “this night”
the specificity of the moment, of the trip with his father to a stalled rig. The night is numinous with it's;s
own later remembering, the meaning it holds is the experience itself, saved from the ravages of death
and time. “where the plains wind stacks the skeletons of weeds on barbed wire fences, and rattles the
battered DeKalb sign to to make the child think of time in it's passing, of death” the wind here has
agency, and act “to make the child think”, as though the objects that are indexed are a sort of mystery
play, or allegorical set of symbols revealed in succession, the weeds possess “skeletons”, and the world
is alive/not alive, in the liminal place of initiatory experience, where animals and the wind speak, and
have intent. The poem shuttles between this mythic world and the dross of industrial objects, the stalled
rig, the father's Ford, damaged drill pipe.
The child speaks again in the second stanza “road, this road” both “road” as the mythic place of story
and “this road” the specific, mud hollowed road of the evening described. Roustabouts in the crows
nest, oilfield workers are transfigured into the mythic, float “like Ascension angels on a ring of lights”,
not just angelic, but specifically ascension angels, those that uplift the material body into the heavens.
And the world is transfigured. “Chokecherries gouge the purpled sky” and “starlight rains across the
Ford.s blue hood”, another object is fixed both as an abstraction and in the personal mythology. “Blue,
this blue” This transfiguration of the world into life, into the living image is the heart of the poem, it is
seen as the crux of the experience itself. The next stanza finds us “later”, after the experience, the men
in the crows nest of the rig floating and numinous with meaning, the revelation of starlight, of the sky,
of the specificity of the Ford's blue as significant, and eternal, released from the meditation on
mortality of the first stanza,
“later, where black flies haunt the mud tank”, where the world is again returned to time, and decay
“the boy walks along the pipe rack dragging a stick to make a kind of music” and this is the work of the
poet, to recall the experience after the fact, to make “a kind of music” from the damaged drill pipe and
mud (mysterium) of the world. This act is seen as being in concert with the song of the world itself,
“the creek throbs with frog songs, locusts, the rasp of tree limbs blown and scattered.” The world itself
is a type of song, a recollection or mirror of the eternity that is intimated only in visionary glimpses.
”The great horse people, his father, these sounds, these shapes saved from time’s dark creek” in
recollection, in the telling of the poem itself these images are preserved, and live, in the face of the
onward motion of time, here seen as “the car moving across the moving earth” and then the final
pairing/fixing of objects “world, this world” held against death, and decay and the motion of time by
the act of the poem itself, a “kind of music” made from the objects of the world itself, imbued with
meaning, and memory and personal history, the mundane machinery of working class life, drillpipes
and oil rigs made to sing, to invoke the mythic “the great horse people” and the personal “his father”,
both saved from oblivion by the act of creation, by the memory palace and song of the poem itself.
