Muses’ archetext

Here (hear) is a concord of inaugurations:

And then went down to the ship,

~

Off-shore, by islands hidden in the blood

~

A

round of fiddles playing Bach

These are the beginnings of poems that mark the boundaries of their authors’ lives. (The Cantos and The Maximus Poems were never definitively completed, while Zukofsky died a few years after finishing “A.”) Inspiration verges on expiration. This is precisely the nature of the duplicity of the Muses, whose gifts of song or honeyed words are always initiatory detours, beginnings, and “a beginning shows us how much language, with its perpetual memories of silence, can do to summon fiction and reality to an equal space in the mind. In this space certain fiction and certain reality come together as identity. Yet we can never be certain what part of identity is true, what part fictional” (Said, 373). The founding myth of Hesiod’s encounter with the Muses on Mount Helikon has proven enormously consequential for poetry. The Muses tell him that “we know how to say many lies similar (or identical) to true things, but if we want, we know how to sing the truth” (Theogony, book 1, lines 26–28). It is not for Hesiod to determine whether the discourse, the logos, bestowed by the Muses is true, or a lie masquerading as truth. In the Muses’ visit to the poet, the abridgement of sense is their inspiration, and the sense that they might make is possibly nonsense. In Hesiod and the Language of Poetry, Pietro Pucci comments on the predicament : “Not all song, even that produced by the Muses, is true; nevertheless, sung in the voice of the Muses, it always appears as truth. This disheartening message leaves the poet alone, facing the precariousness of the logos” (12). The poet is never to know whether he has been given a true or false discourse. In turn, readers “can never be certain what part of identity is true, what part fictional.”

Poems—as distinct from poets—have always known that the Muses bestow words, not truth, that the “truth” of the Muses is available only in the sense that “I put down words, and these words desire other words” (Noël, 7). The opening of “A” 15, a morphemic transcription of particles desiring other particles, is in an English cohabiting the sound of Job : 38 in Hebrew.

He neigh ha lie low h’who y’he gall mood
So roar cruel hire
Lo to achieve an eye leer rot off
Mass th’lo low o loam echo
How deal me many coeval yammer
Naked on face of white rock—sea.
Then I said : Liveforever my nest
Is arable hymn
Shore she root to water
Dew anew to branch.

It is as if the condition of the schizophrenic prevailed in which “All words become physical and affect the body immediately” (Deleuze, “Schizophrenic and Language,” 287). These too-tangible words become lumps of an excrementitious husk taunting the “body without organs” (Humpty Dumpty scorns Alice because her organized body is punctuated with differentiation—ducts, holes, passages). Deleuze defines the poetic as whatever reflects that which makes language possible, and “Whatever makes language possible is that which separates sounds from bodies, organizes them into propositions, and thus makes them available to assume an expressive function. Without this surface that distinguishes itself from the depths of bodies, without this line that separates things from propositions, sounds would become separable from bodies, becoming simple physical qualities contiguous with them, and propositions would become impossible” (284–85). Alice, in her underground adventure, attaches herself to “sliding along in such a way that depth is reduced to nothing but the reverse side of the surface” (280). The inscrutable obverse need not be deep. Like Saussure’s model of language as a piece of paper, with the concept on one side and the expression on the other, to cut one is to cut the other (Course in General Linguistics 1: 4); or like the rabbit/duck diagram in psychology, in which even prior awareness of the encoded images will not help you see them both at once; in the flicker of difference a world of “différance” is inaugurated—a world like that attested to by the Hassidim, who remark of Heaven that it’s just like this world, only a little bit different. Through its propensity to tropism, poetry takes both sides, adopts contrasting perspectives; it suffers the damage of each position. It undergoes this suffering as typos, blow or impression, literally the mark of the letter as impressed by pen or type, which makes it a text and composes its surface. The poem stains, scars, dismembers, and disperses itself, not through the punctuation that organizes and dispenses prose meanings, but through the highlighted “music” of the verse, the line breaks, and more recently the actual scatter of words across the surface of the page. Might it be possible to conceive of the dots on Mallarmé’s inscrutable dice as punctuation marks hazarded on a surface that might be a body after all?—as if, in Kelly’s lines, “Art is to show other people / what you cant see yourself” (playing “ars” on the hind part). The purpose of surface “is precisely that of organizing and displaying elements that have come from the depths” (Deleuze, “Schizophrenic and Language,” 293). If the reader can be said to understand a text, she sets its type. The writer would be on the obverse, standing under the text. Olson even speculated that “you wrote as though you were underneath the letters” (Muthologos 2:34)—sticking a head up out of earth, calling to Athena (as in Maximus 2:160)—an image he derived from the typesetter’s position of being literally on the underside, facing the bottoms of the letters being set in place in the coign.

The peculiar skill of any art is in making all that is available of itself be surface; even its depths (like the picaresque profundities of Moby-Dick) are disclosed only as surface events. This puts writer and reader on more or less equal footing, because although each has a different approach to the text, once the text is in place the surface it makes available is haunted or shadowed by an obverse, the obvious perversity by which it affords glimpses of eaches and anys where every and all appear to lurk. Both sides are never visible at once, although a fundamental tropical urge is to make both sides available in such rapid succession that, like a coin trick, a continuity of the alternating surfaces blends into one demonic animated texture that is posed as identity and surplus indistinguishably; and with this trick, the axis of combination (metonymy) blends into the axis of substitution (metaphor), yielding a New World every time.

Among available modes of discourse, poetry is unique in favoring utopia as transient occasion, not universal city. Poems effectively consume all the energy they generate, and “Every time the poem is read, it disintegrates” (Fussell, Lucifer in Harness, 65). At the same time, its disappearance is not a loss of meaning, but a recovery of its obscurity, its underside. The paradox of poems is paradise, or being around on the other side of light and law—like the bog Barbara Hurd celebrates in Stirring the Mud, “the glistening, soaked, uncertain ground of reverie” (37)—satisfying sense with nonsense, thing with word, context with text, all by each, as if William James’s suspicion held, that “reality MAY exist in distributive form, in the shape not of an all but of a set of eaches, just as it seems to be” (Pluralistic Universe, 688). The distributed sets of eaches might be said to achieve a constellation in the astronomical sense; but on the human level, there is an accompanying estrangement provoking Olson’s declaration, “Isolated person in Gloucester, Massachusetts, I, Maximus, address you / you islands.”

… The hand holds no chalk
And each part of the whole falls off
And cannot know it knew, except
Here and there, in cold pockets
Of remembrance, whispers out of time.

To read poetry is to suffer a continual lapse of meaning into being, message into event. A digestive sensation—even excremental. As the fable of the Muses suggests, poetry displaces or disables the author’s putative authority. Yet poetry is inaugurated with Hesiod’s willingness to persist as if the words they breathed in his ear were the truth (“just as it seems to be”). He is willing to absorb the naïveté of that confidence into his discourse, and say things that in any other context would appear preposterous. He sings a song of gods, mouthing their myths, while the modern poet appropriates the myth (or mouth) of consciousness (the episteme that has replaced myth and been institutionalized as psychology) and, as in Wordsworth’s Prelude, would make consciousness as such commensurate with mythic awareness. The confounding challenge : “the initiate is expected to remain sober at the feast of thought, even though the language will begin to dance” (Krell,73).

Because of its tropological associations, poetry can be conceived as a turning back in time, and its resources (riddle and charm [cf. Welsh, Roots of Lyric]) can make it seem atavistic. But to turn is not always to return : Hesiod proceeds with the confidence that the Muses’ gift will disclose to him not only past and present, but future. The irreducible plurality of the texture of poems is partially an attempt to occupy all three temporalities at once. In a cunning inversion of the archaeological paradigm, where one delves into the earth to divine the past, Emerson suggests that “poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word or a verse and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem.” The “primal warblings” are denominations of the same fund from which Muses arise. A peculiar dividend of Emerson’s account is that the poet is able to distort the “colossal cipher” of primal language; so his proposed defense against this willful individuation is a libidinous oracular thaw of fossilized nectar, the “ravishment of the intellect by coming nearer to the fact”:

… until at last rage draw out of thee that dream power which every night shows thee is thine own, a power transcending all limit and privacy, and by virtue of which a man is the conductor of the whole river of electricity. Nothing walks, or creeps, or grows, or exists, which must not in turn arise and walk before him as exponent of his meaning. Comes he to that power, his genius is no longer exhaustible. All the creatures by pairs and by tribes pour into his mind as into a Noah’s ark, to come forth again to people a new world. This is like the stock of air for our respiration or for the combustion of our fireplace : not a measure of gallons, but the entire atmosphere if wanted. (“The Poet”)

An entire atmosphere, transcending all limit and privacy as Emerson forecast : this is what makes “A” and The Maximus Poems a circumference within which recent poetry internalizes the local, enacts its location, sustaining evidence of the outermost in syntax rather than reflection (the old sublime), trope as grammar unbound. The great labor of these two texts inheres in smudges, mistakes admitted, reflections in which thought (reflection) is subject to the subject’s (reader’s) breath fogging the glass—condensation that clears, revealing a bounty of lucent interiority to which Robin Blaser returns (shard after shard) in “Image-Nations.”

the voice is recognizable
as fragments
of a greater language,

a live and changing
face

~

the language, older and other

than we are

  prehistoric, sacred

geography

    turns in the wind

uprooted

~

but language is other than ourselves,
older, moves by itself,   and my
heart in it is only an event.
series    a discontinuity rather than
the author’s unity

In antiquity, Psyche appeared in myths as a person, with a predicament, not as an animating principle. The commonplace usage of the word psyche was as “breath-soul,” from psuchein, “to blow.” Psyche was associated with procreation and with the head (from which semen was thought to derive), but not with consciousness as such—hence its association with sneezing, the involuntary expression of something (psyche) in the head (“ecstatic / contorting / of the / soul”). In the living, psyche appeared to cooperate with thumos, blood-spirit. At death, thumos disintegrates, while psyche flies to Hades as an eidolon, or image (a symbol as it came to mean). As such, “the psyche is memory or intelligence dormant, and can under proper circumstances be recalled by grief, love, magic, or poetry” (Vermeule, 41).

The inspired voice of the Muse is breathed into Hesiod on Helikon : “The breath communicates a voice almost without sound, an incorporeal whisper. Such an image accounts for both the soundless nature of inspiration and the necessity of controlling poetic language so that it adds itself to things (or the referent) without intruding with its own body and sound” (Pucci, 28). Hesiod’s poem is a song of memory and oblivion, which links its legacy with two sources of inspiration : first, the articulation of memory as Mnemosyne, essential for poetry or any system of graphic transcription; and second, the obliteration of memory in Hades, past the river of forgetting, Lethe. (Remember Zukofsky : “To begin a song : / If you cannot recall, / Forget.”) In fact, the Greek word for truth, alethea, suggests that truth is that which has not yet been taken over the river of oblivion to the land of the dead, the “stupid dead.” Small wonder, then, the duplicity of poets, whose strength is as much a foraging among necropolitan ancestry as it is a simple mirroring of presentable (appropriate) poetic objects.

“The gift of the Muses should enable the poet to recover a lost privilege, divine memory, and truth : yet it is unsolicited and uncontrollable; it can lead to truth or the worst fallacy; it establishes the origin of poetry in a territory that lies beyond the control of man” (Pucci, 3). The truth of poetry, like a sneeze, is involuntary. The link between poetry and truth is fortuitous and unintended. The Muses’ whispers and the Sirens’ songs ripple the surface and disturb the depth with sediment and surplus. The fable of the Muses emphasizes dispossession, alieniloquiam, or speaking otherwise; and the poet, lending tongue to an othered speech, resumes creation in the very instant of being confounded : “here is the table / Who knows the word for it.”

B says, The real table does not exist
I sang my name and turned into a skeleton

I sang my name but it sounded strange
I sang the trace then

without a sound,
then erased it

It is as if “through its drafts —conduits— the / poem unnames you as it goes.” Sobin’s “Dark Drafts” (in Breath’s Burials), like Mackey’s “Songs of the Andoumboulou” (or songs of the first drafts of humankind) and DuPlessis’s Drafts, engage the world from this groundless prospect of naming as unnaming, where draft is both a preparatory version and source of deep chill : “a draft, a stroke, a kind of fear.”

An intake

of breath by which birth might be proposed

of something said to’ve been known

as meaning made with a mouth filled

with air. The soul sucked in by something

said

as thru a crack in the door though the

doors dissolve.

“Unknownness did your sense of touch re-trace my own nothingness?” wonders Susan Howe. “Is a poetics of intervening absence an oxymoron?” (The Birth-mark, 27). Facing such a prospect, psychology can offer no content. Nor is myth content, but the mu- or mouth-theatre where envoys of visionary circumference appear and disappear, inspiring expirations on whatever margin language itself provides as muthologistical grounding, “the blur, the erasure that is the magic ground in which an image may appear” (Duncan, “Two Chapters from H.D.,” 90). These images, or messages, are mouths mulching and musing, evidence also of a potent animal intelligence swarming in every text.

In antiquity myth was a repository of this swarming mulch, this publicly dissolving intelligence reformulating human agency in divine tableaux. The Maximus Poems are a series of interjections, written on whatever surfaces were available (margins of books, scraps of tickets and napkins, windowframes and walls of Olson’s flat). They are transactions of poiesis seeping back into mythos. An Olson poem wants to feel itself scored in mind like a residue of fire, or like life-forms making the long migration from bios to fossil. They are musings, and it is to musings that the Muses attend, and a music begins.

the Muse
is the ‘fate’ of the poem
its ‘allotment,’ ahead of time   the face of it
at the end   seen
at the beginning

Olson coined the word “archetext” as that which transcends an apparent condition, rendering the text itself transparent to the primary power it imagines (Muthologos 1: 58). Myth : not a content of the poem (myth, as is the case with wisdom, “is solely a quality of the moment of time in which there might happen to be wisdoms” [Human Universe, 71]), but the envoy of its visionary circumference. And within the domain that circumference establishes, both interior and exterior cosmos allow configurations of their powers and persons, agencies of compost inspiring expiration, envisioning the dispensation of particular adherences : for instance, “mythology is not reference / it is inner inherence” (Charles Olson in Connecticut, 21). Things hold together like the clutch of organs in the bodily cavity, proprioceptively poised. Given with this condition—the abounding bond of mortals—is sophrosyne, “the skill of mortality” (Arrowsmith, in Shepard, “Post-Historic Primitivism,” 81).