In scenes of inspiration, as in cases of shamanistic transport, language descends from a higher power to brutalize the human vessel who suffers it knowingly, gnawingly. To assent to this condition is to follow Robert Kelly in believing that “Language is the only genetics,” or to follow Robert Duncan’s faith in the somatic pantheon of biochemistry guiding the composition of the poem; or, with Jack Spicer, call it dictation from the Martians. Taken together, these and other testimonies insist on the capacity of the language in its most subconscious particularity as nourishing and enabling, while conceding that unilateral “meaning” may be retarded and balked. Why “enlarge” your mind, asks Ishmael : “subtilize it” (Moby-Dick, chap. 74).
The dearth of paraphrasable meaning is acutely evident in Zukofsky’s “A,” a work that proceeds almost without “thinking” but which everywhere incarnates a fund of sapience. It proposes, in fact, a poetics of condensation and density within which any overarching thematic or philosophical assertions clearly occupy positions of limited relevance. Like the Watts Tower of Simon Rodia or the Palais Ideal of Facteur Cheval—acknowledged models for Ronald Johnson’s Ark (along with “A” itself)—“A” is a bricolaged monument that is propositional in its means, in the intricacy with which part weds part : this is why it is finally a book of the family, the household, and the secret of why it is also (like Finnegans Wake) conspicuously public (as family life is, as skin, as words). An aggregate cumulonimbus of genetic determination.
To work on a poem spanning fifty years (Pound, Zukofsky) or for several decades (Olson, Johnson) demands not so much stamina as a persistent faith in obscurity, working underground, in the dark, subscribing to indeterminacy as the conditional atmosphere. Negative capability (Keats’s famous term adopted as ars poetica by Olson): “when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” (Special View of History, 32)—where the key terms are capable of being and without irritable reaching, for fact and reason remain salutary options, and doubts and uncertainties are not being affirmed as desirable but as inevitable. Keats’s is a vision of good nature. With slight adjustment, it might be taken as an alchemical dictum.
Alchemy is the science of becoming aware of the whole project in which we are being engaged. Alchemy is the science of being used. Alchemy is the science of use. Its name probably means the art of the black, & alludes in all likelihood not to the black soil of Egypt but to the black blankness of the unknown brain, the “silent areas” in which the Operator, bent night & day over his fire, eventually kindles a Voice, one that guides him in the science of penetration, science of final separations. (Kelly, Alchemist to Mercury, 82)
To suppose with Lacan that the unconscious is like language is to see in that “black blankness of the unknown brain” an overcharged surface, like Freud’s mystic writing pad, a tablet that keeps adding new impressions without erasing the old, becoming a palimpsest of unreadable, impenetrable density.
Olson’s animation of Gravelly Hill plays on the boundaries of temporal strata (such as glacial and interglacial), incorporating them into a minutely registered proprioceptive geosophy, hatching personhood from the core of density:
Gravelly hill was ‘the source and end (or boundary’ of
D’town on the way that leads from the town to Smallmans
now Dwelling house, the Lower
Road gravelly, how the hill was, not the modern usableness
of any thing but leaving it as an adverb as though the Earth herself
was active, she had her own characteristics, she could
stick her head up out of the earth at a spot
and say, to Athena I’m stuck here, all I can show
is my head but please, do something about
this person I am putting up out of the ground into your hands.
For the condition of the poetry is not enclosed in a book, but knitted into your skin; it folds your wrinkles into its holography; it makes reading a compact with writing, becoming wreading. It is the juncture of two worlds, the simultaneous identification of yourself and your text as a language so immediately present to consciousness as to be unconscious, as close and intimate as the tactility of your inner arm or thigh.
the Greeks
made much of chros, face of the body’s
joining with the world, membrane of the self
at the brink of the gap, where the chaos of all
not integumented with
the world of order we feel
from inside out
begins. Skin.
Dermal appetite; parchment of skin; where “craving” and “carving” exchange phonemes in a murmur of particularities.
In the synactic compactness of “A” 22 the location is plainly language indiscriminable from earth:
… Laminated marl—fret changes
only himself, to prove peach
blooms, cherry blossoms, dogwood : seen
seeded flower; unaltered flowerless marriage
of spore. Races endure more
slowly than languages unconsciously sounding
skills as of bees in
a hive, animal passions range
human, alike their affections individual:
if created Once (a thought)
or thought of consecutively fossiliferous
marl saved froghopper, ladybird, glowworm,
red admiral, mingling in dredged
lake mud, anachronous stone, horn,
bone, jade, an armlet’s brass
wire, flax plaited, not woven,
carbonized apple, raspberry, blackberry seed,
wild plum drupe, reindeer antler
nowhere, remains of a larger
hunting dog, a forest pony,
a burnt brick, and round
small bodies—fossils of the
white chalk—might have been
strung together as beads, the
bond that united them unbroken.
The departed celestial radiated alive
under earth rest will not
return above to hunger, sustained
by mayapple root, their children
unmolested fleeted by glowworms before
stars course ocean flicker continents.
Excavation of a Neolithic settlement; compost library : the mystery of terrestrial space “strung together as beads, the / bond that united them unbroken,” all the elements in this vast involuntary configuration concurring that surface then is “not / Superficial but a visible core”—where “bright life needles every clod.” It becomes possible to read layers of earth as multitemporal surfacing, as Olson comes to it in “Maximus, From Dogtown—II”:
earth is interesting:
ice is interesting
stone is interesting
flowers are
Carbon
Carbon is
Carboniferous
Pennsylvania
Age
under
Dogtown
the stone
the watered
rock Carbon
flowers, rills
~
tropical forests hardened to coal
the wedge of sediments pressed and uplifted
crumpled squeezed wrinkled
raised and eroded
overturned
and overthrust over the planes of fracture
~
… I became aware
That beneath me, beneath the gravel
And the hurrying ants, and the loam
And the subsoil, lay the glacial drift,
The Miocene jungles, the reptiles
Of the Jurassic, the cuttlefish
Of the Devonian, Cambrian
Worms, and the mysteries of the gneiss;
Their histories folded, docketed
In darkness; and deeper still the hot
Black core of iron, and once again
The inscrutable archaic rocks,
And the long geologic ladder,
And the living soil and the strange trees,
And the tangled bodies of lovers
Under the strange stars.
~
the faithfulness I can imagine would be a weed
flowering in tar, a blue energy piercing
the massed atoms of a bedrock disbelief.*
The issue of such wreading, then, is persistence in negative capability, dark burrowing while sending up fresh shoots (as in the alchemical engraving of the buried king’s legs sprouting as a tree), in this subterranean density of copenetrating language and earth that is nonetheless all surface, a biodegradable strata of attention in which
the tree, the cup, the star, the bird
in all the rich garden of what we would cultivate in ourselves
moan and strive to utter what they are
up.
The tropological discovery of language as material has enabled this dynamic recognition of thought as matter to emerge in the work of Zukofsky, Duncan, Spicer, and others. Ashbery’s “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror” is a poem concerned with precisely this issue of a soluble surface in which “more keeps getting included / Without adding to the sum,” yet within which nothing appears that doesn’t immediately enter the distribution of parts in time. Ashbery’s strict attention to the cognitive relativity of objects in a field (particularly in Three Poems) complements Olson’s geophysical thematic. “I cannot explain the action of leveling,” Ashbery writes, “Why it should all boil down to one / Uniform substance, a magma of interiors.” Olson:
the greater the water you add
the greater the decomposition
so long as the agent is protein
the carbon of four is the corners
in stately motion to sing in high bitch voice the fables
of wood and stone and man and woman loved.
A giddiness, a weightless suspension attends this call of the sirens, who might well be voices from a legendary place under Ocean where everything comes apart. In Duncan’s “Adam’s Way,” Mrs. Maybe tells Adam:
You were fluid then, a network of soul,
spread for miles about,
breaking and remaking itself in waves.
God and Nature broke and remade themselves in you.
All this fluid Being was calld Atlantis …
What Kelly calls “The gods / broken into the pieces that are us,” Zukofsky is astonished to recognize as familiar neighbors : “why that was you that / is how you weather division.” Or Duncan, considering the “Place Rumord to Have Been Sodom,” allows that it “might have been. / Certainly these ashes might have been pleasures.” Sodom; Atlantis; Olson’s Dogtown in the hills above Gloucester; Pound’s Templar holdout, Montsegur—“wind space and rain space”—all are places reflecting that insatiable drive of poetry (as Paul Valéry said of philosophy) to transform everything we know into what we would like to know. Another French poet, Francis Ponge, said “the function of poetry … is to nourish the spirit of man by giving him the cosmos to suckle. We have only to lower our standard of dominating nature and raise our standard of participating in it in order to make the reconciliation take place” (Voice of Things, 109). Confronting such an imposing order, Ponge seeks “a poetry through which the world so invades the spirit of man that he becomes almost speechless, and later reinvents language”—something like the art envisioned by Emily Dickinson (no. 1247):
To pile like Thunder to its close
Then crumble grand away
While Everything created hid
This — would be Poetry —
Or Love — the two coeval come —
We both and neither prove —
Experience either and consume —
For None see God and live —.
So “truth” (like any reified percept) is only a function of what might become of it, the detour or possible moment of nontruth as in a trope—the aspiration of Stevens’s “Sleight-of-Hand Man” who seeks “the life / That is fluent in even the wintriest bronze,” the grim yet benevolent imagination “which in the midst of summer stops // To imagine winter.” And what could it imagine but that unwobbling, empty pivot, “The Snow Man,” as the poem vaults out on its comely surmise:
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
With these lines the poem closes in on that vessel (bearing in mind the alchemical vessel) that is the object of Heidegger’s scrutiny in “The Thing,” in which he maintains that the jug does not contain its liquid; rather, “The emptiness, the void, is what does the vessel’s holding. The empty space, this nothing of the jug, is what the jug is as the holding vessel …. The vessel’s thingness does not lie at all in the material of which it consists, but in the void that holds” (Poetry, Language, Thought, 169); “in the shattering of the cup He / keeps the cup,” Duncan writes.
The work of snowman, jug, or poem is not to exist as that material phenomenon, but to bring to focus the space and to enlarge the sapience through which pass transient forms with their combustible magnifications. The blank aperture the language itself holds in trust is exemplified by the shifters (deictic terms like pronouns and prepositions—you and this, she and there and now—the meaning of which is always context specific), the clearing into which articulate combinations of material reform and trope themselves back to unboundedness. “[W]rist high unwearying bent, cosmos / fingers order trope to trope,” Zukofsky writes in “A” 22, “AN ERA / ANYTIME / OF YEAR”—a text of which it can be said less that Zukofsky writes than that “Zukofsky” is composed of such particularities as “a,” “an,” “&,” “and,” and “the,” which generate history, language, and whomans (Don Byrd’s delectable neologism shuffling woman and man into that monstrous hybrid, an interrogative noun [Great Dimestore Centennial, 98]), trope on trope.
The work of poetry is less to entertain images than to pass human order through the mulching of language. Not a naturalism, but a means of keeping in touch with the principle of natural depletion; to hold—in whatever clearing can be achieved in verbal space—that confluence of public and private ends, so that “end” may be taken in both its “proper” sense of goal and its “tropic” sense as ground, compost, costume where “The Cosmos / begins at the end of yourself”:
The wickedness
for man is that he is only self begotten only begotten son of
himself monogenetic creature circumferated by the limit of himself
circumambulating in the Dogtown meadow with the chance not to struggle
with the bull but on the air to smell and follow the perfume of the rotting
fish : as you bear to the left circumambulating the black stone the niger
of the fish, if that’s what is at the center of the pasture drunk
in the night or in splendor in matador’s costume in the Sunday light of
afternoon whatever smell the fish the degradation under control produces
one hundred percent protein or nature is busy eating it up The Cosmos
begins at the end of yourself It includes you It wavers and retires it
advances and disappears it gathers as the flies do on the pile of smoked
fish it evaporates into the air …
~
Jack Clarke’s ‘we are under image’
rythmos (form’s movement) to walk into ‘the
primordial always exists’ face to face always outside
ourselves the astonishment is
that it is kosmos
playing out with one man entheos
they are
the flowing boundary taking birth taking leave
at the point of the heart a continual
division of halves
The name of such halving is sharing. It is a work of symbolism, of sundered pieces rejoined; the law of push and pull, or Emersonian “compensation,” in which “An inevitable dualism bisects nature, so that each thing is a half, and suggests another thing to make it whole”; and in which “Every excess causes a defect; every defect an excess” (“Compensation”). Of course for Emerson the defect belongs to the arcana of good fortune, also known as “nature”: “Nature sends no creature, no man into the world without adding a small excess of his proper quality … a slight generosity, a drop too much” (“Nature”). In “Compensation” this is the principle by which “The value of the universe contrives to throw itself into every point.” The points are like numeric dots on dice, and “The dice of God are always loaded”: “What we call retribution is the universal necessity by which the whole appears wherever a part appears.”