Memoranda and signatures

Order is relative.

‘An apparent confusion if lived with long enough
may become orderly’. Charles Ives

… accumulating,

a humus! (The upper strata—dry, newly-
fallen leaves, twigs, lichen.
Seeds from the size of the whispered dandelion, to
acorns
big as thumbs.

This passage (from Ronald Johnson’s “The Different Musics”) continues in a scrupulous documentation of layers of disintegration, to “the under-ooze & loose loam of slug & worm.”

… to find, out of the design,
words may be pulled up
like onions, a humus still
clinging to them, sweet to the taste—
nutty & fragrant.

One way that nuttiness and fragrance is plucked is in the hybrid medium of the anatomized citation (made even sweeter here in a palimpsest of Emerson on Goethe):

All things

are engaged in writing their history.*

The air is

full of sounds;

the sky, of tokens;

the ground is all memoranda & signatures

& every object

covered over with hints

which speak

to the intelligent.

This compost harbors another design, Johnson’s aspiration “that poems / might be made as Harry Partch makes / music, his instruments / built by hand / —that we might determine our own / intervals between / objects, / as he constructs octaves.” So Johnson fancies himself, like Thoreau,

… engrossed,

‘between a microscopic & a telescopic
world’,
attempting to read

the twigged, branchy writing

of frost, spider & galactic cluster.

Finding that “the event is the print of your form. It fits you like your skin” (Emerson, “Fate”), things rouse to consequence. Entities appear as transcarnate compassions. And companions—as the implicate order in the “Dizzy ravine” of “Mont Blanc” provokes Michael McClure’s consideration that “These lines seem to be the energy of the universe expressing itself upon the complex organism of Shelley’s body as if he were a typewriter of protein spirit” (Scratching the Beat Surface, 67). McClure’s own spinally centered poems differ from Johnson’s vertical symmetries mainly through the mammal exaltation of the former and the botanic exfoliations of the latter. “I wanted to write a poem that would come to life and be a living organism” (89). McClure understandably perceives the action painting of Pollock or Kline as “transcriptions of arm and brush that are statements, like pawprints of physical being. Wolfprints!” (137). Like McClure, Robert Duncan knows writing as a postural and gestural amplitude, incisively somatic. For the act of composition,

My whole life
needs to be here
to come alive in this
consideration.

~

My life

in the leaves and on water
My mother and I

born

in swale and swamp and sworn
to water.

As Guy Davenport writes, explaining Shaker Mother Ann Lee’s adage “every force evolves a form”: “A work of art is a form that articulates forces, making them intelligible” (Every Force, ix)—as Lorine Niedecker’s “rich friend / silt” commemorates. “And if truth come to our mind we suddenly expand to its dimensions, as if we grew to worlds” in our newfound solubility (Emerson, “Fate”).

      … And what might have been,
And what might be, fall equally
Away with what is, and leave
Only these ideograms
Printed on the immortal
Hydrocarbons of flesh and stone.

Rexroth’s hydrocarbon glyphs are imprints a woman’s hip shares with lignite (“Tiny red marks on your flanks / Like bites, where the redwood cones / Have pressed into your flesh. / You can find just the same marks / In the lignite in the cliff / Over our heads”). This is in “Lyell’s Hypothesis Again,” a visit to earth’s memoranda in the transitory signatures of passion, in accord with Emerson’s recommendation that “A man ought to compare advantageously with a river, an oak, or a mountain. He shall have not less the flow, the expansion, and the resistance of these” (“Fate”).

And a kind of greening speech comes from those mouths

all but winged—each leaf
cleft & articulate.

~

      Each leaf is an encyclopedia
Slowly reading itself, keeping
Inviolate the secret of its
Discrimination, falling slowly
Through the counter-glow of which it is a part.

The genealogy of glow and counter-glow is everywhere. “If I am overflowing with life,” Thoreau discovers in a journal entry (May 10, 1853), “all nature will fable, and every natural phenomenon will be a myth.” Everything signifies. Every signature applies. The sign has a nature.

So goes : first, shape
The creation—
A mist from the earth,
The whole face of the ground;
Then rhythm—
And breathed breath of life;
Then style—
That from the eye its function takes—
“Taste” we say—a living soul.
First, glyph; then syllabary,
Then letters. Ratio after
Eyes, tale in sound. First, dance. Then
Voice. First, body—to be seen and to pulse
Happening together.

No glyph or signifying scrap resists being immediately put into play by more commanding form. “A” and Maximus bend out convex, so each book anamorphically condenses a spot of insertion like a smokehole through which the reader fits, blackened by the passage as if through Paleolithic cave meanders (“the cave wall socket in which the current is called animal”); turned inside out to the world again—in woods, fields, clearings, thickets, or in “foliaceous heaps [that] lie along the bank like the slag of a furnace, showing that Nature is in ‘full blast’ within,” revealing earth as “living poetry like the leaves of a tree” (Thoreau, “Spring,” Walden)—following the path of things through forms, the park of eternal events, just this recent and local:

THEN I KNOW I AM NATURE, AS TOPOLOGY
UNROLLS ABOUT ME.
Forests turning
into books and rugs.
Things
are carbonized.
Cinders remain where life was/
but power remains
in the frame
of new shapes.

McClure’s all-cap lines can be read as a sublimate of the text. “THE PREDATORS MAKE PATTERNS IN THE AIR”; “WE ARE STICK FIGURES CARVED ON CLIFFS OF STARS.” Kinship with all that is affirms a “Selection of Heaven” in which “yours was the mouth of the wish the tongue of my speech sought.”

It’s in the nature of the sign to arouse a design (or impose one*), a design that signals the otherwise imperceptible difference inscribed in vast sidereal motions. Not all the traces can be read or comprehended, but all that are can be realized as trace, sediment, remnant, nature’s signature.

John of the Oak was here:
these words, as letters,

hang in the air
over the mercurial eye

that maybe saw & always
answered as if it did.

The words pretend
to be painted on the wall.

John. Everything pretends
to be just the place where we find it.

We find it sighing, we kiss it
singing, we call it Real

& measure with our newfangled minds
the distance from that glistering Real

to those heavenly twins our eyes,
& call that the world. That is,

the place where John was
when he wrote or said, John was here.

Such glimpses are not only signatures, but

monumenta. In nature are signatures

needing no verbal tradition.

oak leaf never plane leaf. John Heydon.

as to hsin image

In short, the cosmos continues.