The word “person” means mask, from Latin persona.
The problem of personality
Is the problem of the value
Of the world as a totality
The precarious balance between the personal and the public is amplified in a torrid zone. Crossing the desert in a stagecoach with a corpse called “I,” a character named Everything in Edward Dorn’s Slinger makes the pertinent observation
it’s gonna be hot soon.
I only mean I never met I
but if he turns out to be put together
like most people I’s gonna
come apart in the heat.
You see what I mean?
The boy has a point Slinger
it could get close fast in here
The solution to the problem is commensurate with a soluble continuum baptized by Emerson and Whitman. “Every man’s condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put,” says Emerson, introducing his first book, Nature. Twenty years later (1856), one of Emerson’s most inspired readers wrote in his “Sun Down Poem,” after observing his solarized reflection in the water below, preserving the moment in vitro in the poem : “I too had been struck from the float forever held in solution, / I too had receiv’d identity by my body.” (This is more familiar as “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”: the change of title was the only major revision Whitman made.) “Let us build altars to the Blessed Unity which holds nature and souls in perfect solution, and compels every atom to serve an universal end,” Emerson reiterated in “Fate.”
These formulations of “solution” leach up into Slinger, in which the dead “I” solves for the other pilgrims a storage and detection problem (Everything’s “private batch” of LSD—“Straight man. / 1000 percent, / nothin but molecules”—can be hidden in the corpse) that has metaphysical ramifications:
What then, if we make I
a receptacle of what
Everything has,
our gain will be twofold,
we will have the thing
we wish to keep
as the container of the solution
we wish to hold
a gauge in other words
in the form of man.
It is a derangement of considerable antiquity.
~
The choice is simply,
I will—as mind is a finger,
pointing, as wonder
a place to be.
Robert Creeley’s I will turns in the groove of Charles Olson’s What does not change is the will to change. The word “character” is from Indo-European Gher I: scratch and scrape; rub, smear, tinge; Greek character is a mark scratched on a stone, or branded on a felon. Character means cut, incision. A character is not a person but a groove. Finding the groove means finding the person is the measure. (In a late poem, Creeley writes of echoes “In which these painfully small / endings shreds of emptying / presence sheddings of seeming / person can at last be admitted.”)
Here now you are—
by what means?
And who to know it?
“It assumes an address multiple to itself,” wrote Dorn of these lines. He reads a “molecular consistency” in Creeley’s poems (“This verse is ‘big,’ in other words, by virtue of the distances the rhetorical instruments can resolve and not at all in proportion to some incapacitating ratio of subject to object … the common mistake of modern practice is the miscalculation of that ratio” [Views, 119]), which in his own Slinger obtains not by distances resolved, but by compacting the space so that a stagecoach holds I, Everything, the circumambient Slinger, Lil, and the Stoned Horse (Levi-Strauss), as well as the ghostly entourage of all their implications. The characters, as in Louis Zukofsky’s Bottom, assume an address multiple to themselves. In Slinger Dorn extends the practice to include characters who are immanently extensible beyond their “personal characteristics,” whose conspicuously public personal names constitute the thinnest of borders between identity and the Infinite Circumference. “Scatter be / my name, something said.”
“Life is eating us up. We shall be fables presently,” said Emerson, reflecting on his essayistic predecessor Montaigne. One of Emerson’s successors, William James, recites the doctrine with a twist of his own:
Every bit of us at every moment is part and parcel of a wider self, it quivers along various radii like the wind-rose on a compass, and the actual in it is continuously one with possibles not yet in our present sight. And just as we are co-conscious with our own momentary margin, may not we ourselves form the margin of some more really central self in things which is co-conscious with the whole of us? (Pluralistic Universe, 762)
“You never know what name the periphery’s going to start with,” C. S. Giscombe writes, pursuing the apparition of his own name in British Columbia, where, in the nineteenth century, John Robert Giscome (“a negro miner,” “a pioneer”) left his name all over the map (a town, a portage, a canyon, and Giscome Rapids on the Fraser River). With no evidence of relation, the poet pursues his namesake in a racial odyssey—“the blood as if it too were out there telling”—yielding up a whole territory in place of a person. It proves to be “the same old story / endlessly leaping from river to river but just ahead of the words”:
the story’s the same old edge through the new twists, almost
intestinal from all maps of it, knotted—
the edge in the voice, the little edge creeping
the longest song bends away from the hodgepodge,
takes shape from below & beyond : no telling
how it appears, no word for the way blood arrives.
No word without whir as Mackey puns it, his School of Udhra spinning a constellation of commensurate identities:
His they their
we, their he
his was but if
need be one,
self-
extinguishing
I, neither sham nor
excuse yet an
alibi, exited,
out,
else
the only where
he’d be.