Cid Corman’s magazine Origin helped launch the career of Charles Olson. But what is origin? Isn’t origin unthinkable, like the moment of one’s birth? Whatever we mean by origin, it always comes back to the earth.
Not our good luck nor the instant peak and fulfillment of time gives us to see
The beauty of things, nothing can bridle it.
God who walks lightning-naked on the Pacific has never been hidden from any
Puddle or hillock of the earth behind us.
The origin is a daily event, daily evident, each day’s evidence all that’s needed to “make it new.” Not good luck nor the instant peak and fulfillment of time; not only, for these are numerous and profound. There is no part of it that does not press its release into the forge of a commanding realization. Primitivism, in Paul Shepard’s sagacious definition, is “a reciprocity with origins” (“Post-Historic Primitivism,” 88).
In Lectures in America Gertrude Stein reflects back on the phases of her writing, discerning not a conceptual itinerary but a series of tableaux, tidepools of feeling and sensation. Her ruminations help us overcome the idea that there are ideas, and make her work available as palpability, for this is how she remembers herself, remembers the event of her writing as the uniquely registered perturbation of a proprioceptively animated person. Her métier is talking and listening at the same time, during which she finds herself wondering “is there any way of making what I know come out as I know it, come out not as remembering” (181). Decades ahead of schedule, Stein invents projective verse. “Is there repetition or is there insistence” (166): that is the question. And “insistence is different. That is what makes life that the insistence is different” (167). The difference is so consuming that at its most acute it is without need of supplement; its figure encompasses and includes the ground on which it might otherwise be expected to stand out. And “if it were possible that a movement were lively enough it would exist so completely that it would not be necessary to see it moving against anything to know that it is moving. This is what we mean by life” (170). Credo : “if anything is alive there is no such thing as repetition” (174). Stein’s practice in her portraits is cinematic; “in the Making of Americans, I was doing what the cinema was doing, I was making a continuous succession of the statement of what that person was until I had not many things but one thing” (176–77). Everyday life is extemporaneously creative, so “we have living in moving being necessarily so intense that existing is indeed something, is indeed that thing that we are doing” (182). Significantly, “It is not repetition if it is that which you are actually doing because naturally each time the emphasis is different just as the cinema has each time a slightly different thing to make it all be moving” (179). Stein’s sense of “moving” expands here like a sponge to include, along with movement, the emotionally moving. It is moving : it is taking us somewhere. We are in transport, galvanized with the mobilizing insistence of e/motion.
Insistence is just what Charles Olson’s own syntax prescribes in “Projective Verse”:
The objects which occur at every given moment of composition (of recognition, we can call it) are, can be, must be treated exactly as they do occur therein and not by any ideas or preconceptions from outside the poem, must be handled as a series of objects in field in such a way that a series of tensions (which they also are) are made to hold, and to hold exactly inside the content and the context of the poem which has forced itself, through the poet and them, into being. (Human Universe, 56)
All the ingredient contributions to composition by field are here : the tensional legacy of romanticism, the direct perception of (Poundian) modernism, and the inter-transpicuous* claim of New England transcendentalism that spirit is form and doth the body make (Olson’s declaration at the Berkeley conference in 1965 “that which exists through itself is its own meaning” [in Creeley, Contexts of Poetry, 93] recapitulates Emerson’s definition of the spiritual as that which is its own evidence [in “Experience”]). Olson’s model of the poem as a vehicle of energies accords with Muriel Rukeyser’s contemporaneous view, “Exchange is creation. In poetry, the exchange is one of energy. Human energy is transferred, and from the poem it reaches the reader” (Life of Poetry, 185). The poem conceived as a unit of binding energy rather than an artifact moves with animal grace and an atmospheric diffusion of its content into its form, its emanation. Resistance to Olson’s propositions and to Stein’s practice are similar : the work (“projective” or “moving”), being a species of autopoiesis, corresponds to no prior plan, scheme, blueprint, paradigm, authorizing sanction. It is its own preview and afterthought. Western aesthetic sensibility has been so sedulously trained in the dialectic of repetition and recognition—rather than motion and cognition—that it is literally stupefied at the prospect of anything different. The insistent could be recognized only as a rhetorical manner, or as a certain temper of moral probity, not as the measure of the occasion itself. Its form. As for “content”: that would be circumstantial as well. In Olson’s famous retort to Robert Duncan in “Against Wisdom As Such”: “any wisdom which gets into any poem is solely a quality of the moment of time in which there might happen to be wisdoms” (Human Universe, 71). An important corollary is that there is no secret archetype or governing eidos emanating Idea through the passive plasticity of matter, the mother lode or matrix of manifestation. Everything of the “moment of time” is actualized as surface, incarnate in what Michael McClure calls a “momentary system of poetics” (Scratching the Beat Surface, 54).
Michel Foucault’s insight about origin overlaps significantly with (and, as if to corroborate everything in his thesis, without awareness of) Gertrude Stein and Charles Olson. Foucault views origin as a “thin surface … which accompanies our entire existence and never deserts it” (Order of Things, 330–31). Every move we make inaugurates a new skin of origin. Foucault is inspired here in part by the Romantic dream that valorizes origin as originality. What could be more original than an utterly contingent and gratuitous gesture, such as that celebrated by William Carlos Williams’s poem “Danse Russe” (“Who shall say I am not / the happy genius of my household”)? Yet these acts are not accredited any force of originality because they are too specific, all too proximate to those special signs, the stigmata, the sort of individuation constituted by mortality and diagnosed by the medical gaze.* Origin is not engaged by originality but by reiteration (a point belabored by Plato and Aristotle in their divergent deliberations on First Cause). Foucault and Derrida converge unwittingly on Stein’s repudiation of repetition : all three claim that what superficially looks like a repeat is nonetheless inaugural. The origin is immediate, not remote. This immediacy renders it distinct in kind from depth hypotheses of origin, in which origins are affiliated with a maximal interiority (like Olson, Foucault would find in proprioceptive depth a register of embodiment, not a moral crypt) and interiority is valorized as the inner sanctum of authenticity.† The origin Foucault strives to reclaim is superficial, that which (like Poe’s purloined letter) is transparent, invisible, in its superfluity. (It is only in a context as charged and convoluted as the late chapters of The Order of Things or Derrida’s Dissemination that Stein’s infamous iteration “a rose is a rose is a rose” assumes its proper dimensions.) To reiterate Gilles Deleuze : “the organization of language is not separable from the poetic discovery of surface” (“Schizophrenic and Language,” 285). Brian McHale finds such a prospect handsomely evident in The Tablets by Armand Schwerner : “what might have been a ‘vertical’ structure of transmission, emerging out of archaeological ‘deep time’ into the light of the present, suffers epistemological erosion and ends up collapsing into a single plane …. Nothing wells up from the depths; there are no depths under this eroded plane” (“Archaeologies of Knowledge,” 249; McHale’s boldface).
The babble of origin; the talkative manner in which “origin” is itself a discursive construct to begin with rather than a metaphysical drive; the contingency of origin in acts of perception; means that
the level of the original is probably that which is closest to man : the surface he traverses so innocently, always for the first time, and upon which his scarcely opened eyes discern figures as young as his own gaze … not because they are always equally young [but] because they belong to a time that has neither the same standards of measurement nor the same foundations as him. (Order of Things, 330)
Foucault’s “surface” is marked by that “collateral contemporaneity” in which William James found the whole universe knocking at the door to be let in. “While I talk and the flies buzz, a sea-gull catches a fish at the mouth of the Amazon, a tree falls in the Adirondack wilderness, a man sneezes in Germany, a horse dies in Tartary, and twins are born in France. What does that mean?” This is the riddle William James posed, asking his audience to consider that “We have no organ or faculty to appreciate the simply given order. The real world as it is given objectively at this moment is the sum total of all its beings and events now. But can we think of such a sum?” (Will to Believe, 545, 546). “Yet just such a collateral contemporaneity,” he reminded them, referring to his Borgesian list, “is the real order of the world” (546). Furthermore, “The Universe, with every living entity which her resources create, creates at the same time a call for that entity, and an appetite for its continuance,—creates it, if nowhere else, at least within the heart of the entity itself” (“Human Immortality,” 1125). By this means the individual is wedded to an imponderable congregation in which the whole appears : the accidents and incidents of the everyday that consecrate the unique, in which an odd torque compels divergence, and “objects will not stay concrete and particular : they fuse themselves into general essences, and they sum themselves into a whole—the universe. And then the object that confronts us, that knocks on our mental door and asks to be let in, and fixed and decided upon and actively met, is just this whole universe itself and its essence” (Will to Believe, 549).
The issue of origins and originality is then caught up in the matter—the mutter—of alterity, its looming matrix. One might stress matter, since alterity is virtually synonymous with matrices of materiality, signs of an intimate alien leading, etymologically and conceptually, to the maternal as source and mark of origin. Even language is gendered in the mother tongue. The figure of the mother as guardian of memory—subtended perhaps by the muses as daughters of memory—indicates something about the labile continuum in which Foucault would find us released to a memory alleviated from depth (and the vertical dimension of status and hierarchy), exonerated from authority, and given over to an erotics of transversality rather than laboring under the weight of symbolic capital and the “universal.”* Julia Kristeva gives more credit to the maternal in her figure of the chora, the vocal and kinetic plenitude challenging the symbolic order as such. She attributes this challenge specifically to poetry, the function of which is “to introduce through the symbolic that which works on, moves through, and threatens it” (Revolution in Poetic Language, 81). Below the armaments of social friction and constraint a deep uncanny persists, an “Occult ferocity of origin” wherein
Vision closes over vision
Standpoint melts into open
wanton meteor ensign streaming
~
not water not air not earth not conflux or mixture
not number not mind not force
it is
both thing and thought
co-implicate
singular.