© Gail Besemer Perlatore

ANSELM PARLATORE

… these from the journal, dear Roberto, in trying to answer yr “how the area has affected the work?” Psychogeotectonics, perhaps, or more probably the landscape as a vast religious flood plain metaphor. “… the transcendental & apocalyptic perspectives of religion come as a tremendous emancipation . .” (Frye). Emerson’s expositor or Carlyle’s morality. Jeffersonian, really. &, of course, a Givernian obsession but not the water-lily. Rather, maybe, a combe of gnarled pitch/poverty pines in a swale. It haunts me. The dune. The mathematics. forces. geometry. a crisscrossing matrix . . North/South (Glacial & Marine Geology) & East/West/East (Coastal Hydrology). It’s all vectors. Arrows to the heart. “Like the wind & the rain & the great glacier itself, the surf is the complicated end product of a long series of equations.” (Rattray). Also Ammons: “the very longest swell in the ocean, / I suspect, / carries the deepest memory.” More importantly Neruda: “water which dashes over beaches like daring hands beneath a skirt.” Tides & wind a spiritual & lusty stenography. Lyellian gradualism. Sir Thomas Browne’s East Anglian Shore. Sir Henry Vaughan’s West Country. Paterson. Gloucester. Metcalf. Robert Morgan’s Zirconia. Evolution also as one of many central myths/motifs. But you know as well as I the tradition. “The greatest writers have been at least parochial, provincial in their rootedness.” (Walcott). I dunno . . But, yet . . “if we do not know our environment, we shall mistake our dreams for a part of it, & so spoil our science by making it fantastic, & our dreams by making them obligatory.” (Santayana). But this much I’m sure of: a preoccupation with resolving things bio-muck with the transparency clear & sweet. An impassioned microscopy. Place translated into line break/length at sea level: line break(s) & beginnings pre & post synaptic membrane templates of increased lung capacity . . not Olson Hokum but the flatness keeps the line(s) out there in bird land … “I think more of a bird with broad wings flying & lapsing through the air . . I think I read my poetry more by length than by stress as a matter of movements in space than footsteps hitting the earth.” (D. H. Lawrence in a letter . .). I might ever be able to …! Anyway, a fetish quality, I tell ya, about these erotic post atomic & Newtonian, space age pelagian georgics. Narcissistic reveries with depleation . . (pleas) because of the loneliness … & the wandering. Loci. Nidus. Place. Home. Woman. Fold. “the landscape is The Woman & there is Woman in the landscapes.” (de-Kooning). The medieval Brigit shared the Muse boat with another Mary . . this one with blue robes & pearl necklace . . was the ancient pagen Sea-goddess Marian in drag . . Marian, Miriam, Mariamne, (Sea Lamb) Myrrhine, Myrtea, Myrrha, Maria, Marina (no pun intended), Mecox! Marah (Hebrew) = brine. We have plenty of that here. Mecox as liminal utopia. And these too re: water/posey: “the bottom of the sea is cruel”; (Hart Crane) “nature must include the void as its ultimate ground”; (Molesworth) “the sight of unenclosed water is barely tolerable” (Francine du Plessix Gray) “And the sea itself is there/behind the last house at the end of the street”; (Simpson) “algae of long past sea currents are moved”; (Ezra Pound in letter to Perdita Schaffner in condolence upon hearing of H. D.’s death) “how can water that doesn’t chase the moon speak to the imagination?”; (Barth) “the tide marsh, its twin diurnal ebbs & floods continuously reorchestrating the geography”; (Barth) “the places where water comes together with other water. Those places stand out in my mind as Holy Places.” (Raymond Carver.) But the longing/ loneliness defines the geography & the coordinates. Melvillian wilderness. Geoffrey O’Brien recently sd, “Melville was mad enough to believe that the groves & harbors the words make are real, that the imagined world opens into actual spaces. He entered those spaces, felt out their recesses—those “wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to & fro” … An expeditionary geopoetics. Language as primordial mud. Eroticism of annihilation. Even if in a Virgilian heroic. But, finally, this: reality should, ultimately, be nonlocal. Like Bell’s Theorem, the atom’s measured attributes are determined not by events happening at the actual measurement site but by events arbitrarily distant, including events outside the light cone.