Towards Autumn

First a passage, a reading of an image of an image of an image (Milton's "What thou seest, fair creature, is thyself") from Stephen Knapp's Literary Interest:

Eve looking into the lake in the moments following her creation:  does she fall in love with the image of herself, or should we read God's equation to mean that what she falls in love with is what she herself really is, namely, an image? (LI 53).

Secondly, what Knapp extrapolates from this image, a notion of "self-discovery...by subordination of [Eve's] consciousness,"  or more generally "the attribution of self-awareness to figures traditionally deprived of full consciousness" (LI 53).

And then the thinking that pursues these connections with the extratextual.  Or does it always happen this way?  From text to world, and then back to text?  I found myself trying to write a poem the other day that would succeed in breathing life into something concrete--no eidos but in words.  Instead, I ended up suspended upon a Platonic generality--an ending whereby Love rides high and truth holds on for dear life.  Why is the concrete universal so elusive these days?  Has there been a gradual imaginative separation of the two--particularity/universality--in our culture?  That gets me toward a question, or set of questions, I am trying to ask myself and the poets I am reading for my dissertation.  How and why does the value of traces of the sacred in secular modernity challenge poets to do a certain kind of work--philosophical investigations of the secular--that sustains and rethinks the concrete universal?  Furthermore, why do poets variously see this project as a necessarily ethical one?

Here I am, lost in questions, forgetting where I started, not knowing where I go.  It is starting to feel like autumn out there...
 

Reflection on Allen Grossman's Summa Lyrica: Appearance

Over the past year or so I have become acquainted with Allen Grossman's poetry and poetics.  Since there are no calm shoals to be found along the shores of his oeuvre, no place in his work where the river's current is not immensely strong, deep, and opaque, I decided to dive into the thunderously crashing tides of his primer of "speculative poetics," Summa Lyrica.  I have been reading this collection of scholia off and on for over a year now--underlining, musing, and returning to the book every now and every then to continue with revivified perplexity and antinomic wonder.  Today's reading brought me to Grossman's "commonplace" number 27, "Poem as Appearance or Phenomenon":

A poem is an appearance.  There are no appearances which are not appearances to someone (275).

In this book, as elsewhere (strongly so in his new collection of essays, True-Love), Grossman characterizes poetic indeterminacy as one side of an antinomy between manifestation and mortality (or disappearance of the person).  We long to preserve the image of the Beloved, even while such an act of preservation is fraught with painful contingency and fugacity.  A poem is a complete experience, Grossman claims, but a complete experience of indeterminacy, the latter being "in an intricately qualified sense...autonomy."  "Indeterminacy" for Grossman is not equivalent to "constructivity and undecidability" in general, but rather it "must mean unilateral undecidability by the other."  The materials of poetry resist being put otherwise.  It can only be so.

This does not sound fatalistic to me, but it does sound like it needs further reflection, further conversation.  If I am indeed a pragmoet practicing pragmoetics (the science of endlessly useful image-making) what do I make of the sense of completion that Grossman imputes to a poem?  Well, perhaps he gives us a clue in this commonplace: a completion, or an appearance [of completion] to someone.  Poetry is simultaneously a radically contingent and radically autonomous construction in language of the human image.  The disappearance of this image might be increasing with the speed of perceptual technologies (e.g. see Virilio's concept of "picnolepsy" in The Aesthetics of Disappearance), but still from the space of such disappearances emerge new figures, like the turning face of a holograph, the anamnestic encounter with the unexpectedly familiar, the indeterminate other shimmering brightly amid the dark abysm of a hypnotic, lethal sense of limitation.

Some Thoughts After a Reverie

I realize at this moment that what I want to describe has already passed.  That is, I have been preoccupied with the lingering aftertaste of a mood, a state of consciousness, an "affect," an imagined relationship or identification between a real representation (that is, any experienced representation of something fictive and not a fictive, or hypothetical, representation) and a possible "reader" (in a loose and generally agential sense, cf. moviegoer, listener, sports fan, believer, student, citizen, etc.).  Let's call this "state" a reverie, for the sake of a certain economic pleasure in choosing a term, and less for its descriptive accuracy.  I witnessed such a phenomenon twice this week--once at secondhand, once in propria persona.  Both instances were induced by movies--the first case being Wim Wenders's Paris, Texas, the second Ridley Scott's Blade Runner.  Now I have to confess my filmic neophytism:  I had never seen either of these splendid films before this week.  But what I am interested in pondering for a second, if I am permitted, is not the film an sich, the film qua film, but, as Wallace Stevens calls it, the "just after" the blackbird's beautiful inflections.  The state of transport, of intoxication, of a-maze-ment (yes, I was in a maze this morning, until I reached Starbucks, when the dream evaporated) that any so-called Kunstwerk may provide.  Unexpectedly.  That's the part I want to emphasize--the seemingly spontaneous, but (and emphatically paradoxically) arbitrarily fated nature of this anti-Brechtian "Vertrauenseffekt" (my provisional alternative to the "Verfremdungseffekt"), or "confidence effect."  An affect of believability, of something on the verge of manifestation.  A dream so vivid that you reach out to touch it and when you do you find that you are groping the alarm clock beside your bed.  A movie, a song, a book that makes the real unreal and the unreal real.  Now, perhaps being sick heightens this "Vertrauenseffekt," and boy have I been hackingly and wheezingly delirious over the past few days.  But still, I think there is some kind of synchronic, synergistic force going on at these moments of "Vertrauenseffekt" that can be equally generative of critique as "Verfremdung."  In other words, I am thinking of Deckard's thinking of Rachael's (the replicant's) "constructed" memories as somehow artificial.  And how the film enacts, or enables, the realization of these "arti-facts."  Or, in general, false pictures and/or memories becoming real by being received and absorbed into some form of consciously lived experience.  Now I am not willing to take a Voigt-Kampff test about this, but my speculations only lead me to believe that in this familiar "afterglow" of the text--the path it sets us on which, if we follow quickly and intrepidly enough, might lead us to some type of anthropophany, the brief moment when "things" i.e. ideas, images, forms, beliefs about ourselves and our world are developed--is some critical magic, or insight.  It is vital to preserve that image, that afterglow, that residue before it vanishes completely.  

holus bolus

–adverb

all at once; altogether.

Origin: 

1840–50;  mock-Latin rhyming compound based on phrase wholebolus. See whole, bolus

e.g.  Every one of Hegel's sentences renders holus bolus the experience of infinite incomprehension.

The vale of sleep-making

Recently I have been perusing Laura (Riding) Jackson's 1972 book The Telling.  After the first few pages, I realized I had underlined so many phrases, lines, and whole sentences, written so many unilluminating marginalia, that it made me wonder what kind of reading The Telling does, can, or should elicit.  Somewhere (or somehow) between or amid philosophy, poetry, theory, general "truth-telling" or what have you is what the author calls her "personal evangel."  As generic, old-fashioned, or perverse as it sounds, I am intrigued by studies of modernist or postmodernist poetics in terms of latent or explicit structures of, or imaginative appropriations from, religious/spiritual myths, beliefs, and practices.  Thus my ears prick up whenever I hear vocabularies, grammars, and rhetorics of "rethinking" poetics that resonate with "reviving" religion (or even, a la Frank Zappa, the rise & explosion of the Church of American Secular Humanism).  So far in (Riding) Jackson's book I have noticed a lucid animosity towards all forms of "specialized" knowledge (within such a category poetry is to be placed).  (Riding) Jackson variously characterizes certain lacunae in "specialized" discourses: philosophy "does not look back, or forward far, if at all, but stares hard at what 'is'," history "begins late and ends early," and poetry is "a sleep-maker for that which sits up late in us listening for the footfall of the future on to-day's doorstep" (11).  And regardless of whether or not we dream "the dream of a common language," these various discourses all fail to carry the "burden of the single sense of the manifold totality" (6).  The "telling" for which we wait--the "missing story"--is one for which we go on "quietly craving" (9).  It almost seems, at least in (Riding) Jackson's tone, that one could substitute "endlessly" for the adverbial modification of our common verbal, and thus spiritual, desire.  All of sudden, Bono's voice comes through over all the other frequencies barely audible in my thoughts: "But I still haven't found what I'm looking for..."  So am I calling (Riding) Jackson a mystic?  If so, what does that entail for other modern conceptions of poetry that are less evangelically antagonistic, and perhaps more benignly sympathetic, or "experimental"?  We (one) want(s) to read (i.e. write) the omens of today in light of a tomorrow that is always out of reach, but what response (what responsibility) does this conundrum force upon us (one)?  I've been told I am always too much of a both/and kind of thinker, a dialectical escapist (or something like that), which I think is not the worst position of positions.  Heeding the call to be better (truer, not nicer) at retelling an oft-told story, I want to question what we are looking for.  Maybe some of us aren't looking but listening, some more actively, some more passively.  And before asking "For what?": how to account for personal and social differences without programmatic specialization?  Perhaps it involves some form or forms of fields overlapping, intermingling, and/or realigning, but for that I do not have the blueprint.  I do have time to keep thinking about this, though...for now...    

Work Cited

Laura (Riding) Jackson, The Telling (Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited, 2005). 

Reconvening

Arbitrary as it may be, I pick up here after leaving the blogging world four years ago.  The last post on "Send My Roots Rain" was written when I was just back in Berkeley after my three years in Japan, dis-oriented by the experience of re-entry, unable to find work, and in general, set adrift in a sea with no shores in view.  I skip almost four years--one in Berkeley/San Francisco, three in Providence--to reach this post, utterly altered by circumstances, choices, peregrinations, and oblique inclinations toward earning (ha! that verb!) a Ph.D. in English at Brown University.  I have chosen to re-inscribe myself in the blogosphere for convenience's and exigency's sake.  Pen and paper have, for the most part, failed me the past three or four years.  Intensive academic labor has stultified my more "creative" impulses.  By some miracle of chance, I feel compelled to start again.  Follow intuitions to their productive or digressive ends by means yet to be formulated.  "Make it new" is certainly an old adage by now, so I will sway along, repeating myself at times, and over and over again finding unexpected ways to manifest particular encounters of myself and the world in words.  

So, to start with current events.  I attended the Columbia-Penn Poetics Initiative's "Rethinking Poetics" conference this past weekend in New York.  One particularly salient event, besides having Charles Bernstein fart next to me during one of the panels, was a short talk by Joshua Clover and an unexpected confrontational moment in the Q & A.  I wish my notes could do justice to Clover's provocations, which centered around the deceptiveness of a term like "hybridity"--which, as far as I understand Clover, masks certain traditionalist, or "mainstream," aesthetic ideologies (i.e. appropriate what you want from experimentalist poetics and "spit out the rest").  Clover suggestively asked the audience, "Where is our rethought antagonism?"  And while I can see Clover's stance from a philosophical point of view--"All that exists arises out of conflict" writes Heraclitus--I think that hybridity ultimately is an important and necessary term, as squishy and prone to idealist syntheses as it is.  Still, I wish I could recapture Clover's argument more faithfully.  I also realize that I am wandering into this argument after a long period of intellectual torpor.  Here is a recent post by Clover's interlocutor.