Coleridge gave us the first city, while Leo Frobenius (the turn of the century’s Robert Ardrey) and, more recently, Neil Gaiman in his Sandman comic, The Doll’s House: Prologue—Tales in the Sand, brings the second to our attention.
29. Jabès’s Book of Questions, Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. . ., and Silliman’s The Alphabet all seem to share something. The Silliman, by keeping the furthest from argument, seems the most radical to me right now. (I have moments when reading the fragments that compose The Book seem all too much like reading The Journal of Albion Moonlight—which unfortunately is not to praise either.)
30. In human society, there are two forces constantly in conflict: One always moves to socialize the sexually acceptable. The other moves to sexualize the socially unacceptable. Over any length of time, these two forces are always at play, revising the contours of the socio-sexual map.
31. Quasimodo’s tercet,
Ognuno sta solo sul cuor della terra
trafitto da in raggio di sole:
ed è subito sera.
[Each alone at the earth’s heart,
fixed there on a sun ray:
and it’s suddenly evening.]
seemed to describe a romantic stance when I first read it at age 19 or so. Here, weeks before my 50th birthday, it seems a harsh metaphor for an all too hard-edged situation.
“And it’s suddenly evening” has the same number of syllables as “ed è subito sera.” But the English has more than twice the number of consonants and takes almost twice as long to say.
32. Here in Amherst, the present slides between the leafy and layered fact of immediacy and the drowsy retreat through darkness.
33. What does it mean, now that it takes me so much longer to remember things than it did even five years ago? I ask my mind to call up facts; where once they were yielded up to me in two, three seconds, today it’s ten, fifteen, eighteen seconds before thought arrives in the brain, words mount the tongue. And occasionally they will not come at all without prompting—recently: the last name of the late actress Ruth Gordon; the term “certified” for a letter. When I was thirty-five, I recall noting that my dyslexia was substantially worse than it had been at 25. Is the memory situation a continuation of the same phenomenon—or is it some other development entirely?
And will I ever know?
What about the malaise, the extra weight, the free floating anxiety, all of which have their current forms in my life—if I’m honest—as much as they did when they last put me in the hospital at 22?
34. “Well, you can’t see the sex / for the heterosexuality,” writes Isaac Jackson in his poem “The Birds and Bees (Blues Poem).” How pleasant, a year after I read it, to run into the poet at MIT working as a computer jockey!
35. Four writers who, each reaching in an entirely different direction, achieve a sentence perfection that dazzles, chills, and—sometimes—frightens: William Gass, Joanna Russ, Guy Davenport, and Ethan Canin.
36. The poet sees two things: the world’s absolute wonder and beauty in the way its edges and surfaces almost fit together in a purified geometry of desire appeased; and, at the same time, the poet sees through the world’s interstices the banalities and uncomprehending stupidities with which its subjects constantly blat out what it’s constituted of. Language—in its blather and breathless suspension—is at once villain and hero. Perhaps this is why reticence is such an overarching element of modernist esthetics.
37. The unarticulated myth of the American poet currently controlling so many American poetic non-careers is that anyone who has it together enough to teach regularly, edit anthologies, and write criticism cannot possibly live passionately enough to write a truly interesting poem—a good deal of this, doubtless, a holdover from the personal catastrophes of the once popular “confessional poets.”
But even as “confessional” works grow less and less interesting with time, what sediments in the literary psyche still drags and dredges our ideas through its flour and egg.
As someone who has taught for four years now, there’s something to the argument: only I would like to see it leave the realm of unspeakable myth and enter the pinball-courts of articulation: certainly I’ve never been happier that I’m not a poet since I’ve been a professor . . . !
Silliman is the first poet I know who really breaks through these constraints. He does it, basically, by writing such impassioned—and intelligent—criticism. He does it by embracing—passionately—the insights of contemporary literary theory and difficult discourse. He does it by eschewing as intellectually wimpy the notion that criticism itself is not as potentially passionate as poetry. What he convinces us of, in his criticism, is—quite apart from its relevance and rightness—he lives the most passionate life of the mind in America today!
He is a political poet par excellence.
At the same time, he takes the poet niche shaped by Valéry and lurches with it to the American coast.
Poets I read for pleasure: Auden, Van Duyn, Howard, Hacker, Heany, Neidecker, Bernstein, Hudgins, Levine, Cummins, Ashbery, Michael Dennis Browne . . .
But Silliman is a poet I read to break through into new halls and colonnades of verbal richness that, before, I simply didn’t know were sealed up behind those walls and dead ends in the palace of art. His work must be studied, lived with. Its pleasures cannot be simply lapped up off its surfaces. But they are the subtler, sharper, and more resonant for the time they take to taste.
I wonder if I shall ever actually meet the man . . .?
38. Too developed a sense of the usefulness of things militates against the preservation (rather paradoxically) of bourgeois order.
The sock lies in the middle of the rug. It’s easy to say that the slob who’s left it there simply wasn’t thinking. But much more likely some nether thought of the following order did, indeed, occur: I don’t know where the mate is. If I put it away, i.e., out of sight, if the mate turns up they will never get back together! Leave it lie there, then, and if, in an hour or a day or a week, the mate comes to light, I can put them together and then put the pair away. And sometimes—in an hour, or a day, or a week—that’s what happens.
The problem is that, at such a tempo, the forces of disorder will simply swamp the forces of order.
The person maintaining neatness, however, must constantly go through some version of the following: That sock has no mate. Out it goes. Now I shall forget it. And if—in an hour or a day or week—the other turns up, out it goes too! And I shall forget it, too!
It is worth remembering that bourgeois order is only maintained at the expense of a ruthless, if not outright violent, attitude toward the objects—if not the people—which deviate from it.
To the extent that history is basically written in the detritus of things, maintenance of bourgeois order represents a constant and unflagging, if relatively low-level, destruction of history.
That is where the barbarism, as Benjamin originally spoke of it, comes from.
39. There are three things writers do not write about.
First, what everybody knows.
We all know fire engines are red. Thus, it is the mark of a bad writer to write “the red fire engine.” Should a green fire engine come by, then the writer might be justified in remarking it. But not otherwise. With this in mind, at London University (back in the midst of writing “Shadows”), I once got into an after-lecture argument with Saul Kripke, who maintained that we could know things for certain about imaginary objects. Kripke’s cited example came from Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky.” Carroll had written:
Beware the jub-jub bird and shun
The frumious bandersnatch.
Claimed Kripke: We can know, therefrom, that “bandersnatches” are all, or are mostly, “frumious.”
Claimed I: We can assume it only if we decide Carroll was a bad writer. If all, or even most, bandersnatches are frumious, then there is no need for the writer to say so. If we assume Carroll was a good writer, however, frumious band
ersnatches are likely as rare as green fire engines.
What possibly neither of us realized at the time was that Kripke’s argument really hinged on the previous line: The verbs “beware” and “shun,” set as they are in regular meter, evoke a discourse (and thus suggest a reading of the following line and its diction) that comes from an epoch before the modernist writing discourse my initial argument calls up, when, indeed, certain nouns were allowed “epithets”—an epithet being an adjective or set of modifiers that underline a self-evident quality that all acknowledge: the noble Brutus, the shining sun, the pitch-black night . . . Set by the formality of the diction of “beware,” “shun,” and the regularity of the meter, Kripke read “frumious” as an epithet for bandersnatch—whereas I chose to read it as an ordinary adjective. But “Jabberwocky” is a humorous poem. Who is to say where bathos, irony, and anachronism might not be read into its lines?
We can surmise many things about imaginary objects—more or less intelligently. But we can’t know anything about them.
There is, indeed, an equally interesting argument to be formulated about imaginary aspects of actual objects. Are, for example, all birds “jub-jub”. . .?
The second thing that is not written about is that which we consider personally unimportant: for example, the true amount of muddle in the world. It was the Great God Muddle that some critic cited as the titular deity of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. But even there the fictive expression of muddle in no way reflects its real prevalence: this morning I got up and, still in my underwear, walked four times back and forth between the bedroom and the kitchen, looking for my coffee cup from yesterday, till, on a whim, I went into the study to find the cup sitting, where I had left it, beside my word processor. Yesterday, before going to my office at the university, I purchased a bagel and cream cheese, a glass bottle of cranberry juice, and a pecan square from the local bakery. Once in my office, I sat all the breakfast items on the edge of my crowded desk. Reaching for a pencil, I knocked the bottle of juice off the edge of the desk. Fortunately it hit the leg of my computer table, was deflected, so landed rolling and did not break. I dived to retrieve it, but the hand I grabbed the edge of the desk with moved a piece of paper, which the still paper-wrapped bagel was sitting on, so that it now fell to the floor. I put the juice on the desk and hurriedly turned to pick up the bagel, and my hand knocked the pecan square onto the floor—
All of them came up, went back on the desk, and I proceeded to eat my breakfast, trying not to dwell on the fact that I’d managed to knock every bit of it over. In the course of working on the revisions to this piece here, this afternoon I consumed most of a meal in eight or nine desultory trips to the refrigerator, most to get a single salami slice from the brown rumple of butcher paper wedged on the side of the second shelf—and, in one case, a spoonful from the container of cottage cheese—each trip immediately all-but-forgotten once it was over and I’d returned to the word processor here, to continue typing.
The conceit of the literary is that such things happen only in comedy, and are otherwise rare. But the truth is, they make up a disturbing percentage of our lives. We choose to look at them only through the esthetic framing of the comedic, which, by that framing, reassures us such happenings are not of major import. The truth is, however, that a good percentage of our lives is not just comic; it’s slapstick.
The third area that is not written about is simply the socially proscribed: To what great period of literary achievement could an alien turn to learn of the workings of human life and society—the age of Greek tragedy, Japanese Haiku, the 19th Century Russian Novel, Medieval Chinese court poetry, High Modernism, the Victorian Novel, or the English Romantic Poets?—to discover that, say, human beings are creatures who, all of them, male, female, and child, have to void their bowels once or twice a day and empty their bladders between three and ten times in every twenty-four-hour period?
What poems or stories tell us that, in any random American crowd, about a third, between once and three times a week, take a small wad of wet toilet paper or cleaning rag and vigorously and carefully wipe away the hair, body scalings, and dust from the porcelain span between the back of the commode seat and the flush tank—while the other two-thirds are largely oblivious that such a job ever has to be done at all?
Neither Swift’s exclamations over Celia’s excretory functions nor Joyce’s narration of Bloom’s bath conveys such fundamental human facts.
Speaking of Joyce, how many readers of Ulysses today, I wonder, recall that the center of the controversy over the novel’s supposed obscenity was the end of the Lotus-Eaters (section five), in which Bloom, by himself, takes a bath and observes his own pubic hair and genitals breaking the surface of the soapy water (“. . . a languid, floating flower”)—a scene, that, when I first read it at sixteen, I found jarringly erotic?
40. A memory remains with me from a winter visit, some twenty-five or more years ago, to the reading room of the New York Public Library. The late afternoon dimmed outside the high windows above the wrought iron balcony circling the hall, while yellow light puddled the long wooden tables under the reading lamps’ green glass shades. After waiting on the pew-like bench before the barred window under the mechanical-electric call board, with its black frame and red numbers aglow behind the ground glass, I went to the wooden window when my red number lit to receive my volumes. Minutes later, at one of the tables, my coat shrugged over the chair-back behind me, I began reading over the works in various pamphlets and books of the poet Samuel Bernhard Greenberg (1893–1917), copying out vivid lines or striking stanzas into my spiral notebook, as, up in the little town of Woodstock, New York, in the last, chilly weeks of 1923, Hart Crane had made similar copies from the Greenberg manuscripts, then in the possession of William Murrell Fisher. My visit produced an epigraph to a chapter in a novel I finished perhaps two years later.
But a return visit to the library only this past June—the same mechanical callboard, though it may have been repaired, has not been replaced—netted me an interesting revelation. In the novel, where I quoted him at the head of the seventh chapter, Greenberg’s name, I now find, was inadvertently spelled “Greenburg.” And in none of the books currently among the Public Library stacks can I find the poem I quoted a quarter of a century ago.
It’s tempting, then, to imagine all these vanished texts, along with their writers, if not the libraries in which the texts are on store, as inhabiting an alternate city, distinctly separate from ours, yes—yet closer, distressingly closer, than any of us has hitherto imagined.
41. If rhetoric is ash, discourse is water . . .
42.
And then went down to the chips, set wheel to gambit, forth on the Reno night.
—Ron Silliman, “Carbon,” from The Alphabet
After Odysseus recounts to Naussica’s father King Alcinous how the crow-queen Circe, “dread goddess of human speech,” exhorted him to leave her isle of Aeaea—palindromal in English and near so (Aiaien) in Greek—to visit Theben Tiresias in hell to receive wisdom, Odysseus goes on to explain at the opening of book “Lambda” (that is, Book XI):
Autar epei r’epi katelthomen ede thalassan
nea men ar tamproton erussamen eis ala dian,
en d’iston tithemestha kai histia nei melainie,
en de ta mela labontes ebesamen, an de kai autoi
bainomen achnumenoi thaleron kata dakru cheontes.
[“But when we had come down to the ship and to the sea, first of all we drew the ship down to the bright sea, and set the mast and the sail in the black ship, and took the sheep and put them aboard, and ourselves embarked, sorrowing, and shedding big tears,” in A. T. Murray’s translation.]
In 1900, Samuel Butler rendered this, “When we had got down to the seashore we drew our ship into the water and got her mast and sails into her; we also put the sheep on board and took our places, weeping and in great distress of mind . . .” three years after he published The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897), a book th
at influenced Joyce, and that Pound was likely familiar with. The opening of “Lambda” (often called The Book of the Dead) gives rise to two modernist traditions. For at the beginning of “Lambda” ’s second verse paragraph, Odysseus tells how soon his ship
He d’es peirath’ hikane bathurroou Okeanoio.
entha de Kimmerion andron demos te
polis te, eeri kai nephele kekalummenoi. . .
[“. . . came to the deep-flowing Oceanus, that bounds the Earth, where is the land and city of the Cimmerians, wrapped in mist and cloud . . .”—Murray.]
The story is well known how in 1906 (or ’08, or ’10), Ezra Pound, browsing through the book stalls along the Seine’s quay, purchased in an octavo volume Andreas Divus Justinopolitano’s “ad verbum translata”—word for word translation—of The Odyssey, published in Paris in 1538, as part of the rebirth of interest in classical learning that gave the Renaissance its name.
Likely following notions that went back at least to those F. A. Woolf had put forward in 1795 (Prolegomena ad Homerum), Pound saw “Homer” as an amalgam of tales from different times, cobbled together more or less elegantly, more or less invisibly, somewhere before the classical age. Among that varied material, Pound was fairly sure that “Lambda,” with its account of the calling up the dead, who come to drink the blood of the sacrifice—Elpinor, Anticleia, Tiresias, and high born Tyro—before speaking, followed by the parade of ghostly queens—Antiope, Alcmene, Megare, Jocasta, Chloris, Lede, Iphimedeia, Phaedra, Procris, Ariadne, Maera, Clymene, and Eriphyle . . .—represented the oldest material in The Odyssey. Using a set of principles for translation that sound like nothing so much as those Nabokov formulated to bring off his Onegin, certainly Divus had translated the opening more literally than most:
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