I am only this week toeing the waters of words again, both as writer and reader.  Having been keeping my eye out for any Ivy Compton-Burnett book, I finally found one in Green Apple Books: A House and Its Head, published in the NYRB Classics series.  It is a densely beautiful book, and refreshing to read someone for whom every word counts because every word cannot but count and therefore might as well not; they cannot possibly be counted.  I have never read anything which so successfully conjures the half-meanings that crowd the edges of dialogue, and admirably so in that Compton-Burnett does so without recourse to narration.  Whereas most narrators, it seems, attempt to shade shadows into the rough outline of dialogue, this narrator does not clarify what her characters could not convey in their spoken words.  After all, one cannot narrate without needing a narrator, so instead, the speech and its narration end up being wry comments on each other: what little narration there is, beyond speech tags, often mockingly doubles the line of dialogue it frames.  This calls attention to either the mundanity of speech or the fecklessness and absurdity of narration:

“It has been so terrible to be able to do nothing: I have felt so helpless,” said Mrs. Bode, in some consternation at having been unable to prevent Ellen’s death.

Each line of dialogue strikes its antecedent, and shale flints scatter from both stones. (Yes, I am aware of the oxymoron.)  I am too lazy to type it out, but you should know that the the book begins with a quarrel over breakfast, and then read from “Yes” to “no reply,” across the page break from 67 to 68.  Of course, the careful weight one must apply to wring out all the inferences (that are often only revealed by a response to the statement) is balanced by levity: this is also one of the funniest books I’ve read in a while, in that delightfully understated English style of humor:

“There will be a great blank in our midst [now that Ellen is dead],” said Mrs. Bode.
“Yes, Mother dear, but that goes without saying.”
“And like many things that go without saying,” said Florence, “may truly be said.”
“That is so, Mrs. Smollett: I feel duly snubbed.”

Even the simple “said Florence,” placed so awkwardly as to interrupt the flow of the sentence and flush the mental pronoun from the palate, forcing the reader to summon again the thing which need not be said, works double duty.  Or there is:

“Ellen’s family! What a beautiful and intimate sound! That is how I shall think of them.  I shall not feel it presumptuous [to use her Christian name], kept to the confines of my own mind.”
“It will be narrowly restricted,” agreed her brother.

The polite Southerner in me has a deep and abiding love for the obliging insult.

Between Muriel Spark, Clarice Lispector, and Ivy Compton-Burnett, all of whom I have read only in the past few months, this looks to be the year of seriously humorous writers.

Who has ever dreamed that he has become a murderer and from then on has only been carrying on with his usual life for the sake of appearance?

Not only are we not sure whether the life ‘carried on’ is within the dream or without it, the peculiar passiveness of the action makes one question how valid an emotional reaction this is.  He did not murder—he became a murderer, but whether this becoming a murderer has a dreamed effect or real effect, its effect is already in effect, and the stark separation of reality and dream is undermined.  The next sentence offers little purchase, beginning “At that time, which is still going on…”  The time in which this event has its effect is simultaneously distant (“that time”) and present (“is still going on”). Whatever the relationship presently is, however unstable it is, we can be sure that there is something back there with which we have a relationship (and I’m tempted to say that our relationship to the book is like Keushnig’s relationship with his dream, but I think that’s another post).

This type of dream-logic relationship comes up several times.  One of the more easily excerptable ones:

As he ran up the stairs, he was surprised to find himself reenacting a run that had happened in a dream.  Then, for the first time in a dream, there had been actual motion in his running.

What does “then” do?  Does it mean he now realizes that, more than just the abstract concept of “I was running,” he actually remembers the dreamed, physical sensation of running? Or does it mean that, with Keuschnig’s realization of this conjunction of real activity and dreamed activity, the dream motion takes on significance as a simulated “actual”?  What does sequentiality mean here, where what happens as a consequence is a relationship between the present and the past?  And what does the relationship between reality and dream mean for either?

I haven’t read as much Kafka as I should have, certainly, but even someone who hadn’t ready any, I think, could figure out that dear Gregor K. has taken a lot from him.  His story is, in a way, more unsettling than waking up as an insect, though, which we can safely assume will never happen.  Where Kafka begins from a strange place and proceeds apace, Handke is constantly reinjecting the uncertainty that starts this story, and that monumental, grounding uncertainty that makes Kafka’s narratives so shockingly stable pervades Handke’s throughout.

He sat in the square for a long while, one among many, with no thought of the future.  He expected nothing; just once he had a vision of all these people taking on a strange look and beginning to sob heartbreakingly, but all the while excusing themselves on the grounds that they hadn’t slept the night before, that the sun didn’t agree with them, and that their stomachs were empty.  Who could possibly tell them they had nothing to be ashamed of?—When for once he turned away from himself and looked up, he was at a loss to understand why everything hadn’t changed in the meantime.

It could be a weakness, that its method is more apparent—Slow Homecoming is certainly the stronger one—but the ephemeral nature of our position in reality Handke portrays like no one else I’ve ever read, if a bit too hamfistedly in this book.  (Though I still think it does Remainder better than Remainder.)

Between Walls

the back wings
of the

hospital where
nothing

will grow lie
cinders

in which shine
the broken

pieces of a green
bottle

For a brief second, I thought this might be the poem that convinces me to give Williams a solid second try.  But it still succumbs, I think, to Poirier’s criticism that Williams’ poetic ideology is too simplistic to be convincing of anything.  The line is the same as his Famous Poem, with the ending of each line in the two-line stanzas standing in contrast to the other, the first ending on an accented syllable (“the back wings”) and the second on an unaccented (“bottle”), but the incidental-ness of the green of the artificial object positioned “where/ nothing// will grow” and obviously mimicking the thing that should grow there—grass—seems just that: incidental, ignorant that putting this in poetic form makes this no longer just incidental.  In attempting to avoid the high-falutin’-ness of literary language in favor of “real experience,” it unwittingly emphasizes the linguistic structure which mediates our experience of the poet’s experience.  That structure is the real that it tries to bypass so it can return us to the ‘real,’ whether that be green glass glinting on dirt or demotic language. The only thing this poem refers to, as a poem, is the emphasis on “green” and the diminishing of “bottle,” which is, in its innocence, more of a gimmick than a completely ‘artificial’ rhyme or rhythm.

That said, the elision of the preposition that relates the cinder blocks, from which the glass shines, to the back wings—by? at? near?— is a dismantling stroke that I’ve never encountered in Williams before, and it is surely too prominent to be unwitting.

Contrast Creeley’s frustrated, diminished lines, where the breath and syntax of the lines becomes asthmatic, constricted, even as it propels its speaker and its reader to the end of the poem:

Kore

As I was walking
I came upon
chance walking
the same road upon.

As I sat down
by chance to move
later
if and as I might,

light the wood was,
light and green,
and what I saw
before I had not seen.

It was a lady
accompanied
by goat men
leading her.

Her hair held earth.
Her eyes were dark.
A double flute
made her move.

“O love,
where are you
leading
me now?”

It relies on that same deemphasized propulsion, with the ends of most lines—especially that bewildered last line—ending in an unaccented syllable.  The normalized experience (“As I was walking/ I came upon…”) develops into an abstract and mythological relationship, which immediately causes us to question— or causes me to question, what otherwise run-of-the-mill experience, specifically, could possibly underlie this monumental event, out of which the mythological breaks into the daily life of the author?  When the poem pivots on that perfectly iambic line describing the stereotypically “poetic” experience of chance revealing love at first sight—”before I had not seen.”—it reveals implicitly that what could underlie that experience is just that: the poetic, the “artificial.”  After the speaker encounters chance in the first stanza, that quintessentially absurd machinist, he decides to sit down for a spell, and, importantly, retains the right and the freedom to move “if and as I might.” His decision to sit down and stay is just as artificial—willed—as the poem, which would not have received its impetus without the initial artificial decision.  (Similarly, the “song” is not the song: stanza three, which uses a song-like rhythm, sets the stage for the quoted ‘song’ that does not follow a usual, song-like rhythm.)

Rather than simple contrast with an equally artificial emphatic ending, the under-emphasized line-endings of Creeley emphasize the contrivance of the poem, as well as its thematic cliché (“before I had not seen”) in the face of necessarily not cliché experience-itself of an unexpected encounter with the beautiful to which one then submits:

“O love,
where are you
leading
me now?”

And there is true chance’s place in poetry: the poem one sings and the poem one hears are suddenly indiscernible.

With Merrill, I’m reading the books from the sixties, before the supernatural begins to intrude, in the 70s (publicly, that is; he began using the ouija board in the 50s), and when his mature style of playing with form more freely begins to develop.  Rather than the strict rhyme or blank verse of his earlier books, you have his well-known modulation in and out of strict form within the same poem: “An Urban Convalescence,” for example, one of Merrill’s most famous, has eight stanzas of differing lengths, with occasional slant rhymes, and then eight quatrains of rhymed iambic pentameter.  The two poems that I have been spending a lot of time with, to tease out the imagery and its interplay throughout each, are “After Greece” and “Prism,” from his 1962 collection, Water Street, and they are also, interestingly, two where Merrill drops formalism entirely and lets the complexity of imagery, instead of the felicities and coincidences of rhyme, carry the poem.  It’s interesting also because you see Merrill begin to learn how his own chains of logic and imagery work; his early poems typically pick apart a single image very methodically until it becomes either the apotheosis of an idea, or its antithesis, narrowing its focus so tightly because rhyme seems to restrict his ability to move laterally to another idea.  When he drops the rhyme, he is allowed to develop some complex relationships, even if they are left slightly muddy through their lack of the scalpel-like precision that form usually forces—for better or worse—on his poems.

The first instances of the deep anxiety I mentioned in that last post on Merrill are beginning to creep in, with the escalation of the Cold War (Feel free to correct my dating. I have no mind for the subtlety of history, sadly, but Water Street was published a few months before the Cuban Missile Crisis.).  In “After Greece,” some Greek minor deities “seem anxious to know/ What holds up heaven nowadays” and the poet halfheartedly responds, “well, Art, Public Spirit,/ Ignorance, Economics, Love of Self,/ Hatred of Self, a hundred more,/… each dedicated/ To sparing us the worst; how I distrust them…”  But here, it is interesting to see how the cause of that anxiety oscillates between impending doom and that ever present dis-ease I brought up last time.  Here he begins to explore how the common Modernist theme of dissatisfaction and loss can be yolked to the more personal and emotional reactions one has to one’s era, as well as the ultimate (and ultimately dominating) fear that the annihilation we face is physical, and spiritual, and intellectual.

“After Greece” reflects on both the poet’s return from the country which he made his frequent home, as well as the different relationships with the world that someone from ancient Greece and someone from mid-20th Century America would have.  Within the poem there is a constant marvel over how profoundly different those two conceptions of the world are, and which examines, without a futile attempt to revive it, how the older one supported man in ways that our modern ways don’t:

Of the gods’ houses only
A minor premise here and there
Would be balancing the heaven of fixed stars
Upon a Doric capital.  The rest
Lay spilled, their fluted drums half sunk in cyclamen
Or deep in water’s biting clarity
Which just barely upheld me
The next week, when I sailed for home.

The pun here on ‘premise’ is indicative of Merrill’s ambivalence.  At the end of the second line above, the premise is the boundaries of the gods’ houses, albeit shrunken and insubstantial: if the idea of gods has any influence anymore, it is over minor, scattered realms.  The next line reveals another definition of premise which supersedes the first, that of logical support, and then calls into question even this now attenuated ‘premise’ by linking it to the perhaps interesting but untenable idea of the fixed heavens.  Though some of the old ideas are attractive for new reasons, and some are interesting for old ones, and some are ridiculous, they are nevertheless forceful.  It is this old world’s light which, in the first lines, seems to make the olive produce oil, its rain makes the pale stones shine from within— and it’s hemlock, still effective today, is a tempting alternative to the poet who returns to his room in the new world to find that his metaphorical liquor has been drunk by the spirits of the age, and replaced with another outdated idea, but one not quite so foreign:

It is autumn.  I did not invite
Those guests, windy and brittle, who drink my liquor.
Returning from a walk I find
The bottles filled with spleen, my room itself
Smeared by reflection onto the far hemlocks.

But Merrill always hedges his bets, deflating his own metaphors with new ones while he embraces how insufficient the old ones are in the present.  The very ideas from the old world which he tries to name as essential (“salt, wine, olive, the light, the scream—”) become, as he names them and tries to bring them forward in time, like the ones that are already in ruins, “Dressed like your sister caryatids.”

What makes Merrill a great poet, in my mind, is his ability to discover in the process of the poem some metaphor which seems immediately helpful or illuminating, which appears to offer some clarity to the speaker, only for it to be stripped of its power by the end of the poem, where the poet resigns himself to functionality.  It’s epitomized in “To a Butterfly,” where the speaker breaks character mid-poem: “—Enough.// Goodness, how tired one grows/ Just looking through a prism:/ Allegory, symbolism./ I’ve tried, Lord knows,// To keep from seeing double…”  What first seems a luminous, powerful idea is stripped until only its barest structure is used, almost begrudgingly, to move forward (this process goes into overdrive in the long, occult poems— avatars evolve into new avatars, and it is late revealed that some of the spirit guides disguised themselves as simpler, more palatable characters in earlier books).  It’s a trick you can see he learned from Yeats, who, even in his first book, likes to take one image and cast it in multiple moods: his shepherds’ seashell alternately holds voices of comfort and a terrifying moan.

Rather than contrast the differing inadequacies of the old and the new, as in the previous poem, ‘Prism’ explores the processes of synthesis and disintegration that go into thinking about one’s world in any age— how that seashell can be comforting one moment and terrifying the next.  About halfway through, the poem makes a curious assertion:

Look: (Heretofore
One could have said where one was looking,
In or out. But it almost—) Look:

And when you reread, it is clear that, indeed, the addressee of the poem could be either living inside or outside the prism:

Having lately taken up residence
In a suite of chambers
Windless, compact and sunny, ideal
Lodging for the pituitary gland of Euclid
If not for a “single gentleman (references),”… ¹

This is either a literalized description of light’s ‘residence’ in a prism, with a play on the idea of white light’s singularity, or the speaker looking in and describing it as a metaphor for the situation of his subject, the viewer of the prism.  Interestingly, the line that follows this passage begins with “You…”, and therefore reveals who has ‘taken up residence’ in the first line; but until that point, the verb could have taken the first, second, or third person: the subject of the poem is already splitting and integrating.  This is what the poem eventually comes to discuss: the integration and disintegration that occurs as a result of that peculiar relationship between mind, body, and object perceived.  After the previous, reiterated command to look, the speaker says: “You dream of this:/ To fuse in borrowed fires, to drown/ In depths that were not there.”  The word look, commanded twice, functions as a prism, both refracting the white light of perception into its various colors, and then recombining those various colors into white light: to fuse into a single subject or to reveal hidden dimensions.  Merrill gives a nod to the metaphor of writing (“…that pounce/ Of wild color from corner to page,/ Straightaway consuming the latter/ Down to your very signature…”), but does so in order to suggest that writing’s participation in this is metonymic at best.  A signature is something slightly more than just writing, and this prismatic effect goes much deeper than the written word.

But whether or not this heightened perception is a blessing or a curse is questionable, and as the poem continues to investigate this, it is revealed that we are not—anymore, at least—looking in or out: the body is the prism.  The “you” addressed here is specifically the body, distinct from mind and object.

…You meant
To rest your bones in a maroon plush box,
Doze the old vaudeville out, of mind and object,
Little foreseeing their effect on you,
Those dagger-eyed insatiate performers
Who from the first false insight
To the most recent betrayal of outlook,
Crystal, hypnotic atom,
Have held you rapt, the proof, the child
Wanted by neither.

One of the things I’ve noticed in reading these two books more closely, and as complete books, is that one of Merrill’s tactics for unsettling an otherwise sensible poem is to leave whom he is addressing—who the “you” of the poem is—unclear, whether by simply not telling us, or by shifting its designation.  The “you” in this poem begins as a normal poetic subject, and becomes the body, the mind, or the whole at various points, but it also seems as if it could be the speaker’s body itself—which makes keeping the distinction between mind and body difficult, especially when the distinction of perceiver, medium, and perceived is exactly what is in question.  Trying to examine perception, and then focusing one’s perception on oneself, makes it very difficult to draw lines; that ‘white light’ breaks into many colors.

The last few lines are a little underwhelming, with the rhythm falling a bit into simplicity, and the last line’s new-built sense of a prismatic break, as explored by the poem, doesn’t quite dominate the pathetic, traditional sense of “breaking someone’s heart.”  But the diminishing of the idea is characteristic.  That “[y]ou and the stars/ Seem both endangered, each/ At the other’s utter mercy” is an excellent summation of how difficult the relationship between mind, body, and object is to describe, because, as I said, it hedges its bets: the difficulty is only seeming, and the mind and object seem reliant on each other’s spoken mercy.  This is “dozing out the old vaudeville,” to a certain extent.  It refrains from making any sincere or serious statement of the situation, even if the poem has been proving how serious the evaluation of such a complex relationship must be taken.

After a meaningful and revealing, but ultimately faulty exploration, we’re returned to a limited authority, not unlike the end of “After Greece.”   That poem, built on various senses of the physical and spiritual, on a feeling of being questioned by the physical ruins of the “old world” about what today’s spiritual support is like— the poem having asked what is missing from our age, or what could have been missing from theirs, rests in the question rather than answers it.  But it is an uneasy rest, and rather than lazily sum up the relationship between old and new as another instance of a prohibitive “that which cannot be named,” Merrill tries again to name it, but with less force, less directness, finally covering over the possibility that we, in our era, may need something as irrational and outdated as spirits:

Perhaps the system
Calls for spirits. This first glass I down
To the last time
I ate and drank in that old world.  May I
Also survive its meanings, and my own.

The “also” is key: What has survived the old world’s meanings? Humanity? The earth? What does it mean to survive one’s own meanings?  Survival is the limited purview that the poet and the poem eventually return to.  Even though the star and the observer seemed reliant on each other at the end of Prism, “Yet the gem/ revolves in space, the vision shuttles off.”  Ultimately, both continue existing independently, and that is part of the terror, and part of the comfort, of annihilation.

1. I’ve almost convinced myself that Merrill meant pineal gland, which was famously held by Descartes to be the seat of the soul—thus putting the father of geometry in juxtaposition with something as amorphous as the soul— but that pituitary gland just sounds better, so Merrill fudged it.  The juxtaposition would be apt for the poem, and maintaining homeostasis, which the pituitary gland does, just doesn’t seem to be all that interestingly related to the subject matter.  If anyone knows what the commonsense of the mid-1960s believed the function of the pituitary gland to be, I’d be obliged.

The narrator of Faustus is always tentative about first-hand material.  When speaking of his home town, he says, “I really would rather speak in the past tenses, since it is the Kaisersaschern we knew in our youth of which I speak.”  When speaking of his biographical subject, Adrian Leverkühn, he sticks mostly to transcriptions of conversations and to physical descriptions of reactions, and usually throws in a comment about how unwilling he would be to suppose the motivation of such a great artist.  (Interestingly, the narrator also says that, “thanks to my friendship with Adrian, the artist’s life functions as the paradigm for how fate shapes all our lives, as the classic example of how we are deeply moved by what we call becoming, development, destiny—” but you can probably figure out what I’d have to say about that, harping as I do on intention and interpretation and the role of art and all that.)

And here is where my Bearnhard hypothesis enters: The more layers between the narrator and the subject discussed, the more wild the description and supposition become. In Chapter 8, the narrator is remembering lectures he attended with Adrian as a child, given by a stuttering organist and family friend, and attended by virtually none but his and Adrian’s family.  After a rather phenomenal description of the lecturer’s stutter, the narrator gives a lengthy description of a lecture he gave about Beethoven’s last sonata, in which he “describes Beethoven’s state in 1820,” discourses on the boundless subjectivity of harmonic expression, “as opposed to  polyphonic objectivity,” and proposes that Beethoven surpasses the subjectivity of his middle period to achieve a form of objectivity in his late work.  The lecture culminates in a fevered, but inhibited outburst:

In these structures, the lecturer said, the subjective entered into a new relationship with the conventional, a relationship defined by death.  And at that word, Kretzschmar began to stutter violently; holding on to its initial consonant, his tongue set up a kind of machine-gun fire against his palate, setting jaw and chin pulsing in sync, before they came to rest in the vowel that allowed one to surmise the rest.  But once the word had been recognized, it did not seem appropriate for someone to relieve him of it, to do what we sometimes did and call it out to him in jovial helpfulness.  He had to complete it all on his own, and he did so.

Then comes some more postulation about the mythic and collective and objective and whatnot that all tickles my fancy, but the comedy and torture of this passage (these diametric reactions to the lecturer’s stuttering having been previously set up by the narrator) strikes me as a lesson Bernhard learned well.  The emotional content is carried somewhat by the prose style and rhythm (in translation, at least), but the description of the lecture is mostly of the body, and the content of the speech, which makes for a hilarious rendition of the piece under discussion, as Kretzschmar ends the lecture playing the piece while shouting and gesticulating his points the whole time: “‘Chain of trills!’ he yelled.  “Fioriture and cadenzas! Do you hear convention abandoned? Here—language—is—no longer—purged of flourishes—rather flourishes—of the appearance—of their subjective—self-composure—the appearance—of art is thrown off—for ultimately—art always throws off—the appearance of art. Dim—dada! Just listen, please, how here—the melody is overwhelmed…’”

So, as frequently in Bernhard, the narrator’s companion’s interpretation is lampooned in situ, as the narrator simply (though never that simply—he is always also himself lampooned) records his companion’s wild interpretations (*ahem*) of someone else’s life or work (and the two are never far apart in Bernhard, an idea Mann is obviously building to).  But the Bernhardian extremity comes when the next lecture culminates in an apocryphal story describing not only Beethoven‘s emotional state as he writes the Credo of Missa Solemnis, but the emotional state of his servants as he bangs away behind his closed door: “[H]is disciples could hear him working behind the closed door.  The deaf man sang, howled, and stomped over the Credo—the sound of it so horrifyingly moving that the blood froze in the eavesdroppers’ veins.  Just as they were about to depart in great trepidation, the door was flung open, and there in the doorframe stood Beethoven—what a sight! What a horrifying sight!”  This is all, of course, unquoted; the narrator is recounting from memory what the lecturer said years ago, an approach Bernhard takes to its extreme, so when the passage ends with this paragraph, the desperate comedy Bernhard specializes in comes shaking through the whole, chapter-long endeavor:

We did not know the work, we only heard about it. But who would deny that it can also be instructive just to hear of a great unfamiliar work? To be sure, a lot depends on the way in which it is spoken about.  Returning home from Wendell Kretzschmar’s lecture, we had the feeling that we had heard the Missa, and that illusion was not a little influenced by the picture he had impressed on our minds of the haggard and hungry master there in the doorframe.

I think that could be a valuable way to read the book, and, though I think the poems themselves are not as amenable to the idea of building another world (however much one could say Merrill did this, in the process?) as they are to the quest aspect Andrew looks at, he makes the valid point that, in order to consider the poem in any way other than along the axis of belief and disblief that it usually is, the work has to be dislodged, in a sense, from the question of whether or not Merrill believed in the mythology of it.  Indeed, rather than belief, what Andrew notices is the emphasis on a “process or a practice” is certainly more key to my reading of it.

The simple way of trying to dislodge the work from this question is by pointing out that, with one always skeptical eye on its inherent absurdity, Merrill’s other eye is investigating faithfully that idealistic, irrational impetus at the root of all religion and, I think for Merrill and many writers, Yeats and Stevens included, all their creativity.  That dis-ease Merrill feels about the state of the world, which can be relayed into a fantasiac or dystopian reading, has its twin or reflection in Merrill’s dis-ease in the logical, rigorous, Western mindset that has absolutely no questions about the validity of a long poem dictated via Ouija board. 

The more interesting way is to look at how that dis-ease surfaces in other places, in other ways.  Sandover more than any other work I’ve seen, in any medium, conveys what it is like to be dis-eased with one’s world, and Merrill’s shorter poems convey how this dis-ease alters us and our reactions.  I don’t think it would be too much of a stretch to say that dis-ease is Merrill’s constant topic, with his lyrics about childhood innocence, the vicissitudes of family and friends, living in foreign cultures and and living in cultures that feel foreign to one’s instincts, however “native” one is.  In “Charles on Fire,” a group of friends is discussing the fact that beauty takes one perhaps unjustly and perhaps dangerously far in life.  That “No one but squared/ the shoulders of their own unlovliness” at this injustice indicates resentment of this status quo, status quo in its own way, as well as a sense that this opinion is justified by one’s own self-appraisal, and it subtly points out in doing so that nearly everyone feels awkward in their own skin.  But this skin, at the climax of the poem, will be almost supernaturally aflame, and, “As who should step down from a crystal coach,” entrancingly, unexpectedly beautiful— and eerie.

Another evening we sprawled about discussing
Appearances.  And it was the consensus
That while uncommon physical good looks
Continued to launch one, as before, in life
(Among its vaporous eddies and false claims),
Still, as one of us said into his beard,
“Without your intellectual and spiritual
Values, man, you are sunk.”  No one but squared
The shoulders of their own unloveliness.
Long-suffering Charles, having cooked and served the meal,
Now brought out little tumblers finely etched
He filled with amber liquor and then passed.
“Say,” said the same young man, “in Paris, France,
They do it this way”—bounding to his feet
And touching a lit match to our host’s full glass.
A blue flame, gentle, beautiful, came, went
Above the surface.  In a hush that fell
We heard the vessel crack.  The contents drained
As who should step down from a crystal coach.
Stewart of spirits, Charles’s glistening hand
All at once glowed itself in eeriness…

In Merrill’s poems, there is hardly ever a sense of being completely foreign, either of the speaker or the setting; it is always an uncanniness, and his poems are half an attempt to “square” this strange incongruity and half an attempt to document the dissonant feeling of being at home in it, because we have little choice otherwise.

“Mirror” is, as almost all Merrill’s poems, a deceptively complex meditation on appearances, time, change, reflection and transparency, among other things, and ends with this, the mirror reflecting (pun intended) on the end of its long life and the nature of its constitution ["you" throughout the poem is the window across the room, which the mirror faces]:

I suspect
Looks from behind, where nothing is, cool gazes
Through the blind flaws of my mind. As days,
As decades lengthen, this vision
Spreads and blackens. I do not know whose it is,
But I think it watches for my last silver
To blister, flake, float leaf by life, each milling-
Downward dumb conceit, to a standstill
From which not even you strike any brilliant
Chord in me, and to a faceless will,
Echo of mine, I am amenable.

This passage shows, in a roundabout way, the different conception of “belief” that Merrill pursues (and its symbolism echoes the lines which Andrew quotes: “The stripping process, sort of.  What to say?/ Our lives led to this.  It’s the price we pay.”).  We tend to treat “belief” as a set of ideas, rational or not, which an individual psyche has cultivated to anneal the incongruities that feel inherent in its world.  But belief, in that sense, is always a kind of secondary or tertiary question for Merrill, and especially for JM, the voice of Sandover. The process and practice come first, and one’s practice is in fact a coming to terms with the practice and process of living, the movement of one’s dumb conceits from reflection to blankness.  The “faceless will” is first read (and emphasized by the rhyme) as a parallel construction listing another, slightly nonsensical thing which the silvering reflects in its new, fallen position, and then as something to which the speaker submits— that it echoes the mirror/speaker’s own will is almost irrelevant, and yet, if this faceless will is an echo, the speaker’s will is the originating sound.  For all we talk about our belief, the interplay between our conscious and unconscious will is infinitely more complex than any notion of belief could ever answer for.  The more interesting question to ask, than whether or not Merrill believed what he wrote in Sandover, is whether or not his belief changes how you react to the work.  Merrill’s belief or disbelief is akin to the question of Proust’s intent when his narrator names himself after the author: interesting for its affects on your relationship with the work, not really for what it says about the work itself, because it cannot really be made logical sense of.  The major ideas raised by the work, the issues with its logical coherence, the thoughts its apocalyptic visions and chorus of angels and dead humans prompt— yes, Merrill believed in them; no, Merrill didn’t believe in them— these isues do not strike me as “solved” by either answer.  Indeed, to take the metaphor of “Mirror” much too far, and to place it in conjunction with the lines quoted by Andrew, the artistic remnants in poem form may be seen as the very “blister[ing], flak[ing], float[ing] leaf by life” of belief, come to reflect a faceless will that is merely the echo of the original.  The work of literary art is, perhaps, the death and supplanting through awareness of a belief.

This type of almost irrelevance, in “Mirror,” is a precursor to the full-blown sense of unease I mentioned in relation to Sandover, which is specifically rooted in the fears of nuclear war, and which, though appearing occasionally before it, did not become the obsessive fear it did until the Sandover works.  The theme of imminent world-wide destruction is prevalent, in its prehistorical instances, which the spirit guides of the poem reveal, and in JM and DJ’s never-ending anxiety about whether or not it is something they will see in their own lifetime.  It feels, somehow, that if we know Merrill’s stance, we know more surely how to react; we can mimic it, at least for the sake of reading the poem.  But, like the terrifying knowledge that the world may or may not end, in the not very distant future, which is no knowledge at all, and which therefore cannot be entirely soothed, no assurance can erase the tenuous nature of one’s real interaction with the world, which is wholly governed by neither belief or knowledge, and from which imagination is an insufficient escape.  The ambiguities of statement, belief, action, and reaction are perfectly summed in the final five lines of “Charles on Fire”:

The moment passed.  He made two quick sweeps and
Was flesh again. “It couldn’t matter less,”
He said, but with a shocked, unconscious glance
Into the mirror.  Finding nothing changed,
He filled a fresh glass and sank down among us.

Commentary and translation stand in the same relation to the text as style and mimesis to nature: the same phenomenon considered from different aspects. On the tree of the sacred text both are only the eternally rustling leaves; on that of the profane, the seasonally falling fruits.

In the guise of a singular aphorism, Benjamin presents these two divergent assertions, and worse than misleadingly simple condensation, he buries the lead.  The truly unexpected assertion is that style and mimesis are different views of the same natural phenomenon, an assertion which he buries between two less unexpected ones, but two which are more truly aphorisms, pithy sayings whose pith is as important to them as their saying. Even that meatiest of points about the relationship of style and mimesis to nature immediately points back to commentary and translation, illuminating their relation to each other instead of to its own more interesting observation; more interesting because I wonder how exactly mimesis enters into “nature.”  Can we say the butterfly’s faux-owl’s face is mimesis?  If so, then it is certainly clearer how style and mimesis are the same phenomenon, and in turn how translation and commentary are balanced in the same relationship.

I wonder, then, about the unconscious evolutionary motivation for style and mimesis, translation and commentary.  I have been bothered by the recently growing frequency of treating non-sentient objects as “using” us the way humanity has used them.  In Michael Pollan’s otherwise interesting documentary, The Botany of Desire, his repeated pretension—the speciousness of which he acknowledges even while he continues to use it as the key to making his subject interesting—that these plants (tulips, potatoes, apples, and marijuana) have used us as unwitting accomplices to their own secret plans for world domination, is absurd, almost as if it were an unconscious attempt to exculpate ourselves by saying, if only they had their wits about them, tulips would have leveled the rain forests, melted the icecaps, and poured uncountable gallons of oil into the Gulf, too.

And then there is the tangentially related, but no less interesting observation, that translation and commentary, style and mimesis are— but to which pair does “both” refer?  In condensing his subject to a metaphor of nature, the first two assertions are overlaid and made to say much, much more.  Not only is this a thesis about translation and commentary, it is a thesis on the evaluation of literature over time, on, not why, but how literature survives, on literary fame and value— and perhaps a tentative guide to evaluating contemporaneously what will continue rustling and what will wither with its fruit.

Curious, though, that Benjamin’s aphorism minimizes the commentator and translator, the styler and mimer, and says virtually nothing about authors, perhaps only saying anything at all about creating by mentioning style and mimesis.

Perhaps most important is that, rather than vaulting everything into the realm of the artificial, to the realm of the natural everything is returned.  Our avarice is indeed natural, and one could even call it, safely, I think, “tulip-like” in this regard, but progress is not by default good and does not raise us above the natural into some self-sufficient human realm, nor does the tulip transcend its vegetal self and enter, even metaphorically, some ‘separate, human realm.’  I am reminded of the peculiar tension I found in reading “The Storyteller,” where Benjamin so clearly and strongly disagrees with the movement of literature and modern society, its proliferation and speed and constant aversion to the past and death, and yet he struggles so fiercely against any automatic condemnation of it.  One’s own anomie is not a valid reason for condemning that from which one feels disconnected (and that, I would toss off offhandedly, is the failure of most contemporary art).  The present is not worse than the past simply because it comes after the past, however much some aspects of the past may be preferred.  Now is simply, to steal from Roubaud, what will have been.

In the midst of this discussion, Nichols drops this choice— especially for anyone reading Roubaud— morsel of information:

About the same time that secular poetry began to be recorded in manuscripts in the early thirteenth century, Geoffroy de Vinsauf wrote his Poetria nova (The New Poetry, c. 1210) which became one of the most popular and influential poetic treatises of the high Middle Ages.  [This work] reveals the new concerns with ordering narrative for written presentation.  Reading him, we can seize his excitement in the face of a new aesthetics, and his awareness of the need to create a new poetics for dealing with the innovation.  He makes us sense that writing was not simply a tool for remembering, but a technique for thinking.

Whereas classical rhetoric was concerned primarily with the immediate rhetorical effects of oral delivery… Geoffroy’s Poetria nova stressed techniques for organising and presenting the narrative of writing.  Consequently, for Geoffrey, the order of the book as arrangement or dispositio becomes paramount.  The poet has two choices: to follow the natural sequence of events, the historic order, or to invent a synthetic order based on aesthetic or other principles.  {I should mention here that, though he certainly implies that the principles may apply more broadly, Nichols probably intends to reference manuscript ordering here: i.e., ‘naturally’, Peitieu should come before Marcabru, but not necessarily thematically.} Geoffroy writes that the latter ‘strives on the footpath of art’, while the former ‘follows the highway of nature.’  Natural order renders an unimaginative sequence flatly.  The same brief space may be made at least pleasing and perhaps even interesting by a synthetic style: ‘skillful art so inverts the material that it does not pervert it; art transposes, in order that it may make the arrangement of the material better.  More sophisticated than natural order is artistic order, and far preferable, however much permuted the arrangement be.’

Geoffroy speaks about arranging or transposing existing materials.  The artist or poet ‘finds’ (in the medieval sense of trobar, trouver) his material already in the world and makes his poetry as a construction, a reconstruction and a reordering.  As Guilhem de Peitieu had already put it so brilliantly, the flowers of rhetoric are the product of artistic construction in the poetic workshop or obrador.  The song ‘Ben Bueill’ thematises Guilhem’s poetics… :

{The Occitan poem is followed by this prose translation:}

(I want all to hear if a song that I’ve produced in my workshop is of good quality [color = sign of quality in refining or smelting].  For I possess the flower of my métier, and that’s the truth.  The song itself will testify to this, once it’s finished [lit: 'laced up', meaning that the versification has been worked out satisfactorily].)

When Guilhem de Peitrieu and later Geoffrey of Vinsauf place the art of trobar at the heart of the poetic process, they are also describing exactly what the manuscript matrix invited the scribe to do with the material he sought to include in his chansonnier. From this viewpoint, the work of the scribe is not so very much different from that of the poet, since the art of the manuscript is the art of dispositio: artistic arrangement and construction.  …  The difference is that the chansonnier gives a meaning – or a sense of a whole – to a large body of pre-existing works, and in the sense of the whole lies the ‘intelligence’ of the chansonnier.  The poet creates a sense or an identity – a poetic logic – for a single poem; the scribe for an entire corpus.

And ‘corpus’ becomes a provocative pun when I consider the images Roubaud is conjuring, of the childhood body in various positions throughout his childhood home and its grounds, positions whose sequence of presentation is determined by a rigorously synthetic set of principles, so rigorous as to prevent any possibility of its appearing to be ‘natural’ in Vinsauf’s sense, a ‘synthetic order’ which is, by Roubaud’s argument, all the more natural for its caveat emptor depiction, in prose, of the experience of memory.  A double negation.  ”the great fire of london” is not a poem, or an autobiography, or a fiction.  It is a manuscript which will have been written, and will continue to ‘will have been’ as long as there are readers to read its present of composition.

It is also important, for anyone not familiar with the troubadours, that the printing press was a few centuries off when this transition from sung song to manuscript happened.  Even if we consider writing as a “technique for thinking” to mean mainly thinking out one’s own thoughts, Nichols must also stretch such a meaning to include the scribes of the chansonniers, engaged in a mostly rote copying process, with a little of the artist’s flourish in the illuminations and choice of order.  The concord with Roubaud’s rigorous compositional method, writing his writing before dawn each day until the sun rises, is significant.  Even when the “moment of prose” written does not have a place in the developing format until the ‘inter-branches’ proposed (discovered?)  in branch two, The Loop, we learn in the midst of his discussion of them that he still writes every morning.

from §3 My returning to this image

Seeing that nocturnal windowpane covered with its flowers of frost has become habitual for me, very familiar.  And sometimes the image appears to me on its own, at random, removed from its natural setting, without any particular thought of this memory preceding it.  But I recognize it immediately—I can hardly fail to recognize it, since it resembles nothing so much as itself.

But one day, one day I managed to associate this image with a spoken word, a word from a poem (if I grant for a moment that poetry is speech, a “music of the mouth proffering speech in meter,” as Eustache Deschamps said), a word spoken, then, and put down on paper centuries ago, and now caught on this paper between the blank spaces, the “margins,” that define verse:

Er resplan la flors enversa

These words make up the entire first line of a canso (a “chanson,” a music-poem) by the troubadour Raimbaut d’Orange, written more than eight centuries ago: “Now shines [is resplendant] the inverse flower.”  Raimbaut d’Orange wastes no time in revealing the primary sense of this strange grouping: “quals flors” he says (“which flower?”). And he answer himself, taking the spontaneous and absolute solipsism of all verse even further: “neus gels e conglapis” (“snow, frost and ‘conglapi‘”), introducing, with this last vocable—so rare that it appears only here—who knows what sort of frozen thing.  I have decided to understand it, according to the needs of my own composition, as a vitrified conjunction of neus (snow) and gels (frost): as the condensation of a mist-noise and a cold substance, emblematic of the cold itself; and I hear in it an entire “glapissement,” a kind of screen, along with the scratching sound made by those transparent pellets of cold as they were scraped up, crying out under my nail:

Er resplan la flors enversa
Pels trencans rancx e pels tertres.
Quals flors neus gels e conglapis
Que cotz e destrenh e trenca.

(Then shines the inverse flower
among sharp cliffs and hills.
Which flower? snow frost and ice
that cuts and torments and slices.)

Now, every dawn is a new spring, even a dawn covered in frost.  And in this paradoxical beginning of a lover’s canso, Raimbaut d’Orange—instead of following a tradition that would have him echo the sweet and didactic love songs of the teacher-birds, the teachers of the song, essenhadors del chan—gives voice instead to abstract nightingales.  The poet sees blocks of ice in place of the craggy red mountains, which are now invisible; in place of the orioles or larks, whose throats are now numb; in place of their song now dead from the cold:

Vey mortz quils critz brays siscles
(I see dead calls, cries, noises, whistles)

For Raimbaut, invoking the great aviary cold of the hills, now gripped by frost , is a way to make the three-in-one flower of song, poetry, and love still more brilliant— the inverse flower absent from every bouquet (and here the absence is double).  When I read this image, when I found myself gripped, transfixed, and benumbed by these words, flors enversa, I recognized them as my own (this was near the very beginning of my reading of the Troubadours, I still knew virtually nothing about them), and I spontaneously and sentimentally placed myself, implicitly and without at first realizing it, in one of the two camps—each devoted to a certain method, simultaneously antagonistic and interwoven—of the trobar, the art of the Troubadours.

For this is not simply an insolent metamorphosis of the tradition’s “spring-time” metaphor (the beginning of poetic singing, in the spring, identified with the love songs of the birds), but also the affirmation of a certain way of speaking in poetry, which goes far beyond the privileged moment in which the singing flowers of the frost are discovered.  One could dub this the Way of Double Negation (which has its related and parallel forms in philosophy, theology, and even logic): the frost negates both the flower and the song.  But in the desert of first, a paradoxical flower blooms—in its silence an insistent disharmony resonates, and from this “hirsute” blossoming, as from this polar atonality, are reborn, in the vibratory evocation of the verse, both a happy music and its simultaneous and hopeless disappearance.

The poetic method called “obscure” and “closed,” according to Raimbaut d’Orange and Arnaut Daniel, never forgets that beneath love’s greatest “joy”—its “joi“— lurks the frost of fulfillment, the ferocity of a reality mingled with death.

This is why, even if it wasn’t within my power to dissolve this association between childhood and a fragment of poetry, I did not for a moment refuse it.  As I progressed (slightly) in my knowledge of the trobar, as I formed a clearer idea of it, this association became deeper and still more necessary, losing the sudden, fortuitous, and arbitrary character of its origins.  The memory image of the square pane made hazy with frost, the night that it hid and then revealed, and the bedroom around me all acquired from this association a greater force of conviction (the conviction of being an authentic and significant revelation of the past) and a greater legitimacy.

The poem which Roubaud discusses may also be read at Google Books, in a translation by William D. Paden and Frances Freeman Paden, here.

Green’s primary point, in response to Mayhew’s separation, is that perhaps we can make the same distinction within fiction itself: there is ‘fiction-as-art,’ which would aspire to ‘music’ in the same way that poetry does, and there is ‘fiction-as-discourse,’ which depicts society through its dispersion of nuggets of cultural meaning— things like Myers’ assertion that in Wharton’s The Age of Innocence there is an “intellectual argument via plot”  that the cultural institution of marriage is a tragedy.  This was largely my point in the last post, and Green puts it much more eloquently: this type of reading, fiction as discourse on culture, is certainly valid, and there is a field of fiction where this is the perfect method of interpretation, but it is not universally applicable.

The dilemma faced here, then, is that it is the language’s motivation, not its style, form, or content, that distinguishes ‘writing-as-art’ from ‘fiction-as-discourse,’ ‘poetry-as-cultural-relic,’ etc; but such a motivation can only be discovered by active engagement with style, form, and content.  (I say ‘writing-as-art,’ per Green’s idea that, should we break fiction-as-art from fiction-as-discourse, we are free to develop a field of writing that encompasses all such “musically inclined” work, whatever form it takes, be it poetry, prose, essay, etc..)  One must, in a sense, trace back from the work to the originary impulse in order to determine its aesthetic motivation.

______________

Having written as far as above, I was having trouble articulating just what I meant by motivation, or what, of all possible motivations, is the one behind what I talk about when I talk about writing-as-art.  Myers’ latest missive helped me figure out.  This particular passage is where I feel most prominently the dissonance between Myers’ way of thinking and mine:

The term experimental writer must be given its unconditional release. A good novelist, whose writing is alive, seeks to pioneer an idiom—a style, a method of organization—by which he is able to complete his novel’s design according to his ideal conception of it.

“Pioneering an idiom” is all good and well, but the presumption here is that “writer” and “novelist” are one and the same. Writer and novelist, however, are not perfect synonyms. A novelist is a writer, but a writer need not be a novelist, even if she writes novels.  Which sounds absurd, at first.  But when I look at the writers who interest me, in whatever form, be it novel or poetry or essay,the ones to whom I return again and again are the Writers.  They are concerned with language and with writing, and with how language is inextricable from our lived life, and often especially with how writing is as well.  A parallel, perhaps: Myers is concerned with The Novel in the way a lot of people are concerned with Identity, and I can stomach books whose sole domain is the minority experience as much as I can books whose sole domain is character and plot.

James Merrill, when asked if he had any for young poets, once gave this advice: “There’s no need to wallow in the assumptions of your time and place, since your work will reflect them, whatever you do.”  One cannot totally dissociate art from culture, of course (nor should one want to); even art that is more concerned with aesthetics than cultural discourse must inherit and develop the aesthetic concerns of its culture.  But, for example, as a gay man, I’ve always found the popular concern with identity literature to be baffling.  I am not interested in Gay Literature; I’m interested in Literature.  (For the moment, let’s agree to just save the topics of oppression, exclusion, and canon formation for another time.)  Poets like Crane and Merrill, some of the strongest influences on my writing, all have a peculiarly homosexual bent which sublimates overt sexuality and the concerns which having a minority sexuality bring about, to allow for more universal themes of language, sexuality, communion, and society.  I may even sense an echo of this type of sublimation in writers like Stevens or Hopkins or Melville, whom certain people are always trying to claim as Gay Writers, but I need not claim them as Gay Writers to have enjoyed their work and gotten what I have out of it any more than I need to claim Melville’s novels are poetry because his prose is particularly concerned with sound and rhythm.

I may get a certain type of enjoyment out of “Voyages,” knowing it is the rare poem I could read to a boyfriend without having to subconsciously switch pronouns and alter represented genders, but what most enthralls me about “Voyages” is the language, the desperate attempt to use language to compensate for physical distance and anneal spiritual separation— even if I can acknowledge that that desperation to connect is certainly intensified by the social oppression it faced at the time.  But the same expectation of commitment goes for traditional novels. I do not put down a novel simply because it has a traditional plots and characters; I will put down a novel, however, because it only has them, or because it does not seem to be doing more than repositioning things I have seen before.  I didn’t finish Hemon’s Lazarus Project, for example, for that reason. Writers who use language like they use grocery bags, whether it be to contain identity issues or social issues, are, at best, marginally interesting to me.  (This may be why I’m ambivalent about Bolaño; his writing is excellent, but I’m just not terribly interested in what he uses it for, however much I feel like I ought to be.)  I don’t think they should be prevented from writing and publishing, and I’m certainly not attempting to prove their valuelessness, but they will probably not be getting my attention.  In the terms I toyed with before, it’s the Nantucketers I’m interested in, not the merchant sailors or the pirates.  If the merchant sailor/fiction-as-discourse is your thing, go for it— just please, please don’t expect us all to pretend with you that the Nantucketer doesn’t exist.