Primitive Information

A response to Martin Heidegger’s “The Thing” (Poetry, Language, Thought)

As someone recently pointed out, no one has yet satisfactorily explained Zeno’s Paradox – that of the arrow, because of the distance it has to travel being infinitely divisible, never hitting the target. It has taken science two millenia to arrive at theories of relativity and quantum physics that really do no more than propose further contradictions. On the one hand, the ability to look at things in greater and greater detail has revealed the intuitive wisdom of the paradox – those infinite divisions, the breaking down into atoms and neutrons and electrons and so on and what’s between them. But still you can’t explain what it is that the arrow pierces and passes through, what the something consists of, as a fact having occurred.

Heidegger gets further into this, it seems to me, by writing into the thingness of things, in this case a jug, and there is a further analogy here in the paradox of what is near also bringing its distance, that is, what is close at hand demands that I break it down in all its minuteness, in order to begin to understand it. Then there is what he gets to, after many words and arguments, of a thing having this four-foldedness, earth/sky/gods/mortal, melded into the one-foldedness of its thing. Which is perhaps a way of saying that a thing cannot exist at a single point in time but must be apprehended in the flow of all its uses, bundled together – jug is the earth of the jug itself, the void it contains (air), its “giving forth” of water to drink (mortal), and its “gushing forth” of libation for the gods. But I realize that in using the word “uses,” I am presuming too much. The point is there is an error in logic that we make, every day, in order to merely use the jug and not stop and contemplate it for six hours in all its thingness, that it exists in the form of its outward appearance, and this is enough for us.

The wonderful and exasperating thing about poetry is that it never stops at the outward appearance, but it also does not linger for six hours in contemplation working through various arguments, but cuts right to the heart of the matter. That is, it expresses or contains the paradox as its primary material. Wonderful, then, because it recognizes the inability of words-as-explanation to express the truth behind the paradox. Exasperating, because it must still use words to express it. Demands a different kind of thinking that is perhaps not a thinking at all, but a knowing, no, a dreaming, not quite that either, an apprehending, that is, a containing and then giving forth in the same sense of the jug, a constant motion that both does and doesn’t reach the target. All these are a clue to what a poet is and what a poem does, it can only point to, the leap and piercing the target must belong to someone or something else.

I could go into signifier and signified, and how the poem siezes the territory of the former to try to contain both in that, rather than constantly (futilely) pointing at the latter, as even Heidegger must finally do because he’s thinking and writing in prose. But I’m not well-versed in theory, I can only surmise this aim of poetry. And perhaps even that is over-shooting, but let me give an example. In Rilke’s “Panther,” as Jim Gavin spoke about with regards to the cup in a poem being a real cup, you get the sense there is a real panther stalking around in there. This is achieved through the tremendous skill of the poet in recreating the sense of an animal stalking in a cage and the barely contained danger of that and frustration, all through rhythm and sound and image. You see and feel the panther, and you sense that it is real. Yet it is not description or an advertisement, it is not sentimental, doesn’t propose to speak for or interpret the panther or tell us what it says or means. Just leaves it circling there, as disturbing and memorable as the sight of a real animal in a cage, leaves one with as undigestible a question as that. And the proof of it is that it’s just as susceptible to change over time, it is not frozen there like a snapshot, it moves as you move, shifts, like any living thing, it has angles, it continues to work and squirm inside you.

Another way. In Creeley’s poem “Do you think…”, it seems to me there is a supposition or expression of this paradox, the paradox of being and not being, of moving towards but not hitting, of containing several realities at once. “Do you think that if / there’s an apple on the table / and somebody eats it, it / won’t be there anymore.” Next stanza, an elaboration: “Do you think that if / two people are in love with one another, / one or the other has got to be / less in love than than the other at / some point in the otherwise happy relationship.” This then foregrounds the problem of language in expressing reality as it exists in the dimensions of time and space. Eats what? On what? In whom? At when? Which one? Each stanza in the poem is a question with no question mark. So: a rhetorical question, “a question to which no answer is expected, or to which only one answer may be made” (or both?), also a question having to do with rhetoric, its inability to express ultimate truth in its however-many foldedness. The last stanza of the poem breaks it down even further. Language breaks down. “Do you think that if / I said, I love you, or anyone / said it, or you did.” And so on. No answer. Or: the answer must be worked out alone. In silence.

To look at a clock and see an hour is to see all hours. To imagine what one will be doing an hour from now, or at this same time tomorrow, or remember what one has done, to recognize that one has existed at all previous hours and will continue to do so until one ceases to do so, but this is unimaginable. To look at a clock and see the time is to recognize all the myriad infinite others who also exist at this time, the children on the schoolbus, the moths on the screen, the buds on the tree, water, air, faces, coins, grass, wheels, pens, so on and so on and so on. Also unimaginable. And yet, there it is. Was. Will be. Language is sort of the same thing. A tool that we necessarily use to deal with these competing, contradictory, into-each-other-flowing realities that stand above and behind it.

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A response to Lorca’s speech on Duende

I want to start out with this concept that Lorca tosses out, almost off-handedly, towards the end of the main part of the Duende speech, of the “interpreter’s duende” making up for a lack of same in the original source material, e.g. (as he describes) a singer making something extraordinary out of a vulgar song, or an actor with duende infusing that into an inferior play. I’m not going to try to re-interpret duende, as the concept seems to invite us to do, and as poets have done from the moment it first became known, nor will I question its existence or whether it’s a good or bad thing, or the same thing as inspiration, emotion, the muse, what-have-you. For the sake of expediency I’ll take it as given that it’s this ineffable, form-altering thing that Lorca says it is. That it is there for some and not for others. That it brings “freshness,” “an almost religious enthusiasm,” that “no emotion is possible without it.” That it must be “awakened from the remotest mansions of the blood.”

Having assumed all this, I will now posit that the interesting cases Lorca described, of duende being inexplicably culled from some “vulgar trifle,” is not a freakish instance of duende but a precondition for the existence of duende itself. The cases he cites, I would argue, merely show their banal origins in a more explicit way than is usually done. And again, I don’t know how to prove this, exactly, other than to bring in all sorts of examples and endlessly elaborate on them, which really amounts to no proof at all, but then again, this is sort of the same method Lorca uses to discuss the concept of duende in the first place.

First I’ll explain why this is so. It is so because without risking the banal, the vulgar, the ordinary, there can be no tension in the poem for the depth of emotion, the freshness the duende provides, to play off of. The merely profound, the heightened thing, winds up seeming isolated and absurd. (And in my mind Lorca at his most heightened and profound is also quite absurd.) The trick is to somehow embody both, to be the poet of no duende infusing one’s own inferiorities, if you will, or vulnerabilities, fears and whatnot, with the duende that comes along from the “mansions of the blood.” This is why in the poems of Lorca, for example, the ones that seem to work best are coming out of the old folk and gypsy songs, where he infuses them with new life, a sincerity informed by the modernity of his surrealist impulses. Surrealism in itself is a sort of sickness that tends to act on a work of art or an artist’s body of work as a viral infection, performing the trick of surrealism over and over again, but the real interest in Lorca’s poems comes out of the simplest turns of phrase, the repetitions, the chorus-like effects of seemingly banal phrases they turn on.

And for some reason the question seems to keep wanting to go back to the idea of song. I think again of Creeley’s “anonymous as any song” as a standard to aspire to in his poetry. I think of picking up the rhythms of ordinary speech, which are at their most natural when discussing the most ordinary things, picking one’s son up from school, going to get the groceries, the sorts of things one says off-handedly, without any forethought whatsoever. Now Lorca might say there was duende there to begin with – in those old gypsy songs, in the unpremeditated utterance, in the immediacy of whatever sparked a sentiment or song – to which I would reply – perhaps – but it is an argument that ultimately resembles the paradox of Zeno’s arrow. You are everyone and no one at the moment you pick up the strand of speech, which perhaps comes out of the spiritus mundi or the collective unconsious or some other place that all of us can sense but no one can prove the existence of, and make a poem or a song out of it. Is that strand a gift from duende or the devil’s gumwrapper? Does it matter?

Perhaps it’s because I’ve been reading Borges that I think of Troy. What we have now is the incredible gift of the Iliad, in all of its richness, emotion, and depth of detail, its epic clashes of spirit and flesh writ large and broad as the sky; what’s there underneath all those layers of actual dirt is a dusty little town that some men struggled over with pathetic little wooden swords thousands of years ago. It doesn’t matter that the Trojan Horse was an ox-cart, that Helen was a hag, that Priam was a minor chieften. It matters that someone or several someones we now refer to as “Homer” came along and puffed duende into the tale. One couldn’t have been without the other.

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Another reason I can’t wait to visit Toronto. Who knew Blue Jays games could be so much fun? (If you click the link, make sure to scroll all the way down to the bottom…)

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Consider how a poem is made. First there has to be attention, which can either be receptive (a softening) or penetrative (a keenness). That has to happen first, because in truth, the stuff that makes poetry is floating around us all the time, as plentiful as air and light. It could be anything, but it tends to be those things that already have something dynamic about them – a bit of speech or song, image, movement, interaction, maybe something out of a book or film, almost never something from TV (which does not even have the projective qualities of film) – something, in other words, where there is an exchange botched that demands the qualities of poetry to complete and communicate its significance.

That sounds more specific than I wanted it to be. And I don’t want to get too far into philosophy to explain it. But let’s say there is an instant that seems to suggest a poem in the poet’s mind. Most often that would begin with a complex (made up of any or several of the above-mentioned elements) that bursts through into speech, i.e., image having something to say, whether it’s a face, a bird, a gesture, a glance, and the fact of its not having been said with perfect completeness already, so the further lift of the poem is demanded to give it its say. This seems to be often how it happens with me. There will be a flash of recognition at some visual, emotional, or aural thing (hence “complex”) that resolves itself into a line, which suggests a rhythm as a sort of map to proceed (if the whole thing doesn’t come out at once).

In a sense, this is what one might mean in supposing that “things” – whether of nature or the “inert” world – want us to see them; they might have a perfect completeness of exchange amongst themselves, but in order for anyone else to recognize and appreciate that little discharge of energy, the poet (or dancer or painter or…) must come along and capture that and distill it again. And this particular exchange is not one of taking profit, with the aim of mining out some ore that can be consumed. In fact it is one of total giving, a giving of attention, energy, emotion, over to the thing for the duration of the exchange. And in this sense I think of it as a dance, with the product being the poem itself as a record of that dance for others to enjoy.

So the question of audience becomes almost central. If there is no one to see the dance, what is the point, who is it for? What is the distance between familiarity and bafflement, between understanding and incomprehension, where is the mystery located and how does one drop the clues? Audience matters tremendously for all these questions. The dancer is never just dancing with his or her partner (the poem), but with those observing the dance. Of course this is something to have thought about, not to think about while the dance is afoot. This seems to add a layer to the analogies that Valery draws between poetry and dancing, but it complicates his equating of prose with walking. I for one don’t enjoy watching people walk, but I do like to read novels. This seems like one of the typically back-handed compliments the two genres are constantly paying each other. Perhaps, if one insists on retaining dance for the realm of poetry, a more apt analogy would be to compare prose to a race, or some other kind of sporting event with a definite end and a need for absolute efficiency of motion, but that nevertheless holds some interest for the spectator.

But to return to the terms of that exchange… It is curious to me, and I would be very interested if anyone could devise a way of studying this, how remarkably similar the act of writing seems to be to physical activity, especially that of an intensive kind. I am struck by how many writers are known to have written standing up, for instance – Hemingway, Rilke, Pessoa come immediately to mind. I seem to recall Kafka being particularly proud of having stayed up all night writing, bragging to his maid when she came in the morning, like a prize fighter who’d just gone 15 rounds. And how other acts of physical gratification – eating, drinking, sex – seem so readily to either arrive as sublimated urges the moment one sits down to write, or to stand in for writing itself. Is there some sort of exertion that takes place at a cellular level when writing is going on, could that be measured? Has anyone tried?

Perhaps I’m “dancing” now around the questions I raised in the first half of this, but if so, it’s because I truly don’t know how to answer them. Language itself breaks at the edge of the dance between the thing itself and the poet, who must yet somehow put the record of his or her dance into words. All I know is that the investment has to be total, because there’s no other way to somehow perform the magic trick of reproducing the irreducible thing that nature is and does. But one final consideration would be to wonder what feeds that total giving, replenishes the store that gets burned up in the exertion of the dance, as the dancer must eat and drink and rest to restore the body.

World, one supposes, and I think of Rilke’s line about being “too full of World,” in other words too full of the myriad complexes of image/thought/speech that the body of the poet digests and turns into poems, the excess that brings a sense of irritation and overripeness when one simply isn’t able to write. Like food, World in the Rilkean sense doesn’t all have the same nutritional value, and it can’t be stored up forever without transmuting and passing through in some other way. We speak of “writing towards exhaustion,” but this works as well in a similar way to food in the dancer’s belly, dance in the dancer’s limbs. Each dance seems like the last possible performance, and yet somehow the next is already promised by its very finality, the living need to store up and expend again.

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It’s a year since I hopped on this plane with Tina

to see this view of her hometown, Maribor

and then flew to Cork (not on the same plane)

to hang out with this group from Texas State.

A lot’s happened since then. We’ve been in Buffalo, enjoying the weather (though it’s raining today) and the tastes. Tina’s been blogging and posting images here.

Couldn’t help checking out the weather in Cork right now: it’s 57 degrees F and drizzly, just the way I remember it. There’s a new group there now with Steve and Nancy, exploring the town and country.

In other news, Micah Robbins, publisher of Interbirth Books, has posted images of the book he’s working on for Mary Burger. I’m looking forward to seeing the finished product, and reading with Mary next month in California.

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As Rich points out, the video posted below is coming up “no longer available,” as are all Bruce Conner videos formerly on youtube, which notes there’s a “third party claim” on the work. Thus, I’ve cadged one of his more iconic images, titled Bombhead.

It’s really too bad, but perhaps it’ll inspire me to go about acquiring some Conner video on the up-and-up — perhaps via Artisan? — and inviting folks over to watch it here. And encouraging others to do the same.

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Above clip: Breakaway, Bruce Conner, 1966, with Toni Basil.

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