--the museum became real

The best way to experience the Cloisters is to get locked out. I had gone to the Cloisters on a Monday, and while I know museums are usually closed then, someone assured me it was open, and I thought maybe it had some kind of special not-closed-on-Monday status. I prefer word of mouth to digital confirmation, especially when traveling, and here is where it gets me. However, while circling the base of the hill (a drumlin? a roche-moutonée?) I noticed that the striations of rock poking up through the grass were almost identical to those at Garret Mountain. Perhaps, in Williams' imagination, these rocks formed a secret continuum between places, a continuum which disturbs or challenges the creation of human artifacts. The way they came through the surface, it seemed similar to Zizek's description of the Real in Looking Awry, as that undifferentiated substance that is sometimes encountered in science fiction tales in which the edge of the phenomenal world or simulacrum is reached or broached. The Cloisters itself is a mass of organized rock on this undifferentiated, unorganized surface, although there seems to be a continuum, a redundancy even between the museum and its hill. For Williams, the bare rocks speak as "the thing itself," rather than the museum (although what would it mean that the "museum became real," if not this continuum or infinite regress of redundancy that challenges poetic distinction?) Yet I can imagine also that, for him, he is celebrating what one heroically fashions out of the bare rock, and, consequently, what it contains, "her trophies of action and instruments of pleasure"(94). In some ways the unicorn inside the Cloisters is an enviable excrescence when compared to similar artifacts in Garret Mountain's Lambert Castle, a haven for union-busting, nouveau-riche excess rather than monastic withdrawal. Reflecting, perhaps, on these related places, connected during his lifetime by the George Washington Bridge, he says in the beginning of Book V that "Here/ Is not there,/ and will never be." Yet, toward the end of the book he switches this insight up to a less despairing "Anywhere is everywhere." In some ways, the continuity of rock may facilitate the latter interpretation. Yet, when one finally enters the museum, its unicorn tapestries have as a background feature an image of a city in the distance, very much like the way New York City looks from the top of Garret Mountain. If Williams is imagining the unicorn as "I, Paterson, the King-self," and if the city in these tapestries is linked to the forces of civilization that try to trap and kill the unicorn, then is he indicting NY with the murder of the unicorn, or cities in general (since this city in the tapestries can easily, in this dialogue between doubled spaces, be Paterson itself)? And how does this book twist and explode the "man like a city, woman like a flower" equation, if Williams sees himself as the unicorn persecuted by violent group think of cities; or does it rectify it as the overriding theme since it brings in the overlapping symbolic systems of the tapestry's thousand-flowered background and the virgin Mary, with Williams emulating a Christ-like figure?

The Thing Itself!

In July, I took birdwatchers and filmmakers Michael Gitlin and Jackie Goss to Garret Mountain and Rifle Camp Park to look and listen for some fine feathered friends and talk about the references Williams makes to them. Unfortunately, it was too late in the day and too hot to see any wildlife, and Rifle Camp Park’s nature center—an unexpected find—was closed. If you go early enough the mountain teems with bounding doe and wild turkeys, in addition to birds of many stripe.
We discussed, again, the “realite!” section of Book V (p. 207), and I asked them whether bird mnemonics might help one understand what Williams was getting at, if he got at it at all—since as always, he seems to be to showing us the gap between the “getting at” and the “it.” There’s a kind of archaism to bird mnemonics, akin to the language of flowers, that responds to a worldview in which a deep appreciation of nature is more a function of the literary than the scientific. (I kind of like the illusion of objectivity that this form of bird sound analysis gives!) But there is still the dark wall behind the mirror of nature, making Williams wonder whether our apperception of it, literary or otherwise, is fundamentally flawed. Is “the art/ with which these flowers have been/put down . . . to be trusted” (213)? Need the brain “be grafted/ on a better root” (214)?

The Reality! The Reality!

A young William Carlos Williams and his mother translated a surrealist novel about a stalker, a prostitute, a murderer, and a gangster who haunt the streets of Paris. Referenced in the beginning of Book 5 of Paterson, Soupault’s Last Nights of Paris is not as racy as it sounds. Perhaps it is only a surrealist who can take the source material for a typical thriller and evacuate it of all thrill, returning the action to everyday. It is cold in tone, evocative of the ennui of city wandering that denizens of the night experience. Were I argue its conceptual strengths, however, I would hide the fact that, for me, the book did not have much going for it except its connection to Paterson. The publishers even tacitly admit this exterior source of literary value by printing the pertinent section of Paterson not once, but twice—as the book’s only blurb and as its epigraph. It may have been an important inpirational source of Williams’ own exploration of intractable urban mystery (here the city is a woman, not a man as Williams would have it). Nevertheless, while there is much promise in a story that starts with a narrator, a dog, a sailor and a prostitute wandering randomly together at 3 in the morning, it was a chore to glimpse the “inviolable secret of Paris” that their journeys turned up.
Of greater interest to me is Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant (at least the first two parts of it I have so far read), more cryptically referenced in this section of Paterson's Book 5. I was introduced to the book by Holly Tavel who was using it for a summer-term psychogeography course; as she described Paris Peasant, she started to flip through it a few times, a sort of perfunctory gesture of “showing me the book.” What jumped to my eye was the following section, from which Williams seems to have pulled his "la realite! la realite! la rea, la rea, la realite!"(207) Williams is much more tortured (and in the end, impressed) by “the real,” while Aragon is clearly more contemptuous (if only because Williams' “reality” is almost Lacanian in its paradoxical unknowability, whereas for Aragon it is more synonymous with custom, albeit still paradoxical):

The Realities

FABLE

Once upon a time there was a reality
With her own flock of sheep in real wool
And as the king’s son came passing by
The sheep bleated Baaah! How pretty she is
The re the re the reality

Once upon a time there was a reality
Who never could get to sleep at night
And so her fairy godmother
Really took her by the hand
The re the re the reality

Once upon a time there was an old king
Who got very bored as he sat on his throne
His cloak slipped off into the evening
So then they gave him for a queen
The re the re the reality

CODA: Ity ity the rea
Ity ity the reality
The rea the rea
Ty ty The rea
Li
Ty The reality
Once upon a time there was THE REALITY

Aragon’s book is a much more fanciful and detailed exploration of the mysteries of public life in the city than is Soupault’s, and is in more in line with Williams’ aesthetic (menus, news articles, playlets, and street signs are pasted directly into the prose). His subject is the passages—“human aquariums” cut into the shadowy corners of the streets—which threatened to disappear under the impending Haussmannization of Paris. Or rather, the passages frame his various subjects—which include reflections on “blondness,” an accordionist with P-E-S-S-I-M-I-S-M written on the folds of his bellows, bathhouses, shoeblacks, cocktails, and postage stamps.

End of Discussion!

Before we were able to begin our last discussion of Paterson in Paterson, we were locked out of the Ivanhoe Arts Center for about an hour. We took the time to slowly get stoned on Smirnoff Ice while gazing intently at the falls of the raceway. Was this the true experience of Paterson--following the twisting braids of the waters, focusing on this layer, now that, as the patterns fell into their destined pool? Once inside, perhaps begrudgingly, we took up the discussion of bird mnemonics, Williams' virgin-whore complex, pastoral poetry, and Alexander Hamilton's final demise on the Weehawken shores (the subject of Williams' unfinished Book VI, and pictured above). The discussion series ends with a rousing version of "But Not For Me" with Mike accompanying on the piano. This mp3 is another long file, perhaps best suited to loading onto an iPod and listening in traffic. Or you can just go to the end of the file to the "musical number," which includes includes the brilliant intro that no one, except maybe Bobby Short, sings, because of the all-pervasive influence of the Chet Baker version or its dated reference to Beatrice Fairfax.