To What xxTUNE Dance in this IM MENSE?. .

David Lyle's letter to Dr.Williams Dec 1 1939 . . . elapsed writing time for letter Lyle notes as 5.5 hours, but then also the letter has been expanded on April 9 1939 before sent out . . . questions of the Tao, swastika . . . symbol as "real substance" . . . the "continuous realism of the Hebrews" is based in their monism . . . "the central problem is of the particular. . HOW do we KNOW anything at all . ." . . . "the TAO symbol is the wiring diagram of the source of human energy" . . . Lyle's profession as a radio operator and engineer comes through in his technical metaphors, as in "BREAKING thru humanity. IE.. to break thru every anthropomorphism...every inadequate concept and its ensu-ing inadequate operating custody...." . . . more a child of cybernetics than of the modern machine world, he rightly but completely oddly puts the Hammond Organ as the new paradigm of consciousness, NOT the cinema . . . "topologically fotographing the idea behind this country called America. . . in terms of the running Hammond Organ basic underlying second by second simultaneously as moving image all and/or any ever happened. . . happening . . . and ever will happen event structuring of man. . or men" . . . Hammond Organ tones being generated by oscillation, on/off, discrete signals whose parameters are controlled in real time and also based on a system shared with missile control devices, also invented by Hammond . . . "to make a map of the sea (of human energy)" a constant refrain, as is the attempt to situate imagism as a break-thru to a system that structures events closer to the re-al substance "And since Arnold ask the real substance question as . . . To what TUNE dancein this immense? . . . ." Or is it TONE? I wish I could go back and time and buy Lyle a new typewriter ribbon . . . the plectrum does not weave by itself . . . "Utmost permanence can be transferred directly to the uses of calculus and asymptotic curves in MATH . . . . transferred dirrectly to the swastika being asymptotic to the symbol area formerly known as ONE nation . . . W hat is oneness.and where is re-al substance....." . . . I think I had a sense this morning in bed of what this math looked like, and then I woke up a little more (proving its reality) . . . "Math signs closest to imagist operating of central nervous system." . . . "Behind any and/or all of the above areas. . there must be an imagism law. . which is continuous. . testable and checkable by anyone, once they know HO W TO SEE it. . ie, once they know HOW TO EXPERIENCE the ART of knowing. . . . either directly or thru others. . . as on a busman's holiday. . ." "The right question being Shakesspere's 53rd sonnet. . . What mmmmmm is YOUR RE-al SUBSTANCE, whereof are you made, T hat millions of strange shadows on you tend?" . . . and you must imagine the substance fading out with the lapsing ink of the ribbon the cross-outs (mmmmm) the penned-in corrections and misspacings . . . a loveable but maddening text, so hard not to want to include, but so hard to completely transcribe . . . Lyle himself, in a sense, his symbol or re-al substance . . . "As continuous imagism . . . all disguises have been stripped away, it is ALWAYS and EVER-y-WHERE (Where is your re-al substance?)" . . .

1014 E 24th St.

This is where David Lyle lived. His method of information-sculpting was one of Williams' main inspirations for Paterson, and I've been told by acquaintances of Lyle that there were boxes and boxes of his "great work" back in the garage. Can someone please just go knock on the door for me, and ask to see if there is anything still in the garage???

Return to Paterson

I spent a little time in Paterson last week, while participating in the William Carlos Williams Society's Annual Conference. The talks happened some remove from the chaos of the city in the more bucolic satellite campus of William Paterson College, mostly dead for the summer, although the focus was particularly on the relation of the poem to the city. As hoped, I unearthed some bits of knowledge not easily dislodged from academic books or internet searches. For example, my hunch that the Kevin McCarthy involved with a dramatic reading of Paterson at the Lexington Ave. Y was the Kevin McCarthy of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (thus, through pure hunch setting off the continuing series of Body Snatcher hacks) was given credence since someone pointed out that he was Mary McCarthy's brother, and thus would share her literary circles. I met the almost-allegorically named Dr. Peterson, distinguished for having written the first book-length study of Paterson, and whose collection of Williamsiana includes a manuscript with a mole Williams removed from Floss taped to it. He also had some David Lyle manuscripts and gave me some insight into Lyle's personality. While I couldn't get her to say anything on tape, one scholar mysteriously said something during a question and answer session something to the effect of "Marcia Nardi ruined my career!" So, some juicy bits from long-time travelers in the Patersphere. I took a few of the "greener" critics--including someone writing on ecocrit and Paterson--out to the more off-limits places, where the dead factories seem to have sagged and mulched a little bit more since my last visit. I wonder what will happen to these mysterious and historical abandoned spaces now that the falls area will become a National Park. I almost fear the worst, but hopefully they can get people who are smart about maintaining "preserved ruins" in the spirit of a place like the Eastern State Pen, rather than turn it into a tacky tourist phantasmagoria. Already they have painted the Looms-Warpers-Winders-Quillers-Coppers- Jacquards-&Supplies on the side of the old Paterson Silk Machinery Exchange. Ugh!

David Lyle, Blogger

Because the Beinecke Library at Yale took its Williams papers out of circulation with little notice this fall, I wasn’t able to take a look at the Lyle manuscripts there (in an earlier entry, I discussed them as an important hidden inspiration for Paterson). Nevertheless, Bob Perelman pointed out to me that in Mike Weaver’s William Carlos Williams: The American Background there is a useful approximation—a reorganization of the Lyle material by Williams, available here. Weaver gives us some more detailed facts about this Patersonian, which warrants a long quote:

Lyle had had ten years of Marconi in the Merchant Marine, the U.S. Navy, and the shore-based Radio Marine. He had come to Paterson in 1938 to work as an instrument-engineer at the Wright Aero Factory, to which the old city now looked for its industrial existence. From the time he left radio service in 1931 he had been seeking some kind of connection between abstract codes of communication like Morse and patterns of human behaviour; in short, the relation between mathematics and particulars. . . . [H]e has spent his life correlating the multiple networks of facts, events, and ideas, which have poured past his local vantage-point in New Jersey; first from East Twenty-fourth Street in Paterson not far from the Falls, then up in the ‘back country’ in Midvale about eighteen miles from the city. In 1944 he gave up his job at Wright Aero to devote himself fulltime to his method. Lyle’s hypothesis was that the world’s ills could be cured not by means of newly-created political theories but by the proper alignment of thought and fact at every level of knowledge, from concrete to the abstract . . . . These letters by means of which Lyle addressed simultaneously persons often unknown to each other and in widely divergent fields, consisted of correlations of their published writings with those of other writers. In short, he was not so much a writer as a re-writer. (122-23)

Gould, Lyle, Nardi

Because Williams pastes Marcia Nardi’s pleading, convoluted, obsessive letters full of high dudgeon right into Paterson, we normally think of her presence as the one that uniquely pulled Williams out of the formal constraints of the poem and into a vast territory outside his control. However, as Paul Mariani shows in A New World Naked (1981), Williams was also inspired by David Lyle, whose work did not ultimately make it into the pages of the poem. Mariani describes Lyle as:

an old radio operator who had settled in Paterson . . . to devote all his prodigious energies to one extraordinary project. By dint of hard work he had turned himself into a one-man information station, reading and digesting everything he could get his hands on in an attempt to discover in that aphasic river of random words just what were the central energies and patterns of the times. Blake-like, he moved into the tonnage of news media pitchblende in order to extract what Williams had called the radiant gist, the luminous center. . . . Lyle mailed off his missives—sometimes five or eight or ten pages long, single-spaced and glossed—to artists, musicians, poets, politicians, engineers, in short, to whatever names he found in the news. It was as though he had managed to freeze the very radio waves themselves and make their energies visible in ink as they flowed through the thousands of names and places and especially verbs that were in the air at any given moment. (468-69)

Nardi’s prose, in light of Lyle’s influence, does not necessarily point to some more authentic, democratic, “real” world outside poetry. Rather, its inclusion dramatizes the role of poet as a manager of data—a filter of sorts, rather than creator ex nihilo.
In the same chapter, Mariani off-handedly notes a trip Williams takes to Manhattan to visit Joe Gould on his birthday. Here, perhaps, was another secret well of inspirational company that Williams kept, since Gould was allegedly interfacing massive amounts of live data to produce his Oral History of the World. Joseph Mitchell describes Gould’s vast trove of cheap composition books as “a great hodgepodge and kitchen midden of hearsay, a repository of jabber, an omnium-gatherum of bushwa, gab, palaver, hogwash, flapdoodle, and malarkey, the fruit, according to Gould’s estimate, of more than twenty thousand conversations. In it are the hopelessly incoherent biographies of hundreds of bums, accounts of the wanderings of seamen encountered in South Street barrooms, grisly descriptions of hospital and clinic experiences . . ., summaries of innumerable Union Square and Columbus Circle harangues, testimonies given by converts at Salvation Army street meetings, and the addled opinions of scores of park-bench oracles and gin-mill savants” (Joe Gould’s Secret 12-3).
Mariani tells me that the Lyle letters are at Yale, where, sometime this fall, I hope to go to get a look at them. The Gould books, for a long time believed to be baled up and buried in a cellar on Long Island, are not so retrievable, their substance dispersed into the “infinitude of bushwa.”