--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?

Aztec Astral Glitch

This time reading Book II, I picked up on this mental wormhole that takes us from Garret Mountain to a similar place in Mexico, Chapultepec or "grasshopper hill." It seems like he refers to this statue, or ones like it, when he talks about the "grasshopper of red basalt, boot long . . . a matt stone solicitously instructed/ to bear away some rumor/ of the living presence that has preceded it, out-precedented its breath . " The rumor, we can imagine, may refer to grasshopper's signature sound, and Williams may be reflecting on the appropriateness of a representation without this sound. However, that its "wings do not unfold for flight--," for Williams "no need!" Remember, this passage occurs after the first appearance of the references to that which he approaches "concretely." I had been thinking this time around that, contrary to perhaps more wishful interpretations of Williams' relation to the concrete, that in Book II he conceptually places the concrete in subordinate relation to the vitality of the workers in the park, and thus seems to denigrate the concrete, even though the workers are boisterously rude. Yet he goes on to describe how the "mind's wings," connected to the artist's hand, and faced with the unyielding rock, seem, in this odd game of rock-paper-scissors to beat out any cheap vitality. This reference may serve to clarify the cryptic lines "Love is a stone endlessly in flight;" "the stone lives, the flesh dies;" as well, perhaps his reference to "window-eyes that front the whole head" (see pic above) implying the immortal insomnia of artistic vision, of the "Love [that] combat[s] sleep."
A big question for me is how this passage was meant to be read without the possibility of a quick Internet search? As an astral residue in memory? How legible is it meant to be?

Paterson Datum no. 6

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)?

Between Athens and the Amphioxus

Now’s a good time to reread book III (esp. parts 2-3), taking place in the cold April on Garret Mountain. It’s structured around the open-aired harangue of a preacher, his nacreous pate glistening in the still wintery sun, benches and harmonium set out pell-mell on the plateau of the overlook. Williams is taking a walk and, while listening to the preacher (whose thoughts seem to echo his own), his mind strays to the history of a hanging in the same place, and to the magnified detail of black cloth on the coat that Washington wore at his inaugural, and to the abstract notion of the system of debt and capital, and to the woman who writes long letters pleading for his attention (Nardi). In some ways, this section is about exploitation, the way in which “Cash is mulct of them that others may live/ secure.” But it’s clear as he beats things around in his mind that the preacher who preaches giving all his money away is the only beauty there, a beauty that may be “torn to shreds by the/ lurking schismatists” (the latter is actually a word meaning “non-believer,” although at first I thought it was some portmanteau word with a geological pun embedded.) As such, the preacher is another avatar of the noise and chaos of the falls, which preach their own sermon of return to the nothing that founds the chaos of Paterson. “—with monotonous insistence/ the falls of his harangue hung featureless/ upon the ear, yet with a certain strangeness/ as if arrested in space” (70). This section is a progressive building up to a moment of clarity when, almost in song, Williams delivers his magisterial advice (channeled from the preacher and sung to Nardi and the reader) to “Look for the nul.”

Mystery Mountain, Part Two

If you are following this vlog, way back in September we had Part One of a journey to a inconspicuous-conspicuous hummock that had haunted our guest-drifter Kyle Lapidus whenever he passed it on the highway. Turns out that this haunting led us to Garret Mountain itself, and constituted New Jersey as an Impossible Object's first trip to this place, central to Williams' poetography (a word that--if you force it between a volcano, a tectonic plate, and a word processor--becomes topography). While Williams found ghosts of a German Singing Society transformed into a vengeful mob, and dead babies killed for crying too loud, we found Middle Eastern women posing on tanks for boudoir photos, and plentiful cries of little children.

Mystery Mountain, Part One

Day Six
“In ignorance/ a certain knowledge.” There are places on the highway that I think everybody has an intimate knowledge of, yet knows nothing about. They are those little inconsistencies or changes that mark time or space in an otherwise monotonous forward motion, curves of road that suddenly say “closer” or “farther” or “amidst,” if only to you. For me, maybe for you too, it is the place on route 78 where the highway starts to be walled with tan concrete (sound baffles for bedroom communities?) and promises the approach of New York; there’s the barn that is painted “Vote Republican” where the highway makes a sharp turn taking you that much closer to Chicago on the way from Milwaukee. You might also remember that moment in John Barth’s classic deconstruction of forward motion, “Lost in the Funhouse,” where the boys look for the electrical towers and the standpipe on the way to “Ocean City.” For Kyle Lapidus, it is a hill in Paterson that has this kind of insignificant-significance. He has only ever seen it from the highway but, in his estimation, it is the most important hill or mountain of any he has experienced . . . or rather, despite never having experienced it. We take a closer look. Who needs Pedro? In two parts.