Falls Cameo

Damn. Even though D. W. Griffith filmed his famous ice floe climax of Way Down East in Connecticut, I'm almost certain that this cutaway is the Passaic Falls . . . which makes perfect sense, since for a long time Griffith worked in the industry when it was still in Fort Lee, New Jersey, just down the road from Paterson.

Barack and the River!

Obama's first national park designation is














Maybe this spring it's time for Silliman to reread Paterson instead!

Hell Must Be Peopled (1859)

Brimstony! . . .

Campbell, Alfred Gibbs
"INVITATION TO THE CLERGY TO PARTICIPATE IN THE INAUGURATION OF THE TAVERN AT PASSAIC FALLS, N. J."

Ho ! preachers of His Gospel who
Salvation came to bring,
Rest from your labors for awhile,
And join our gathering!

Ye servants of the Living God!
Your fealty cast aside,
And with us for a single day
Stand on the Devil's side!

What boots it that we open wide
Another door to woe,
Through which a still increasing tide
Of human souls shall flow?

Hell must be peopled; and our plan
Is quite the surest one;
Our railway's a descending grade,
Our cars the swiftest run.

Not faster do the waters plunge
Adown Passaic's steep,
Not swifter do the lightnings fly
Athwart the vaulted deep,

Than our good train, when once she starts,
With freight of priceless souls,
Speeds to the pit where, deep and dark,
Perdition's Ocean rolls.

Then come with us and view the train;
The depot consecrate;
Where God's voice in the cataract speaks,
Rum's reign inaugurate!

Ho! servants of the Living God!
Your fealty cast aside,
And with us, for a single day,
Stand on the Devil's side!

1859.

It's the Economy, Stupid

In Williams’ Embodiment of Knowledge, he talks about the general notion of waste and excess as antithetical to “economy,” widely defined to include notions of the poetic. This assertion might strike those for whom writing poetry today is the closest thing to potlatch as patently silly. Even more silly, as always with Williams, is how he dovetails these insights with a general theory of womanhood:

And it is certain that purity which we require in woman is nothing more nor less either than the beautiful flower of the common plant, economy. And all that is manly—all doing, perseverence, daring, courage, all are nothing else than economy in their reduction, however we glamour them about. It is all: the set value, the single path, concentration of energy, each is economy of purpose which alone makes action beautiful. (187)

He even goes as far as to say that the reason that he stays with Floss, and does not cat around, “is that I am too lazy to go about for others. This is the sole reason.” (187) If laziness prevents him from being “divided by over multiplication,” Paterson eventually gives Floss the horns, since here he does engage multiplicity and challenge the economy of “one.” It makes sense that Paterson becomes a locus for these transgressions, since, as we have discussed earlier, it is the product of Alexander Hamilton’s “new” economy—a planned system that, in its disregard of the contours of natural energies, proved disastrous. And that, in his “elucidation by multiplicity,” he includes the excess of materials from archival sources, representing economies he can’t understand, an intractable “messiness” confounding the poet—finicky at heart, yet challenged by the cosmic imposition of an ontological lassitude. If, as he says earlier in Embodiment of Knowledge “[p]oems must be . . . considered as documents of men” (74), Paterson attempts to break this existential rationale for formal coherence in pursuit of a knowledge not necessarily in his own body. Or is this just his science-fictional sex-poem-fantasy? For, further down in “Waste and Use,” he muses on the possibility that if he were a river he could embrace multiplicity and, thus, manage to get around with more women. Maybe “in the year 1, 011, 000 A. D. we will be river large . . . I think in that case I could be content with a thousand women of proper assortment” (187). . . . a clear case of Passaic envy?

unworldly love that has no hope of the world that cannot change the world to its delight

At about 22 minutes in this July 1987 class on Williams by Ginsberg, he talks about what he calls "Paterson: The Wanderer (A Rococo Study)," although in other places on the web I only see it referred to as "The Wanderer: A Rococo Study." Nevertheless, Ginsberg describes it as the early poem (1914? 1917?) that explains "how [Williams] got to be the great poet of Northern Jersey." Also in this file: Wordsworth and spots of time, Williams and Zen ordinary mind ("If you want to get high, don't; if you want to get high, get down"), Williams as super8 artist super haiku artist sound haiku artist.

No Ideas but in 3-D

3-D seems to be making a come-back in Hollywood, but if you prefer what I call “the other 3-D”—those low-tech experiments more enamored of technological deadends than jumping on supposed futuristic bandwagons (e.g. the stereoscopic works of Zoe Beloff and Vladmaster)—you will enjoy the Paterson stereoscopes in the New York Public Library’s Digital Gallery. Just type in “Paterson” as your keyword. There is no way to synthesize these images into their intended depth here. Without the prerequisite googles of wood and ornamented tin, one can instead think of dopplegangers on winter days. Who are these various men—some clearly Whitmanesque and pensive, others shady and melancholic, another with a head as big as Peter the Dwarf's . . . and why are there always two of them? The falls breed doubles, if only the represented and its real. On the backs of these slides (not pictured—a double repressed!) there are various bits of doggerel that I guess work as a kind of soundtrack, helping one to resurrect an even fuller phantasm of the absent falls. To wit: “Where mighty rivers mountain-born/Go sweeping onward dark and deep,/Through forests where the bounding fawn,/Beneath their sheltering branches leap” etc. etc. Note that many of these scenes were fixed in (double) time by Paterson’s stereoscope artist “Doremus”—J. P. Doremus, that is, perhaps a close relative to P. Doremus, undertaker (see p. 192, Book IV), unless this is another case of doubles. An undertaker moonlighting as a stereoscope artist (or, probably more appropriately vice-versa) seems as conceivable a combination in the 19th century as a graphic designer in an emo band would be for our gentler era. The Doremus family makes another cameo appearance in Book I (p. 33), where Williams inserts a catalogue of the posthumous effects of Cornelius Doremus (d.1803) and their market value. Perhaps Williams liked the Doremus clan because their name, in Latin, meant something like “We will endure” or, if you want to give their name the geological resonance that Williams may have enjoyed “We will be hard.” In fact, on the back of some stereoscope slides (click verso), Doremus gives us a listing of Paterson views for sale, and the format is much like that of Williams’ geological cross-section passage. It is interesting to think of the accumulation of “views” of the Passaic—from bad poetry to unfocused instamatic shots—as a kind of geological stratigraphy.
By the way, as you know, I have a soft-spot for these Web 2.0 do-hickeys as used above, but I’m really annoyed how slide.com widgets no longer loop infinitely, but just stop dead and require you to click again, or . . . horrors . . . enter your email information. The way that block in the corner pulses asking you to be my friend, my fan: unless you find your place apart from it, you are its slave! Its sleeper!

Mapping the Void

This summer, I looked into using Yellow Arrow as a possible means to map Paterson. By the time my arrows came in the mail and I figured out the confusing instructions, my stay in Paterson was almost over. Nevertheless, I used one to mark the portal for a trek I took with Anne and Alita along the freight rail that cuts through the city's notoriously turbulent 4th ward all the way to the fetid shores of the Passaic. You can check out the exact location by typing "Paterson" into the search engine at Yellow Arrow's main gallery (one of the many drawbacks to this site/service is that there are no distinct urls you can reference). I think this site may have been a pioneer in terms of Internet mapping experiments; however, other larger entities have surpassed them with their ease and accessibility (e.g. Google, Flickr). Pictures from the trip are above: I love the fake super 8 (courtesy slide.com)! There may be only 8 millimeters between heaven and earth. Such are the mysteries of photogenie.
I'm reading some essays on mapping and psychogeography for a talk I'm giving at Parsons next week via iChat. I'm interested in a point about Situationist techniques of alternative mapping made by Tom McDonough in "Delirious Paris: Mapping as a Paranoiac-Critical Activity": "Freud notes the way in which the animism of 'primitive man' (which bore striking similarities to the neurotic mind) altered the spatial arrangements of the phenomenal world into a new configuration that obeyed a logic all its own. . . . It was the task . . . of the Situationist derive . . . to induce that hallucinatory state, to adopt the obsessional neurotic's belief in the omnipotence of thoughts and desires, in order to momentarily assert the possibility of radical change in the form of a world fully accommodated to the subject." (np) Even though he is appreciative of the Situationists, his language seems to me unproductive, as if this type of remapping is an aberration of the solipsistic, rather than a healthy impulse which civilization has repressed, and which is crucial for survival in the modern city. The value of Situationist experiments is to point up how the habitual experience of the city is neurotic and obsessional, not the derive. Undoubtedly, the neurotic has a positive value in McDonough's essay, but I think this backhanded valorization (similar to his use of the word "animism") points to a deeper suspicion he may hold.
The popularization of alternative forms of mapping may bear my position out, even though most uses of Flickr, for example, are more what I would call obsessional or neurotic proper. But maybe these are the wrong words. Since McDonough is bringing up Freud, I must add that I think the crucial shift in perception may have to do with a shift (unpackable here?) from Freud to Lacan, and within Lacan from the symptom to the sinthome. The sinthome, as Zizek has described it (especially in The Fragile Absolute), announces a constant and fragile arrangement of "quilting points" as they attach to the real. Instead of imagining a "real space" to which we must submit our perception, the network of points composing the sinthome is the reality itself, not a neurosis which must be overcome.

The Bridges of Passaic County

Saturday was my first overnight in Paterson. After the opening at the museum, we sat in the backyard at the new crash pad and ate Chinese food under tiki torches. "Who is the Andy Warhol of hip-hop?" I asked as the conversation veered towards the artistic merit of one of our dinner guest's bump and booty-style videos. "Missy Elliott," was the unanimous reply.
The next day, after the first meeting of the Paterson reading group, while driving back from dropping someone off in Glen Rock, I saw an old bridge over the Passaic. Was this the bridge Smithson talks about in "A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, NJ"? Even though the walkway was paved (instead of the wooden slats on the Smithson bridge), it looked like the one. Later, when I checked a map I realized I was way off. In fact, Brian Dillon's article "Objects in the Mirror" tells us that the bridge Smithson photographed no longer exists, replaced by a "flat, bare concrete structure bordered by wire fencing and punctuated by a few unconvincing replicas of nineteenth-century lampposts." (41) What a map does reveal is that there is a necklace of bridges over the Passaic that surround the Paterson area, which may be in various states of repair/disrepair. Of them, this is ostensibly number 9. I'll have to take a drive along the Passaic soon to check out the others.
Now, if I can only find hip-hop's Robert Smithson. . . .

Outside Myself There is A World

Day Five
I set out with Alexis Bhagat and Sahra Walker to try the heart of Paterson once again. I seem to have many mistaken notions as to the nature of this heart. For instance, I have been avoiding the falls: touristy, too easy. After another long, hot day, however, we drive down Ryle Rd. past the old factory buildings and the animal shelter, park the Buick, and take the wooded path to the falls. I am thinking that I have failed to connect to the city. However, in a quiet corner where the falls eddy at the mouth of a mammoth open pipe, we meet Tony, for whom the falls is the true Paterson in contrast to the commercial, violent, and seductive forces of the street. Contrary to what I had been thinking, for Tony, the falls were a site of black power, the psychic center of the city's integrity. The rest was Babylon. The waters of the Passaic seemed to hold powers of self-actualization. You could also probably do drugs there. Tony was both doing drugs and self-actualizing, but using one to pry free from the other. And he was also writing poetry. Here's some of what he recited for us: "She turns over her life everyday, like a hamburger slaving over the heat. Constantly constantly all they want and eat and beat is beef and beef. Cow after cow after cow I ask now, when will they just want milk?" The prostitutes on Van Houten St. seem to be a continuity between Williams' world and Tony's. We leave Tony and end up at the library, where I find out that all the archival Williams materials are in Hackensack.