The Swerve of the Thing

I felt as if Ginsberg’s assertion in the last video clip that “‘no ideas but in things’ means that there's no God, basically” was a little glib, so I decided to take yet another dive into Williams’ materialist (but perhaps crypto-theological) apothegm, this time via Slavoj Zizek, who has been, since his appearance on the scene, the philosopher of the “Thing,” and who has recently taken up the project of “thinking the subversive deadlock of monotheism through to the end.” (71) I find a lot of chance points of intersection in Chapter 3 of The Puppet and the Dwarf with various readings of Paterson, especially Zizek’s reevaluation of Freud’s notion of psychic automata and traumatic blockage. What follows may be more my riffing than a close reading, as can be only possible in this constrained space.
Firstly, those “thousand automata” of Paterson “who neither know their sources nor sills of their/ disappointments,” may in the end, be better materialists than Williams is; the language fails them, but they operate fine, and are the body of the demos. They are Paterson. Williams, in contrast, posits himself as alienated demiurge of the things he sees—the things emerge from him and the Falls rather than just sitting there like the green bottle glass. Poet is trumped by the people, and like them may also be an epiphenomenon of the Falls, which are, in turn, a better, natural geist that animates all the automatons. Can Williams get from geist to mere gist, thus overcoming the oversoul that haunts his search for the thing (although becoming Christ in the end?), or will he always miss this encounter in his deadlock with the people of Paterson?
The Falls may be what Zizek (citing Jonathan Lear) calls an “enigmatic term”: a seductive, empty concept that keeps a traumatic inconsistency from true consciousness. They are not “false” per se, but are structurally important placeholders for opacity, blockage, and the impenetrability of the Other’s desire, to use his terms. What’s important is that, in this reading, the Falls are not a stand-in for the Real as the thing-in-itself beyond the grasp of language—the flow, the noise, the movement towards death, etc. Rather, they mark the blockage and inconsistencies of the Paterson-system: “this Real . . . is not the inaccessible Thing, but the gap that prevents our access to it.” (78) This gap may be the all important antagonism between the poet who individually sings the city and the multitude that does not hear the song, so Williams is hep when he sings the blockage, but not when he makes the Falls an allegory for the flow behind appearances. There is no flow, only these blockages. There is no crossing the gap of the structural antagonisms, and this realization—the materialism of Williams—is paradoxically when he is most Christian, according to Zizek: “It is the very radical separation of man from God that unites us with God, since, in the figure of Christ, God is thoroughly separated from himself—thus the point is not to ‘overcome’ the gap that separates us from God, but to take note of how this gap is internal to God Himself” (78) We could say that Williams’ separation is incomplete—perhaps because of his Unitarian shilly-shallying with the divine—and, to end with a Zizekian doosy, it is only, then, the Jewish poet Ginsberg who can then become the Christian God.
Zizek makes a rare reference to poetry (Plath’s “The Other”) at the end of this chapter, which makes me think it is an apt one for these meditations. Here’s another good quote from this chapter for the poetics grab-bag:

It is not that we need words to designate objects, to symbolize reality, and that then, in surplus, there is some excess of reality, a traumatic core that resists symbolization—this obscurantist theme of the unnameable Core of Higher Reality that eludes the grasp of language is to be thoroughly rejected; not because of a naïve belief that everything can be nominated, grasped by our reason, but because of the fact that the Unnamable is an effect of language. We have reality before our eyes well before language, and what language does, in its most fundamental gesture, is—as Lacan put it—the very opposite of designating reality: it digs a hole in it, it opens up the visible/present reality toward the dimension of the immaterial/unseen. When I simply see you, I simply see you—but it is only by naming you that I can indicate the abyss in you beyond what I see. (70)

Or if you are completely bored by all this, here’s his dirty joke about tennis.

Rough for Television: Poetry and Comedy 3

It’s almost like Beckett: a comedian is suddenly humbled by an apocalyptic landscape, so that he can only get one punch line out, perhaps his best and only funny one ever: “That mattress has seen better springs.” Uncle Floyd, a native Patersonian, makes TV with “nothing,” and nothing comes of it. I watched his “best of” DVD over the weekend, a compilation of the kind of thing you might happen upon once-upon-a-time on a local New Jersey UHF station or, later, public access. His show is in the style of the “playhouse abject,” perfected by Pee Wee Herman, less well calibrated by the likes of Paper Rad. His comedy was perhaps ahead of his time, and thus we can grant him some leeway (the reverse of his piano playing which, while masterful, is a bit dull because uninnovative and past its prime.) But is he accidentally, or intentionally, Beckettian? It’s hard to say. We have been for a while under the spell of the new lameness, so that it’s hard to discern true idiocy from genius, arrested development from avant-garde. In the end, it could be merely a question of taste. I enjoy some Adam Sandler films (and not just the high-brow foray of Punch Drunk Love), and think DaxFlame is genius, whereas I don’t care much for Napoleon Dynamite, I never liked Andy Kaufman, and I think the new high-art emerging under the sign of Garfield and magic unicorns is a depressing mix of anti-intellectualism, infantalism, and 80s nostalgia. Perhaps, in the end, this phylogenetic line is just not my style. If Floyd perhaps had more self-consciousness and control, he might very well have made it into MoMA, but he’d still be a tin man for art. You have to have heart too (which is the je ne sais quoi that Pee Wee, Sandler and Dax share).
Imagine, if you will, William Carlos Williams on the set of Uncle Floyd, as Uncle Floyd, beaming out a couple miles via UHF to a couple Paterson homes of an empty evening, “I’ve written you a poem . and the worst is, I’m about to read it to you . [stacks papers on make-shift desk in television studio. Makes wry moue to off-screen technician. Teenage drawings of Alexander Hamilton, unicorns, “man like a city,” Sam Patch, Garfield, Ezra Pound on the wall behind him.] You don’t have to like it. [suppresses laugh, amused with himself] But, hell take it, you damn well better listen to it. [hollow laughter of off-screen claque]”

Notes on the Paragram: Poetry and Comedy 2

When I first went to Paterson about a year ago, I was struck by the absence of any trace of William Carlos Williams. No monument, no mention in the various “Visitor’s Guides to Paterson” outside the Cultural Center (it was 6 AM on a weekend, so I must admit that I didn’t go in the Cultural Center, but my guess was that inside there was no undue reference to the doctor.) The best I evidence I could find was a place called “Doctor’s Cave Lounge Go-Go Girls.”
What I did come upon was bronze statue of Lou Costello. The statue seemed to be language’s bronze cheer to poetry. The star of films like Buck Privates, Pardon My Sarong, Here Come the Co-Eds, and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein would have more cultural importance to Paterson than the man who wrote a modernist epic poem about it. Not that the readers of this poem haven’t returned the favor. After all, most poets I have talked to have either never visited the actual place, or if they have, they have not expressed any desire to return, since the poem itself provides better returns on revisiting. But the question that immediately comes to mind is, what really was the better poem . . . Paterson or Who’s On First?? Or maybe, we should instead ask, what was the most influential. Was Who’s On First? a gateway drug for poets like Charles Bernstein, the Henny Youngman of Language Poetry, who wrote “Who’s on first? . . . Only the real is real” (“Whose Language”)?
Or take this passage (please), from Paterson, which seems to deconstruct the question and the pronoun, oscillating between it and I, in ways that are not foreign to Costello’s abuse of “who,” “what,” and “I don’t know”:

Who is younger than I?
The contemptible twig?
that I was? stale in mind
whom the dirt
recently gave up?
. . .
A mere stick that has
twenty leaves
against my convolutions.
What shall it become,

Snot nose, that I have
not been?
I enclose it and
persist, go on.

Let it rot, at my center.
Whose center?
I stand and surpass
youth’s leanness.

My surface is myself.
Under which
to witness, youth is
buried. Roots? (30-31)

[12/2/06 correction: however, later I did find Williams made it onto the timeline inside the Cultural Center, along with Allen Ginsberg, and Al Tangora, "World's Champion Typist."]

Notes on the Paragram: Poetry and Comedy

Sometimes the best insights come while watching television in hotel rooms. I had a minor Raymond Williams moment the other night in Ardmore, PA, watching Family Guy after coming across the word “paragram” used to describe certain poetic effects (see Perloff, McCaffery, Kristeva, Roudiez, Marsh.) The episode begins with Peter playing Wheel of Fortune and it’s clear that he is so oblivious to the basic rules and generic conventions of the show that he calls the host “Regis,” rattles off a string of hilariously useless “letters,” and doesn’t understand that the “fat man in the circle” is a keyed-in video image of himself. If you look up paragram, you’ll see that it merely means a “pun.” But, I think it is used in the context of poetic theory to imply more broadly what happens when the meaning of a word oscillates because of the unstable rules by which we are to understand it. We appraise the word through a montage of contexts, rather than a montage of words themselves. Compare, for example, the use of a word in Futurism and one in Language Poetry. The Futurist word is a verbal piece of shrapnel, an object-in-itself, flung; whereas the Language Poetry word radiates in multiple dimensions precisely because we are not sure how to take it. Lytle Shaw talks about this dynamic in the Williams-inspired work of Robert Smithson, whose word pile we saw in the last entry. Shaw says that Smithson engages multiple genres such as “science fiction, geology, travel narrative, philosophy, poetry, art criticism, pulp drug novel, cartography, and film treatment” (124) to force the extreme dislocation of his non-sites, his various concrete poems (“concrete” in various dimensions; “poem” in various dimensions). So it is that, for Williams' Paterson, we are immediately given directions how to “take” the book; those directions are just as immediately thwarted. At the beginning of Book I, Williams sets out a kind of subtitle to Paterson:

“: a local pride; spring, summer, fall and the sea; a confession; a basket; a column; a reply to Greek and Latin with the bare hands; a gathering up; a celebration;
in distinctive terms; by multiplication a reduction to one; daring; a fall; the clouds resolved into a sandy sluice; an enforced pause;
hard to put to it; an identification and a plan for action to supplant a plan for action; a taking up of slack; a dispersal and a metamorphosis.” (2)

Subtitles tend to place and frame the work, but this list of genera is more like Borges’ example of the Chinese encyclopedia. What is Paterson? Some of the answers veer towards the surreal (Paterson is a basket) some defy the basic grammatical premise (Paterson is in distinctive terms). Rather than an exploration of the materiality of the signifier, this type of humor banks on the immateriality of the premises which give sense to the signifier. After all, Paterson can be spring, summer, fall and the sea, the batman symbol and Alex Karras in Webster.