All Her Teeth Were Ideas

The other night, while reading "Berenice"--Poe's zombie thriller of dental surgery gone horribly awry--I was reminded of WCW's admiration for flowers with the power to break rock:
"Thus it will appear that, shaken from its balance only by trivial things, my reason bore resemblance to that ocean-crag spoken of by Ptolemy Hephestion, which steadily resisting the attacks of human violence, and the fiercer fury of the waters and the winds, trembled only to the touch of the flower called Asphodel." Poe's wholly fictitious "Nubian geographer" serves as an authoritative stand-in for his own fascination with alternative geographies and other ultima thule. It may be that these territories are less exotic and closer to hand, as can be seen in a picture of grass growing up through curb concrete in an essay by Jonathan Skinner in the new eco language reader. This image, from Cecelia Vicuna's Unravelling Words & the Weaving of Water, is an example of what he calls the "third landscape" of "critical corridors and buffer zones" (24) where there is a proliferation of growth that humans can't match to their system of needs. Accordingly, for him, the job of what one might call "ecopoetry" would be a poetics that "attend[s] to the untended as the untended, essentially leaving it alone" (46-7). Whether Asphodel's powers are actual (like the saxifrage) or metaphorical, I don't know enough to say. Ginsberg calls the Asphodel both mad and cultivated, Williams seems to use it precisely to reflect upon how things "tend" (towards the untend or unintend), and "the sea/which no one tends/ is also a garden." I'm dealing with my own "third landscape issues," since a lovely wild vine on my fence was mysteriously cut overnight--suddenly something seemingly "out-of-control" became a locus of variety of exterior forces. I won't go into the whole tangled narrative that evolved out of this intervention, but given that I'm in a weird intersection where I live, on the one hand, next to an inland forest, but on the other next to an airstrip and industrial zones, and, as well, in a neighborhood which has garden walks (which to me have always reeked of a form of neighborhood surveillance and control of landscape aesthetics), these mini-struggles are bound to occur. I can't even start to articulate how that constant image of the plume of oil coming up through the water in the gulf is impacting (no, beating up) my ability to conceptualize these issues. I have tentative plans to talk with Jennifer Scappettone about her work delivered at the Rethinking Poetics conference, which circulates around such issues. And maybe, also back to the gulf. Thalassa!

--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?

Altogether Unfit for Ordinary Use

for godot's send up of Williams' geological cross section passage?

The Geology of Aura

“Dig in—and you have/ a nothing.” Warhol and Williams are strange bed(rock) fellows when talking about geology. Geographically Warhol’s Pennsylvania has a similar psychic distance from New York City as Williams’ New Jersey, with the artists differing on exactly what to do with their connection to these originary environs. Warhol’s relation to the past and history in general is limited to brief anecdotes about his Polish mother and his sick bed, or wonderment towards things old but ahead of their time (Hitler’s prescient use of lighting) geared as he was towards the now, and the glamorous blank of futurity (or the blank futurity of glamor). However, reading The Philosophy of Andy Warhol for the third time now, I’m struck by the inconsistency of a certain passage with regards to the rest of the book’s style, and it’s a passage that reminds me of both the structure and the poetic tenor of Williams’ geological cross section passage.

‘I get very excited when I read advertisements for perfume in the fashion magazines that were published in the 30s and the 40s. I try to imagine from their names what they smelled like and I go crazy because I want to smell them all so much:

Guerlain's: "Sous le Vent"
Lucien Le Long's: "Jabot," "Gardénia," "Mon Image," "Opening Night"
Prince Matchabelli's: "Princess of Wales," in memory of Alexandra
Ciro's: "Surrender," "Réflexions"
Lenthéric's: "A Bientôt," "Shanghai," "Gardénia de Tahiti"
Worth's: "Imprudence"
Marcel Rochas’: "Avenue Matignon," "Air Jeune"
D'Orsay's: "Trophée," "Le Dandy," "Toujours Fidèle," "Belle de Jour"
Coty's: "A Suma," "La Fougeraie au Crépuscule" (Fernery at Twilight)
Corday's: "Tzigane," "Possession," "Orchidée Bleue," "Voyage à Paris"
Chanel's: brisk "Cuir de Russie" (Russian Leather); romantic "Glamour"; melting "Jasmine"; tender "Gardénia"
Molinelle's: "Venez Voir"
Houbigant's: "Countryclub," "Demi-Jour" (Twilight)
Bonwit Teller's: "721"
Helena Rubinstein's: "Town," "Country"
Weil's: Eau de Cologne "Carbonique"
Kathleen Mary Quinlan's "Rhythm"
Lengyel's (pronounced "len-jel"): "Impériale Russe"
Chevalier Garde's: "H.R.R.," "Fleur de Perse," “Roi de Rome”
Saravel's: "White Christmas"’

This craziness of imagination thwarted is precisely the blank awe one has when faced with the simple list of Williams’ geographical layers. Earlier on in the book, Warhol—one of the “pure products of America” gone crazy—talks about how people in his circle treat him, versus strangers who are enchanted by his “aura:” “‘Aura’ must be until you open your mouth.”(77) Smell, then, is this kind of “nothing” message like aura: it telegraphs out; communicates a wordless fascination . . . identity without knowledge, mixed in with the “auratic” value of another (Elizabeth Arden, Helena Rubinstein . . . merging with the ecosphere of aristocratic old ladies.*) Warhol’s own mix of “make it new,” seems to break down when faced with the unknowability of perfume combinations past, under distant labels, unretrievable essences . . . a nostalgia for “essence” in the service of the evacuation of essence. Warhol’s “geology” however does not remain to take a core sample; only old fashion magazines do, which he probably wants to get rid of anyway. So, after this list, he engages in a catalog—again uncharacteristic, and almost Whitmanesque—of the smells he does encounter in his immediate environment:

“When I'm walking around New York I'm always aware of the smells around me: the rubber mats in office buildings; upholstered seats in movie theaters; pizza; Orange Julius; espresso-garlic-oregano; burgers; dry cotton tee-shirts; neighborhood grocery stores; chic grocery stores; the hot dogs and sauerkraut carts; hardware store smell; stationery store smell; souvlaki; the leather and rugs at Dunhill; Mark Cross, Gucci; the Moroccan-tanned leather on the streetracks; new magazines, back-issue magazines; typewriter stores; Chinese import stores (the mildew from the freighter); India import stores; Japanese import stores; record stores; health food stores; soda-foundation drugstores; cut-rate drugstores; barber shops; beauty parlors; delicatessens; lumber yards; the wood chairs and tables in the N.Y. Public Library; the donuts, pretzels, gum and grape soda in the subways; kitchen appliance departments; photo labs; shoe stores; bicycle stores; the paper and printing inks in Scribner's, Brentano's, Doubleday's, Rizzoli, Marboror, Bookmasters, Barnes and Noble; shoe-shine stands; grease-batter; hair pomade; the good cheap candy smell in the front of Woolworth's and the dry-goods smell in the back; the horses by the Plaza Hotel; bus and truck exhaust; architects' blueprints; cumin, fenugreek, soy sauce, cinnamon; fried platanos; the train tracks in Grand Central Station; the banana smell of dry cleaners; exhausts from apartment house laundry rooms; East Side bars (creams); West Side bars (sweat); newspaper stands; record stores; fruit stands in all the different seasons—strawberry, watermelon, plum, pleach, kiwi, cherry, Concord grape, tangerine, murcot, pineapple, apple--and I love the way the smell of each fruit gets into the rough wood of the crates and into the tissue-paper wrappings." (152-53)

* or drag queens, who, like Jack Smith, he considers living archives, see p.54.

It is the Word Which is the Dwelling Place

I picked up a used copy of Barthes' Writing Degree Zero while in Rochester. Its descriptions of modern poetry are apt for reflecting on the referential dynamics of Paterson. For Barthes, the word in modern poetry is like a terrible, inscrutible monolith, "without environment." "It is the Word which is 'the dwelling place.'" (47) The Word has an "existential geology" rather than a social space. Throughout New Jersey as an Impossible Object, this type of purity has been under scrutiny, especially when the poem drags along with it an entire city, seducing us into imagining that it serves--however absurdly--as a kind of map that connects us to that city, or cities in general. But what seems a little more interesting than this familiar dilemma is that, the way Barthes describes it, classical language (which he contrasts with modern poetry) acts in many ways like the modern factory. Thus, the modern factory town of Paterson, with Alexander Hamilton as its creator, is a failed attempt to create classical poetry in the modern world. Barthes' description of the classical evokes the industrial manipulation of nature:

"The economy of classical language . . . is relational, which means that in it words are abstracted as much as possible in the interest of relationships. In it, no word has a density by itself, it is hardly the sign of a thing, but rather the means of conveying a connection."

"The classical flow is a succession of elements whose density is even; it is exposed to the same emotional pressure, and relieves those elements of any tendency towards an individual meaning appearing at all invented." [think: sluice, which may be an "invention" but doesn't mistake the invention for raw material.]

If we want to take Barthes' on his "word" here, then Paterson's relation to the city, and the connections we make to it and through it, is a kind of parody (or another favorite Barthesian word, "alibi" . . . but he uses parody here.) It's a way to trick the mind around a dark corner in the city leading one to the revelation of the word. "Connections [in modern poetry] are not properly speaking abolished, they are merely reserved areas, a parody of themselves, and this void is necessary for the density of the Word to rise out of a magic vacuum, like a sound and a sign devoid of background, like 'fury and mystery.'" (47) It's as if his approach to the city itself is like a culture-jammer picking up some crappy classical poem (like Thomas Ward's Passaic), and treating it to a variety of recontextualizations, mutations, and derangements in order to get at something more elemental.

However, beware of random tips from used books. Because even though a lot of poets have glommed onto this notion of the dwelling place of modern poetry, a few quick web searches make me think that maybe Barthes will challenge this strict division between classical and modern poetry later in the book. Or--given the self-canceling nature of web-opinion--not. Read on . . .

Passaic Under Paris

With poet-geologist Jonathan Wonham and cataphile-author Gilles Thomas, I took a 10-hr walk under Paris, in the quarries where the architects of Place François 1er perhaps mined the "gray stone cleanly cut and put together in complementary masses” that Williams admired during his Paris hangover. There, 20 meters under the surface of the city, we found German bunkers, bone piles from Montparnasse, punk crash pads, catacomb art, defunct phone cables, a scrabble game abandoned by gnomes, beer can lanterns, and inscriptions dating back to the French revolution . . . when they started to realize that the mining that was done under the city was making the city cave in. Accordingly, most of the tunnels consist of supports at regular intervals which serve to keep whole city blocks from collapsing. Jonathan thought it would be appropriate to read Williams’ geological-cross section passage down in the depths, and so, we staged a group performance with fellow travelers to liven things up. We later found a room with a geological cabinet of curiosities, where each step carved into the stone would have at one time displayed a sample from each geological level, in much the same way that Williams' arrays the strata of the Passaic.

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!

Things!

“No ideas but in things”: that damn thing to which the poem is reduced. Its block and tackle, its phonograph needle: the means to it and through it. Things! We’ve said before that Williams is not as materialist as it would seem when he says this. But maybe, he is consummately materialist, albeit espousing the materialism of a Deleuzean, who understands the “‘wisdom of the rocks,’ a way of listening to a creative, expressive flow of matter” (DeLanda, "Nonorganic Life"). It seems more and more, as we’ve pointed out with the geological cross section, that the poem is a kind of stratigraphy that pays attention to possible flows and movements in a seemingly rigid and static layering. The song made out of the block. The fire that finds its fuel. The wind, the rocks and water.
This mind creates things rather than finds them: thus, instead of getting out of materiality, it uses materiality against itself. “Things are our way of dealing with a world in which we are enmeshed rather than over which we have dominion. The thing is the compromise between the world as it is . . . and the world as we need it to be or would like it to be. . . It is a compromise between mind and matter, the point of their crossing one into the other” (Grosz, "The Thing"). The thing represents reciprocal poeisis with the world, a “seeking/ down the wind/ until we are unaware which is the wind and /which the wind’s power over us ./ to lead the mind away.”

I Never Told You To Read It

Those who have followed this blog know that I am not a fan of Pound, although, of course, when dealing with Williams there’s somehow no avoiding Ez and his pretensions. The newly archived sound recordings of Pound on PennSound, reveal that he was as much if not more a voice than a writer, but it’s a voice that has erased all the original Jersey in it, replaced by some monstrous fake-bardic brogue. I prefer the simple, cracker sing-song of Williams next to the oracular posturing of Pound spouting the indecipherable or the patently ridiculous (an example of the latter is the insufferable whine of “Cantico del Sole.”) The reason Pound has been on my mind again is that, while rereading Paterson, I am paying attention this time to the overall design, and it’s interesting to me that the geological cross section passage which has fascinated many of the writers associated with this blog (Shaw, Lunberry, Wontham) is preceded by a passage culled from a correspondence with Pound. It seems that the “unreadability” of the geological cross section is montaged with Pound talking about the readability of Artaud. It’s as if Williams is saying that the mute geological depths are just as unrelentingly silent as the classics Pound is telling him to read instead. So, I’m reading it as a diss of Pound, but you tell me. While Pound seems to be criticizing Williams for enjoying Artaud, Williams is siding with the vitalism of Artaud (note the higgeldy-piggeldy of the text on pg137 before the Pound page, which is regimented more like a sales receipt.)

A More Dense Intelligibility

Poet-geologist Jonathan Wonham's copy of Paterson finally arrived in the mail, and he has formulated some initial ideas on his blog about the relation of geology to literature, based on Randall Jarrell's description of Paterson as "a geological event" (entries so far for February 10 AM and PM). Tune in to Connaissances for more of Paterson, NJ as seen from Paris, France. Do I smell a book club coming on?
Here is a long quote from Claude Levi-Strauss from one of Jonathan's earlier blog entries. Our reflection for today!: "I count among my most precious memories . . . a hike along the flank of a limestone plateau in Languedoc to determine the line of contact between two geological strata. It was something quite different from a walk or a simple exploration of space. It was a quest, which would have seemed incoherent to some uninitiated observer, but which I look upon as the very image of knowledge, with the difficulties it involves and the delights it affords. Every landscape appears first of all as a vast chaos which leaves one free to choose the meaning one wants to give it. But over and above agricultural considerations, geographical irregularities and the various accidents of history and prehistory, the most majestic meaning of all is surely that which precedes, commands and, to a large extent explains the others. A pale blurred line, or an almost imperceptible difference in the shape and consistency of rock fragments, are evidence of the fact that two oceans once succeeded each other where, today, I can see nothing but barren soil . . . When the miracle occurs, as it sometimes does; when, on one side and the other of the hidden crack, there are suddenly to be found cheek-by-jowl two green plants of hidden species, each of which has chosen the most favourable soil; and when at the same time two ammonites with unevenly intricate involutions can be glimpsed in the rocks, thus testifying in their own way to a gap of several tens of thousands of years suddenly space and time become one: the living diversity of the moment juxtaposes and perpetuates the ages. Thought and emotion move into a new dimension where every drop of sweat, every muscular movement, every gasp of breath becomes symbolic of a past history, the development of which is reproduced in my body, at the same time as my thought embraces its significance. I feel myself to be steeped in a more dense intelligibility, within which centuries and distances answer each other and speak with one and the same voice."