--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?

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?

saxifrage

I swear, the last (and first) time I was at Mt. Rainer, the park signs had hieroglyphics for "saxifrage." I called the park ranger to confirm this memory, but all I got were dead answering machines (of course they are not at their phones, they are in the wild!) I usually take pictures of these things, so I feel addled having no evidence to back me up, but I'm not going to drive all the way back to the great mountain on the near horizon just for this one post. Believe me when I say that saxifrage is plentiful enough that even if a hieroglyphic for this flower were not to be found, it should be there in some imagined guide. Because the word has a hieroglyphic nature that Williams would have appreciated. From the Latin, "saxi" and "frage" combines two favorite Williams concepts: fragmentation and rock. That no flower appears in the etymology is perhaps also what drew Williams to it as he inspiration for "no ideas but in things." For the flower emerges, invisible as it were to the object pieces of language, but indebted to them nevertheless, in the same way that meaning breaks between elements of montage rather than in separate film cells. Both breaking (of the rock) and building (of the flower) are combined here in a single, slow geologic complex. Here is Williams' poem about saxifrage, the original locus for Paterson's "no ideas but in things." It is a deceptively simple poem, somewhat pastoral, but so much about writing itself that one is unsure where the metaphors stop and where things begin.

A Sort of a Song

Let the snake wait under
his weed
and the writing
be of words, slow and quick, sharp
to strike, quiet to wait,
sleepless.
-- through metaphor to reconcile
the people and the stones.
Compose. (No ideas
but in things) Invent!
Saxifrage is my flower that splits
the rocks.

When Williams says "let the snake wait under/his weed" it seems like he's saying: give that to the snake, it don't interest me none. Does that carry over to writing with words? Is Williams NOT writing with words (my interpretation above that the poetry happens BETWEEN the words might carry this out)? In this case, a metaphor that reconciles people to the stones would be the problem with metaphor. However, the "let" could also be a kind of laissez-faire attitude, a benediction even. This is what snake does. Amen. This is what words do. Amen. Yet, is this the natural order of things? "Let" could also announce the trope of hysteron proteron (since the snake is waiting and the words are striking: a distinct reversal). If all these are true, he's caught in a kind of disabling polysemy. So he returns to simple commands (to himself or to the reader). Compose. (but then he takes it a step further, and hits upon the mot juste.) Invent! He is not reconciled to writing and metaphor, but is split from it (even as it does the splitting, but in splitting it himself he (sort of) makes a song of it, or at least emerges as a kind of unified being, one, not two (although there is a two within the one.)

Two and Two with Language

Click here for the recording of our recent book discussion of Paterson Book I at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY. We discussed numbers and mathematics; the archive as the condition of knowability; man as a city, woman as flower; nature and industry; as well as rehearsing some issues regarding Book One that weren’t recorded in our earlier real-space discussions of Paterson.

Williams: A Very Sexually Suc-sexual Young Man

I’ve been trudging through the Williams material on PennSound, trying to log the material that may be useful to my purposes, and it has not been fun. Like celebrities are apt—especially celebrity old-timers—we hear the same pat formulations, the same stories. It may be that the famous just lack imagination in general (at least outside of the spheres of their imaginative control) or that we live with a notion of fame that points to our own lack of imagination (we make people famous because we need these human signposts, and require them to turn out these same stories about themselves). Nevertheless, here are some of the more juicier moments dealing with Williams’ relation to sex, which of course is really what we want of our celebrities:

“I don’t like jazz. It’s tiresome. I hear the people, the artists, in Paris would rave about jazz, but it’s too tiresome! It’s too much of the same thing! . . . Not subtle. If you’re going to be sexually excited about it, it shows you to be a boob. But if you want sex, go and get a colored gal, and she’ll teach you sex, but don’t be kidded. Erections mean more to me than rhythm.”

“I was very sexually successual as a young man [sic], but I did not believe in going so far that I lost my head. I wanted always to be conscious, quite. I didn’t want to indulge in sex so much that I lost my head!”

On Ginsberg: “I’m disgusted with him and his long lines . . . . [The Beats] tend towards homosexuality. For God’s sake what is homosexuality but a variant of sexuality? It’s the same thing. There’s nothing new about that. It’s been done before. No enlightenment!”

On Toulouse-Lautrec: “I was attracted to Toulouse-Lautrec by his social position, which I sympathized with. But the whore’s just as much a human being as a saint. And I wanted to emphasize that, that he was the man who respected the truth of the design. For God’s sake, what the hell difference is it to him that she’s a whore? He was indifferent to it! And the poet is also indifferent to it.”

These all come from an interview with Walter Sutton that he did late in life; something about that interview situation must have brought out the cranky old man in him, and it’s more revealing than the genteel commentaries and interviews that were recorded. The reason I’m fixating on these fragments is more than just idle salaciousness, or playing to Williams-bashing. Since I’m reading Paterson once again, I wanted to take on a challenge. Since I, like many other readers, find his formulations “man like a city, woman like a flower” etc., inane and glance over such with embarrassment or intellectual indifference, I wanted to take them seriously, since they are part of the structure of the poem. How did Williams theorize sex and how does this theory inform the poem? By passing these passages over, we are lacking the type of vigorous imagination that Williams is calling for—that which sees what is before you clearly. Even though these little biographical tidbits give us a sense that—though he be suc-sexual in things sexual—he has quite a bit of issues with sex (and race), we might be giving the poem short shrift by taking references to sex with too much literalness. Again, I’ll admit I might be perversely generous here, but it seems a productive, counter-intuitive inquiry to take up. I’ll probably approach this issue in later blog entries, but I think one thing to think about is that he’s obsessed with this notion of unity, design, and the one, and that identity categories that take on the guise of “difference” (starting with the idea of “woman”) are an instance of a kind of divorce (a favorite word for Williams). So Williams’ poetics, which implies an intense unity with the object, a kind of spiritual-optico marriage with things, also implies the “unity of man” ideal of the Enlightenment to make it work. And as was troubling for Enlightenment thought, he is troubled by that which splits from his optics, and exerts difference, desire, and distance. I think he does not ignore these splits, but makes them very palpable (as with, for example, the Marcia Nardi letters), so that his poem is able to be a performance of the problem rather a symptom of his anxieties.