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.)

Et in Paterson Ego

Perhaps it is appropriate to talk about displacement after driving over 4000 miles and never once passing through our locus of inquiry. Along the way, I talked to some fellow-travelers of the Paterson poem in Philadelphia--tk in a future entry--and sat through a rousing 4.5 hours of Feldman's For Philip Guston in Charleston--which gave me some ideas for the progressing audio piece, or at least some insight into the true nature of stamina (the pianist endured a surreal wardrobe malfunction for close to 20 minutes, and I really don't know how they venture into such an undertaking without Depends.) I fear along the way, as Charlestons became Missoulas, that I might have forgotten some of the insights gained along the way, lost to an amnesia of miles. But that may be for the best, a letting-go which both astronauts and Morton Feldmans know something of. What would constitute a pastoral for our age of astronauts? Because it is Williams' use of the pastoral which I held-to as the next entry, since one of my conversants in Philadelphia, Randall Couch, brought up the genre in relation to the pastoral parody in Book 4, and sent on this link to a precursor. The pastoral is a genre of displacement: a way for mostly city folk to imagine their more authentic shepherd counterparts, like Rush Limbaugh conjuring Dakota. Williams places the pastoral conversation that begins Book 4 in New York City--it took me a couple reads to get this, given that one at least imagines the points-of-view, however fractured, to be limited by the poem's titular city. It could be that this pied-à-terre on the East River, inhabited by a lesbian poet (and this I totally missed, but thanks to Randall for pointing it out) is, in a pointed reversal, the Arcadian hinterland where one can escape the actual reality of the city or cities or "things" in their terrible intensity. No ideas but in things: et in NYC ego. "The whirring pterodactyl/ of a contrivance, to remind one of Da Vinci,/searches the Hellgate current for some corpse" and this helicopter is the snake in the grass, the shadow of death that haunts this "idyllic" escape. While Randall pointed out book four's relation to an 18th-century tradition, I think Williams maintains a discussion with poets much further back, especially Theocritus and Vergil. One thing that brought me back to Vergil was a passage that I kept recalling when thinking of Williams' use of numbers and the passage on page 18 of the two girls and their ribboned hair. This is from Eclogue 8, depicting the song-competition of Damon and Alphesiboeus "at whose rivalry the heifer marvelled and forgot to graze":

ALPHESIBOEUS
[64] “Bring out water, and wind soft wool round this altar; and burn rich herbs and male frankincense, that I may try with magic rites to turn to fire my lover’s coldness of mood. Naught is lacking here save songs.

Bring Daphnis home from town, bring him, my songs!

[69] Songs can even draw the moon down from heaven; by songs Circe transformed the comrades of Ulysses; with song the cold snake in the meadows is burst asunder.

Bring Daphnis home from town, bring him, my songs!

[73] Three threads here I first tie round you, marked with three different hues, and three times round this altar I draw your image. In an uneven number heaven delights. Weave, Amaryllis, three hues in three knots; weave them, Amaryllis, I beg, and say, ‘Chains of love I weave!’

Bring Daphnis home from town, bring him, my songs!

[80] As this clay hardens and as this wax melts in one and the same flame, so may Daphnis melt with love for me! Sprinkle meal, and kindle the crackling bays with pitch. Me cruel Daphnis burns; for Daphnis burn I this laurel.

Here is an early version of "no ideas but in things." While Damon frets over lost love and threatens to jump in the ocean, Alphesiboeus succeeds by busying himself with earth-magic and binding rituals. There also may be something to the relation between "in uneven number heaven delights" and Williams triadic line. Nevertheless, I think a look back into ancient pastoral points to a timeless struggle between vague lyricism and a materialist poetics, perhaps mistakenly limited to the innovations of the 20th century.

End of Discussion!

Before we were able to begin our last discussion of Paterson in Paterson, we were locked out of the Ivanhoe Arts Center for about an hour. We took the time to slowly get stoned on Smirnoff Ice while gazing intently at the falls of the raceway. Was this the true experience of Paterson--following the twisting braids of the waters, focusing on this layer, now that, as the patterns fell into their destined pool? Once inside, perhaps begrudgingly, we took up the discussion of bird mnemonics, Williams' virgin-whore complex, pastoral poetry, and Alexander Hamilton's final demise on the Weehawken shores (the subject of Williams' unfinished Book VI, and pictured above). The discussion series ends with a rousing version of "But Not For Me" with Mike accompanying on the piano. This mp3 is another long file, perhaps best suited to loading onto an iPod and listening in traffic. Or you can just go to the end of the file to the "musical number," which includes includes the brilliant intro that no one, except maybe Bobby Short, sings, because of the all-pervasive influence of the Chet Baker version or its dated reference to Beatrice Fairfax.