Radiant Gist of Science

A CFP of interest from the William Carlos Williams Newsletter:
"The confirmed panel on Williams for next January’s MLA convention in Los Angeles is entitled: 'Williams and the ‘Radiant Gist’ of Science.' Proposals are now invited that examine any aspect of the poet’s relationship to science--e.g., medicine, physiology, chemistry, and physics (Einstein, Heisenberg, Curie, etc). Please send an abstract of 250 words to Erin Templeton (e.e.templeton@gmail.com) no later than 15 March 2010."
Also in the same announcement, Teddy Rapp is organizing another Williams MLA panel: "Sessions title session is ‘An Early Martyr and Other Poems’: 75 Years Later.' Proposals are invited on the volume within the 1930s context, or on individual poems, clusters and biography. Interdisciplinary approaches are particularly welcome. Please send a 250 abstract to Theodora Rapp Graham at this address: theorg1995@aol.com no later than 15 March 2010."

Before the Whatsit, The Gist

Eleven years before “The Great Whatsit” made its apocalyptic debut in Kiss Me Deadly, the more science-factual, tiny and (seemingly) less deadly glow of Marie Curie’s luminous “stain at the bottom of the retort” in Mervyn LeRoy’s Madame Curie inspired Williams’ quest for the “radiant gist” in Book IV of Paterson. This 1943 movie comes from a more innocent time, when radiation was not accompanied by extreme atomic-age anxiety, and when a new type of romantic couple could be imagined under the pretext of scientific collaboration. . . . Or rather, we should say that romance is pretext for science, but without any sense of perversion or ill-faith. The film has all the sentimental pleasures of a 1940s “woman's film,” while conveying a disdain for sentimentality towards past knowledge, conventional attitudes, and romantic love. I guess this is the signature mix for these films . . . proto-feminism vying with the dictate to be a homemaker and nurturer. (Marie is told by her father-in-law that “women without babies are parasites;” coming from Henry Travers, who we know as the failed angel of It’s a Wonderful Life, it seems a little harsh.) Regardless, Marie and Pierre are one of the great nerd-couples of film.
It seems there are a lot of things about their relation that may have appealed to Williams’ sexual, as well as poetic, imagination. When Pierre proposes to Marie, he compares their bond to NaCl: “so if we marry on this basis, our marriage would always be the same, the temperature would be the same, the composition would be the same.” There are other numerous, more obvious ways that Williams probably saw his desires mirrored in the film. For example, the first scene he details in Paterson IV is a description of the film’s epilogue when this “frail stubborn eager woman who carried on her great work for a quarter of a century” walks onto the stage at the Sorbonne to receive her honors. The movie, after all, is about hard work. . . . really hard, unappreciated, but ultimately revolutionary work. When he writes this bit in Book IV, he’s already plowed through the geological cross section passage, can’t really see the end (which may be his own), and maybe suddenly remembers this movie that he must have seen in some dinky Paterson moviehouse during the war, on a rainy day before even Paterson I was completed . . . I initially thought that Williams went to the premiere with Greer Garson, which I think would have been great PR for both camps. Now that I look for the reference, that image was just a wishful misreading. When Paul Mariani says Williams saw Madame Curie with Greer Garson he must have just meant she was in the movie, not in his entourage (or he hers). No, it was probably just a Saturday matinee with Floss.
Some facts about radium: it takes 400 tons of Colorado ore to isolate 1 gram of radium. You can learn this in the DVD’s extra feature “Romance of Radium” directed by Jacques Tourneur and narrated by a guy who sounds like nothing more than an OTB cashier. Tourneur’s reportage is probably more in line with Williams’ poetics—it is stripped of melodramatic cues and distinguished acting. While every character’s performance in the feature reeks prettily of historical gravitas—that is, except for the cameo by Van Johnson, who seems to have unwittingly stumbled into history—Tourneur leaves the Curies flat and distant like half-tones from the C volume of the encyclopedia. Yet Tourneur still maintains a wonderment towards the subject, by moving into the more macabre and outré episodes in the history of radium. What the Mervyn LeRoy feature uniquely offers . . . and need I say that Williams missed an opportunity to reference LeRoy’s Golddiggers of 1933 rather than the social credit pamphlets in this section? . . . is a palpable sense of the extremities endured by the Curies, as they reduced tons of pitchblende by hand in a miserable shed, and without any sense of what they were looking for. So this film is for Williams not a merely a haphazard collaged reference, but a complete statement of his poetics from beginning to end. It is yet another clue that, for him, the “materiality of signifier” was not mere brute tonnage, more than just thing. The slow drama of working through tons of material is placed in the service of the discovery of a new form of matter, one that is not dead, but “alive, dynamic,” yet exceedingly rare. That this matter forms only a 1000th of a percent of actual matter—mistaken by the Curies as “extraneous” impurities because it did not fit the expected Mendeleev schema—is only more invitation to perceive material more clearly, without despair.

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.

With Trick and Money Damned

Pound’s and Williams’ interest in the ‘money question’ has a special relevance for the ‘modernist’ style of their poetry because it involved them in similar (though not identical) theoretical efforts to reconcile poetic and economic theory at the linguistic level and not just through criticism of capitalism or society. The money question prepared them to see money as another form of representation much like a limited form of language. If the solution to the economic crisis lay in the conundrum of money, it was therefore wrapped up with the problem of speech. The power of money was, in fact, money’s power to utter the otherwise inchoate wishes of social, political, and economic power that far exceeded the traditional poet’s linguistic and literary resources. (Marsh 5)

I need to pick up Alec Marsh’s Money and Modernity where I left off a couple weeks ago. I always enjoy reading things with a detailed sense of economic theory, if only because it pains me to hear vapid phrases from artists and pundits like “it’s a capitalist society” to justify any and all forms of asshole-ness. How it tires me! But listen, there are as many brands of capitalism as capitalism gives us potato chips, even though the kind of capitalism usually invoked by such phrases is just a hair's-breadth from rape and pillage. And hey, there’s also socialism, which still exists, or else the vaunted 9-11 firemen would not have made it to the towers without those trapped inside having to swipe their credit cards or revealing their mom’s maiden name to telephone operators in Bombay. But I digress. Marsh’s book arrays the two primal forms of American capitalism against each other. On the one hand, Jeffersonian notions of wealth, stemming from the beliefs of the French physiocrats, posit a kind of natural wealth (which, although premised on an agricultural society, are alien to notions of bean countin’); on the other, the Hamiltonian system—upon which the entire raison d’etre of Paterson, NJ rests—establishes money itself as the ultimate value (deracinated from land value in the form of exchange value). Marsh claims that Williams is more interested in Jefferson, but I think that there can’t but be a fascination with the kind of non-referentiality of value that the Hamiltonian city, like modernist poetry itself, encourages—even though it is roundly agreed that Paterson, NJ is the disastrous outcome of Hamiltonian planning (like the Cantos are of modernist poetry). Marsh goes as far to say that Williams and Pound write “Jeffersonian jeremiads and partly experimental structures through which Jeffersonianism can be renovated and modernity reshaped in such a way as to allow for a truly American independence” (14). I’m still not convinced, if only because even the idea of “two capitalisms” is in the end still reductive: the true versus the false; one close to the spirit, the other pure artifice; one for the poet, the other for the plutocrat. Williams’ relation to the real and to artifice and language is too complex to merely ally him with Thoreau who dreamt of having a Realometer at his disposal “that future ages might know how deep the freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time” (qtd in Marsh 17). Maybe I give Williams too much credit. credit. credit. After all he does twice make the analogy "money : joke" in contrast to some inalienable "radiant gist." So I will have to read on in Marsh. Indeed, the relationship between the coin of language in poetry and money itself is an intersection worthy of much discussion. If you look at some early language poetry, in fact, notice how the word “capital” comes up again and again. Is it an elaborate joke on referentiality (presuming that our ken encompasses its entire system in a single utterance) or is it a more earnest attempt to foreground questions of value at the frontiers language-making?