Paterson Datum no. 9

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 . . .

The Archeology of Sluice

I’m beginning to read Paterson again (assuredly this is the end . . .) and so, whereas the last re-read looked for overarching design not readily perceivable in the first reads’ struggle with thingness, now I am back to the thing, its minuteness, with a vengeance. I wondered how specific was Williams about the “mechanics” of the “sluice” evoked on the poem’s first page (the pre-page, the extended subtitle starting “: a local pride . . .”) “Sluice” is undoubtedly the first vaguely complex technology on this page, predominated by “a reply to Greek and Latin with the bare hands.” Confession comes first, the primitive radio booth of guilt linking mouth to silent ear of authority; then a basket, and then—whether it be for tabulation or architectural support—a column (is this a very sketchy pan of history from neolithic to classical times? From the loosely gathered to the artistically or actuarially organized? I’d rather, as in my comments in an earlier entry, consider it more surreal non-sequitur rather than overinterpret the history of the world onto these fragments. Nevertheless . . . Williams is not a surrealist, nor is he yet a language poet. And there is a consistency with these technologies as kinds of “gathering up.”) Then we get: “the clouds resolved into a sandy sluice.” Footwork in the city of Rochester—which, like Paterson, is another northeastern city which owes its life to the powers of the falls, and the webwork of canals, factories, raceways, and railroads that extend from their harnessing, which here, mirable dictu then becomes the fount of all photographic images, creating a double of the world via Eastman's photographic processes—delivered me, serendipitously, to an actual sluice which fed a waterwheel still extant (pictured). Now, while a sluice controls and regulates flow, it doesn’t normally accommodate clouds, unless of course, Williams is skipping as many steps here as he does between neolithic basket weavers and classical aestheticists. It is an ellipsis that is “poetic,” yet not sluicelike (since the sluice depends on an active surface-to-surface connection of contiguous parts—such as gears—in order to do anything; or rather, it is the place where this process starts out from an undifferentiated flow.) Perhaps poetry's penchant for ellipsis is why the outcome is sandy. Unless you are Sam Patch, a poet can’t go from the clouds (mystical transcendence) to the sought-after gold in one jump, just as the sluice (which one normally thinks of as “sandy” when designating the filter used for panning gold) is best used to power a kind of plodding continuity—the weight of water falling, the slow grind of gears, and the painstaking transformation of that into various powers (triphammers, furnaces, and a “beyond” not metaphysical, but organized up to its gills.)

(5/10/08: Belated discovery . . . the Rochester falls pictured above are not merely a random stand-in for the Passaic Great Falls, but were the place where Sam Patch met his demise, as mentioned in Book I.)