George Quasha
Uncertainties
I
… this unique reading, each time the first reading and each time the only reading….
Maurice Blanchot[1]
As a species humans love firsts. Firsts are to die for. We shape mind, mood, body, and wallet in order to get there first or be rewarded in top position. Best poem, bestseller, first lover…. With notable exceptions: last to die is usually number one on our lists; and in a different register: last noticed, best spy, best con, best loan shark, number one predation you can bank on…. And words? “First thought, best thought”? Well, it depends. We mainly pursue firsts that are not yet present but instead are distant, hard to get, lofty, beyond reach. When first means present it’s problematic. “This is the first moment of your new life” makes for anxiety, because it’s instantly untrue and instinctively we know that living firstness is challenging—in fact, it’s next to impossible to sustain for more than a special moment. A true paradox of the poetic may be that it both presents a language reality in immediate firstness and extends that lingual immediacy over time, so that intense temporality may become indistinguishable from atemporality or some form of hyper-temporality. Gertrude Stein brought heightened awareness to this paradoxical poetic reality in her theory and practice of the continuous present. Ezra Pound enlarged historical access in the present with ideas like “all ages are contemporaneous in the mind.” Robert Kelly variously exploits these and a number of other angles of entry to time in a timeless present, which he accomplishes parapoetically; that is, ever renovating his own poetics by prioritizing certain resources of language and consciousness only possible in a poetics of singularity--of firsts available in the [absolute present]. I bracket those words as anything truly parapoetic implies bracketed status, as uncertainties.
In 1973 Charles Stein and I initiated our long-contemplated project in dialogical criticism (DiaLogos) as poet-centered exercise in “how to read” difficult work, focusing on issues important to a given poet whose work was in some sense hard to read.[2] For our engagement with Robert Kelly that year the dialogue had a single focus which we already knew he shared with us: ta’wil, the historically significant exegetical practice among medieval Sufis like Avicenna and Ibn ‘Arabi as presented by the great French scholar of Islam, Henry Corbin, celebrated by Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, and Robert Creeley, among others.[3] We discussed the meaning of ta’wil, famously defined by Corbin as “the exegesis that leads the soul back to its truth,” as a unique event, a particular reading of a given text, rather than a procedural approach to conventional or dogmatically sanctioned understanding. Kelly emphasized the connection of ta’wil with “Recital” (Récit), as developed in Corbin’s Avicenna and the Visionary Recital,[4] which dealt with a species of narrative and therefore was appropriate to the text we elected to discuss in the dialogue: a section of the long poem The Loom from 1972.[5] Kelly comments:
To work with one of those Loom sections, particularly that one [then #44, later changed to #36 in The Loom],
would interest me because it has that other aspect of ta’wil in it--Récit, or whatever the Arabs call that, you
know, the Recitals. I can’t think of The Loom in a better way than that; because when I want to find a type of
The Loom somewhere, I find myself thinking about Avicenna in that Corbin book, and the stuff that’s like it
elsewhere in the world—the endless and/or beautiful stories that spill themselves out of uncertain meaning--
I mean the clear absence of final moral focus in the Récit reminds me very much of the same thing in The
Loom. It is not the building of a Temple, but of an Altar, and that altar’s very ambiguous, and the whole
relationship between myself and the skull is very curious. I mean I take the récit to be that kind of fable that
cannot be paraphrased, and thus all the récits of Alchemy, which are, I suppose, as close to it as the West
generally has—like the Thabritius and Beya stories, the people who go under the sea to teach the undersea
people how to conjugate, or The Chymical Wedding. These are stories that must be read and the reading of
them is itself the [alchemical] “operation.” (Vort, 114)
Uncertain meaning. The kind of fable that cannot be paraphrased. The récits of alchemy. The reading is itself the operation. These four interrelated notions, articulated in a single clarifying statement in the course of the conversation, point to important ongoing concerns in Kelly’s work and to what I’m calling a poetics of singularity. Uncertain meaning: uncertainty is the matrix of the kind of récit that drives Kelly’s visionary and unparaphraseable tale such that we find in much of The Loom--a rather dreamlike, non-ordinary personal process that seems performative of a ritual action of profound, initiatic, and transformative consequence, and yet does not map onto any identifiable religious or traditionary dogma or procedure. It suggests a sort of unnamable genre that is said to fit the notion of récit; but what is a récit?
A story born of uncertain meaning, in Kelly’s indication, implies that there is, and can be, no encompassing ideology that gives the story authority. The story therefore cannot be known in advance of its performative narrative action, at least not as it will now be known. The previously unknown and now unfolding story acquires a special kind of authority through the event of authorship, through the telling, the recital, the action of its own coming into being as writing. This is what makes it a visionary recital: it appears only inside the telling, inseparable from an individual’s own necessity in performing its action, and without it that individual would not complete an aspect of self-realization—realization such that is not otherwise achievable than by the poem itself. It cannot be characterized by an abstraction referencing previous actions or authorized by literary, mythic, religious, or psychological precedent, because any such precedent would miss its singular necessity, its poetic ontology unknowable outside the action of its telling.[6]
It’s important here to resist recounting or summarizing the action of Section 36 of The Loom, for according to the principle of ta’wil as described by Kelly, paraphrase of the narrative action impedes the real event by absorbing it in abstraction. And, to be sure, a reader of our dialogue “Ta’wil or How to Read” (1973) would optimally read the poem for the occasion; the purpose was to make vivid the full presence of récit, both as a text and as a ta’wil-like reading (the poet’s, ours, a new reader’s) in order to evoke the further unfolding of a core principle: a poetics of singularity.
To create a kind of meta-context for this principle I would point to two key notions. First, Charles Olson’s insistence on a statement he treated rhetorically as a secret: That which exists through itself is what is called meaning. He slightly modified the phrase taken from the Taoist alchemical text discussed by Jung, as translated by Wilhelm/Baynes, The Secret of the Golden Flower (“That which exists through itself is Meaning (Tao)”); but the important shift was in taking the phrase from a context with extensive commentary and setting it in a context of poetics where, stripped of all reference, it points to the self-nature of performative language action. Here language is not functioning primarily as reference or communication but as a manifestation of being with a particular intensity of focus. I’m not interested here in the question of influence, although Kelly of course has known Olson in depth from very early; perhaps we could shift the emphasis from influence to a context or field of transmission of a certain possibility: the poetic as performative of singular action inseparable from how being itself means. When Kelly takes récit from the context of extensive commentary in Corbin and lets it indicate his own uncertainty-narration, he performs an action parallel to Olson’s transposition of a classic Taoist phrase to a radical redirection of poetry toward a further nature.[7] The sense of the poetic as having such a profound and evolutionary role in human consciousness amounts to a poetic paradigm that puts the poetic act on a plane with Taoist and Sufi text, the purpose of which was to guide a reader’s mind on a productive path of self-awareness outside dominant cultural, religious, or literary tendencies. Exactly what constitutes such a path and any given outcome inevitably remains uncertain.
Another meta-contextual frame to help us with récit is Maurice Blanchot’s very special usage, which Kelly would not have been familiar with in 1973. Blanchot used the term to distinguish certain works, in fact most of his prose fiction, from the traditional story (histoire, conte) and novel (roman), and he characterized a récit as “not the narration of an event, but that event itself, the approach to that event, the place where that event is made to happen—an event which is yet to come and through whose power of attraction the tale [récit] can hope to come into being, too.”[8] Blanchot calls it “the secret law of the tale” which relates it to the unknowing we are discussing in terms of uncertainty as “a movement towards a point, a point which is not only not known, obscure, foreign, but such that apart from this movement it does not seem to have any sort of real prior existence, and yet it is so imperious that the tale derives its power of attraction only from this point, so that it cannot even ‘begin’ before reaching it—and yet only the tale and the unpredictable movement of the tale create the space where the point becomes real, powerful, and alluring.”
That Olson and Blanchot invoke secret in presenting their radical core notions may acknowledge the difficulty of grasping their subtle force. I place them beside Corbin in the service of understanding something fundamental to Kelly’s poetics and to show a basic uncertainty in the relation of their ideas to context: poetic, philosophically critical, and, in a rather special sense, esoteric. That is, everything depends on how we read, for the context itself is in the process of being revisioned.
In the same ta’wil dialogue, we say in the introductory statement:
During our talk with Kelly we tried to get him to speak about the new poetics emerging, say, in the year 1950.
After all, that was the year of “Projective Verse,” Concrete Poetry, etc. But Kelly insisted that “the interesting
date would not be the first time that something was written, but the first time that somebody is able, say, to read
Basil Valentine or Paracelsus as a processual document, rather than as a guide to operations with crucibles, and
that date is probably after 1950…. The issue that I’m at is when we were able to read… and I think that our
history will have to concern itself less with when a thing gets written than when a thing gets read, because I
think those are the moments of achievement in our consciousness.” We [GQ & CS] had been talking for a couple
of years about the right strategy in writing a “How to Read” book appropriate to the ’70′s, but it had not occurred
to us to plot the history of consciousness in terms of how to read specific texts. Kelly argued that “someone who
had read and perceived ‘Projective Verse’ and some other [of Olson’s] essays, ‘The Gate and the Center’ for
instance, would be in a position to read anew. It strikes me that Pound had called it The ABC of Reading and
before that How to Read… [but] that critics have supposed him really to be saying ‘how to write’…. If there
is any art or future in criticism, such that the work we’re immediately concerned with can ever get read, or
the thing that makes your book America a Prophecy [GQ co-editor with Jerome Rothenberg; Random
House: New York, 1973] possible, will be a new method of reading, not a new method of writing.”
I remember Robert Duncan speaking about how he and Olson created a poetry that had to be read at the level of its poetics. I took this to mean that, while poetry clearly can be read in many ways and have very different functions for different readers (often context specific), they insisted on a level of reading that is inseparable from the kind of thinking in language—the language-living—that generates the poem. What is at stake is not only “change” from the perspective of literary history, or formal innovation, but what Olson insisted on calling “a stance toward reality,” an orientation toward what is taken to be otherwise (without, that is, the action of the poem) an unknown dimension of reality. That dimension is reflected and engaged as a language reality, a linguality. Our access to it is by reading in a way that meets the poem at its own level of action, and for Kelly (1973) that way of meeting the récit of The Loom is named processual. One does not so much circle the poem mentally to appreciate its perfections and tease out its stylistic devices as undergo its narrative process, including circumambulating its interior constructions, a perhaps proto-ritualistic but unsanctioned action, engaging its continuous present as one’s own.
A reading of this process as ta’wil may have psychological and indeed variously cultural force, but the emphasis is on where and how it leads one to a further access to unlived reality that is now, and only now as a result of the narrative process, one’s own. It’s an initiatic event in the sense that, having crossed a readerly threshold, by virtue of an engage-able poetics, one is now of the poem, no longer who one was, but a further oneself. This does not mean that one becomes the “self” of the particular poet (as perhaps one does in an empathic reading of a very personal poem) but one enters a self-otherness in a sense equivalent to that which the poet entered by way of the récit. And this is not a matter of interpreting the particular poem as such, or assigning an interpretation or meaning to the poem, although of course the process may include meanings of all kinds, but of awakening a zone of continuing resonance which the récit imparts, an event of transmission of possibility. It can be associated with any number of related textual realities but it does not belong to a separately defined context (religious, literary, psychological, etc.). Its ontological status remains open, that is, uncertain.
Reading as ta’wil, in the non-traditionary way emphasized by Kelly in relation to The Loom, yet nevertheless related to the way Corbin tracks the practice in Avicenna’s “Recitals” which was attractive to so many poets, foregrounds the importance of being in step with the compositional principle of a given text. The “how to read” is tied in with the way of writing and in a sense conveys a permission of reading as further writing intrinsic to a poetics of singularity: a readerly event that is also writerly far more than literarily interpretative. To the extent that reading processually is initiatic to a reorientation within personal vision, a reader takes on the compositional possibilities opened by the text. And this gives special importance to any auto-exegetical commentary offered by the poet directly, which in fact was the theory behind our exercises in dialogical criticism. Consider Kelly’s remarks about the way of working in The Loom:
What’s interesting is the way in which the Recital comes… A Recital chooses one seed to grow from, and all the
other seeds do not. Now I could be left in a kind of typical lyrical impasse with all of the seeds and wanting to
tend all of them and have them all grow and rush from flowerpot to flowerpot, as indeed I have done in lots of
poems and in the way, say, Duncan always does, thus letting no seed go untended, until it all comes up in an
odd, approximative kind of garden. But what happens constantly in The Loom—well, not constantly, but lots
of times—is that the Recital begins, and the Recital which seems to be developing only one seed turns out by
the time it’s finished (and I look back at it) to have developed all the seeds. And it’s all there. And I stand in
awe of that narrative process. Because that’s really the first time that I came to know about the spontaneity of
narrative. I mean of course certain kinds of narrative do tell themselves—fantasies or dreams or whatnot—but
to have the power expressing itself right in the moment of one’s conscious, most alert activity, where I’m
thinking about vowels and it’s thinking about what’s going to happen, seems to me so extraordinary….
Spontaneity of narrative. Narratives tell themselves. The power expressing itself right in the moment of one’s conscious, most alert activity. What the poet is indicating here, if we allow our understanding to align with his sense of compositional event, is the way in which récit—the telling that occurs on its own and without authorization or premeditation—has the same firstness for the poet that it has for the poem’s reader. Poet and reader have a similar ontological status as recipients of a telling. The statement of the text is “objective,” not with respect to a world truth or outside status report or interpretability according to any sort of standard of correctness, but by a shared and willing uncertainty that is an openness to what is ready to be told. Objective as an object one agrees to hold in common. The “message” is the state of receptivity itself, the realization that telling is what happens when we declare ourselves receivers, listeners, readers. The ta’wil is the intentional participation in what is active on its own, what in Greek grammar (a mood lost in modern languages) is designated as middle voice (neither active nor passive) and is the voice in which, traditionally, the epic poem begins, the poet’s declaring oneself to be in the state of request for the song. (Obviously the conventional “Sing, Muse” doesn’t capture the mood.) The art of subtle receptivity is an evolutionary process, and accordingly it’s a practice that is refined over time. It may even be the state of what is increasingly recognized as conscious evolution. At any rate it indicates a way of being with unfolding narration that applies equally to poet writing who is also reading the self-telling and reader who is also within a writing unfolding process. It is an event that is always happening the first time ever. And first-time things are profoundly uncertain.
II
In our 1973 dialogue with Kelly we bring up his having spoken of the process of the poem as “ta’wil of its own first line.” This striking notion extends the way he was speaking, as cited above, about the Recital telling itself. It implies that the initial gesture unfolds as a reading out of its own “seed,” and it can do this because, it seems, the whole is coinherent with the part. First gesture, first line, first word, first sound—they are of the same nature, the substance of the telling, corresponding to a level of intensified awareness that opens to an unknown event. It is not a matter of development, as conventionally a plot develops a story or a book develops a theme. Unfolding is different from development. A Visionary Recital, the récit, is a process of appearance, of something contained in the nature of a thing that is, now coming into appearance. It may show up somewhat the way recalling the dream instructs the conscious mind in what it hasn’t yet seen in itself. But the unfolding telling is happening without the mind going unconscious in order to be receptive to what it can’t ordinarily bring up or let come forth, and in fact it is happening in the state of greatest alertness. This in itself is a non-ordinary state in an ordinary waking context, which context, however, is subtly reoriented by the event—a disturbance of the ordinary that calls for the extraordinary act designated by ta’wil. On this model ta’wil implies that non-ordinary text can be journeyed through, initiatically and transformatively, in what looks like ordinary reading, a literary act, but which, in the nature of text with consequential poetics, effects a reorientation of reading itself as a singular and incomparable event.
Jumping ahead to a text written nearly four decades after The Loom and which bears the name of our recurrent theme, Uncertainties,[9] we seem initially to be looking at an opposing poetics. Uncertainties appears to be a non-narrative series of 125 numbered and untitled poems of irregular length, which are discontinuous and non-unified in theme and detail. The single regularity is what stands in for a formal principle: it is written in two-line stanzas in which each line is more or less self-contained.
Preceding the main text, in the place of a dedication or part title, is an expression of the core desire of the book:
tout dire
Perhaps the great aspiration of being incarnate as poet: to say it all.
Next page, still preceding the main text, a short preludial poem declares:
Speak language
the way thunder does,
all the words at once
what lingers
turns slowly into meaning
meaning is not what you think
meaning is what stays
The book opens with a double valence, a twist of the grammatical axis: It speaks, first, to itself, in the presumption of a kind of intimacy: Speak in language the way thunder does in all sound together (beyond a mission of controlled or consensual human discourse). At the same time it addresses language, sounding an approximation of the middle-voice mood of epic, an invocation to language itself as if the muse has gone inside the physical mouth, and conjures speech with a trans-comprehensible noise of wild nature (like the thunderclap of Finnegans Wake) to say all with all words at once, cultivating faith in meaning as residue of a slow process of transmutation within apparent chaos. Implicit is the view of language as self-organizing matrix, a field of intelligence, to which access is by permission gained in a state of release, trust in surrender to the telling. The species of lingual intimacy is both personal and impersonal, embedded in what is.
The main text of the book is that slow process. It begins with an unexpected connection to récit now in the absence of story on the grand scale:
1.
Tell it just enough to begin
then the form takes over and tells
The will of the poet to inhabit the state of the poem is only a spark to jumpstart a self-generating process. The “form” that assumes the power of speech is, on one level, little more than a limit of irregularity, a neutral container with no assigned value, no privileged nobility of formal or aesthetic accomplishment, barely a source of legality as governor, and yet an opportunity for measure within variability of the self-accounting voice.
The speaking text—half-forgetting the name Robert Kelly in this call to language itself, yet language as intimately inhabited—is aspiring to the condition of all-speaking, occupying a sort of midpoint between Adam of the Garden and the Tower of Babel. This is not language as abstract system (linguistics) but as bodymind membrane, liminal, that is, to the autonomous magical power of a sovereign human creator and a common social property uncontrollable in its infinite variability. It’s as if poetry is a zone in which “two truths”—body & mind, person & world, this & an other dimension, ordinary & non-ordinary language—are in play & at play, and meaning is the residue of any complete action thereof. And an activity of the midpoint, middle voice, limen: the speaking that occurs in the surrender of message-control, letting go of the core habit of a dominator culture built on certainty.
What does it mean to call a book Uncertainties? Needless to say it’s uncertain, but not in the sense of a poet confused, indecisive, tentative, or indefinite. Also not in the sense of literary ambiguity, however many types you can count; not, that is, poetry as rhetoric. We might consider it as indicating a willingness to be as uncertain as things are, and not necessarily in a negative sense; it’s not a lament or any personalized mood of receptivity re: the problematic of unpredictability. On this plane of meaning, the personal response, it might better be seen as an alignment with the world on its own terms; to be in step with what is never fully in step until you are. Poem as specific alignment in process, so to speak. The poem inside the moment happening, then, is a medium for exposing what is otherwise invisible, the maneuver of bodymind to maintain a certain upright balance amidst perceived attractions and torrents of the day. One name for this perceptual process is proprioception, “self-knowing,” applied, with some license, to verbal events, as a sort of lingual register of how a being knows and maintains itself in spacetime. Yet it’s not strictly personal; in fact it’s interactive with the world, something happening between.
One of the Uncertainties (cap to acknowledge unique qualities) is the status of identity. It’s rather hard to allow a poet with the name Robert Kelly the space of “open identity” which requires momentarily forgetting that he’s the author of many dozens of published books; that is, to read him as he writes himself free from who he already is. But this is notoriously difficult where identity is considered cumulative, which is why poetry—especially a poetry where the poetics values uncertainty—verges on the impossible in the sense of its most radical possibility: to come upon singularity. The mind tired out by the school of hard knocks, literature as the crowning achievement of a culture of comparative assessment, and the pursuit of identity status can barely resist evaluating according to the abstraction du jour (Modern, post-Modern, etc.), and trying to make out the stripes of the home team. It’s only human. The will to be first. Identity as certainty.
What, then, is the way into the Uncertainty poem as it is to itself?
28.
Meshes mean me the voices
family matters murder the ear
I am deaf from sheer neglect
the snow perishes hence is beautiful
men ask women for the time of night
men don’t know women are the sun herself
it’s all about hiding and being found
all the rest of culture is a battered rose
we are stronger than war we can give it a name
to have seen with own eyes Danube’s Iron Gate
leaving the sea behind came to this brown hill
the opposite of everything
he took the long-stemmed rose and pounded it on the table
spread its petals and found food he gave to a child
we are nourished by mysteries alone
calm this morning like a book you read before.
One way to track a work is to look for its very own poetics. Where there is no discernible tradition-based prosody, procedure, concept, or theoretical dogma, we might allow a given textual process a parapoetic permission by which it defines its “rules” as a singular dynamic. I’ve been calling it here, ad hoc and sui generis, an Uncertainty poem, written it seems in flexible units: numbered sections made up of a variable number of two-line stanzas in distinct (more or less separate but linked) lines, wherein, so to speak, the deuces are wild. They contain but somewhat like corkless bottles as stopovers for genii in passage.
The poem does not progress; it lives along. The journey home is uncertain, perhaps in the sense of the Taoist classic: The land that is nowhere, that is the true home. Speaking from where it is, it can say: Today poetry doesn’t quite know what it is. And so it feels its own “true,” its ways of being true to its moment, with no room for apologies. How long it takes to reach a fecund not-knowing and offer no resistance to sudden awareness, that’s how long the poem is in every line. And every line is a site of possibility only available as singularity.
The mind can’t help trying to say something true. Nothing wrong with that, unless it believes in what it says. We become fundamentalists of our own constructions. Perhaps poetry is what saves us from ourselves, from our continuous surrender to the siren of our own voice claiming to tell the truth. The will of the poem to continue, to keep coming back, to leave behind the already said—a rescue mission from a part of the mind that knows better. But this too is uncertain.
2.
Smart ones would tell you too much
be a mirror until you break
be a tumbler till you fall
fill or drown, just be unsure
uncertainty is all and your appeal
the way your eyes so steady are clear
while your fingertips are roving
through the frantic jungle of what you really mean ….
The present is the greatest uncertainty—the precarious edge over the abyss below. “Form” here is not a wall of protection against unintelligibility or an aggressive instrument of reform, analysis, satire (social, psychological, political…), which presumes intellectual certainty and a standard of correctness (inheritance of 18th century “Age of Enlightenment” values), but a sort of valve for release of the unknown “through the frantic jungle of what you really mean.” Its social/political function is to clear linguality of false occupation and the coercive discourse of control. In this view the distracting, dubiously intentioned, controlling duplicity of public discourse, limiting freedom of mind and being, exploits an absence of actual complexity and subtle polyvalence of language. Discursive health requires the self-true multiplicity that speaking bears when we allow it to show itself. A moment of true speech contains more than we know how to hear, but the poem hears more.
The embrace of multiplicity shows it to be far more than a rhetorical strategy or proliferation of effects. It’s a discipline of the mouth obedient to the more that mind can say. The art of poetic aporia—the intrinsically unresolvable because replete with variable yet irreducible mental directives—is a reality challenge, a state of presence within complexity, and its access is rooted in acknowledged doubt and uncertainty. In the realization of the Uncertainty poem it’s a call, not to resolve or explain, but to stand within the oscillations of possible meaning until mind knows a sudden and necessary sense of the present moment. Meaning as a residue of the process of engagement does not detract from the intensity of self-aware presence.
In a parallel to the contribution of Corbin to the poetics of récit, another scholar of Islam and a range of medieval ontological hermeneutics, Michael A. Sells, brings traditionary perspective to a poetics of apophasis that goes beyond rhetorical denial, often associated with so-called “negative theology.” He shows a tendency in mystical writing (Plotinus, Eriugena, Ibn ‘Arabi, Porete, and Eckhart) where saying the unsayable is worked through apophasis as saying/unsaying (“speaking away”). “Genuine aporia,” he states, “instead of leading to silence, leads to a new mode of discourse.”[10] I’m interested in how such an approach can help us see wherein a poetics of singularity is connected to a profound problematic of language-thinking, with a range of historical antecedents outside what is usually considered literary history, and how it has led to many practices of saying/unsaying and what I call further saying.
Further saying in this sense is more than avant-garde innovation and experimentalism, but it can be that too; I think, for instance, that Alfred Jarry’s ‘Pataphysics, the “science of imaginal solutions,” understood as a poetics of singularity, has broad implications that go beyond any particular exploitation of them (such as OuLiPo). One could read aspects of Kelly’s Uncertainties as at once in an alignment with the ‘Pataphysical and with a tradition of apophasis, and both as modalities of dealing with the always newly unsayable requiring further language invention in step with mind-opening initiation. They lead to new ways of reading in which passage through the text is “the operation,” the alchemical working that alters both the possibilities of reading and consciousness itself—“be a mirror until you break//be a tumbler till you fall/fill or drown, just be unsure….” Uncertainty could be viewed as something like a Nigredo stage within the alchemy of reading, and its recognition can help discover a power of the mind-degradable within discourse. Such a power makes our need for positive assertion, the kataphatic or “bringing down” the elusive real into speaking, a constructive possibility of the moment which, by virtue of sustained transformative intensity, is reabsorbed into the open processual.
Blake gave us permission to escape the “mind-forg’d manacles” of belief while remaining poetically respectful of our acts of faith and attachment: Every thing possible to be believ’d is an image of the truth. Truth in poetry is viewed as a multiplicitous play of images, indeed a species of play, not a hierarchy of more or less valid truth claims. Perhaps in the Uncertainty poem we are at the threshold of a Blakean ta’wil: Any possible reading in poetic process is an imaging of meaning as a poem’s truth. Reading is itself the alchemical operation and its ludic enhancements.[11]
37.
To rise without compunction
into a day without a word
all travel tunnels through my thought
stay home glad sunlight dim in amber
licking shadows of travelers off the wall
Atlantis rises in our houses (…)
One’s life stand as Atlantis the always-disappearing continent, the Atlantean condition of our islanded living, the day empty of language calling us out, all times contemporaneously tunneling through the mind, poem pulling into disjunctive time where thinking enters into a continuous present…. Zero point poetics—the return to unknowing—is the state required for singularity, wherein we do not accumulate meaning but “rise” to its possibility “without compunction.” By reinstating us to zero as instantaneous still point, line-by-line the poem teaches emptiness (shunyata) as the openness of reality, its intrinsic capacity to be lived without preconditioning, the possibility of speaking between ourselves and the world/others. Here the poem instructs—restructures—how being emerges into the new by way of a new linguality.
If there were a persistent rhetoric behind the lines it would be something like a charm—a quasi-intelligible language act performative as magical operation, a reordering of syllables to tempt the tongue into sovereign behavior driven by a will to change.
However, the intention—the aim of the charm—remains sub-intelligible and polyvalent.
57.
Day of quarrel no man tiger knife knife
spill an island off your chest and spit
Micro-narratives with instant récit force open out as fleeting ta’wil, meaning on the fly. Story unfolds in the instant, turns upon a split-second axis, and moves on to a new grip through renewed traction. If there is mimesis in complexity it is revelation as aporia, nature as linguality in its mode of operation. The spin, genetic shifting as axial force in the releasement of a constantly moving center, regenerates discursive energy. Mind asserting and apophatically taking back or cutting off leaves a residue of poetic meaning with traces in the reading mind. It wakes in what it finds and lets go.
The two-line stanza (as distinct from couplet), according to the poet, sets up “experiments in duration, in complex syntax and melodic demands.”[12] The sense of continuity derives not particularly from content as such but from how the “melody of the first line necessitates the melody of the next. Shape shaping shape.” Melody here functions as “ta’wil of the first line,” that is, the principle of unfolding in which a thing realizes its further nature in the way it goes on, staying in step with itself freshly responsive, as opposed to getting ahead of itself by following prescription. He acknowledges constraint at the level of a line’s desire to be itself: “each line wants to be semantically intact”; “yet it also must link syntactically or narratively with the line that follows”—sovereignty subjected to inevitable variability. And stanzas stand “in relation” with those before and after, but that relationship is quite open—a neighborhood where most anything can happen, and does.
54.
Follow your own femoral artery long enough
you’ll find yourself in the body of another person
this sometimes called love was called by the ancients the Red Thread
stitches life together with itself you wake in the mountains
the girl brings you small gentian flowers you go on sleeping
she says Spring is here and you dream Old Persian verbs ….
“Hypersyntax, where phrases link with what comes before or after, or plausibly stand alone” are “strategies in ‘mental strife’”—attractors of a state of mental warfare which Blake opposes to corporeal warfare. Robert Kelly wishes the poem in its mind-degradable axiality to “solicit the dissolving of certainties—in between the inbreath and the outbreath, where nothing is fixed, and freedom begins.”
All lines are first lines, and lines are ta’wil of themselves—self-accounting, self-regulating like Blake’s bird that never soars too high if he soars with his own wings—a surge of language in autopoiesis of a single line. Or, in two-line stanzas, co-self-organizing in mutual pairing in a field of such co-piloted flight patterns.
Poems as Uncertainties declare an order in process, the track of their moving forward, the actual order of composition, not programmed or symbolic order and yet not arbitrary; a self-organizing, its own necessity wherein poems in fact can be read in any order without disrupting the overall sense of the work. That’s its spacetime reality: go anywhere, know anything, in your actual own time. The public signs are non-paranoid: If you see something, write something. It’s a poetics that continuously points back to the singularity of readerly configuration. Reader furthers the reading which is writing. Poem as matrix of world reconfiguration. And it’s a world without censorship, beyond dogma, without arbitrary control, where taboo cannot get a foothold, and desire is never made less than what it is—desire. And all our secret personal fundamentalisms dissolve into breath.
Barrytown, New York
May 2014
[1] “Reading,” transl. Lydia Davis, in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader: Fiction & Literary Essays, ed. George Quasha with Charles Stein (Station Hill Press: Barrytown, New York, 1999), taken from The Gaze of Orpheus and Other Literary Essays, transl. Lydia Davis, ed. P. Adams Sitney (Station Hill Press: Barrytown, New York, 1981).
[2] A few years later, 1976, I wrote about the ideas behind this project in an extended piece, “DiaLogos: Between the Written and the Oral in Contemporary Poetry,” New Literary History, (Vol. VIII, number 3, 1976-1977), reprinted, minus the last section, in Symposium of the Whole: A Range of Discourse Toward an Ethnopoetics, ed. Jerome Rothenberg, Diane Rothenberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); online at http://www.quasha.com/writing-2/on-poetry-poetics/dialogos/dialogos-between-the-written-and-the-oral.
[3] “Ta’wil or How to Read: A Five-Way Interactive View of Robert Kelly,” published in the Kelly issue of Vort, #5, Summer 1974, 108-134; online at http://www.quasha.com/writing-2/on-poetry-poetics/dialogos/tawil-or-how-to-read. Others drawing upon Corbin include Gerrit Lansing, Kenneth Irby, and Theodore Enslin.
[4] Engl. transl. Willard Trask, Bollingen Series LXIV, Pantheon Books: New York, 1960; French edition, 1954. This is the book that had been important to Olson, whereas Duncan, Creeley, and Kelly later also address Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi, Engl. transl. Ralph Manheim, Bollingen Series XCI, Princeton Univ. Press, 1969. French edition, 1958; this later translation was not available to Olson (1910-1970).
[5] In our dialogue the text is designated as “Section 44,” as it had been published in Caterpillar #18 (April 1972) and reprinted in Vort #5, but in the book The Loom (Black Sparrow Press: Los Angeles, 1975) it would become Section 36 [Building of the Temple], 401-415, the final poem in the book.
[6] It may be unnecessary to point out that this is not a discussion of literary merit, aesthetic quality, or critical judgment as such, which is a relative matter of largely cultural-context evaluation and special consensus.
[7] Olson’s poignant phrase “further nature” occurs in the “Proem” in “MAXIMUS, FROM DOGTOWN—I” in Maximus Poems IV, V, VI (Cape Goliard Press: London/Grossman Publishers: New York, 1968); and in The Maximus Poems, ed. George Butterick (University of California Press: Berkeley, 1983).
[8] “The Song of the Sirens,” trans. Lydia Davis, op. cit.
[9] Station Hill of Barrytown (Barrytown, New York: 2011).
[10] Mystical Languages of Unsaying (The University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1994), 2.
[11] Peter Lamborn Wilson refers to “serious joke” as “alchemical term,” applicable to art, in “Magi-ism,” Alchemy & Inquiry: Phillip Taaffe, Fred Tomaselli, Terry Winters. (Exhibition catalog: Wave Hill: April 3rd-June 19th, 2011, Bronx, New York). The likely source is from 1611: Jocus Severus, A Serious Joke, Michael Maier, transl. Darius Klein (Seattle: Ouroboros Press, 2010).
[12] Robert Kelly’s comments on the poetics of Uncertainties are recorded on the book cover.
… this unique reading, each time the first reading and each time the only reading….
Maurice Blanchot[1]
As a species humans love firsts. Firsts are to die for. We shape mind, mood, body, and wallet in order to get there first or be rewarded in top position. Best poem, bestseller, first lover…. With notable exceptions: last to die is usually number one on our lists; and in a different register: last noticed, best spy, best con, best loan shark, number one predation you can bank on…. And words? “First thought, best thought”? Well, it depends. We mainly pursue firsts that are not yet present but instead are distant, hard to get, lofty, beyond reach. When first means present it’s problematic. “This is the first moment of your new life” makes for anxiety, because it’s instantly untrue and instinctively we know that living firstness is challenging—in fact, it’s next to impossible to sustain for more than a special moment. A true paradox of the poetic may be that it both presents a language reality in immediate firstness and extends that lingual immediacy over time, so that intense temporality may become indistinguishable from atemporality or some form of hyper-temporality. Gertrude Stein brought heightened awareness to this paradoxical poetic reality in her theory and practice of the continuous present. Ezra Pound enlarged historical access in the present with ideas like “all ages are contemporaneous in the mind.” Robert Kelly variously exploits these and a number of other angles of entry to time in a timeless present, which he accomplishes parapoetically; that is, ever renovating his own poetics by prioritizing certain resources of language and consciousness only possible in a poetics of singularity--of firsts available in the [absolute present]. I bracket those words as anything truly parapoetic implies bracketed status, as uncertainties.
In 1973 Charles Stein and I initiated our long-contemplated project in dialogical criticism (DiaLogos) as poet-centered exercise in “how to read” difficult work, focusing on issues important to a given poet whose work was in some sense hard to read.[2] For our engagement with Robert Kelly that year the dialogue had a single focus which we already knew he shared with us: ta’wil, the historically significant exegetical practice among medieval Sufis like Avicenna and Ibn ‘Arabi as presented by the great French scholar of Islam, Henry Corbin, celebrated by Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, and Robert Creeley, among others.[3] We discussed the meaning of ta’wil, famously defined by Corbin as “the exegesis that leads the soul back to its truth,” as a unique event, a particular reading of a given text, rather than a procedural approach to conventional or dogmatically sanctioned understanding. Kelly emphasized the connection of ta’wil with “Recital” (Récit), as developed in Corbin’s Avicenna and the Visionary Recital,[4] which dealt with a species of narrative and therefore was appropriate to the text we elected to discuss in the dialogue: a section of the long poem The Loom from 1972.[5] Kelly comments:
To work with one of those Loom sections, particularly that one [then #44, later changed to #36 in The Loom],
would interest me because it has that other aspect of ta’wil in it--Récit, or whatever the Arabs call that, you
know, the Recitals. I can’t think of The Loom in a better way than that; because when I want to find a type of
The Loom somewhere, I find myself thinking about Avicenna in that Corbin book, and the stuff that’s like it
elsewhere in the world—the endless and/or beautiful stories that spill themselves out of uncertain meaning--
I mean the clear absence of final moral focus in the Récit reminds me very much of the same thing in The
Loom. It is not the building of a Temple, but of an Altar, and that altar’s very ambiguous, and the whole
relationship between myself and the skull is very curious. I mean I take the récit to be that kind of fable that
cannot be paraphrased, and thus all the récits of Alchemy, which are, I suppose, as close to it as the West
generally has—like the Thabritius and Beya stories, the people who go under the sea to teach the undersea
people how to conjugate, or The Chymical Wedding. These are stories that must be read and the reading of
them is itself the [alchemical] “operation.” (Vort, 114)
Uncertain meaning. The kind of fable that cannot be paraphrased. The récits of alchemy. The reading is itself the operation. These four interrelated notions, articulated in a single clarifying statement in the course of the conversation, point to important ongoing concerns in Kelly’s work and to what I’m calling a poetics of singularity. Uncertain meaning: uncertainty is the matrix of the kind of récit that drives Kelly’s visionary and unparaphraseable tale such that we find in much of The Loom--a rather dreamlike, non-ordinary personal process that seems performative of a ritual action of profound, initiatic, and transformative consequence, and yet does not map onto any identifiable religious or traditionary dogma or procedure. It suggests a sort of unnamable genre that is said to fit the notion of récit; but what is a récit?
A story born of uncertain meaning, in Kelly’s indication, implies that there is, and can be, no encompassing ideology that gives the story authority. The story therefore cannot be known in advance of its performative narrative action, at least not as it will now be known. The previously unknown and now unfolding story acquires a special kind of authority through the event of authorship, through the telling, the recital, the action of its own coming into being as writing. This is what makes it a visionary recital: it appears only inside the telling, inseparable from an individual’s own necessity in performing its action, and without it that individual would not complete an aspect of self-realization—realization such that is not otherwise achievable than by the poem itself. It cannot be characterized by an abstraction referencing previous actions or authorized by literary, mythic, religious, or psychological precedent, because any such precedent would miss its singular necessity, its poetic ontology unknowable outside the action of its telling.[6]
It’s important here to resist recounting or summarizing the action of Section 36 of The Loom, for according to the principle of ta’wil as described by Kelly, paraphrase of the narrative action impedes the real event by absorbing it in abstraction. And, to be sure, a reader of our dialogue “Ta’wil or How to Read” (1973) would optimally read the poem for the occasion; the purpose was to make vivid the full presence of récit, both as a text and as a ta’wil-like reading (the poet’s, ours, a new reader’s) in order to evoke the further unfolding of a core principle: a poetics of singularity.
To create a kind of meta-context for this principle I would point to two key notions. First, Charles Olson’s insistence on a statement he treated rhetorically as a secret: That which exists through itself is what is called meaning. He slightly modified the phrase taken from the Taoist alchemical text discussed by Jung, as translated by Wilhelm/Baynes, The Secret of the Golden Flower (“That which exists through itself is Meaning (Tao)”); but the important shift was in taking the phrase from a context with extensive commentary and setting it in a context of poetics where, stripped of all reference, it points to the self-nature of performative language action. Here language is not functioning primarily as reference or communication but as a manifestation of being with a particular intensity of focus. I’m not interested here in the question of influence, although Kelly of course has known Olson in depth from very early; perhaps we could shift the emphasis from influence to a context or field of transmission of a certain possibility: the poetic as performative of singular action inseparable from how being itself means. When Kelly takes récit from the context of extensive commentary in Corbin and lets it indicate his own uncertainty-narration, he performs an action parallel to Olson’s transposition of a classic Taoist phrase to a radical redirection of poetry toward a further nature.[7] The sense of the poetic as having such a profound and evolutionary role in human consciousness amounts to a poetic paradigm that puts the poetic act on a plane with Taoist and Sufi text, the purpose of which was to guide a reader’s mind on a productive path of self-awareness outside dominant cultural, religious, or literary tendencies. Exactly what constitutes such a path and any given outcome inevitably remains uncertain.
Another meta-contextual frame to help us with récit is Maurice Blanchot’s very special usage, which Kelly would not have been familiar with in 1973. Blanchot used the term to distinguish certain works, in fact most of his prose fiction, from the traditional story (histoire, conte) and novel (roman), and he characterized a récit as “not the narration of an event, but that event itself, the approach to that event, the place where that event is made to happen—an event which is yet to come and through whose power of attraction the tale [récit] can hope to come into being, too.”[8] Blanchot calls it “the secret law of the tale” which relates it to the unknowing we are discussing in terms of uncertainty as “a movement towards a point, a point which is not only not known, obscure, foreign, but such that apart from this movement it does not seem to have any sort of real prior existence, and yet it is so imperious that the tale derives its power of attraction only from this point, so that it cannot even ‘begin’ before reaching it—and yet only the tale and the unpredictable movement of the tale create the space where the point becomes real, powerful, and alluring.”
That Olson and Blanchot invoke secret in presenting their radical core notions may acknowledge the difficulty of grasping their subtle force. I place them beside Corbin in the service of understanding something fundamental to Kelly’s poetics and to show a basic uncertainty in the relation of their ideas to context: poetic, philosophically critical, and, in a rather special sense, esoteric. That is, everything depends on how we read, for the context itself is in the process of being revisioned.
In the same ta’wil dialogue, we say in the introductory statement:
During our talk with Kelly we tried to get him to speak about the new poetics emerging, say, in the year 1950.
After all, that was the year of “Projective Verse,” Concrete Poetry, etc. But Kelly insisted that “the interesting
date would not be the first time that something was written, but the first time that somebody is able, say, to read
Basil Valentine or Paracelsus as a processual document, rather than as a guide to operations with crucibles, and
that date is probably after 1950…. The issue that I’m at is when we were able to read… and I think that our
history will have to concern itself less with when a thing gets written than when a thing gets read, because I
think those are the moments of achievement in our consciousness.” We [GQ & CS] had been talking for a couple
of years about the right strategy in writing a “How to Read” book appropriate to the ’70′s, but it had not occurred
to us to plot the history of consciousness in terms of how to read specific texts. Kelly argued that “someone who
had read and perceived ‘Projective Verse’ and some other [of Olson’s] essays, ‘The Gate and the Center’ for
instance, would be in a position to read anew. It strikes me that Pound had called it The ABC of Reading and
before that How to Read… [but] that critics have supposed him really to be saying ‘how to write’…. If there
is any art or future in criticism, such that the work we’re immediately concerned with can ever get read, or
the thing that makes your book America a Prophecy [GQ co-editor with Jerome Rothenberg; Random
House: New York, 1973] possible, will be a new method of reading, not a new method of writing.”
I remember Robert Duncan speaking about how he and Olson created a poetry that had to be read at the level of its poetics. I took this to mean that, while poetry clearly can be read in many ways and have very different functions for different readers (often context specific), they insisted on a level of reading that is inseparable from the kind of thinking in language—the language-living—that generates the poem. What is at stake is not only “change” from the perspective of literary history, or formal innovation, but what Olson insisted on calling “a stance toward reality,” an orientation toward what is taken to be otherwise (without, that is, the action of the poem) an unknown dimension of reality. That dimension is reflected and engaged as a language reality, a linguality. Our access to it is by reading in a way that meets the poem at its own level of action, and for Kelly (1973) that way of meeting the récit of The Loom is named processual. One does not so much circle the poem mentally to appreciate its perfections and tease out its stylistic devices as undergo its narrative process, including circumambulating its interior constructions, a perhaps proto-ritualistic but unsanctioned action, engaging its continuous present as one’s own.
A reading of this process as ta’wil may have psychological and indeed variously cultural force, but the emphasis is on where and how it leads one to a further access to unlived reality that is now, and only now as a result of the narrative process, one’s own. It’s an initiatic event in the sense that, having crossed a readerly threshold, by virtue of an engage-able poetics, one is now of the poem, no longer who one was, but a further oneself. This does not mean that one becomes the “self” of the particular poet (as perhaps one does in an empathic reading of a very personal poem) but one enters a self-otherness in a sense equivalent to that which the poet entered by way of the récit. And this is not a matter of interpreting the particular poem as such, or assigning an interpretation or meaning to the poem, although of course the process may include meanings of all kinds, but of awakening a zone of continuing resonance which the récit imparts, an event of transmission of possibility. It can be associated with any number of related textual realities but it does not belong to a separately defined context (religious, literary, psychological, etc.). Its ontological status remains open, that is, uncertain.
Reading as ta’wil, in the non-traditionary way emphasized by Kelly in relation to The Loom, yet nevertheless related to the way Corbin tracks the practice in Avicenna’s “Recitals” which was attractive to so many poets, foregrounds the importance of being in step with the compositional principle of a given text. The “how to read” is tied in with the way of writing and in a sense conveys a permission of reading as further writing intrinsic to a poetics of singularity: a readerly event that is also writerly far more than literarily interpretative. To the extent that reading processually is initiatic to a reorientation within personal vision, a reader takes on the compositional possibilities opened by the text. And this gives special importance to any auto-exegetical commentary offered by the poet directly, which in fact was the theory behind our exercises in dialogical criticism. Consider Kelly’s remarks about the way of working in The Loom:
What’s interesting is the way in which the Recital comes… A Recital chooses one seed to grow from, and all the
other seeds do not. Now I could be left in a kind of typical lyrical impasse with all of the seeds and wanting to
tend all of them and have them all grow and rush from flowerpot to flowerpot, as indeed I have done in lots of
poems and in the way, say, Duncan always does, thus letting no seed go untended, until it all comes up in an
odd, approximative kind of garden. But what happens constantly in The Loom—well, not constantly, but lots
of times—is that the Recital begins, and the Recital which seems to be developing only one seed turns out by
the time it’s finished (and I look back at it) to have developed all the seeds. And it’s all there. And I stand in
awe of that narrative process. Because that’s really the first time that I came to know about the spontaneity of
narrative. I mean of course certain kinds of narrative do tell themselves—fantasies or dreams or whatnot—but
to have the power expressing itself right in the moment of one’s conscious, most alert activity, where I’m
thinking about vowels and it’s thinking about what’s going to happen, seems to me so extraordinary….
Spontaneity of narrative. Narratives tell themselves. The power expressing itself right in the moment of one’s conscious, most alert activity. What the poet is indicating here, if we allow our understanding to align with his sense of compositional event, is the way in which récit—the telling that occurs on its own and without authorization or premeditation—has the same firstness for the poet that it has for the poem’s reader. Poet and reader have a similar ontological status as recipients of a telling. The statement of the text is “objective,” not with respect to a world truth or outside status report or interpretability according to any sort of standard of correctness, but by a shared and willing uncertainty that is an openness to what is ready to be told. Objective as an object one agrees to hold in common. The “message” is the state of receptivity itself, the realization that telling is what happens when we declare ourselves receivers, listeners, readers. The ta’wil is the intentional participation in what is active on its own, what in Greek grammar (a mood lost in modern languages) is designated as middle voice (neither active nor passive) and is the voice in which, traditionally, the epic poem begins, the poet’s declaring oneself to be in the state of request for the song. (Obviously the conventional “Sing, Muse” doesn’t capture the mood.) The art of subtle receptivity is an evolutionary process, and accordingly it’s a practice that is refined over time. It may even be the state of what is increasingly recognized as conscious evolution. At any rate it indicates a way of being with unfolding narration that applies equally to poet writing who is also reading the self-telling and reader who is also within a writing unfolding process. It is an event that is always happening the first time ever. And first-time things are profoundly uncertain.
II
In our 1973 dialogue with Kelly we bring up his having spoken of the process of the poem as “ta’wil of its own first line.” This striking notion extends the way he was speaking, as cited above, about the Recital telling itself. It implies that the initial gesture unfolds as a reading out of its own “seed,” and it can do this because, it seems, the whole is coinherent with the part. First gesture, first line, first word, first sound—they are of the same nature, the substance of the telling, corresponding to a level of intensified awareness that opens to an unknown event. It is not a matter of development, as conventionally a plot develops a story or a book develops a theme. Unfolding is different from development. A Visionary Recital, the récit, is a process of appearance, of something contained in the nature of a thing that is, now coming into appearance. It may show up somewhat the way recalling the dream instructs the conscious mind in what it hasn’t yet seen in itself. But the unfolding telling is happening without the mind going unconscious in order to be receptive to what it can’t ordinarily bring up or let come forth, and in fact it is happening in the state of greatest alertness. This in itself is a non-ordinary state in an ordinary waking context, which context, however, is subtly reoriented by the event—a disturbance of the ordinary that calls for the extraordinary act designated by ta’wil. On this model ta’wil implies that non-ordinary text can be journeyed through, initiatically and transformatively, in what looks like ordinary reading, a literary act, but which, in the nature of text with consequential poetics, effects a reorientation of reading itself as a singular and incomparable event.
Jumping ahead to a text written nearly four decades after The Loom and which bears the name of our recurrent theme, Uncertainties,[9] we seem initially to be looking at an opposing poetics. Uncertainties appears to be a non-narrative series of 125 numbered and untitled poems of irregular length, which are discontinuous and non-unified in theme and detail. The single regularity is what stands in for a formal principle: it is written in two-line stanzas in which each line is more or less self-contained.
Preceding the main text, in the place of a dedication or part title, is an expression of the core desire of the book:
tout dire
Perhaps the great aspiration of being incarnate as poet: to say it all.
Next page, still preceding the main text, a short preludial poem declares:
Speak language
the way thunder does,
all the words at once
what lingers
turns slowly into meaning
meaning is not what you think
meaning is what stays
The book opens with a double valence, a twist of the grammatical axis: It speaks, first, to itself, in the presumption of a kind of intimacy: Speak in language the way thunder does in all sound together (beyond a mission of controlled or consensual human discourse). At the same time it addresses language, sounding an approximation of the middle-voice mood of epic, an invocation to language itself as if the muse has gone inside the physical mouth, and conjures speech with a trans-comprehensible noise of wild nature (like the thunderclap of Finnegans Wake) to say all with all words at once, cultivating faith in meaning as residue of a slow process of transmutation within apparent chaos. Implicit is the view of language as self-organizing matrix, a field of intelligence, to which access is by permission gained in a state of release, trust in surrender to the telling. The species of lingual intimacy is both personal and impersonal, embedded in what is.
The main text of the book is that slow process. It begins with an unexpected connection to récit now in the absence of story on the grand scale:
1.
Tell it just enough to begin
then the form takes over and tells
The will of the poet to inhabit the state of the poem is only a spark to jumpstart a self-generating process. The “form” that assumes the power of speech is, on one level, little more than a limit of irregularity, a neutral container with no assigned value, no privileged nobility of formal or aesthetic accomplishment, barely a source of legality as governor, and yet an opportunity for measure within variability of the self-accounting voice.
The speaking text—half-forgetting the name Robert Kelly in this call to language itself, yet language as intimately inhabited—is aspiring to the condition of all-speaking, occupying a sort of midpoint between Adam of the Garden and the Tower of Babel. This is not language as abstract system (linguistics) but as bodymind membrane, liminal, that is, to the autonomous magical power of a sovereign human creator and a common social property uncontrollable in its infinite variability. It’s as if poetry is a zone in which “two truths”—body & mind, person & world, this & an other dimension, ordinary & non-ordinary language—are in play & at play, and meaning is the residue of any complete action thereof. And an activity of the midpoint, middle voice, limen: the speaking that occurs in the surrender of message-control, letting go of the core habit of a dominator culture built on certainty.
What does it mean to call a book Uncertainties? Needless to say it’s uncertain, but not in the sense of a poet confused, indecisive, tentative, or indefinite. Also not in the sense of literary ambiguity, however many types you can count; not, that is, poetry as rhetoric. We might consider it as indicating a willingness to be as uncertain as things are, and not necessarily in a negative sense; it’s not a lament or any personalized mood of receptivity re: the problematic of unpredictability. On this plane of meaning, the personal response, it might better be seen as an alignment with the world on its own terms; to be in step with what is never fully in step until you are. Poem as specific alignment in process, so to speak. The poem inside the moment happening, then, is a medium for exposing what is otherwise invisible, the maneuver of bodymind to maintain a certain upright balance amidst perceived attractions and torrents of the day. One name for this perceptual process is proprioception, “self-knowing,” applied, with some license, to verbal events, as a sort of lingual register of how a being knows and maintains itself in spacetime. Yet it’s not strictly personal; in fact it’s interactive with the world, something happening between.
One of the Uncertainties (cap to acknowledge unique qualities) is the status of identity. It’s rather hard to allow a poet with the name Robert Kelly the space of “open identity” which requires momentarily forgetting that he’s the author of many dozens of published books; that is, to read him as he writes himself free from who he already is. But this is notoriously difficult where identity is considered cumulative, which is why poetry—especially a poetry where the poetics values uncertainty—verges on the impossible in the sense of its most radical possibility: to come upon singularity. The mind tired out by the school of hard knocks, literature as the crowning achievement of a culture of comparative assessment, and the pursuit of identity status can barely resist evaluating according to the abstraction du jour (Modern, post-Modern, etc.), and trying to make out the stripes of the home team. It’s only human. The will to be first. Identity as certainty.
What, then, is the way into the Uncertainty poem as it is to itself?
28.
Meshes mean me the voices
family matters murder the ear
I am deaf from sheer neglect
the snow perishes hence is beautiful
men ask women for the time of night
men don’t know women are the sun herself
it’s all about hiding and being found
all the rest of culture is a battered rose
we are stronger than war we can give it a name
to have seen with own eyes Danube’s Iron Gate
leaving the sea behind came to this brown hill
the opposite of everything
he took the long-stemmed rose and pounded it on the table
spread its petals and found food he gave to a child
we are nourished by mysteries alone
calm this morning like a book you read before.
One way to track a work is to look for its very own poetics. Where there is no discernible tradition-based prosody, procedure, concept, or theoretical dogma, we might allow a given textual process a parapoetic permission by which it defines its “rules” as a singular dynamic. I’ve been calling it here, ad hoc and sui generis, an Uncertainty poem, written it seems in flexible units: numbered sections made up of a variable number of two-line stanzas in distinct (more or less separate but linked) lines, wherein, so to speak, the deuces are wild. They contain but somewhat like corkless bottles as stopovers for genii in passage.
The poem does not progress; it lives along. The journey home is uncertain, perhaps in the sense of the Taoist classic: The land that is nowhere, that is the true home. Speaking from where it is, it can say: Today poetry doesn’t quite know what it is. And so it feels its own “true,” its ways of being true to its moment, with no room for apologies. How long it takes to reach a fecund not-knowing and offer no resistance to sudden awareness, that’s how long the poem is in every line. And every line is a site of possibility only available as singularity.
The mind can’t help trying to say something true. Nothing wrong with that, unless it believes in what it says. We become fundamentalists of our own constructions. Perhaps poetry is what saves us from ourselves, from our continuous surrender to the siren of our own voice claiming to tell the truth. The will of the poem to continue, to keep coming back, to leave behind the already said—a rescue mission from a part of the mind that knows better. But this too is uncertain.
2.
Smart ones would tell you too much
be a mirror until you break
be a tumbler till you fall
fill or drown, just be unsure
uncertainty is all and your appeal
the way your eyes so steady are clear
while your fingertips are roving
through the frantic jungle of what you really mean ….
The present is the greatest uncertainty—the precarious edge over the abyss below. “Form” here is not a wall of protection against unintelligibility or an aggressive instrument of reform, analysis, satire (social, psychological, political…), which presumes intellectual certainty and a standard of correctness (inheritance of 18th century “Age of Enlightenment” values), but a sort of valve for release of the unknown “through the frantic jungle of what you really mean.” Its social/political function is to clear linguality of false occupation and the coercive discourse of control. In this view the distracting, dubiously intentioned, controlling duplicity of public discourse, limiting freedom of mind and being, exploits an absence of actual complexity and subtle polyvalence of language. Discursive health requires the self-true multiplicity that speaking bears when we allow it to show itself. A moment of true speech contains more than we know how to hear, but the poem hears more.
The embrace of multiplicity shows it to be far more than a rhetorical strategy or proliferation of effects. It’s a discipline of the mouth obedient to the more that mind can say. The art of poetic aporia—the intrinsically unresolvable because replete with variable yet irreducible mental directives—is a reality challenge, a state of presence within complexity, and its access is rooted in acknowledged doubt and uncertainty. In the realization of the Uncertainty poem it’s a call, not to resolve or explain, but to stand within the oscillations of possible meaning until mind knows a sudden and necessary sense of the present moment. Meaning as a residue of the process of engagement does not detract from the intensity of self-aware presence.
In a parallel to the contribution of Corbin to the poetics of récit, another scholar of Islam and a range of medieval ontological hermeneutics, Michael A. Sells, brings traditionary perspective to a poetics of apophasis that goes beyond rhetorical denial, often associated with so-called “negative theology.” He shows a tendency in mystical writing (Plotinus, Eriugena, Ibn ‘Arabi, Porete, and Eckhart) where saying the unsayable is worked through apophasis as saying/unsaying (“speaking away”). “Genuine aporia,” he states, “instead of leading to silence, leads to a new mode of discourse.”[10] I’m interested in how such an approach can help us see wherein a poetics of singularity is connected to a profound problematic of language-thinking, with a range of historical antecedents outside what is usually considered literary history, and how it has led to many practices of saying/unsaying and what I call further saying.
Further saying in this sense is more than avant-garde innovation and experimentalism, but it can be that too; I think, for instance, that Alfred Jarry’s ‘Pataphysics, the “science of imaginal solutions,” understood as a poetics of singularity, has broad implications that go beyond any particular exploitation of them (such as OuLiPo). One could read aspects of Kelly’s Uncertainties as at once in an alignment with the ‘Pataphysical and with a tradition of apophasis, and both as modalities of dealing with the always newly unsayable requiring further language invention in step with mind-opening initiation. They lead to new ways of reading in which passage through the text is “the operation,” the alchemical working that alters both the possibilities of reading and consciousness itself—“be a mirror until you break//be a tumbler till you fall/fill or drown, just be unsure….” Uncertainty could be viewed as something like a Nigredo stage within the alchemy of reading, and its recognition can help discover a power of the mind-degradable within discourse. Such a power makes our need for positive assertion, the kataphatic or “bringing down” the elusive real into speaking, a constructive possibility of the moment which, by virtue of sustained transformative intensity, is reabsorbed into the open processual.
Blake gave us permission to escape the “mind-forg’d manacles” of belief while remaining poetically respectful of our acts of faith and attachment: Every thing possible to be believ’d is an image of the truth. Truth in poetry is viewed as a multiplicitous play of images, indeed a species of play, not a hierarchy of more or less valid truth claims. Perhaps in the Uncertainty poem we are at the threshold of a Blakean ta’wil: Any possible reading in poetic process is an imaging of meaning as a poem’s truth. Reading is itself the alchemical operation and its ludic enhancements.[11]
37.
To rise without compunction
into a day without a word
all travel tunnels through my thought
stay home glad sunlight dim in amber
licking shadows of travelers off the wall
Atlantis rises in our houses (…)
One’s life stand as Atlantis the always-disappearing continent, the Atlantean condition of our islanded living, the day empty of language calling us out, all times contemporaneously tunneling through the mind, poem pulling into disjunctive time where thinking enters into a continuous present…. Zero point poetics—the return to unknowing—is the state required for singularity, wherein we do not accumulate meaning but “rise” to its possibility “without compunction.” By reinstating us to zero as instantaneous still point, line-by-line the poem teaches emptiness (shunyata) as the openness of reality, its intrinsic capacity to be lived without preconditioning, the possibility of speaking between ourselves and the world/others. Here the poem instructs—restructures—how being emerges into the new by way of a new linguality.
If there were a persistent rhetoric behind the lines it would be something like a charm—a quasi-intelligible language act performative as magical operation, a reordering of syllables to tempt the tongue into sovereign behavior driven by a will to change.
However, the intention—the aim of the charm—remains sub-intelligible and polyvalent.
57.
Day of quarrel no man tiger knife knife
spill an island off your chest and spit
Micro-narratives with instant récit force open out as fleeting ta’wil, meaning on the fly. Story unfolds in the instant, turns upon a split-second axis, and moves on to a new grip through renewed traction. If there is mimesis in complexity it is revelation as aporia, nature as linguality in its mode of operation. The spin, genetic shifting as axial force in the releasement of a constantly moving center, regenerates discursive energy. Mind asserting and apophatically taking back or cutting off leaves a residue of poetic meaning with traces in the reading mind. It wakes in what it finds and lets go.
The two-line stanza (as distinct from couplet), according to the poet, sets up “experiments in duration, in complex syntax and melodic demands.”[12] The sense of continuity derives not particularly from content as such but from how the “melody of the first line necessitates the melody of the next. Shape shaping shape.” Melody here functions as “ta’wil of the first line,” that is, the principle of unfolding in which a thing realizes its further nature in the way it goes on, staying in step with itself freshly responsive, as opposed to getting ahead of itself by following prescription. He acknowledges constraint at the level of a line’s desire to be itself: “each line wants to be semantically intact”; “yet it also must link syntactically or narratively with the line that follows”—sovereignty subjected to inevitable variability. And stanzas stand “in relation” with those before and after, but that relationship is quite open—a neighborhood where most anything can happen, and does.
54.
Follow your own femoral artery long enough
you’ll find yourself in the body of another person
this sometimes called love was called by the ancients the Red Thread
stitches life together with itself you wake in the mountains
the girl brings you small gentian flowers you go on sleeping
she says Spring is here and you dream Old Persian verbs ….
“Hypersyntax, where phrases link with what comes before or after, or plausibly stand alone” are “strategies in ‘mental strife’”—attractors of a state of mental warfare which Blake opposes to corporeal warfare. Robert Kelly wishes the poem in its mind-degradable axiality to “solicit the dissolving of certainties—in between the inbreath and the outbreath, where nothing is fixed, and freedom begins.”
All lines are first lines, and lines are ta’wil of themselves—self-accounting, self-regulating like Blake’s bird that never soars too high if he soars with his own wings—a surge of language in autopoiesis of a single line. Or, in two-line stanzas, co-self-organizing in mutual pairing in a field of such co-piloted flight patterns.
Poems as Uncertainties declare an order in process, the track of their moving forward, the actual order of composition, not programmed or symbolic order and yet not arbitrary; a self-organizing, its own necessity wherein poems in fact can be read in any order without disrupting the overall sense of the work. That’s its spacetime reality: go anywhere, know anything, in your actual own time. The public signs are non-paranoid: If you see something, write something. It’s a poetics that continuously points back to the singularity of readerly configuration. Reader furthers the reading which is writing. Poem as matrix of world reconfiguration. And it’s a world without censorship, beyond dogma, without arbitrary control, where taboo cannot get a foothold, and desire is never made less than what it is—desire. And all our secret personal fundamentalisms dissolve into breath.
Barrytown, New York
May 2014
[1] “Reading,” transl. Lydia Davis, in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader: Fiction & Literary Essays, ed. George Quasha with Charles Stein (Station Hill Press: Barrytown, New York, 1999), taken from The Gaze of Orpheus and Other Literary Essays, transl. Lydia Davis, ed. P. Adams Sitney (Station Hill Press: Barrytown, New York, 1981).
[2] A few years later, 1976, I wrote about the ideas behind this project in an extended piece, “DiaLogos: Between the Written and the Oral in Contemporary Poetry,” New Literary History, (Vol. VIII, number 3, 1976-1977), reprinted, minus the last section, in Symposium of the Whole: A Range of Discourse Toward an Ethnopoetics, ed. Jerome Rothenberg, Diane Rothenberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); online at http://www.quasha.com/writing-2/on-poetry-poetics/dialogos/dialogos-between-the-written-and-the-oral.
[3] “Ta’wil or How to Read: A Five-Way Interactive View of Robert Kelly,” published in the Kelly issue of Vort, #5, Summer 1974, 108-134; online at http://www.quasha.com/writing-2/on-poetry-poetics/dialogos/tawil-or-how-to-read. Others drawing upon Corbin include Gerrit Lansing, Kenneth Irby, and Theodore Enslin.
[4] Engl. transl. Willard Trask, Bollingen Series LXIV, Pantheon Books: New York, 1960; French edition, 1954. This is the book that had been important to Olson, whereas Duncan, Creeley, and Kelly later also address Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi, Engl. transl. Ralph Manheim, Bollingen Series XCI, Princeton Univ. Press, 1969. French edition, 1958; this later translation was not available to Olson (1910-1970).
[5] In our dialogue the text is designated as “Section 44,” as it had been published in Caterpillar #18 (April 1972) and reprinted in Vort #5, but in the book The Loom (Black Sparrow Press: Los Angeles, 1975) it would become Section 36 [Building of the Temple], 401-415, the final poem in the book.
[6] It may be unnecessary to point out that this is not a discussion of literary merit, aesthetic quality, or critical judgment as such, which is a relative matter of largely cultural-context evaluation and special consensus.
[7] Olson’s poignant phrase “further nature” occurs in the “Proem” in “MAXIMUS, FROM DOGTOWN—I” in Maximus Poems IV, V, VI (Cape Goliard Press: London/Grossman Publishers: New York, 1968); and in The Maximus Poems, ed. George Butterick (University of California Press: Berkeley, 1983).
[8] “The Song of the Sirens,” trans. Lydia Davis, op. cit.
[9] Station Hill of Barrytown (Barrytown, New York: 2011).
[10] Mystical Languages of Unsaying (The University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1994), 2.
[11] Peter Lamborn Wilson refers to “serious joke” as “alchemical term,” applicable to art, in “Magi-ism,” Alchemy & Inquiry: Phillip Taaffe, Fred Tomaselli, Terry Winters. (Exhibition catalog: Wave Hill: April 3rd-June 19th, 2011, Bronx, New York). The likely source is from 1611: Jocus Severus, A Serious Joke, Michael Maier, transl. Darius Klein (Seattle: Ouroboros Press, 2010).
[12] Robert Kelly’s comments on the poetics of Uncertainties are recorded on the book cover.