Notebook (Clark Coolidge, Wallace Stevens, &c.)

Clark Coolidge

Slate-colored rain bouncing off the streets, flung back off the bicycle’s wheels. In the yellow slicker, its rustle and pop. Spieling forth under the onslaught. Spieling: slang, originally, for gambling. Sign of how a glib volubility portends a propping up of effusory chance. “A happier aporian one could / not knock up.” (Clark Coolidge, “A Residue”). Or, earlier in the piece:

The book to be a heart or open sphere, closed
at any saying of words as posits. I am only
that it of the precise instant. Nothing.

“Words as posits.” That tenuous inveterate bounce, unmaintainable. I think of Coolidge, in “Arrangement,” quoting out of Lewis Padgett’s 1943 story “Mimsy Were the Borogroves”:

      Scott kept bringing gadgets to Emma for her approval. Usually she’d shake her head. Sometimes she would signify agreement. Then there would be an hour of laborious, crazy scribbling on scraps of note paper, and Scott, after studying the notations, would arrange and rearrange his rocks, bits of machinery, candle ends, and assorted junk. Each day the maid cleaned them away, and each day Scott began again.
      He condescended to explain a little to his puzzled father, who could see no rhyme or reason in the game.
      “But why this pebble right here?”
      “It’s hard and round, Dad. It belongs there.”
      “So is this one hard and round.”
      “Well, that’s got vaseline on it. When you get that far, you can’t see just a hard, round thing.”
      “What comes next? This candle?”
      Scott looked disgusted. “That’s toward the end. The iron ring’s next.”
      It was . . . like a scout trail through the woods, markers in a labyrinth. But here again was the random factor. Logic halted—familiar logic—at Scott’s motives in arranging the junk as he did.

The fierce alogic of merely belonging. That temporal freeze one experiences in the throes of the spiel, its shift and feint and realignment keeping the whole thing out of stasis, in a zone of extended offertory and kinetic doubt. Putting one thing here, putting one thing there, agog and bestilled with the tenuousness of purchase, of commitment. Out of “A Residue”:

                        Altered weights of certain things
to suggest Wallace Stevens’ favorite song,
Did You Ever Lose Something To Say And Keep On
Walking? Realigning terms are a complementary
geometry, a syntax caught in crystal doubt,
the collected gleams of ignorant eyes.
Sense that words are, makes clear, that tempo.
Too much meaning, wave and particle.
And am I finally able to invent a care
without sum, the clock. The resolve, much
as I might want to appear unknown.
Can words be declared, without erasing their names?
Such being poetry, such diminishing solace.
It was bound somewhere, yet everytime
simultaneous . . .

Simultaneity, balance “without sum,” discharge and seizure and maintenance tout à la fois: the latticed entrapment of ongoing uncertainty (“crystal doubt”) is where the striving goes. A pliably yielding stubbornness. Out of Coolidge’s Code of Signals piece, “From Notebooks (1976-1982)”:

Perhaps art is merely the translation
of the external into an obduration
of mind that erodes neither to the
side of memory nor conception.

Unslipping, in the sheer veer of ready placability. Not to recall, nor to conceive, means to be entirely present in the sharp nick of time’s own ponderous traffic . . .* I think of Coolidge’s lines in “A Note on Bop” (Now It’s Jazz: Writings on Kerouac & The Sounds, 1999):

The feel is that time has a precise center. Like tight-roping on a moving pulley clothesline, you’re always trying to keep up midway between the poles. It really gets that sharply physical. As a drummer you’re holding time’s cutting edge in your right hand (ride cymbal), a simultaneity of holding and shaping. You occupy the center of the sonic sphere, the world, and ride it and bear it, inviolable (why heroin is Bop’s perfect chemical). And everything that happens there happens once and at once. Once and Ounce, Groove and Chord, Wave and Particle: the Complementarity of Bop.

Too, I think of Stevens’s lines out of “The Well Dressed Man with a Beard”:

If the rejected things, the things denied,
Slid over the western cataract, yet one,
One only, one thing that was firm, even
No greater than a cricket’s horn, no more
Than a thought to be rehearsed all day, a speech
Of the self that must sustain itself on speech,
One thing remaining, infallible, would be
Enough. Ah! douce campagna of that thing!
Ah! douce campagna, honey in the heart,
Green in the body, out of a petty phrase,
Out of a thing believed, a thing affirmed:
The form on the pillow humming while one sleeps,
The aureole above the humming house . . .

It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.

—

To note. Consider the similarities between Coolidge’s lines here (out of the Code of Signals entries)—

Perhaps the point at which I know nothing will be
the place wherein I am finally able.
The use of words posits a sphere in which all impulse
routes may describe themselves freely but always on walls
of thought. Therefore I find that I can only write certain
things. The verbal dimension is never a blank. The room of
the poem is a charged and loaded space. Anyone who has ever
written a poem has somewhat altered the weights and trajectories.
It is as if each succeeding poet will be obliged to invent
his own physics of sense and motion. The resultant scope is
endlessly additional without sum.

—and “A Residue” (out of the 1990 book Sound as Thought: Poems 1982-1984)—

Perhaps the next thought at which I know nothing
will be a project closed for the time.
The book to be a heart or open sphere, closed
at any saying of words as posits. I am only
that it of the precise instant. Nothing.
Beckett. Altered weights of certain things
to suggest Wallace Stevens’ favorite song,
Did You Ever Lose Something To Say And Keep On
Walking? Realigning terms are a complementary
geometry, a syntax caught in crystal doubt,
the collected gleams of ignorant eyes.
Sense that words are, makes clear, that tempo.
Too much meaning, wave and particle.
And am I finally able to invent a care
without sum, the clock. The resolve, much
as I might want to appear unknown.
Can words be declared, without erasing their names?
Such being poetry, such diminishing solace.
It was bound somewhere, yet everytime
Simultaneous. A happier aporian one could
not knock up. Hints about the brought to all
this, perhaps with integers to handle the sphere.
I must stay with taken form? I must face
motion and add the words?

Surely writ contiguously. Or in the heave of time’s slippery (and unendurable) succession . . .

* Another entry out of Coolidge’s Code of Signals piece:

At the same time there is the plethora,
proliferation of all forms, making a muck
unforeseen previously. Beckett’s statement (1961):
“To find a form that accommodates the mess, that
is the task of the artist now.” seems pointed
exactly at our condition.