Notebook (Richard Owens, &c.)

Nathaniel Tarn, c. 1971
(Photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson)

Richard Owens, Clutch (Vigilance Society, 2012)

Roughly duodecimo-sized pamphlet. Letterpress-printed cover of dripping brain material scooped up in a hand, fingers manicured to devilish points, porn-sharp. Eight smallish (and syntactically impacted) pieces, each consisting of nine lines, each beginning with the imperative “Engage—”:

Engage—that grinding under
the hood draped over
your head is what they call teeth
masticating colossus
interrupted by spectral singularities
taxidermied into a white
formalist indifference to history
balancing out supper time
with you never mattered anyhow.

Abu Ghraib hood, no other reading for “hood” at present. A sort of American Golem underneath, the “masticating colossus” a shapeless mass of pure imperium, no less lethal for that, being “what we’ve become,” clay-made, ungainly, automatous, wholly indifferent: the vaunted “formalist” meaning “going through the motions.” Dolls stuffed fat, preening (“taxidermied”) for other inhuman dolls. “Supper time” (call it “global zupping”) in one possible reading opposed directly (“balancing out”) against “you never mattered anyhow.” Another:

Engage—all the angels and
saints deign to plead
necessity not need which is an
altogether different in
the eyes those are yours which
her moth is foreign
to me because it speaks so openly
when our people
were permitted only to compete.

Call it “an altogether different in”—the way syntax so brusquely welcomes what’s so usually expelled.

—

Lautréamont claimed that poetry should be made by all. The world is tough enough to take as many poets as it can muster, so that it is foolishness to deny the value of a poet because he is “academy” or because he is not. The terms are never more than relative at best. Among makers, cross-breeding occurs continually: see Gunn on Snyder for example, in a recent Listener. It is interesting to look for those poets who find themselves, perhaps unwillingly, taken as bridges between contending schools. Is Creeley the most accessible of the Black Mountain poets? Has Lowell, in Life Studies, taken something from the other side? A poet is an ongoing process, a lifetime at work, focused now on one problem, now on another. It is only the commentators whose living is made out of treating a poet as if he were a discrete set of unrelated books; whose vested interest lies in splitting, antagonizing, bringing into conflict, destroying this living entity. The Arena now, should be as wide as it can be and set against the whining ifs-and-buts of the little shepherds.

So Nathaniel Tarn in 1968. Thom Gunn’s note regarding Gary Snyder begins with a poke at critic M. L. Rosenthal who “devoted only one-third of a sentence” to Snyder’s work in The New Poets: “The reason for the near-omission is that he was so interested in grouping poets into schools and movements that he found it difficult to perceive talent existing outside them. The mistake is common, but it is still a shameful one, since most real talent cannot be so classified and thus it gets overlooked.” That, today, it’s the poets themselves that perpetuate the shame of such pigeonholing, ought to be reason for alarm and censure.

—

Virginia Woolf, out of The Waves (1931):

“Like” and “like” and “like”—but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing? . . . There is a square, there is an oblong. The players take the square and place it upon the oblong. They place it very accurately; they make a perfect dwelling-place. Very little is left outside. The structure is now visible; what is inchoate is here stated; we are not so various or so mean; we have made oblongs and stood them upon squares. This is our triumph; this is our consolation.

The meager triumph of reductionism. Regal consolatory diminishments. “We are not so various or so mean” akin to Owens’s “spectral singularities / taxidermied into a white / formalist indifference.”

—

Per contra (chancing the Pollyannaish, whereof any hint of altruism is seemingly fraught):

There is a beautiful action. It has an operative grace. It is when one, seeing some uneasy sleeper cold and without a cover, goes away, finds and brings a blanket, bends down, and covers the sleeper because the sleeper is a living being and is cold. He then returns to his work, forgetting that he has performed this small act of compassion. He will receive neither praise nor thanks. It does not matter who the sleeper may be. That is a beautiful action which is divine and human in posture and intention and self-forgetfulness.

Ethel Wilson, out of Swamp Angel (1954).

A Riff and a Bleat

Stéphane Mallarmé, c. 1896
(Photograph by Nadar)

A Riff

Half thinking I know what’s up, half knowing I think up what’s up. Fatigue of a sort. The sort in sors (Latin). John Aubrey knew that he “wanted” (meaning, lacked) “patience to go through Knotty Studies.” So he “tumultuarily stitcht up” what all he’d collected. “For I have not leisure to heighten my Stile.” That need to dodder into patience, its sere particularity, its refusal of mere ambient refuse. A need I “want.” The puncturing immediacy of a bird out the window, a blue jay, doing its astringent double-slash call, marks a break in the ongoing slurry of traffic. Call it: “Stanzas Ending with Bird Noise.” Lyn Hejinian (Oxota): “A word is not a point but a spot and prosody is a study of its motion . . .” Verbal presence is a glob. Unmathematical, excessive, inundatory the word, its globular stamp. The smeary word, its stain and capillarity. Michael Faraday’s towel left “hanging over the edge of a half-filled wash basin.” Writing the unintended puddle on the floor the next morning.

Somewhere in The Pound Era Kenner writes of “words ‘hung with pleasing wraiths of former masteries’” and labels it “Williams's phrase”—avers such “qualities the Objectivists sought to avoid.” Williams, out of In the American Grain (1925):

With Poe, words were not hung by usage with associations, the pleasing wraiths of former masteries, this is the sentimental trap-door to beginnings. With Poe words were figures; an old language truly, but one from which he carried over only the most elemental qualities to his new purpose . . . Sometimes he used words so playfully his sentences seem to fly away from sense, the destructive! with the conserving abandon, foreshadowed, of a Gertrude Stein . . .
      This was an impossible conception for the gluey imagination of his day. Constantly he labored to detach SOMETHING from the inchoate mass—That’s it:
      His concern, the apex of his immaculate attack, was to detach a “method” from the smear of common usage . . .

And yet, none go unworded, every human wraith and subjectivity burthened with it, the grease of what thinking (“sentences . . . fly away”). See Williams’s The Great American Novel (1923), Williams’s futile attempt to cut through, or to extract that “SOMETHING”: “The words take up the smell of the car. Petrol. Face powder, arm pits, food-grease in the hair, foul breath, clean musk. Words. Words cannot progress. There cannot be a novel.” I keep thinking of how, yesterday, reading a transcript of Susan Howe’s lecture “The Whispered Rush, Telepathy of Archives,” I got stopped by the marvelous phrase “Death, at the last was, was . . .” A tiny stammer in the reading of a few lines out of Henry James’s 1914 Notes of a Son and Brother:

. . . death, at the last, was dreadful to her; she would have given anything to live—and the image of this, which was to remain long with me, appeared so of the essence of tragedy that I was in the far-off aftertime to seek to lay the ghost by wrapping it, a particular occasion aiding in the beauty and dignity of art.

I read Howe’s “at the last was” as a kind of equivalence to “death,” a place where language itself becomes pure presence, or begins to exist only in the present tense. Is it in that wavering, in hesitance, in trepid gaffe (and in its obverse, intrepid onslaught and tumult and smear) that utterance is renewed, stripped of its slurry? Big claim for what is—“at the last was”—simply put, a “bibelot d’inanité sonore,” one way of translating “slip of the tongue.” Mallarmé, out of “Le Mystère dans les lettres” (1895):

The sentence may seem to stammer at first, hold back in a knot of incidental bits; then it multiplies, takes on order, and rises up in a noble harmony, wavering all the while in its knowing transpositions.
. . .
      Words rise up unaided and in ecstasy; many a facet reveals its infinite rarity and is precious to our minds. For our mind is the center of this hesitancy and oscillation; it sees words not in their usual order, but in projection (like the walls of a cave) so long as that mobility which is their principle lives on, that part of speech which is not spoken. Then quickly, before they die away, they all exchange their brilliancies from afar; or they may touch, and steal a furtive glance.

Or Hejinian again, out of that most furtive book, Oxota: “Experience is only indirectly responsible for words.”

—

A Bleat

In an era of catatonically modest squeaks and one-liners, of tediously re-retailed video “clips,” of continually burgeoning (apparently—I refuse to “dogfetch” or whatever it’s called, knowing all the while exactly what I “like”) network chatter, of “feeds” tumbling forth a highly selected archive in mimic-succession, I read Kenner (The Pound Era) as warning:

There is no substitute for critical tradition: a continuum of understanding, early commenced. Remy de Gourmont surmised that the Iliad discovered today in the ruins of Herculaneum “would produce only some archaeological sensations,” interesting exactly as is The Song of Roland, illustrative of some vanished civilization. Precisely because William Blake’s contemporaries did not know what to make of him, we do not know either, though critic after critic appeases our sense of obligation to his genius by reinventing him. Something analogous is true of Gerard Hopkins, of whom contemporary taste, except for a few correspondents, had no chance to make anything; consequently, it is more of an effort than it should be for us to make of him what we do. In the 1920’s, on the other hand, something was immediately made of Ulysses and The Waste Land, and our comfort with both works after 50 years, including our ease at allowing for their age, seems derivable from the fact that they have never been ignored.

Writ roughly forty years back. A reminder (to myself, amongst “you others”) to entangle with “the considerable deposits of the now”—howsomever wrongly, or doggedly.

Kidney

William Say, “Three Sections of Diseased Kidney,” 1827
(“Coloured mezzotint after Frederick Richard Say for Richard Bright”)

I went down by Cascadilla
Falls this
evening, the
stream below the falls,
and picked up a
handsized stone
kidney shaped, testicular, and

thought all its motions into it,
the 800 mph earth spin,
the 190-million-mile yearly
displacement around the sun,
the overriding
grand
haul
of the galaxy with the 30,000
mph of where
the sun’s going . . .

        —A. R. Ammons, out of “Cascadilla Falls” Uplands (1970)

—

PETRIFICATION of a Kidney.—When Father Harcourt suffered at Tyburne, and his bowells, etc. throwne into the fire, a butcher’s boy standing by was resolved to have a piece of his Kidney which was broyling in the fire. He burn’t his fingers much, but he got it; and one Roydon, a Brewer in Southwark, bought it, a kind of Presbyterian. The wonder is, ’tis now absolutely petrified. But ’twas not so hard when he first had it. It being alwayes carried in the pocket hardened by degrees, better then by the fire—like an Agate polished. I have seen it. He much values it.

        —John Aubrey, out of “William Harcourt”
        (Aubrey’s Brief Lives, edited by Oliver Lawson Dick, 1949)

—

. . . mark the sequel, Master Brook: I suffered the pangs of three several deaths; first, an intolerable fright, to be detected with a jealous rotten bell-wether; next, to be compassed, like a good bilbo, in the circumference of a peck, hilt to point, heel to head; and then, to be stopped in, like a strong distillation, with stinking clothes that fretted in their own grease: think of that,i—a man of my kidney,—think of that,—that am as subject to heat as butter; a man of continual dissolution and thaw: it was a miracle to scape suffocation. And in the height of this bath, when I was more than half stewed in grease, like a Dutch dish, to be thrown into the Thames, and cooled, glowing hot, in that surge, like a horse-shoe; think of that,—hissing hot,—think of that, Master Brook.

        —William Shakespeare, out of The Merry Wives of Windsor (1602)

—

                                                  . . . They found in there,
            in the human heart,
this tiny crucifix, this eye-sized figure
            of tissue and blood.
Here are the penknife, the scissors. Here are the towels
            they soaked the blood

up into, here the three kidney stones, the piece
            of lung in the shape
of a bird, here the story the hurry like so and like
            so, and the singing voices now that it’s noon . . .

        —Jorie Graham, out of “Eschatological Prayer” (The End of Beauty, 1987)

—

                                                . . . To doubt physics is to be
Self-ironical. Loaded with grace, I “fell through”
The headache system. The only truth is style is what
I was telling her—That feldspar causes fatigue
Like stage directions for a kid with one kidney, crestfallen
Or falsely upbeat, like on divorce weekends
With Out of Africa, the picture of the season . . .

        —Jeni Olin, out of “Meryl Streep”
        (Blue Collar Holiday & A Valentine to Frank O’Hara, 2005)

—

      Has not some ox closed its great and downy eye, that she might fix an orb of disquietude upon her lover? Some fin, in dark water ceased to wave, that she, with beckoning hand, might take some gallant prisoner?
      What rib could do that for itself which she has done? What kidney ever laid a nation’s dust, as lightly as she will lightly lay that nation’s dust, when that same kidney is relieved of its vain days of miring, by her reprieve?
      Did ever brain of ewe fling a noose of desire beyond the next green leaf, until she raised it to a cast that brought down the stars, or turned a knot or two of it to trickery and treason?

        —Djuna Barnes, out of Ryder (1928)

—

Oh, God, my kidneys and gall bladder, you’re cooking up stones: bezoar, calculus, calx!

Dear sweet God, let me fight your fire with flowers!

Give me the Torch-Wort, the Great Mullein, give me the Torch-Lilly, Flameflower . . .

. . . the feverfew will drive away fever . . .

        —Paul Metcalf, out of Louis the Torch (1983)

—

                                        Houille blanche,
Auto-chenille, destroy all bacteria in the kidney,
Invention-d’entités-plus-ou-moins-abstraits-
en-nombre-égal-aux-choses-à-expliquer . . .
      La Science ne peut pas y consister.   “J’ai
Obtenu une brulure” M. Curie, or some other scientist
“Qui m’a coûté six mois de guérison.”
              and continued his experiments.
Tropismes!   “We believe the attraction is chemical.”

        —Ezra Pound, out of “Canto XXIII” (A Draft of XXX Cantos, 1930)

—

There’s literally no end to it,
to what they can do.
The proprietary virus
is throughout thy body—
Bio-Catalysm is the way to go.
Buy into it, it’s thy only hope.
Thy money will percolate
right into thy foot,
no more worries, no more waiting for thy boat.
No more dreadin’ o’ the Tijuana steroids
because they put screw-worms in thy kidney.

        —Edward Dorn, out of “Proprietary Rights and Patented Germs”
        (Abhorrences, 1990)

—

. . . To weave Jerusalem a Body repugnant to the Lamb.

Hyle on East Moor, in rocky Derbyshire, rav’d to the Moon
For Gwendolen: she took up in bitter tears his anguishd heart,
That apparent to all in Eternity, glows like the Sun in the breast:
She hid it in his ribs & back: she hid his tongue with teeth
In terrible convulsions pitying & gratified drunk with pity,
Glowing with loveliness before him, becoming apparent
According to his changes: she roll’d his kidneys round
Into two irregular forms: and looking on Albion’s dread Tree,
She wove two vessels of seed, beautiful as Skiddaw's snow;
Giving them bends of self interest & selfish natural virtue:

She hid them in his loins; raving he ran among the rocks,
Compelld into a shape of Moral Virtue against the Lamb.
The invisible lovely one giving him a form according to
His Law a form against the Lamb of God opposd to Mercy
And playing in the thunderous Loom in sweet intoxication . . .

        —William Blake, out of Jerusalem (1804)

—

Deaths, causes: tuberculosis, syphilis, dysentery, scarlet fever and streptococcal
sore throat, diptheria, whooping cough, meningococcal infections, acute
poliomyelitis, measles, malignant neoplasms, leukemia and aleukemia, benign
neoplasms, asthma, diabetes, anemias, meningitis, cardiovascular-tenal diseases,
narcolepsy, influenza and pneumonia, bronchitis, other broncho-pulmonix
diseases, ulcer of stomach and duodenum, appendicitis, hernia and intestinal
obstruction, gastritis, duodenitis, enteritis, and colitis, cirrhosis of liver,
acute nephritis, infections of kidney, hyperplasis of prostrate, deliveries and
complications of pregnancy, childbirth, and the puerperium, abortion, congenital
malformations, birth injuries, postnatal asphyxia, infections of newborn,
symptoms, senility, and ill-defined conditions, motor vehicle accidents, falls,
burns, drowning, railroad accidents, firearms accidents, poison gases, other
poisons, suicide, homicide.

        —Anne Waldman and Ted Berrigan, out of Memorial Day (1971)

—

Hit you unless you come over to our table. All
I took was just a little to get me through the
evening, lentils, don’t they have Valo Shampoo
too, and you sit with your legs crossed and can’t

TALK for two hours, WHAT??, who’s heard from Michael
Rumaker, someone ought to write, cheese with cara-
way seeds, chutney, I LIKE DUMB PEOPLE—Jack Spicer,
macaroni and tuna-fish, kidney stew, waffles butter,
maple syrup, everyone was so Hungover and Joanne ate
FIVE pancakes for breakfast, it made me Sick, cream
of barley soup, I wouldn’t care so much if he just
weren’t my roommate, dried lemon peel, Navy beans,
prunes, orange juice, watermelon, cod liver oil,
I’m never going to North Beach again, candied sweet
potatoes, mashed potatoes, yams, cucumbers, You can
throw book ends at Harold Dull but you can’t get
away with throwing them at me POW!

        —Joanne Kyger, out of “Poem for the Stomach Lined with Pills” (c. 1958)

—

. . . I sent Mr. Qwock some money last spring, with a request for some erudite teas. It appears that, when this letter reached Canton, he had left on a holiday in Central China, or in the moon, or wherever it is that learned Chinese go in the summer time. But on his return to his studies in the autumn he wrote to me and said that he had written to one of his uncles, who lives in Wang-Pang-Woo-Poo- Woof-Woof-Woof, and has been in the tea business for hundreds of generations. I have no doubt that in due course I shall receive from Mr. Qwock enough tea to wreck my last kidney, and with it some very peculiar other things, because I asked him to send me the sort of things that the learned Chinese drink with that sort of tea.

        —Wallace Stevens, out of a letter to James A. Powers (17 December 1935)

—

      Oblivious of my misdoubts, I fell under the spell of these Russians who considered all Americans lackeys dozing over their ulcerated middle-class newspapers, having nothing in their minds but the treacle and rot of motion pictures. After several weeks one who had been to a czarist military academy before the revolution lashed me with this observation: “Capitalism wears a man out before his twenty-fifth year. You’re as unhealthy-looking as a toad.”
      His remark enfeebled me and I told him I had long ago dried up, and my legs were weak, but I was only an unmonied street Arab in the Amercan society. “You can find me in any sough, alley, spittle, or just dig me out of a cemetery. A muckhill orphan, I read, and swallow oil of niter or a dram of hellebore to purge a halfpenny of the petit-bourgeois in me. Sometimes I drink barley water to clear my kidneys so that I can think. Now and then I catch a capitalistic cold, but after I have come to my working-class senses I cough up the phlegm of any social ambitions I have. Believe me, I own nothing, am nothing and will never be anything but a miserable glut of nothing.”

        —Edward Dahlberg, out of The Confessions of Edward Dahlberg (1971)

—

      To bring the white of a whale’s eye made hard by boiling.
      Whether the country be plane or mountainous: how the tides to ours: whether it raineth often, thundereth and lighteneth often: what winds most common.
      What quantity of salt a gallon or any other greater measure of sea water affordeth, if taken up at flowing water.
      What use they make of the stones or seed of whales.
      To bring the bladder of a whale or morse, cleansed and dried so that it may be blown up.
      The bigness of the stones and kidneys of whales, if not too big, to bring one dried, or one of a sea horse.

        —Sir Thomas Browne, out of “Of Greenland”
        “These queries were in all probability instruction for some friend, by whom
        Browne was desirous of obtaining information respecting Greenland.”

—

It is Swedenborg’s theory, that every organ is made up of homogeneous particles; or, as it is sometimes expressed, every whole is made of similars; that is, the lungs are composed of infinitely small lungs; the liver, of infinitely small livers; the kidney, of little kidneys, etc. Following this analogy, if any man is found to carry with him the power and affections of vast numbers, if Napoleon is France, if Napoleon is Europe, it is because the people whom he sways are little Napoleons.

        —Ralph Waldo Emerson, out of “Napoleon; or, The Man of the World”
        (Representative Men, 1850)

—

My only grudge against nature was that I could not turn my Lolita inside out and apply voracious lips to her young matrix, her unknown heart, her nacreous liver, the sea-grapes of her lungs, her comely twin kidneys.

        —Vladimir Nabokov, out of Lolita (1955)

—

Authors and actors and artists and such
Never know nothing, and never know much.
Sculptors and singers and those of their kidney
Tell their affairs from Seattle to Sydney.
Playwrights and poets and such horse’s necks,
Start off from anywhere, end up at sex . . .

        —Dorothy Parker, out of “Bohemia” (Sunset Gun, 1928)

—

I suspect impurities adhere to their substance. I think acidity weakens the spleen, sugar expands the kidney, grief sours the lung and salts encrust the heart. I observe quick-silver trembling in the aludel. I watch menacing seeds sprout. And there is strange emptiness behind the moon.

        —Evan S. Connell, out of Alchymic Journals (2006)

—

The morning is past and the sun remains but the sunlight is brighter. The study of painting is exhausting and the sea always gets larger—here I quote Tintoretto. Twigs are the many sounds of light. Could the prairie be this sea—for love. What I felt was that figs resemble kidneys.

        —Lyn Hejinian, out of My Life (1980 / 1987)
        “The coffee / drinkers answered / ecstatically”

—

Wednesday 13th June [11th]. . . . My brothers and I again went upon the water, and returned to dinner. We landed upon the island where I saw the whitest hawthorn I have seen this year, the generality of hawthorns are bloomless. I saw wild roses in the hedges. Wm. and John went to the pike floats. They brought in two pikes. I sowed kidney beans and spinnach. A cold evening. Molly stuck the peas. I weeded a little. Did not walk.

        —Dorothy Wordsworth, out of The Grasmere Journals (11 June 1800)

—

      If Heav’ns bright Torches, from Earths kedneys sup
Some somewhat drie and heatfull Vapours up,
Th’ambitious lightning of their nimble Fire
Would sodainly neere th’Azure Cirques aspire:
But scarce so soone their fuming crest hath raught,
Or toucht the Coldnes of the middle Vault,
And felt what force their mortall Enemie,
In Garrison keeps there continually:
When downe againe, towards their Dam the beare,
Holpe by the waight which they have drawn from her:
But in the instant, to their aide arives
Another new heat, which their heart revives . . .

        —Guillaume de Salluste, Sieur du Bartas, out of The Divine Weeks and Works (1604),
        translated by Joshua Sylvester

—

And then we have one unending, undeviating succession of junketings, in which “devilled kidneys” are never by any accident found wanting. The unction and pertinacity with which the author discusses what he chooses to denominate “devilled kidneys” are indeed edifying, to say no more. The truth is, that drinking, telling anecdotes, and devouring “devilled kidneys” may be considered as the sum total, as the thesis of the book.

        —Edgar Allan Poe, out of “Charles Lever”
        A review of “Charles O’Malley, the Irish Dragoon.
        By Harry Lorrequer. With Forty Illustrations by Phiz.”
        (Graham’s Magazine, 1842)

—

You say that everything is very simple and interesting
it makes me feel very wistful, like reading a great Russian novel does
I am terribly bored
sometimes it is like seeing a bad movie
other days, more often, it’s like having an acute disease of the kidney
god knows it has nothing to do with the heart . . .

        —Frank O’Hara, out of “Yesterday Down at the Canal” (1961)

—

no fool merely slow and the day comes we come to the day when stabbed in the arse now an open wound instead of the cry a brief murmur done it at last

with the handle of the opener as with a pestle bang on the right kidney handier than the other from where I lie cry thump on skull silence brief rest jab in arse unintelligible murmur bang on kidney signifying louder once and for all cry thump on skull silence brief rest . . .

        —Samuel Beckett, out of How It Is (1964)

Susan Howe’s Pierce-Arrow (Stray Notes)

Susan Howe

Re-read: Susan Howe’s Pierce-Arrow (1999). Out of “Arisbe” (name of Charles S.—“I am variously listed in print as Charles Santiago Peirce, Charles Saunders Peirce, and Charles Sanders Peirce. Under the circumstances a noncommital S. suits me best”—Peirce’s property located just north of Milford, Pa., off U.S. 6—Grand Army of the Republic Highway. Found unexpectedly one morning early spring, 1995, en route to who knows where . . .)*:

While outlining the Pragmatic Principle in the North American Review, October (1871), he first coined the term pragmatism, but it went unrecognized or unacknowledged until William James publicly used the word in a lecture at Berkeley in 1898, titled “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results.” James said he was presenting “the principle of Peirce, the principle of pragmatism.” Their ideas on the definition and principle were never identical. In 1903, after attending Peirce’s Lowell Lectures, James referred to the current thought of his friend as “—flashes of light relieved against Cimmerian darkness.” In 1905, Peirce, in a paper titled “What Pragmatism Is,” announced the birth of the word pragmaticism, a name “which is ugly enough to keep it safe from kidnappers.”**

Footnotes. Thus is one caught—Lucky Pierre style?—between two competing writing sites, bifurcated text, bicameral mind. Peirce, somewhere: the “field of may-be.” Or Howe (out of “The Leisure of the Theory Class”), pertinently:

“Whatever my thumb rests on

I shall take as having reference

to my work.” His thumb hit the

words “What a work it is likely

to turn out! Let me begin it.”


1846—Dickens went to Lausanne

he carried in his book-box

a copy of Tristram Shandy

G. W. Garrod calls Sterne’s book

the sors shandeana for Dombey

Texts fueling texts, be it ever thus. So one makes a stab at recovery, so one aligns the echoes. Howe, nudging forth a scant “peryll of apprehending” (ratifying one’s sense of receiving):

Trench letters do get used

eventually for poetry you

long history of nihilism

Get ready to advance don’t

everyone rattle camouflage

as if we are nothing only

company dive-bomb anxiety

A few persistent “islands”

of half inaudible whispers

jabbing the radioman Lethe

(Spicerean hints un peu partout: I think of “These letters are to be as temporary as our poetry is to be permanent” in one of the letters in After Lorca.) “Get ready to advance don’t” a kind of humming stasis, the propulsory engine stopped and unrelenting. Peirce himself, in a letter (quoted in Joseph Brent’s Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life) in 1904 to Francis Russell writing to say:

. . . that I am by nature most inaccurate, that I am quite exceptional for almost complete deficiency of imaginative power, and whatever I amount to is due to two things, first, a perseverance like that of a wasp in a bottle & 2nd to the happy accident that I early hit upon a METHOD of thinking, which any intelligent person could master, and which I am so far from having exhausted it that I leave it about where I found it,—a great reservoir from which ideas of a certain kind might be drawn for many generations . . .

Howe, quoting Peirce:

MS 1606: One of my earliest recollections is of hearing Emerson deliver his address on Nature and I think on that same day Longfellow’s Psalm of Life was recited. So we were within hearing of the Transcendentalists, though not among them. I remember when I was a child going upon an hour’s railway journey with Margaret Fuller, who had with her a book called the Imp in the Bottle.

Identity of the book unascertained. Tant mieux. “In poetry all things seem to touch so they are.”

* Howe:

. . . for one thousand dollars they acquired Thomas Quick’s 140-acre farm on the western bank of the Delaware River (“the wildest county of the Northern States”) two and a half miles from Milford, Pike County, Pennsylvania, seven miles below Port Jervis, New York. They covered the outer walls of Quick’s original farmhouse with shingles in the then fashionable New England “summer cottage” style and added floors and rooms, including a library for his large book collection. Max Fisch says the Peirces probably called their property “Arisbe” after a city in Troas, the ancient colony of Miletus, the home of the early Greek philosophers, Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes, who first searched for the Archē, the Principle, the first of things. I think Peirce named the house for Homer’s “brilliant” or “shining” Arisbe.
      Arisbe mark of mortality.

      Next Teuthras’ Son distain’d the Sands with Blood,
Axylus, hospitable, rich and good:
In fair Arisba’s Walls (his native Place)
He held his Seat; a Friend to Human Race.
Fast by the Road, his ever-open Door
Oblig’d the Wealthy, and reliev’d the Poor.
To stern Tydides now he falls a Prey,
No Friend to guard him in the dreadful Day!
Breathless the good Man fell, and by his side
His faithful Servant, old Calesius dy’d. [Iliad, VI.15-24]

Alexander Pope was 25 when in spring 1714 economic necessity pushed him to begin the ambitious project of translating Homer into up-to-date English. As Roman Catholics he and his parents were unable to invest money easily, and their annuities from French rentes they depended on were in danger of default. The translation was to be published by subscription in the manner of Dryden’s Virgil. Proposals were issued, the reaction was enthusiastic; 652 sets were reserved in advance. King George I and the Prince of Wales were among the subscribers. Only when he was sure of making a profit did Pope begin this work that for the next five years became his obsession. The first volume, containing the first four volumes of the Iliad of Homer, with a Preface, Essay, and Observations, printed by W. Bowyer for Bernard Lintot between the Temple-Gates, was delivered to subscribers in 1715 and established his reputation.

That a redoubtably homely hodge-podge: economy, geography, architecture, naming, the Iliad, Pope, religion, literary upstartism. The pragmatic text. (James: “Pragmatism is uncomfortable away from facts. . . . The pragmatist clings to facts and concreteness, observes truth at its work in particular cases . . .” Howe: “What is the secret nature of fact? What is the fact that is present to you now? . . . Let y be y you cannot gasp at blue. . . . Originality is in being such as thus this being is.”)

** Recalling another percipient (and contested) moment of naming in the annals of American pragmatism—that of Frank O’Hara’s “Personism.” (Isn’t William James’s insisting that “the one thing that has counted so far in philosophy is that a man should see things, see them straight in his own peculiar way, and be dissatisfied with any opposite way of seeing them” directly akin to “You just go on your nerve”?) Joe LeSueur, out of “Four Apartments” (1968):

      One night after dinner—the manuscript carries the date September 3, 1959—Frank mentioned that Don Allen was coming by for a piece on poetics he’d promised to write for Don’s anthology, New American Poetry. [LeSueur’s footnote: As it turned out, Don eventually used another statement by Frank in his anthology, and “Personism” first appeared in LeRoi Jones’ magazine Yūgen.] It was already long overdue, and he hadn’t so much as jotted down an idea, though the piece must have been in the back of his mind for weeks. He poured himself a bourbon and water, thought a moment, then went quickly to the typewriter. I asked him if he wanted me to turn off the radio. “No, turn it up,” he said. “They’re playing Rachmaninoff’s Third next.” I said, “But you might end up writing another poem to Rachmaninoff.” He liked that idea. “If only I could be so lucky,” he said. Then the concerto began and Frank was off. Less than an hour later—in fact, about the time it took for the concerto—he got up from the typewriter and let me see what he’d written. “Do you think it’s too silly?” he said when I’d finished reading it. “No, I think it’s great,” I said. The only thing I didn’t like or wasn’t sure of, I told him, was the title, which was “Personalism: A Manifesto.” “Personalism is the name of a dopey philosophy founded in Southern California,” I explained. “Oh, then I’ll call it ‘Personism,’” he said quickly. “That’s better anyway.”

(How gluey LeSueur’s prose on the heels of Howe’s, feet dragging through molasses with all the obstinacy of any compleatist . . .)

Arisbe, c. 1907

What, what, what . . .

Wallace Stevens, Letter to William Carlos Williams, 22 January 1942

Raking at the scree of one’s own critical intransigence, assembling musts for an outing undefined. Tired of the explicatory push, tired of the push, period. A cardinal going what, what, what under the expiring disc of sun. To bottle the wild gaseous blanche of the all, its fizz and finagle, in lieu of these glum florilegiums consigned at random to their boxes. (See Wallace Stevens, say, “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”: “The bees came booming as if they had never gone, / As if hyacinths had never gone. We say / This changes and that changes. Thus the constant // Violets, doves, girls, bees and hyacinths / Are inconstant objects of inconstant cause / In a universe of inconstancy . . .”) Robert Duncan, in a lecture* delivered 29 March 1979 (“this one was, and is, proposed to address the, the world, felt as a presence”—and, against the incipient shrug of the nod obvious literalists, adding—“gods are felt as presences”). Of poetry:

In its main drive it makes us feel presence because typically it follows a rhythm [. . .] it follows sound. It may—rhyme, almost, mostly means: do we rhyme at the end of the line—even now, when people think of eschewing rhyme. But the most important thing of rhyme is a feeling of a measure and a measure that’s different from speech and creates what Aristotle found in Parmenides—a sort of hypnagogic state—so he disqualified it as philosophy. And Pound himself unable to focus on what it was saying, because it was in a kind of hypnotized state. But my point would be that poetry certainly is what we feel—what we begin to feel—and then how we think [. . .] the primary ground of it is—must be—the changes taking place in our own bodies when we are moved out of the rhythms of our speech and exited by a music moving through the language.

Duncan rarely talks about Stevens. Though there is the piece called “Structure of Rime XXVIII: In Memoriam Wallace Stevens” with its lines: “Here and now only I from this life can come forward to impersonate the necessity of his being here. His, the horizon. His, the perspectives and outlines. His, the regulation of the relevant. I will willingly assume his numbers among my own.” (Somewhat recalling Pound’s “A Pact”: “I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman— / . . . / We have one sap and one root— / Let there be commerce between us.”) In The H. D. Book Duncan includes Stevens—with Marianne Moore and T. S. Eliot—in “that company” who “remain within the rational imagination and do not suffer from the creative disorders of primitive mind, the shamanistic ecstasies and the going ‘after strange gods.’” Or, he allies Stevens with Eliot, two who “preserve throughout a melodious poetic respectability, eminently sane in their restriction of poetic meaning to the bounds of the literary, of symbol and metaphor, but at the cost of avoiding facts and ideas that might disturb.” No “bold-face emphatic,” no “rant,” no “caricature of voice.” Where, though, is found a more viscous hypnagogy of “god-delivered” musics? Hugh Kenner, who, too, assigns Stevens an implausible mild purgatory (“Stevens, the exotic,” he says, and calls Stevens’s “an Edward Lear poetic, pushed toward all limits”), points nevertheless to lines out of “Analysis of a Theme”:

. . . There being no subconscious place,
Only Indyterranean
Resemblances

Of place: time’s haggard mongrels.
Yet in time’s middle deep,
In its abstract motion,

Its immaterial monsters move,
Without physical pedantry
Or any name.

Invisible, they move and are,
Not speaking worms, nor birds
Of mutable plume,

Pure coruscations, that lie beyond
The imagination, intact
And unattained,

Even in Paris, in the Gardens
Of Acclimatization,
On a holiday.

The knowledge of bright-ethered things
Bears us toward time, on its
Perfective wings.

We enjoy the ithy oonts and long-haired
Plomets, as the Herr Gott
Enjoys his comets.

Music taut and variegated, and willing to fleer off into moue, unencumbered by the age. The “gods . . . felt as presences” of no more (or less) import than any other “bright-ethered” thing. Duncan, again: “the primary ground of it is—must be—the changes taking place in our own bodies when we are moved out of the rhythms of our speech and exited by a music moving through the language.” Kenner (making spindly alliances again, nursery rhyming it into simplicity):

      Two boys went to Harvard. One stayed home afterward, and became an insurance executive. The other went abroad, and became a banker and publisher. Both wrote poetry.
      Two boys went to Penn. One stayed home afterward and became a physician. The other went abroad, and became Ezra Pound.
      Stevens: Eliot. Williams: Pound. It is as neat as a laboratory experiment. And Williams, the intensely local, was often in Europe, whereas Stevens, the exotic, never went there.
      One evening on the Chestnut Ward TV Ezra Pound heard of Stevens’s death. “Poetry owes him a memorial issue,” was his immediate response; and would someone, preferably ol Doc Wms, take the occasion to say what it was that Wallace Stevens’s work had been all about? The request was passed on to Williams, and he wrote a feeling obituary** but did not venture to answer the question. Of the four, Stevens alone concerned himself not at all with a paideuma . . .

Paideuma (Pound): “the tangle or complex of the inrooted ideas of any period.” A vortex. “And”—Kenner—“what Frobenius meant by a paideuma—a people’s whole congeries of patterned energies, from their ‘ideas’ down to the things they know in their bones, not a Zeitgeistbefore which minds are passive . . .” Isn’t a paideuma no more than what Stevens would call a “sufficing fiction”? Out of “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” the heroics of Canon Aspirin when “normal things had yawned themselves away”:

The nothingness was a nakedness, a point,

Beyond which fact could not progress as fact.
Thereon the learning of the man conceived
Once more night’s pale illuminations, gold

Beneath, far underneath, the surface of
His eye and audible in the mountain of
His ear, the very material of his mind.

. . .

The nothingness was a nakedness, a point

Beyond which thought could not progress as thought.
He had to choose. But it was not a choice
Between excluding things. It was not a choice

Between, but of. He chose to include the things
That in each other are included, the whole,
The complicate, the amassing harmony.

Thus the confederacies of music, thus the wild gaseous blanche . . .

* See Duncan’s Charles Olson Memorial Lecture, edited by Ammiel Alcalay, Meira Levinson, Bradley Lubin, Megan Paslawski, Kyle Waugh and Rachael Wilson. One of the Lost & Found pamphlets in Series II of the Poetics Document Initiative.

** Williams, out of “Wallace Stevens” (1956): “We were of the same approximate age. Both of us could be sticking our thumbs to our noses at the world with about the same gusto and regretting it afterward as contritely—as would be the choice, say, of Villon had we spoken our minds and hearts. We both sought, as Villon did, mastery in the difficult art of the poem. It is at the contempt of the world for that, that we would be really thumbing our noses.” The “fleer off into moue, unencumbered by the age . . .”

“Nat Tate” / “Frank O’Hara”

Nat Tate, “Bridge No. 122,” c. 1952

Read: British novelist William Boyd’s minor hoax monograph Nat Tate: An American Artist, 1928-1960 (21 Publishing Ltd., 1998). Story of Nathwell Tate: who’d “executed in the early 1950s” a “once legendary, now almost entirely forgotten series of drawings inspired by Hart Crane’s great poem, The Bridge”:

All the drawings in this series—and it was reputed to run eventually to over 200—were of similar format: at the top was the boldly stylized representation of a bridge, sometimes a tangle of girders, sometimes a simple arc, and on the bottom two thirds or half of the page was accumulated a sort of clutter or litter—slashing ink strokes, or furious cross-hatching, occasional half-representational figures, sometimes obscenely graffito-like, sometimes finely and carefully drawn, or lettering, or pasted letters, illustrations torn from magazines, skilfully juxtaposed collages in a style reminiscent of Kurt Schwitters. ‘I like bridges,’ Nat Tate once told an acquaintance, ‘so strong, so simple—but imagine what flows in the river underneath.’

(Pointed and improbable drollery in the Cedar Tavern: “‘That Crane fellow should charge you a commission,’ Franz Kline once jokingly observed to Nat when he later became a succès fou. ‘Hart is dead,’ Nat replied, flatly, ‘so it doesn’t matter.’ Kline denied this heatedly and fiercely until he was advised they were talking about Hart—not Art.”) Tate: who—orphaned early—’d grown up the adopted son of one Peter Barkasian, retired (“aged 36”) paper company (“Albany Paper Mills”) heir, in the rebuilt “summer house, Windrose, on the north fork of Long Island” (“loosely modeled on the Petit Trianon”); who’d studied painting in Provincetown “for the four summers of 1947-51 . . . under the eccentric but vigorously modern tutelage of Hans Hofmann”; who’d hung work—with “Barnett Newman, Lee Krasner, Todd Heuber and Adolf Gottlieb”—in a 1952 exhibit at a co-op gallery called Aperto run by a woman named Janet Felzer (1922-1977) who “went everywhere with an ill-disciplined, yapping Norwich terrier she called Pablo.” Felzer’s discovery of Nat Tate occurs whilst “driving back from Long Island to New York—she had been weekending in Southampton—with the poet and critic Frank O’Hara”:

They stopped for a drink in Islip and, killing some time, wandered into a local gallery there, which happened to be run by a friend of Peter Barkasian (from whom Barkasian had bought two Winslow Homer watercolours, it seemed). Half a dozen of Nat Tate’s Bridge drawings were hung in a back room.

Boyd: “The fact that Felzer was with Frank O’Hara, himself a poet (and an admirer of Crane’s work), seems to have consolidated her instinctive enthusiasm for the drawings.” Boyd, wholly overreaching, one thinks—is it possible to assess the hoax-worthiness of a hoax uncovered?—in a later portrayal of O’Hara (complete with “uncollected poem”):

For Nat Tate, Frank O’Hara remained a mentor-figure and friend. It is not clear if they were ever lovers (O’Hara was living with Joe LeSueur from 1955) but the relationship took on more professional dimensions when O’Hara, as curator, selected two of the White Building paintings for the 4th San Paolo Bienal in 1957. There is an uncollected poem O’Hara wrote around that time called What if we hadn’t had such great names? that captures some of the flavour of those heady days in the ’50s, when the art world looked to New York for its inspiration, and the city’s artists, it seemed, could do no wrong.

What if we hadn’t had such great names?
What if we had been called
Gilbert Kline, Jonathan Pollock, Cyril
O’Hara, Jennifer Krasner, Timothy Rivers,
Philip Tate? . . .
We were lucky people, lucky to be living
then and in NYC. Quelle chance! Lucky
(watch out posterity, here we come!)
that we had such great names.

Hubris of the giddy concocter. (One must recall: Boyd’s intended audience composed of art world citoyens et citoyennes of the pre-millennial glut.) If O’Hara’s poem is witlessly unconvincing, there is nevertheless in Boyd’s book a lovely allegory of art-making at its most sterile, work deliberately and formally cut off from life, the Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox (one recalls the puny exercises of homophonic translation). None of O’Hara’s being “mainly preoccupied by the world as I experience it” here. Boyd, quoting the journal of Logan Mountstuart (1905-1996), another of the conveniently dead.* He’s witnessing Tate’s painting of one of the Third Panel Triptychs, unavoidable period props in place:

He was swigging direct from a Jack Daniel’s bottle. He was working on a triptych and the final panel was primed and ready on the big easel. We listened to music (Scriabin, I think) and talked aimlessly about the forthcoming trip to France and Italy—where he should go, who he should see. Nat seemed to be waiting to reach a certain plateau of drunkenness, seemed to be waiting for the booze to trigger the precise moment. Suddenly he threw the dust sheets off the other two completed panels. There was, first, a nude, an orthodox odalisque, more yellow than flesh toned, and then, in the second panel, another version of it, more stylised and crudely flashy—very sub-de Kooning. Nat stood there staring at the two panels, drinking, and then literally attacked the big canvas with a wide brush and tubes of cadmium yellow, laying on great swathes of colour. He seemed quite deranged to me. I left after an hour with my still life and he was still at it, rubbing off most of what he had done with a rag then going hard at it again, this time with black and green.

Cartoon maneuvers in Abstract-Expressionist land. Boyd, winsomely explaining the Third Panel Triptychs: “purported copies of the first two panels which were more orthodoxly representational, and which explains their run-of-the-mill figurative titles—Sag Harbour Sunset, Still life with Baseball Mitt, Yellow Nude, Portrait of K (possibly Kenneth Koch). When the third panel was completed to his satisfaction, Nat destroyed the other two—thus erasing the sources and breaking the causal chain forever.” The Koch afterthought: faux-naïf pricelessness.

Tate’s story ends in the only way conceivable: destroyed paintings, presumed drowning (Staten Island ferry: “the ship was midway between the Statue of Liberty and the Military Ocean Terminal at Bayonne, heading for the New Jersey shore and roughly in the direction of Union Beach”), body unrecovered. In Tate’s empty studio: “one large canvas placed against the wall, obviously recently started, a crosshatched mass of bruised blues, purples and blacks. Its title Orizaba / Return to Union Beach was scrawled on the back . . .”

* A note in the Tate monograph reads: “Logan Mountstuart: The Intimate Journals, edited by William Boyd, will be published in September 1999.” In 2002, Boyd’s novel Any Human Heart: The Intimate Journals of Logan Mountstuart appeared (with some of the Nat Tate material included.)

Nat Tate, “Portrait of K,” 1958

Pebble bis

Eliot Porter, “Lichens on River Stones, Iceland,” 1972

      God loves from Whole to Parts: But human ſoul
Muſt riſe from Individual to the Whole.
Self-love but ſerves the virtuous mind to wake,
As the ſmall pebble ſtirs the peaceful lake;
The centre mov’d, a circle ſtrait ſucceeds,
Another ſtill, and ſtill another ſpreads;
Friend, parent, neighbour, firſt it will embrace;
His country next; and next all human race;
Wide and more wide, th’ o’erflowings of the mind
Take ev’ry creature in, of ev’ry kind . . .

        —Alexander Pope, out of An Essay on Man (1734)

—

      If, then, to meanest mariners, and renegades and castaways, I shall hereafter ascribe high qualities, though dark; weave round them tragic graces; if even the most mournful, perchance the most abased, among them all, shall at times lift himself to the exalted mounts; if I shall touch that workman’s arm with some ethereal light; if I shall spread a rainbow over his disastrous set of sun; then against all mortal critics bear me out in it, thou just Spirit of Equality, which hast spread one royal mantle of humanity over all my kind! Bear me out in it, thou great democratic God! who didst not refuse to the swart convict, Bunyan, the pale, poetic pearl; Thou who didst clothe with doubly hammered leaves of finest gold, the stumped and paupered arm of old Cervantes; Thou who didst pick up Andrew Jackson from the pebbles; who didst hurl him upon a war-horse; who didst thunder him higher than a throne! Thou who, in all Thy mighty, earthly marchings, ever cullest Thy selectest champions from the kingly commons; bear me out in it, O God!

        —Herman Melville, out of Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851)

—

Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægæan, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery . . .

        —Matthew Arnold, out of “Dover Beach” (1867)

—

Brag, sweet tenor bull,
descant on Rawthey’s madrigal,
each pebble its part
for the fells’ late spring.
Dance tiptoe, bull,
black against may.
Ridiculous and lovely
chase hurdling shadows
morning into noon.
May on the bull’s hide
and through the dale
furrows fill with may,
paving the slowworm’s way.

A mason times his mallet
to a lark’s twitter,
listening while the marble rests,
lays his rule
at a letter’s edge,
fingertips checking,
till the stone spells a name
naming none,
a man abolished.
Painful lark, labouring to rise!
The solemn mallet says:
In the grave’s slot
he lies. We rot.

        —Basil Bunting, out of Briggflatts: An Autobiography (1966)

—

At one end of the room was a big cast iron stove that Hélène came in and filled with a rattle, and in one corner of the room was a large table on which were horseshoe nails and pebbles and little pipe cigarette holders which one looked at curiously but did not touch, but which turned out later to be accumulations from the pockets of Picasso and Gertrude Stein.

        —Gertrude Stein, out of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933)

—

      “An onion is an onion is an onion,” Robert Jordan said cheerily and, he thought, a stone is a stein is a rock is a boulder is a pebble.
      “Rinse thy mouth with wine,” Agustín said. “Thou art very rare, Inglés. There is great difference between thee and the last dynamiter who worked with us.”
      “There is one great difference.”
      “Tell it to me.”
      “I am alive and he is dead,” Robert Jordan said.

        —Ernest Hemingway, out of For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)

—

In Franconia, 1476, a base illiterate fellow took upon him to be a prophet, and preach, John Beheim by name, a neatherd at Nicholhausen, he seduced 30,000 persons, and was taken by the commonalty to be a most holy man, come from heaven. “Tradesmen left their shops, women their distaffs, servants ran from their masters, children from their parents, scholars left their tutors, all to hear him, some for novelty, some for zeal. He was burnt at last by the Bishop of Wartzburg, and so he and his heresy vanished together.” How many such impostors, false prophets, have lived in every king’s reign? what chronicles will not afford such examples? that as so many ignes fatui, have led men out of the way, terrified some, deluded others, that are apt to be carried about by the blast of every wind, a rude inconstant multitude, a silly company of poor souls, that follow all, and are cluttered together like so many pebbles in a tide.

        —Robert Burton, out of The Anatomy of Melancholy (1652)

—

At one point something shot across the moist pebbles of the path, causing Mrs. Bridgewater to scream. “Was that an eft?” she asked.
      “Why yes,” Memmo said, “it was.”

        —John Ashbery and James Schuyler, out of A Nest of Ninnies (1969)

—

      Pebbles.—The millers in our country use to putt a black pebble under the pinne of ye axis of the mill-wheele, to keep the brasse underneath from wearing; and they doe find by experience, that nothing doth weare so long as that. The bakers take a certain pebble, which they putt in the vaulture of their oven, which they call the warning-stone: for when that is white the oven is hot. . . .
      There was a time when all pebbles were liquid. Wee find them all ovalish. How should this come to passe? As for salts, some shoot cubicall, some hexagonall. Why might there not be a time, when these pebbles were making in embryone (in fieri), for such a shooting as falls into an ovalish figure?
      Pebbles doe breake according to the length of the greatest diameter: but those wee doe find broken in the earth are broken according to their shortest diameter. I have broken above an hundred of them, to try to have one broken at the shortest diameter, to save the charge and paines of grinding them for molers to grind colours for limming; and they all brake the long way as aforsayd.

        —John Aubrey, out of The Naturall Historie of Wiltshire (c. 1690-1)

—

      “You’re awfully inconsistent, Mr. Mallet, you know,” she said.
      “Oh, nothing so makes for good relations as inconsistency.”
      “Not of your elaborate kind. That first day we were in Saint Peter’s you said things that inspired me. You bade me plunge into all this. I was all ready; I only wanted a little push; you gave me a great one; here I am up to my neck! And now, instead of helping me to swim, you stand on the shore—the shore of superior information—and fling pebbles at me!”
      “Pebbles, my dear young lady? They’re life-preservers . . .”

        —Henry James, out of Roderick Hudson (1875)

—

pebble, n.
(pippel, pyppel, paple, pepble, peple, pepulle, pupel, pibple, poppell, pypple, pipple)

Origin uncertain . . . may be imitative . . . arising either from the sound pebbles make when walked upon or from the association of pebbles with flowing water . . . compare Frisian babbel-stientsjes little round stones washed up at the beach . . . (babbelje = to babble)

        —Out of the Oxford English Dictionary, vaguely

—

Who knew what was real? Who knew what was unreal or where one ended and the other began or whether, indeed, there was only the illusion? Or if one pebble was real in all the universe where pebbles rolled and roared on lonely shores, then who would know which pebble it was where all pebbles rolled and roared, sometimes splashed upon by light, light with its scintillations, stars burning like straws, so much being forever in darkness sweeping like a wave over him, and if one whisper was true, then who would know which whisper it was where all were whispering? Even the shrouds of the old boats which had foundered on these thinning shoals whispered as if they might sail again although they sailed not—only this world sailed. It pitched and rolled.

        —Marguerite Young, out of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling (1965)

—

O yes I wish her well. Let her come on
to Henry’s regions, with her mortal wound.
In so far as repair
is possible, we’ll lie her in the sun
forever, with to protect her a great hound,
so that she lies in peace there.

Until her lover comes: let him be good
quietly to her, and her blocked faith restore
in the mountains & the roar
of the grand sea of tumbling pebbles: could
anyone anywhere ask more?
Her patience is exemplary.

Cold & golden lay the high heroine
in a wilderness of bears. Let one man in.
One is enough.
Fish for the master, who will do you well,
rely not on the stormy citadel—
it’s a matter of love.

        —John Berryman, out of His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (1968)

—

“The mind is stifled.” Very little sky
is visible through the ailanthus,
and through the ailanthus is the red brick
and the grey brick, and the smell of the cats

in the courtyard. My left hand falls
on a tea bag, humid like the lightless air.
It is morning and a whole day starts
stepping daintily along my sweaty flesh.

Yearning grasses growing from my eyes
to this music do you lean, shallow and wet
like a pebble? I roll the tea into a cylinder
and it’s like marijuana beside a pool,

not like a good American cigarette
with its delicate twigs flaring up now
and then beside the nose. In this room
there is suddenly a pool. Drops of water,

slightly chlorinated, fall from my nose
onto the cigarette as I heavily breathe
from swimming through the wood of this parquet
which is deep brown, the tall trunk of hell.

        —Frank O’Hara, “Homage to Pasternak’s Cape Mootch” (c. 1954)

—

He uses the direct image, it is true, but he seems to use it as a means to evoke other and vaguer images—a pebble, as it were, dropped in a quiet pool, in order to start across the silent water, wave on wave of light, of colour, of sound.

        —H. D., out of a review of John Gould Fletcher’s Goblins and Pagodas in The Egoist (1916)
        Quoted by Robert Duncan in The H. D. Book (2011)

—

I think the Earth is nothing but a pebble, a marvelously big stone . . .

        —Charles Olson, out of Causal Mythology (1969)

—

I do not wait, Charles, to answer you as the gods would reply, or even as the meager footprint of Vulcan, for it is said also that he is the Father of all mankind, is some dim tracery in sand or earth or in pebble, of the first brazier. But I should be more ashamed not to reply now, though it be the niggard word of a caitiff than to wait, having you in the meanwhile, regard me as something even worse in the morbose bottoms of the earth . . .

        —Edward Dahlberg, out of a letter to Charles Olson (In Love, In Sorrow: the Complete
        Correspondence of Charles Olson and Edward Dahlberg, 1990)

Pebble

Eliot Porter, “Brown Stones with Red Lichen, near San Ignacio, Baja California Sur, Mexico,” 1966

      This person gathers mementoes with a perfect recklessness, now-a-days; mixes them all up together, and then serenely labels them without any regard to truth, propriety, or even plausibility. I have found him breaking a stone in two, and labeling half of it “Chunk busted from the pulpit of Demosthenes,” and the other half “Darnick from the Tomb of Abelard and Heloise.” I have known him to gather up a handful of pebbles by the roadside, and bring them on board ship and label them as coming from twenty celebrated localities five hundred miles apart. I remonstrate against these outrages upon reason and truth, of course, but it does no good.

        —Mark Twain, out of The Innocents Abroad; Or, the New Pilgrims’ Progress (1869)

—

The scribes sank in wonderment.
This was not the hierarchical file to which
access had been deeded. It was something
far more wonderful: an opaque pebble in the grass.

        —John Ashbery, out of “A Litmus Tale” (A Worldly Country, 2007)

—

As my worthy Friend Mr. Powallis of Penzance, was taking an Evening’s Walk in the Fields, he accidentally trod upon ſomething, which having all the Appearance of an human Excrement, made him immediately congratulate himſelf upon his good Luck. But upon a ſtricter Scrutiny it appeared to be a Pebble, which both in Shape and Colour perfectly reſembled what he at firſt took it for. He carried it Home to his Lady, who at firſt Sight cry’d out, my Dear, you have brought Home a                 mentioning a Word, which I am ſorry ſhou’d ever drop from a Woman of her Decency and Diſcretion. However, upon handling it ſhe was pacify’d, and diverted herſelf by now and then depoſiting it in the Parlour, to the Confuſion of the House-Maid, and ſometimes dropping it in Company, for the Entertainment and Aſtonishment of her Friends.

        —Christopher Smart, out of “A Letter from Mrs. Mary Midnight, to the Society of
        Antiquarians, giving them an Account of a very curious Petrifaction found
        near Penzance, in the County of Cornwall” (The Midwife 1, 1751)

—

I took my Power in my Hand
And went against the World—
’Twas not so much as David—had—
But I—was twice as bold—

I aimed my Pebble—but Myself
Was all the one that fell—
Was it Goliah—was too large—
Or was myself—too small?

        —Emily Dickinson, #540 (Johnson) / #660 (Franklin), c. 1862

—

Demosthenes with his mouthful of pebbles had to talk without choking himself or allowing the pebbles to drop from his mouth. Verbal reverberations keep us safe, that is their interest. Emerson shows in the essay he titled “The Poet” how smallest things can serve for symbols, how every relation is picture-language. “Bare lists of words are found suggestive, to an imaginative and excited mind; as it is related of Lord Chatham, that he was accustomed to read in Bailey’s Dictionary, when he was preparing to speak in Parliament.”

        —Susan Howe, out of “Arisbe” (Pierce-Arrow, 1999)

—

It may be the future depends on an orator,
Some pebble-chewer practiced in Tyrian speech,
An apparition, twanging instruments
Within us hitherto unknown, he that
Confounds all opposites and spins a sphere
Created, like a bubble, of bright sheens,
With a tendency to bulge as it floats away . . .

        —Wallace Stevens, out of “Owl’s Clover” (1936)

—

Patience is truly my device, as we wait
for the past to happen, which is to come into
the open. As I expect it to, daily & the ques-
tion is really what size we’re in, how much of
it is the measure, at one time. Patience is
the sum of my inertia, by which the base-line
lays itself out to the touch
                    like the flower in
                    heaven, each pebble
                    graded in ochre. How
to extend, anyway to decline the rhetoric
of occasion, by which the sequence back
from some end is clearly predictive. We
owe that in theory to the history of person
as an entire condition of landscape—that
kind of extension, for a start . . .

        —J. H. Prynne, out of “First Notes on Daylight” (The White Stones, 1969)

—

I took a pebble from my pocket and sucked it. It was smooth, from having been sucked so long, by me, and beaten by the storm. A little pebble in your mouth, round and smooth, appeases, soothes, makes you forget your hunger, forget your thirst.

        —Samuel Beckett, out of Molloy (1951)

—

—bum & zoom, leaving & yet never this awful old
   this dark ocean life that hardly sees comes &
   flashes on the sofa sits as Ms. Missa Brevis—
   to go to try to find the rail between names.
   I’ve tried painted black in a basic baggage dress
   now ghost & jacket & engine now I’m surely going
   fresh from qualifications to the canal and
   the man in Texas I am a next
   horse to be west of the pebbles almost as if
   if again. I always get to change minutes.

        —Alice Notley, out of “September’s Book” (How Spring Comes, 1981)

—

. . . haunted in the streets of Saturday night in the American city with his eyes torn out like Oedipus who sees all and sees nothing from the agony of having lived and lived and lived and still not knowing how to conjure from the pitiful world and the folks around some word of praise for something that makes him grateful and makes him cry but remains invisible, aloof, delinquent, complacent, not unkind but just dumb, the street themselves, the things themselves of life and of American life, and the faces and hopes and attempts of the people themselves who with him in gnashing map of earth pronounce vowels and consonants around a nothing, they bite the air, there’s nothing to say because you can’t say what you know, it’s a void, a Demosthenes pebble would have to drop way long down to hit that kind of bottom.

        —Jack Kerouac, out of Visions of Cody (c. 1951-2)

—

                                                                   (ochre buick 6
                                                                         (runabout lap lathe
bulb bend to hand
                                    your soapstone hello
envelope larva bulk machine, parts of a hill

silver ash weed dovetail   “spread, out that way”   cams
rods to grease the spoken circle, head on
to brillo sapphire, the sweep gleams to this lot
broken blue, neon wristlet car park, ears
muff on the shaft, on elbow shot
tweed drift engine & the elk hewn full
nozzle whispering to blunt

      wire pebbles.               tricycles.
                              plat ice.

        —Clark Coolidge, out of “Dripstone Assembly” (Space, 1970)

—

CC wants to write his life. Any attempt to go by earlier models for how to do that would never be “my” life, which, as all might know, since it’s fact, is composition of thwarted desire with misdirected intention come right. So he puts pebbles in his mouth, thus to shape his utterance to figures having that in common with his life: not personal poesy à la I-take-the-hose-into-my-mouth-&-switch-on-the-ignition, this speaks through a medium & knows it. The medium has to be huge, as the person it gathers to contain, conceal present, prevent, explain.

        —David Bromige, out of “Clark Coolidge, Weathers” (L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E 12, 1980)

—

But for compulsion of strong grace,
The pebble in the road
Would straight explode,
And fill the ghastly boundlessness of space.

        —Coventry Patmore, out of “Legem Tuam Dilexi” (The Unknown Eros, 1877)

—

The water o’er the pebbles scarce could run
And broad old sexpools glittered in the sun.

        —John Clare, out of “I found a ball of grass among the hay . . .” (c. 1836)

—

                A restless surface. Chewing, and spitting sand and
Small white pebbles, clam shells with a sheen or chalky white.
A horseshoe crab: primeval. And all this without thought, this
Churning energy. Energy! The sun sucks up the dew; the day is
Clear; a bird shits on my window ledge. Rain will wash it off
Or a storm will chip it loose. Life, I do not understand. The
Days tick by, each so unique, each so alike: what is that chatter
In the grass?

        —James Schuyler, out of “Hymn to Life” (Hymn to Life, 1974)

—

Eating Lake Superior Cisco Smoked Fish

When the flageolets verts are finally cooked I shall be high on Mississippi rock water. The water flows over the rock leaving rich traces, unlike Alpine water that is so pure and sprightly like Fauntleroy Alpine deer, never touching rock or pebble. Pure. Yet feeble. Weak because the minerals are lacking. They only follow the tough arm of water that likes to mingle with the crowd and pick up its bitters in a dirty old smokey fist. Like Dickens.

        —Barbara Guest, out of The Countess from Minneapolis (1976)

—

Line up all around the block, inscribe
dry red Kansas, country empty, even ‘Great American Desert’
no mapped puddle skipped a pebble, but Flood,
Flood parted ahead, let stack up time,
fast blood put out to pasture
our large argosy:
        —Ronald Johnson, out of “ARK 47, Plow Spire” (ARK, 1996)

—

Macrocosm (the universe) microcosm / (man) / Measurable or immeasurable / Pebbles as stars / Secrecy a long silence

        —Susan Howe, out of a journal dated July 30, 1980–October 9, 1980

—

The result of the thoughts’ operating on the data given to sense is to transform the order in which experience comes into an entirely different order, that of the conceived world. There is no spot of light, for example, which I pick out and proceed to define as a pebble, which is not thereby torn from its mere time- and space-neighbors, and thought in conjunction with things physically parted from it by the width of nature.

        —William James, out of The Principles of Psychology (1890)

—

It was a mountain creek, running over little pebbles of white quartz and mica. Let's say that every possibility waits. In raga time is added to measure, which expands. A deep thirst, faintly smelling of artichoke hearts, and resembling the sleepiness of childhood.

        —Lyn Hejinian, out of My Life (1980 / 1987)
        “The obvious / analogy is with / music”

—

On the inscribed surface
of sleep.

Almost constant
bird soundings.

“Aloha, Fruity Pebbles!”

Music, useful
for abstracting emphasis.

Sweet nothing
to do with me.

        —Rae Armantrout, out of “Confidential” (Made to Seem, 1995)

—

As a certain bulk of Water was instituted at the Creation, so very likely a certain portion of intellect was spun forth into the thin Air for the Brains of Man to prey upon it. You will see my drift without any unnecessary parenthesis. That which is contained in the Pacific cannot lie in the hollow of the Caspian; that which was in Milton’s head could not find Room in Charles the second’s. He like a Moon attracted Intellect to its flow. It has not ebbed yet, but has left the shore pebble all bare . . .

        —John Keats, out of a letter to James Rice (24 march 1818)

—

      Para thina poluphloisboio thalasses: the turn of the wave and the scutter of receding pebbles.
      Years’ work to get that. Best I have been able to do is cross cut in Mauberley, led up to:

                             . . . imaginary
Audition of the phantasmal sea-surge

which is totally different, and a different movement of the water, and inferior.

        —Ezra Pound, out of a letter to W. H. D. Rouse (23 May 1935)

—

                                                                    As Cicero asks somewhere:

“What is sillier than to talk about talking?” And so Demosthenes
took to putting small pebbles into his oratorical mouth,
took to marching up and down

the steep pebble-covered hills near Athens, talking pebble talk.
Perhaps he knew the fragility of words and was comforted in
spitting them, stone-like, into the silences.

It is as if all necessary eloquence could come only of rejection,
of a leaving behind . . .

        —John Latta, “Reading Cicero’s De Oratore” (Breeze, 2003)

—

Like the moisture or the polish on a pebble, genius neither distorts nor false-colours its objects; but on the contrary brings out many a vein and many a tint, which escape the eye of common observation, thus raising to the rank of gems what had been often kicked away by the hurrying foot of the traveller on the dusty high road of custom.

        —Samuel Taylor Coleridge, out of Biographia Literaria (1817)

—

The CLOD & the PEBBLE

Love seeketh not Itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care;
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a Heaven in Hells despair.

So sang a little Clod of Clay,
Trodden with the cattles feet:
But a Pebble of the brook,
Warbled out these metres meet.

Love seeketh only Self to please,
To bind another to Its delight,
Joys in anothers loss of ease,
And builds a Hell in Heavens despite.

        —William Blake, out of Songs of Experience (1794)

—

The imagination, intoxicated by prohibitions, rises to drunken heights to destroy the world. Let it rage, let it kill. The imagination is supreme. To it all our works forever, from the remotest past to the farthest future, have been, and are and will be dedicated. To it alone we show our wit by having raised in its honor as monument not the least pebble. To it now we come to dedicate our secret project: the annihilation of every human creature on the face of the earth. This is something never before attempted. None to remain; nothing but the lower vertebrates, the mollusks, insects and plants. Then at last will the world be made anew.

        —William Carlos Williams, out of Spring and All (1923)

—

                                          How fearful
And dizzy ’tis, to cast one’s eyes so low!
The crows and choughs that wing the midway air
Show scarce so gross as beetles. Half way down
Hangs one that gathers sampire, dreadful trade!
Methinks he seems no bigger than his head.
The fishermen that walk upon the beach
Appear like mice, and yond tall anchoring bark,
Diminish’d to her cock; her cock a buoy
Almost too small for sight. The murmuring surge
That on th’ unnumb’red idle pebble chafes
Cannot be heard so high. I’l1 look no more,
Lest my brain turn and the deficient sight
Topple down headlong.

        —William Shakespeare, King Lear (c. 1605)

“Bag” and/or “Dump”

John Ashbery, c. 1964
(Photograph by John Jonas Gruen)

Hugh Kenner (The Pound Era) quoting lines—“printed in June 1917”—out of Ezra Pound’s “ultimately abandoned Ur-Canto,” the one beginning “Hang it all, there can be but the one ‘Sordello!’”:

. . . But say I want to, say I take your whole bag of tricks,
Let in your quirks and tweeks, and say the thing’s an art-form,
Your Sordello, and that the modern world
Needs such a rag-bag to stuff all its thought in; . . .

Kenner commenting: “Pound notes one impulse, display of wonders one has found.” And continuing: “He inverts his ragbag image, no longer a putting-in but a spilling out”:

Say that I dump my catch, shiny and silvery
As fresh sardines flapping and slipping on the marginal cobbles?

“A rag-bag to stuff all its thought in”: is that the unsung fons et origo of Ashbery’s canny (and widely applicable) remark concerning O’Hara’s “Easter”—“whose form is that of a bag into which anything is dumped and ends up belonging there”? Some estimable niggle and itch—it’s the “rag” in “rag-bag”—makes me look, too, at Yeats. Lines I know without knowing (my persistently dithering non-acquaintance with the Irishman no penalty here):

Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder’s gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

A precursor to Pound’s stuffed rag-bag? “Pretty to think so”—except the Yeats lines (out of th3 1939 “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”) post-date the Pound by roughly two decades. (Pound toyed with the “rag-bag” theory elsewhere, too. In “Aux Etuves de Wiesbaden”—out of Pavannes and Divisions (1918)—one Poggio considers, broadly, style and type with one Maunsier, using women for exempla (“Her breasts stuck out like great funnels, her shoulders were rounded like basins, her biceps was that of a wheel-wright,” and so forth). To conclude: “Men have a curious desire for uniformity . . . They ruin the shape of life for a dogmatic exterior.” And, defiantly: “I myself am a rag-bag, a mass of sights and citations, but I will not beat down life for the sake of a model.” Maunsier, acknowledging the warning: “even a style might become a religion and breed bigots as many, and pestilent.” One need only look at the nuisant palpable effects partout of any succeeding literary “movement” to see . . .)

Curiously enough, William Carlos Williams, in the 1920 Kora in Hell: Improvisations, turns briefly, too, to “rag-bag” talk, avoiding model-making by metaphorical veer-off, that itch to avoid a vendible intent, or a too tidy kit:

Virtue is not to be packed in a bag and carried off to the rag mill. Perversions are righted and the upright are reversed, then the stream takes a bend upon itself and the meaning turns a livid purple and drops down in a whirlpool without so much as fraying a single fibre.

Whence, though, cometh the ragbag model? I think of David Jones quoting—in the Preface to The Anathemata (sous-titre: “fragments of an attempted writing”)—Nennius’s line out of ninth century Historia Brittonum—“coacervavi omne quod inveni”: “I have made a heap of all that I could find.” Jones:

So wrote Nennius, or whoever composed the introductory matter to Historia Brittonum. He speaks of an ‘inward wound’ which was caused by the fear that certain things dear to him ‘should be like smoke dissipated’. Further, he says, ‘not trusting my own learning, which is none at all, but partly from writings and monuments of the ancient inhabitants of Britain, partly from the annals of the Romans and the chronicles of the sacred fathers, Isidore, Hieronymus, Prosper, Eusebius and from the histories of the Scots and Saxons although our enemies . . . I have lispingly put together this . . . about past transactions, that [this material] might not be trodden under foot.’

(One is tempted to read that odd “inward wound” as a kind of bag, a receptacle like the roomy heart is a receptacle, ever filling up, ever pushing out . . .) Jones, with a kit bag metaphor:

. . . making a journey is not thinking thoughts but accomplishing an actual journey. There are the same tediums: strugglings with awkward shapes that won’t fit into the bag, the same mislayings, as of tickets, the missings of connections, the long waits, the misdirections, the packing of this that you don’t need and the forgetting of that which you do, and all such botherations, not to speak of more serious mishaps. Until in the end you may perhaps wish you had never observed that mote of dust in the beam from the clerestory light that set you willy-nilly on your journey . . .

Another bag. Ashbery, in a 1984 interview, regarding the writing of The Vermont Notebook (1975):

It was an exercise in almost automatic writing. I wrote most of it on buses traveling through New England, though not Vermont. It was a kind of experiment for me in writing in an uncongenial environment and also writing in longhand, which I hadn’t done in many years. It’s a kind of messy grab bag as the word notebook implies. Generally speaking I guess it’s a catalogue of a number of things that could be found in the state of Vermont, as well as almost everywhere else—another “democratic vista.” This was also the idea behind my poem “Europe.”

“Rag-bag”: for stowing scraps, a repository, a miscellany, a keeping. “Grab bag”: for extracting a prize, “containing various articles, into which one may dip on payment of a certain sum . . .” Oddly enough, looking into The Vermont Notebook one finds Nennius’s “heap”:

The book I read is the dump it is printed in dump letters. . . . I tell the old story of the dump. I work on the story to be the real story of the dump which is never telling. If it ever was telling it would not be the dump which it is. The dump escapes the true scape of the telling and in so doing it is its own scape—the dump dumped and dumping. As I swear the dump is my sweet inner scape self so do I condone the dump for having nothing left for me only the will to go on dumping creating it out of its evacuation. . . .

(Pound: “I dump my catch . . .”)

Enrique Vila-Matas’s Dublinesque (Reading Notes)

Enrique Vila-Matas
(Photograph by Daniel Mordzinski)

Sour dirges for a misplaced gone world, against a “now” of stupidity rampant, imbecility accruing un peu partout. Enrique Vila-Matas quoting the gist of a Flaubert letter (to Louise Colet, c. 1852):

Nowadays, literature looks like a great urinal factory. This is what people smell of, more than anything! I’m always tempted to exclaim, like St. Polycarp did, ‘O my God! What century—or what world—have you made me born into!’ and to flee, covering my ears, as this holy man did whenever he found himself faced with an unseemly proposition. Anyway. The time will come when the whole world will have turned into a businessman and an imbecile (by then, thank God, I will be dead). Our nephews and nieces will have a worse time. Future generations will be tremendously stupid and rude.

Solace of roaring against the universal (inexplicit) connerie. Flaubert writes, too—to Colet, 3 November 1851—with all the audacious flippancy of a taunt, of how splendid it is “to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your words and make them pop like chestnuts.” Continues:

There must be delirious pride in the feeling that you are bringing the full weight of your ideas to bear on mankind. But for that you must have something to say. Now, I will confess to you it seems to me I have nothing that everyone else doesn’t have, or that hasn’t been said equally well, or that can’t be said better.

Defiantly refusing, though, to “take on the passions of the crowd, in order to please it, and . . . descend to its level:

Rather sit by the fire and make Art for oneself, the way one plays ninepins. When all is said and done, Art is perhaps no more serious than a game of ninepins. Perhaps everything is an immense bluff.

Vila-Matas the canny skeptic, too, of that regime, its glorious diminished light:

To begin with, he’s clearly sensing that both God and the genius he always sought have died. To put it another way, without having given his consent, he sees himself now settled in a deplorable pigsty within a repugnant world.
      They are all gone, as Henry Vaughan said. “They are all gone into the world of light,” is how the first line of that seventeenth-century English poem actually reads. But from the pigsty he’s holed up in now, worstward ho, that illuminated kingdom is not exactly visible . . . So Henry Vaughan’s line is reduced to a foul and miserable: “They are all gone.” End of story.

“Worstward ho.” The unavoidable Beckett, gloriously and stubbornly diminishing, route forever fixed. Vila-Matas:

No one was further from suicide than Beckett. When he visited the grave of Heinrich von Kleist he felt a deep unease and scant admiration for this Romantic artist’s final suicidal gesture. Beckett, who loved the world of words and loved gambling, led a life where he wrote ever shorter, more minimal novels, works that were more and more stripped down and sparse. Always worstward. “Name, no, nothing is nameable, tell, no, nothing can be told, what then, I don’t know, I shouldn’t have begun.” A stubborn walk toward silence. “So leastward on. So long as dim still. Dim undimmed. Or dimmed to dimmer still. To dimmost dim. Leastmost in dimmost dim.”
      He changed his language to impoverish his expression. And in the end his texts appeared more and more purged. The lucid delirium of poverty. Going through life forever hindered, precarious, inert, deformed, unsettled, numb, terrified, unwelcomed, naked, sickly, shaky, defenceless, exiled, inconsolable, playful. Beckett, skinny and smoking in his room in Tiers-Temps, a nursing home in Paris. His pockets full of cake for the pigeons. Retired, like any other elderly person with no family, to an old people’s home. Thinking of the Irish Sea. Waiting for the final darkness. “Much better, in the end, if sorrow disappears and silence returns. In the end, it’s how you’ve always been. Alone.”

(Audacity of “inconsolable” juddering up next to “playful.”) Vila-Matas writing of Sergio Chejfec’s My Two Worlds (Open Letter, 2011):

I begin as I’ll end: adrift. And I begin by wondering if novels have no choice but to narrate a story. The answer couldn’t be simpler: whether they intend to or not, they always tell a story. Because there’s not a single intelligent reader who, given something unique to read, even the most hermetic of novels, would fail to read a story into that impenetrable text. Now then, what happens if the reader is intelligent but the novelist isn’t? I remember Georges Simenon saying that it’s absolutely unnecessary for a novelist to be intelligent, quite the opposite: the less intelligent he is, the more possibilities open up to him as a novelist. He was unquestionably right, for I’ve dealt with great novelists throughout my life and none have seemed very intelligent to me.

Vila- Matas thence proceeding to except the Argentine Chejfec by a dodge (“Chejfec is someone intelligent for whom the word novelist is a poor fit”): rather precisely like Vila-Matas himself. Proceeding by means of the incidental, the divergent, the uncertain, the seemingly useless, the wayward and stray. Sentence-ry of unhesitant push, glacially up-gathering le tout, animally moving things here to there, to re-deposit. One recalls Flaubert (to Louise Colet, 15 July 1853):

The human consciousness has broadened since Homer. Sancho Panza’s belly has burst the seams of Venus’s girdle. Rather than persist in emulating old styles, we must exert ourselves to invent new ones. . . . Life! Life! To have erections! That is everything, the only thing that counts! That is why I so love lyricism. It seems to me the most natural form of poetry—poetry in all its nakedness and freedom. All the power of a work of art lies in this mystery, and it is this primordial quality, this motus animi continuus (vibration, continual movement of the mind—Cicero’s definition of eloquence), which results in conciseness, relief, form, energy, rhythm, diversity . . .