D escriptions of an I maginary U nivercity 23 b 3 / 17 / 95 To The Bloodless Refugees of Emptiness (cont.) [ Through the suburbs sleepless people stagger, as though just delivered from a shipwreck of blood. -Garcia Lorca, The Dawn ] . . . What presently smoulders is a desperate search for mathematical shamans to re-populate expression with re-assuring rigidity, so as to give the functioning of matter the static procedure of paradise. Because the eucharist is now a phlegm wracked body, tainted by opium and murder. The colour of its eyes has revealed the wrangling scent of bestial enervation. In the zones of Manhattan, in the pyretical confines of The City of the Angels, live wayward populations, performing a staggered ballet of estranged and exploded spiders. Their dialogue scattered between immolation and leakage, with its recent heritage clustered around the old Nagasakian chronicles, the dense memoirs of the Solzhenitsyn gulags, the Hitlerian propositions conjoined by x-rays and voltage. Such is the cruelty we inhabit, distorted as transitional bipeds, with our tenuous salvo of ethics, disastrously routed along fractures of separation and antimony. Leadership is now called for directed along the lines of a Nepalese thought practitioner. Persons, whose dynamical gifts rise above emptied chariots whose hydrogen has gone bad. Such oblique leaders are capable of transmuting action from the catacombs of ruin, with a wise and circular gospel of magic. Such are the leaders of a true alchemical amnesty... --WA [ to be continued in D I U 2 4 ] * THE LITERATI OF SAN FRANCISCO Some Honest Opinions at Random Respecting Their Authorial Merits, with Occasional Words of Personality by Edgar Allen Poe ----------- First Installment: LYN HEJINIAN _Miss Hejinian_ was at one time editor, or one of the editors of Tuumba Press, to which she contributed many of the most emphatic, and certainly some of the most peculiar papers. She is known, too, by _My Life_, a remarkable assemblage of sketches, issued in 1980 by Burning Deck, and reissued in expanded form some years after by Sun & Moon. She is intellectually associated with Mr. Barrett Watten, an author who has occasioned much discussion, having had the good fortune to be warmly abused and chivalrously defended in the pages of _Poetry Flash_, and she has written a poetic collaboration with Mr. Watten's wife, Miss Carla Harryman. More recently, she has published _Oxota: A Short Russian Novel_, and the lecture "The Quest for Knowledge in the Western Poem." At present, she is co-editor of _Poetics Journal_, for which she has furnished a great deal of matter, all falling under the general heading Criticism. Two of the best examples of this are her review of a biography of William Carlos Williams, and an appeal to the public against the concept of "Closure." The review did her infinite credit; it was frank, candid, independent--in even ludicrous contrast to the usual mere glorifications of the day, giving honor _only_ where honor was due, yet evincing the most thorough capacity to appreciate and the most sincere intention to place in the fairest light the real and idiosyncratic merits of the poet's life. In my opinion it is one of the very few reviews of Williams's career, ever published in America, of which the critics have not had abundant reason to be ashamed. Mr. Williams is entitled to a certain and very distinguished rank among the poets of his country, but that country is disgraced by the evident toadyism which would award to his aesthetic position and influence, to his everydayness and likability, to the acuity of his line as seen through the eye of Mr. Robert Creeley, that amount of indiscriminate approbation which neither could nor would have been given to the poems themselves. Her "Rejection of Closure," or rather her Philippic against those who would insist that closure is possible, was one of the most eloquent and well-_put_ articles I have ever yet seen in a journal. "The Quest for Knowledge" (published in _Disembodied Poetics: Annals of the Jack Kerouac School_) is a lecture few poets in the country could have written, and no poet in the country would have delivered, with the exception of Miss Hejinian. In the way of independence, of unmitigated radicalism, it is the production of one of America's most perspicuous "Native Agents," and Semiotext(e) would do well to include the piece in their series. I need scarcely say that the lecture is searching, emphatic, thoughtful, suggestive, brilliant, and to a certain extent scholar-like--for all that Miss Hejinian produces is entitled to these epithets--but I must say that the conclusions reached are only partly my own. Not that they are too bold, by any means--too novel, too startling, or too dangerous in their consequences, but that in their attainment too many premises have been distorted and too many analogical inferences left altogether out of sight. I mean to say that the intention of Creation as regards "the self," (Western or non-Western,)--an intention which can be distinctly comprehended only by throwing the exterior (more sensitive) portions of the mental retina _casually_ over the wide field of universal _analogy_--I mean to say that this _intention_ has not been sufficiently considered. Miss Hejinian has erred, too, through her own excessive objectiveness. She judges _the self_ by the heart and intellect of Miss Hejinian, but there are not more than one or two dozen Miss Hejinians on the whole face of the earth. (I should further appreciate a gloss on her opinion about Rodney King; I find the point of her summary utterly bewildering.) Holding these opinions in regard to "The Quest for Knowledge," I still feel myself called upon to disavow the silly, condemnatory criticism of the work which appeared in one of the earlier numbers of "(D)escriptions of an (I)maginary (U)niversity." That article was _not_ written by myself, and _was_ written by my late associate Thus, Albert or Hubert. The most favorable notice of Miss Hejinian's genius (for high genius she unquestionably possesses) is to be obtained, perhaps, from her contributions to Tuumba Press, and from her _My Life_ and _Oxota_. Many of the _descriptions_ in this last volume are unrivaled for their _graphicality_, (why is there not such a word?) for the force of which they convey the true by the novel or unexpected, by the introduction of touches which other artists would be sure to omit as irrelevant to the subject. This faculty, too, springs from her subjectiveness, which leads her to paint a scene less by "function" than "form." Here, for example, is a portion of her account of a meeting with Russian writers: Observations that days come, arrive, approach, are blots, hangovers, reactionary reactions, said the doorkeeper at the Writers Union on Voinova The future can't be made out with such metaphors, he added, tapping a new tabloid So, it is my right to present this to an American Plumbers' beauties are plumbers' proofs And so, our new poets in leather jackets won't get wet Only our cheerful tongues Upstairs I met with Evgenii Ivanovich, who was translating the American metaphorist Raymond Chandler A pale man with tiny pad He turned away and lifted its page What does it mean, please, "The woman had rubber lips with no tread" She's lost her grip on the truth Or maybe what she says goes by him We have no such metaphors, he said, but maybe I'll find one Maybe something like, "The circle she made with her mouth was warped" The truthfulness of the passage will be felt by all; the issues raised are, perhaps, confronted by every (imaginative) writer who dreams of escaping the past, whether such past be understood as metaphor or tradition; but most persons, through wishful overexcitement, would never think of describing _how_ the dream is pursued, though this alone conveys the difficulty and necessity of the task. Hence so many desperate attempts on the part of ordinary critics and poets to describe the future of literature as if it had already been achieved. Mr. Lew Daly, to be sure, in his tract _Swallowing the Scroll_, is sufficiently sober in his attention; he describes neither the future of poetry nor its means of achievement, but rather the need for such a future as felt by _him_. This need makes him think of his _own_ greatness, of his _own_ superiority, and so forth, and so forth; and it is only when we come to think that the thought of Mr. Daly's greatness is quite idiosyncratic, confined exclusively to Mr. Daly, that we are in a condition to understand how, in despite of his sobriety, he has failed to convey an idea of anything beyond one Mr. Lew Daly. From the essay entitled "Variations: A Return of Words," I copy a paragraph that will serve at once to exemplify Miss Hejinian's more earnest (declamatory) style, and to show the tenor of her prospective speculations:-- Probably all feeling are cliches--which is not to say that they are invalid, or stupid, or even absurd (though like anything else, they may be). Feelings are common to us all, never new, stunning only to the person feeling them at the time, and foolish (or boring) to everyone else. Thoughts, however, can be affective whether one shares them at the moment or not, and they can be original. From what I have quoted a _general_ conception of the prose style of the authoress may be gathered. Her manner, however, is infinitely varied. It is always emphatic--but I am not sure that it is always anything else, unless I say picturesque. It rather indicates than evinces scholarship. Perhaps only the scholastic, or, more properly, those accustomed to look narrowly at the structure of phrases, would be willing to acquit her of ignorance of grammar--would be willing to attribute her slovenliness to disregard of the shell in anxiety for the kernel; or to waywardness, or to affectation, or to blind reverence for Gertrude Stein--would be able to detect in her strange and continual inaccuracies, a capacity for the accurate. My old aunt entertained us with her lie, a story about an event in her girlhood, a catastrophe in a sailboat that never occurred, but she was blameless, unaccountable, since, in the course of the telling she had come to believe the lie herself. *** Ultimately, conditions are incomprehensible without the use of analytical conceptual structures, but an initial, essential recognition of difference--of strangeness-- develops only with attention to single objects, while others are temporarily held in abeyance. *** This is quite different from the self of the English language, whose definition proposes it as the essence of each single human being and the constant point from which the human being can truthfully and originally speak. These are merely a few, a very few instances, taken at random from among a multitude of _willful_ murders committed by Miss Hejinian on the American Idiom. Such tid-bits as used to fill out the _New Yorker_'s rear pages could easily be discovered in surplus in the pages of her books. In spite of these things, however, and her frequent unjustifiable Steinisms (such as that of writing sentences which are no sentences, since, to be parsed, reference must be had to sentences preceding,) the style of Miss Hejinian is one of the very best with which I am acquainted. In general effect, I know no style which surpasses it. It is singularly piquant, vivid, terse, bold, luminous--leaving details out of sight, it is everything that a style need be. I believe that Miss Hejinian has written much poetry, although only a portion has been published and remains in print. That portion is tainted with the affectation of the _language poets_, (I use this term, of course, in the sense which the public of late days seems resolved to give it,) but is brimful of the poetic _sentiment_. Here, for example, is something in Clark Coolidge's manner, of which the author of _Quartz Hearts_ might have had no reason to be ashamed:-- The inanimate are _rocks_, desks, bubble, _mineral_, ramps. _It is the concrete being that reasons_. The baseboard weighing its wall span. The clouds never form regiments and don't march. The gap in my education needn't be filled. Stubbornness is provocative. The pessimist suppresses a generous anger. A Trace linked to a fence of forgetting. _Lying awake may serve the purpose that dreams do_. In the dark opaque disposal of the missing past. Canned laughter is white noise. Comparable repositories freight dust into the shadows. Anger the animate of stubbornness. To show the evident ponderousness with which this poem was constructed, I have italicized a superfluous reiteration and two locutionary pomposities. The final line of the first stanza is difficult of pronunciation through excess of consonants. Indeed, the force of the poem is not musical but propositional--in this Miss Hejinian differs most markedly from her model, the prosodically astute Mr. Coolidge. The supposition that the book of an author is a thing apart from the author's self is, I think, ill-founded. The soul is a cypher, in the sense of a cryptograph; and the shorter a cryptograph is, the more difficulty there is in comprehension--at a certain point of brevity it would bid defiance to an army of Champollions. And thus he who has written very little, may in that little either conceal his or her spirit or convey quite an erroneous idea of it--of his or her acquirements, talents, temper, manner, tenor and depth (or shallowness) of thought--in a word, of his or her character, of him- or herself. But this is impossible with him or her who has written much. Of such a person we get, from his or her books, not merely a just, but the most just representation. Ron, the individual, personal man, in tweed jacket and sneakers, is not by any means the veritable Mr. Silliman, who is discoverable only in _What_, where his soul is deliberately and nakedly set forth. And who would ever know Susan Howe by looking at her or talking with her, or doing anything with her at all except reading _My Emily Dickinson_? What poet, in especial, but must feel at least the better portion of his- or herself more fairly represented in even the commonest verse (earnestlty written) than in his or her most elaborate or most intimate personalities. I put all this as a general proposition, to which Miss Hejinian affords a marked exception--to this extent, that her personal character and her printed book are merely one and the same thing. We get access to her soul _as_ directly from the one as from the other--no _more_ readily from this than from that-- easily from either. Her acts are bookish, and her books are less thoughts than acts. Her literary and her conversational manner are identical. Here is a passage from her poem _The Guard_:-- Nostalgia is the elixir drained from guilt . . . I've been writing with the fingers of my non-writing hand I patted the dashboard. "Hi, car." It responded "Hello Mommy." Now all this is precisely as Miss Hejinian would _speak_ it. She is perpetually saying just such things in just such words. To get the _conversational_ woman in the mind's eye, all that is needed is to imagine her reciting the lines just quoted; but first let us have the _personal_ woman. She is of the medium height; nothing remarkable about the figure; a profusion of frizzy blonde-gray hair; eyes palish blue, full of water, and widely set apart, like a reptile's; capacious forehead; the mouth when in repose indicates profound sensibility, capacity for affection, even love--when moved by a slight smile, it becomes perhaps beautiful in the intensity of this expression; but the upper lip, as if impelled by the action of involuntary muscles, habitually uplifts itself, conveying the impression of a sneer. Imagine, now, a person of this description looking you at one moment earnestly in the face, at the next seeming to look only within her own spirit or at the wall; moving nervously every now and then in her chair; speaking in a high key, but emphatically, carefully, (not hurriedly or loudly,) with a delicious distinctness of enunciation--speaking, I say, the lines in question, and emphasizing certain words unpredictably, not by impulsion of the breath, (as is usual,) but by drawing them out as long as possible, nearly closing her eyes the while--imagine all this, and we have both the woman and the authoress before us. = diu c/o the logic of snowflakes = cf2785@albnyvms.bitnet ********************************************** *subscribe to *Passages*, a technopoetics* *journal =+=+==+=+= cf2785@cnsvax.albany.edu * *Issue 2, this weekend, featuring an intense * *meditation about the Internet by Will Alex- * *ander + further thought by P. 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