MODERNIST AND POSTMODERNIST POETICS AND AESTHETICS
Charles Olson, Jazz, Jackson Pollock, and the Quantum Paradigm:
Kerouac’s Spontaneous Composition as Projective Art in a Quantum Field
Through William Blake’s and Marcel Proust’s respective themes and techniques of visions and dreams, memories and time—and through the exploration of similar themes in the techniques of James Joyce and William Faulkner—Jack Kerouac developed his own method of presenting the inner and outer worlds of experience as the two halves are drawn together through Buddhist Idealism. Essentially, all five writers address the interplay between the exterior world and consciousness through the effect that the processes of perception have on the imagination, as well as the effect that the imagination has on the perceived exterior world. A cosmology based on this form of Idealism may be naturally presented through a literature in which the form and content of the text have the same interplay between them as do the exterior and interior worlds within the Idealistic philosophy.
As Kerouac was developing the technique that would be a unique and full expression of the mind of the artist, other artists of the early 1950s were developing similar approaches to their work—literary approaches which may now be termed “Postmodern” after Olson’s use of the term in his essays from the 1950s.[1] Olson termed his approach “projective or OPEN verse” which he also termed “COMPOSITION BY FIELD, as opposed to inherited line, stanza, over-all form, what is the ‘old’ base of the non-projective” (15-16). Kerouac wrote only three published essays on his aesthetics—“Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” published in 1957 and revised in 1958, “Belief & Technique for Modern Prose” in 1959, and “The First Word” in 1967—none of which are broad enough to extrapolate a full sense of Kerouac’s concept of his art. However, what can be extracted from Kerouac’s essays corresponds in many instances with what can be observed in the general Postmodern aesthetics of the late 1940s and 1950s—with distinct affinities that can be drawn to Olson’s seminal essay on Postmodern poetics, “Projective Verse.”
Regarding his concept of projective verse, or open field composition, Olson restates that goal which the formal techniques of such Modernist writers as Proust, Joyce, and Faulkner had achieved:[2]
the principle, the law which presides conspicuously over such [field] composition, and, when obeyed, is the reason why a projective poem can come into being. It is this: FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT. (Or so it got phrased by one, R Creeley, and it makes absolute sense to me, with this possible corollary, that right form, in any given poem, is the only and exclusively possible extension of content under hand.) (16)
Thus, Olson’s maxim that form should be an extension of content would not seem to be original since the notion of form corresponding to content is evident in the novels of Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, and others. It could even be argued that the correspondence between form and content is evident in some of the earliest examples of the genre—as far back as Lawrence Stern’s Tristram Shandy or Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. In fact, the form of Defoe’s early 18th-century novel that was first published in 1722 contains many similarities to the so-called “formless” structure of Modernist and Postmodernist novels in that there is no true plot to Defoe’s novel as Defoe’s narrator suddenly deviates from his principal narrative in order to interject expository material that gives rise to an entirely different narrative vein than the one in which the narrator had been engaged. For instance, on page 76 the narrator begins to relate the experiences of three men who join together to leave
—I say, this brings me back to the three poor men who wandered from Wapping, not knowing whither to go or what to do, and whom I mentioned before [. . .]. (136)
Nearly sixty pages after digressing away from the tale of the three men, the narrator returns to it. In part, this meandering of the narrative is based on the apparent intent of the narrator to relate remembered events of the plague year in one uninterrupted stream of recollected observations in which the memory of one observation leads to the memory of another observation—regardless of the unlikeliness that the narrator could have personally perceived all of the events that are detailed within his narrative—a seemingly random and comprehensive narrative structure that reflects the seemingly random and comprehensive spread of the plague.[3] The overall structure of Defoe’s narrative may be thought of as being preminiscent of the eventual narrative structures of writers who would come nearly 200 years later—Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, et cetera.
In all of these cases, the form of the writers’ novels are undoubtedly to be considered “right form[s]” that are an extension of the content. However, Olson asserts that his interest in energy transference from poet to reader involves “an energy which is peculiar to verse alone” (16), perhaps implying that he is interested in poetic form being an extension of poetic content as well. Even if Olson’s implication is that this concept be prescribed as something new for poetry and not prose, then Blake’s capricious and obfuscated style in conveying the dreams and visions in his poetic works, particularly The Four Zoas, would also be an example of the correlation between poetic form and content. Similarly, the expansive line of Whitman’s verse in which the contextual themes of America’s westward expansion, humanistic Idealism, and the urge of human exploration are presented in the formal techniques of Whitman’s expansive line and all-inclusive cataloging—evident in such poems as “Song of Myself” and Passage to India. Furthermore, Pound, Williams, T. S. Eliot, Basil Bunting and other Modernist poets often presented forms that accommodated, or were an extension of, the content of their poetry.
Olson continues on, echoing the concept that informed the styles originated by Proust and the other stream-of-consciousness writers, primarily novelists again, as he exclaims, “ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION”—an idea directly related to the remembered observations of Defoe’s narrator leading to further remembered observations, and which is evident in the associational details of Stern’s narrator in Tristram Shandy. Within poetry, the notion of one perception leading to another is an informing principle in much Romantic poetry through the technique of the conversation poem as developed by Coleridge in such poems as “The Eolian Harp” and “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”—and used to great effect in Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”—as perception leads to a meditation on the perceived object that eventually leads to a new and more imaginatively-heightened perception of the object or other objects within the percipient’s sensory field. To this end, then, Olson’s “Projective Verse” appears to only reiterate ideas that preceded it.
However, Olson is actually only reiterating these Romantic and Modernist formal concerns in preparation for the truly new tenet in his essay—field composition, where “the poem itself must, at all points, be a high energy-construct and, at all points, an energy-discharge” (16). Kevin Power has restated Olson’s concept—that the poem must be constructed “at all points” in a way that allows it to achieve a “high energy-discharge”—as “the priority of the procedures over the results” (425). Power correctly notes that Olson’s concern for a comprehensive energy construct and energy discharge is attainable only through an emphasis on form over content within the creative process of the poem. This emphasis on form—the priority of the procedure that will assure that the form is capable of a high energy-discharge—will be shown to be one of the things that differentiates what is referred to as Modernist literature from what Olson first referred to as Postmodernist literature.
Regarding the relationship between form and content, many of the Modernists, as Burgess has shown with Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist, concerned themselves with finding a form that accommodated the content of their work—a priority of achieving the end (creating the content) to which the proper procedure (form) could then be found for the purpose of achieving the prioritized end. In Modernist poetry, one of the best expressions of form accommodating content is Eliot’s Four Quartets where the sonata form musical movements within the structures of the four poems are designed to reflect the thematic elements of the content of each poem. With the five movements and ternary structure of exposition, development, and recapitulation in the sonata form, Eliot found a theme and variation musical structure that accommodated his content’s theme and variations of religious experience. The quartets present movements that progress from passive religious belief and abstract personal experience, to religious skepticism, to a resolution of active religious faith and concrete universal experience—within a ternary structure of introduction, development, and resolution for each quartet. Additionally, the ternary structure and temporal (rhythmic) variations on theme in the sonata form are reflected in the ternary structure and temporal variations of past, present, and future in Eliot’s quartets. The sonata form is, thus, a logical extension of the content of the work, and one that optimally accommodates that content.[4]
Conversely, in asserting that the poet’s priority is in constructing a poem that is a “high energy-discharge” at all points, Olson is proposing that form precede content. Olson is not so much interested in form actually being an extension of content, as he claims, but in content being a projection of form—hence “projective verse” as a verse form that is able to project energy “from where the poet got it [. . .], by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader” (Olson 16). Kerouac words his corresponding notion of spontaneous prose as, “sketching language [that] is undisturbed flow from the mind of personal secret idea-words, blowing (as per jazz musician) on subject of image” (“Essentials” 226). By “subject of image” Kerouac is referring to what Olson would term an object in the field—which Kerouac also refers to as an object in some instances, “In tranced fixation dreaming upon the object” (“Belief & Technique” 483). Like Olson, Kerouac also places these objects within a field—the space-time continuum—when he notes that “spontaneous, or ad lib, artistic writing [. . . is] the flow of the mind as it moves in its space-time continuum” (“First Word” 487).
In the opening paragraph of Doctor Sax, Kerouac alludes to the aesthetic process that he shares with Olson. The adult narrator, Duluoz, uses a phrase from Kerouac’s “Belief & Technique” article as he recounts a dream in which he told himself to sketch-write a description of a sidewalk from his childhood—a dream that leads into the novel’s story of Duluoz’s childhood:
The other night I had a dream that I was sitting on the sidewalk on Moody Street, Pawtucketville, Lowell, Mass., with a pencil and paper in my hand saying to myself “Describe the wrinkly tar of this sidewalk, also the iron pickets of Textile Institute, or the doorway where Lousy and you and G.J.’s always sittin and dont stop to think of words when you do stop, just stop to think of the picture better[5]—and let your mind off yourself in this work.” (Sax 3)
Within this opening paragraph of the novel, Kerouac explicitly states that the form of the composition—the spontaneous sketching from memory—is the initial impetus that leads to the eventual content of the novel, in accord with Olson’s proposition that form precede content. The object of the form is being used to uncover the object of the sidewalk from which flows the object of the event of the remembered childhood. However, to this point, Kerouac and Olson’s objects do not differ from Pound’s definition of images in Imagism—in fact, Kerouac’s term “subject of image” represents a link between Olson’s object and Pound’s image:
An “Image” is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time. I use the term “complex” rather in the technical sense employed by the newer psychologists, such as Hart, though we might not agree absolutely in our application.
It is the presentation of such a “complex” instantaneously which gives that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art. (Pound, “A Retrospect” 4)
By “complex” used in “the technical sense employed by the newer psychologists,” Pound is basically referring to “an intellectual and emotional” structure, or form, that is presented by the image. Essentially, Pound, Olson, and Kerouac all want to achieve
To achieve this type of poetry of immediacy, Olson notes that focus must be placed on “the process of the thing, how the principle can be made [. . .] to shape the energies [so] that the form is accomplished” (16-17)—and this process which is the basis of Proust’s attainment of poetic essences, but which Olson cites as being taught to him by Edward Dahlberg, is the already stated idea that one perception must lead to a further perception (Olson 17). Regarding this emphasis on formal process, Olson’s notion is that the artist first develop an individualistic high energy formal technique, and that this form will then dictate the content of the work—or that the eventual content will accommodate the artist’s form since it will be a projection of that form.
Such a distinction makes sense in light of the overall post-World War II aesthetic promoted by the Beat writers, Black Mountain poets, and San Francisco Renaissance writers who reacted against the New Critics’ separation of the artist from the work—a notion that finds its best expression in the essay that helped inform the tenets of New Criticism, Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent”:
It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting. [. . .] And emotions which he has never experienced will serve his turn as well as those familiar to him. Consequently, we must believe that “emotion recollected in tranquility” is an inexact formula. For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor, without distortion of meaning, tranquility. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration, of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation. These experiences are not “recollected,” and they finally unite in an atmosphere which is “tranquil” only in that it is a passive attending upon the event. Of course this is not quite the whole story. There is a great deal, in the writing of poetry, which must be conscious and deliberate. In fact, the bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors tend to make him “personal.” Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. (43)
Eliot actually reveals an association between his poetics and the spontaneous or projective by noting that the poetic process “is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation”—an essentially Zen, or Ch’an, technique like that which informed Kerouac’s conception of spontaneous prose, “write ‘without consciousness’” (“Essentials” 228), and which essentially underlies Olson’s projective composition, “In any given instance, because there is a choice of words, the choice, if a man is in there, will be, spontaneously, the obedience of his ear to the syllables” (“Projective” 18).[7]
However, New Criticism largely ignores the implication of Eliot’s Zen-like aesthetic and focuses, instead, on the implication of his assertion that “the bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors tend to make him ‘personal.’” Eliot seems to be implying that what he calls bad poetry is “personal” in that it is subjective—in one instance it is subjective by being impressionistic (unconscious instead of conscious), and in the other instance it is by being autobiographical (conscious rather than unconscious). Unfortunately, Eliot did not develop his implied notion of a role for the artist within the work through “a concentration which does not happen consciously” —stating, instead, that his “essay proposes to halt at the frontiers of metaphysics or mysticism, and confine itself to such practical conclusions as can be applied by the responsible person interested in poetry” (43). However, Eliot’s notion points to an association between poet and poem that does not exist in what has come to be thought of as New Criticism’s purely objective apprehension of a poem in which the poet is dismissed from consideration entirely—“To divert interest from the poet to the poetry is a laudable aim: for it would conduce to a juster estimation of actual poetry, good and bad” (Eliot, “Tradition” 43-44).
The Beat,
Jazz critic Ted Gioia points out this dominant Postmodern aesthetic in comparing Abstract Expressionism to jazz—more specifically, he compares Action Painting to bebop improvisation:
Abstract expressionism and jazz shared an overlapping audience during much of the 1950s, and [. . .] one can easily understand why. The hipsters who visited the galleries and frequented the jazz clubs were, whether they realized it or not, witnessing something similar in these two superficially different environments. This was a similarity not so much in medium or style but in philosophy. The distinctiveness of jazz, much like that of Pollock’s breakthrough in 1947, depended not so much on its existence as a different kind of art, but on the fact that it embodied a whole different attitude towards art. It required a different set of aesthetic assumptions than did, say, a Bernini sculpture or a Mozart string quartet. The question raised by both jazz and abstract expressionism was the same: How does one judge performance art which emphasizes the performance more than the art? Painting is not typically considered a performance art, yet Pollock’s revolutionary approach could only be understood in that context: such works tried to capture the energy and vitality present in the moment of creation. In this regard they were strikingly similar to jazz, and though jazz has never been as controversial as Pollock’s works, it too needs to justify itself against the criticism that its finished products cannot stand alone, separated from the forces that created them, as great works of art. (104-05)
Of course, writing, like painting, is also not typically considered a performance art. However, the aesthetics of Olson’s projective verse, Pollock’s action painting, and Kerouac’s spontaneous prose—or spontaneous composition, in light of Kerouac’s excursions into verse with such works as Mexico City Blues and San Francisco Blues—are essentially the same as the aesthetics of jazz in that they are a transference of energy from the artist to the audience through the spontaneous, or improvised, creation of content within a predetermined form. Furthermore, the form that will allow such a process must come first in order to allow for the eventual content to emerge. In turn, this process of the spontaneous creation of content ensures that the work will be a projection, or revelation, of the individual artist’s creative mental processes that will, thus, lead to more expansive works as the artist is not limited to creating works that are either objective presentations or subjective impressions. Instead, the revelatory quality of Olson and Kerouac’s shared Postmodern aesthetic allows the artist to encounter the world as an interfacing of objects within a field so that the resulting work is not about the individual artist in a strict autobiographical sense, but is about the revelation of all objects within the field—including those objects known as the artist and the audience. The revelation of these objects within the field is brought about through an immediate revelation of the creative process that is transferred as energy from artist to audience by way of all the objects that lie between the two:
the degree to which the projective involves a stance toward reality outside a poem as well as a new stance towards the reality of a poem [. . .] is a matter of content [. . .]. From the moment the projective purpose of the act of verse is recognized, the content does—it will—change. If the beginning and the end is breath, voice in its largest sense, then the material of verse shifts. It has to. It starts with the composer. The dimension of his line itself changes, not to speak of the change in his conceiving, of the matter he will turn to, of the scale in which he imagines that matter’s use. I myself would pose the difference by a physical change. It is no accident that Pound and Williams both were involved variously in a movement which got called “objectivism.” But that word was then used in some sort of a necessary quarrel, I take it, with “subjectivism.”
[. . .] What seems to me a more valid formulation for present use is “objectism” [. . .]. Objectism is the getting rid of the lyrical interference of the individual as ego, of the “subject” and his soul, that peculiar presumption by which western man has interposed himself between what he is as a creature of nature [. . .] and those other creations of nature which we may, with no derogation, call objects. For a man is himself an object [. . .]. (Olson, “Projective Verse” 24)
Olson’s system of field composition within his poetic of projective verse is based in an epistemological structuralism that allows both the artist to be the projector of the work and the work to be the projector of ontological truth—what Heidegger terms the “the truth of what is” (39). Field composition incorporates the artist within its paradigm while at the same time not making the artistic work subjective because the “lyrical interference of the individual as ego” has been eliminated so that the artist is treated solely as another object within the field.
The poetics and epistemology of Olson’s system of field composition are in agreement with, and appear to be partially based on, Korzybski’s schema as presented in Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics:
[There are] two crucial negative premises as established firmly by all human experience: (1) Words are not the things we are speaking about; and (2) There is no such thing as an object in absolute isolation.
These two most important negative statements cannot be denied. If any one chooses to deny them, the burden of the proof falls on him. He has to establish what he affirms, which is obviously impossible. We see that it is safe to start with such solid negative premises, translate them into positive language, and build a }-system [non-Aristotelian system].
If words are not things or maps are not the actual territory, then, obviously, the only possible link between the objective world and the linguistic world is found in structure, and structure alone. The only usefulness of a map or a language depends on the similarity of structure between the empirical world and the map-languages. If the structure is not similar, then the traveller or speaker is led astray [. . .]. If the structures are similar, then the empirical world becomes “rational” to a potentially rational being, which means no more than that verbal, or map-predicted characteristics, which follow up the linguistic or map-structure, are applicable to the empirical world.
In fact, in structure we find the mystery of rationality, adjustment, and we find that the whole content of knowledge is exclusively structural. If we want to be rational and understand anything at all, we must look for structure, relations, and, ultimately, multi-dimensional order, all of which was impossible in a broader sense in the A-system [Aristotelian system . . .].
Having come to such important positive results, starting with undeniable negative premises, it is interesting to investigate whether these results are always possible, or if there are limitations. The second negative premise; namely, that there is no such thing as an object in absolute isolation, gives us the answer. If there is no such thing as an absolutely isolated object, then, at least, we have two objects, and we shall always discover some relation between them, depending on our interest, ingenuity, and what not. Obviously, for a man to speak about anything at all, always presupposes two objects at least; namely, the object spoken about and the speaker, and so a relation between the two is always present. Even in delusions, illusions, and hallucinations, the situation is not changed; because our immediate feelings are also un-speakable and not words. (60-61)
Essentially, Korzybski’s system is one of epistemological structuralism that was formulated nearly 35 years prior to similar systems presented by Jacques Lacan in Ecrits and Claude LJvi-Strauss in his 1960s and 1970s works that departed from purely anthropological studies. Furthermore, Korzybski seems to have developed his ideas independently from Ferdinand de Saussure’s lectures in linguistics. Instead, one of the primary influences on Korzybski’s 1933-formulated system was Werner Heisenberg’s 1930 treatise The Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory in which Heisenberg presented his Uncertainty Principle, and thus validated a non-Aristotelian approach to all branches of metaphysics:
in atomic physics; the interaction between observer and object causes uncontrollable and large changes in the system being observed, because of the discontinuous changes characteristic of atomic processes. (Heisenberg 215)
Korzybski notes the effect Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle has on various systems that must all be interrelated by the very nature of quantum theory:
It was found that the el [elementalistic] “absolute” division of the “observer” and the “observed” was false to facts, because every observation in this field disturbs the observed. The elimination of this elementalism in the quantum field led to the most revolutionary restricted “uncertainty principle” of Heisenberg, which, without abolishing determinism, requires the transforming of the two-valued A [Aristotelian] “logic” into the 4-valued [infinity valued] semantics of probability. Again, this advance in quantum formulations has suggested new experiments. (107)
Olson’s objectism is an expression of both the quantum physics concept of object as dynamic process, and what Heidegger, in Poetry, Language, Thought, calls the thingly in the thing. In terms of quantum mechanics, the interrelationship that physicist David Bohm notes between observing instrument and observed object may be reworded in Olson’s poetics as projecting instrument and projected object:
in the quantum context, one can regard terms like “observed object,” “observing instrument,” [. . .] etc., as aspects of a single overall “pattern” that are in effect abstracted or “pointed out” by our mode of description. Thus, to speak of the interaction of “observing instrument” and “observed object” has no meaning. (Bohm 134)
Olson’s Postmodernist objectism is, thus, distinct from the Modernist objectivism of Williams that grew out of Imagism—a notion that informed the tenets of New Criticism as much as did “Tradition and the Individual Talent”—in that Objectism treats the form of the poem as an object, the contents of the poem as objects, the poet as an object, and the reader as an object—all existing within a field and revealing an Idealistic interconnectedness between these various objects. The differentiation between the artist-as-object and the art-object occurs within Olson’s compositional field in a way analogous to the differentiation between observing object and observed object within the quantum field—i.e. when the distinction is “pointed out” by critics.
Regarding these interrelated objects, Olson’s objectism is, to use Heideggerian terminology, a deconcelation, or revelation, of that which is objectly in the object. Projective art allows for what Heidegger might call the object-ing of the object:
What matters is a first opening of our vision to the fact that what is workly in the work, equipmental in equipment, and thingly in the thing comes closer to us only when we think [of] the Being of beings. To this end it is necessary beforehand that the barriers of our preconceptions fall away and that the current pseudo concepts be set aside. [. . .] The thingly feature in the work should not be denied; but if it belongs admittedly to the work-being of the work, it must be conceived by way of the work’s workly nature. If this is so, then the road toward the determination of the thingly reality of the work leads not from thing to work but from work to thing.
The art work opens up in its own way the Being of beings. This opening up, i.e., this deconcealing, i.e., the truth of beings, happens in the work. In the art work, the truth of what is has set itself to work. Art is truth setting itself to work. (Heidegger 39)
This “truth of beings setting itself to work” in the art is what Heidegger considers to be the essence of art (36), and it is the primary goal of his aesthetic philosophy:[9]
That into which the work sets itself back and which it causes to come forth in this setting back of itself we called the earth. Earth is that which comes forth and shelters. Earth, self-dependent, is effortless and untiring. Upon the earth and in it, historical man grounds his dwelling in the world. In setting up a world, the work sets forth the earth. This setting forth must be thought here in the strict sense of the word. The work moves the earth itself into the Open of a world and keeps it there. The work lets the earth be an earth. (46)
Heidegger’s point that artistic vision must be open to seeing the objectliness of objects in terms of the “Being of beings”—the essential ontological quality of things that exist—but without approaching the object with any preconceptions, so that “work sets forth the earth [. . .] into the Open of a world” is fundamentally the same as Kerouac’s notion of “
Begin not from preconceived idea of what to say about image but from jewel center of interest in [. . . object] at moment of writing, and write outwards [. . .] to peripheral release and exhaustion [. . .]. (“Essentials” 227)
Like Heidegger, Kerouac advocates approaching the object without any preconceived ideas so that the objectliness of the object, the “jewel center of interest,” is set forth “to peripheral release.” Olson states the same concept in “Projective Verse” using similar language:
The objects which occur at every given moment of composition [. . .] must be treated exactly as they do occur therein and not by any ideas or preconceptions from outside the poem, must be handled as a series of objects in field in such a way that a series of tensions [. . .] are made to hold, and to hold exactly inside the content and the context of the poem which has forced itself, through the poet and them, into being. (“Projective Verse” 20)
Kerouac’s and Olson’s assertions that the prose or poem forces, or releases, or projects itself into existence through both the poet and the objects can only be true if the objectliness of the poem (i.e. the “thingly feature in the work”) belongs to the poem’s form (i.e. “the work-being of the work”) rather than to its content since “the thingly reality of the work leads [. . .] from work to thing”—i.e. it leads, or projects, from form to object rather than from object to form.
Such a projection of objectliness from form to object, or from work to thing, occurs within an Idealistic cosmology—as Heidegger, in the tradition of German Idealism, attests:
All things of earth, and the earth itself as a whole, flow together into a reciprocal accord. But this confluence is not a blurring of their outlines. Here there flows the stream, restful within itself, of the setting of bounds, which delimits everything present within its presence. Thus in each of the self-secluding things there is the same not-knowing-of-one-another. The earth is essentially self-secluding. To set forth the earth means to bring it into the Open as the self-secluding.
This setting forth of the earth is achieved by the work as it sets itself back into the earth. The self-seclusion of earth, however, is not a uniform, inflexible staying under cover, but unfolds itself in an inexhaustible variety of simple modes and shapes. (47)
What Heidegger refers to as “earth” are the tangible objects that appear self-secluded through the limits of physical perception. Blake might refer to Heidegger’s “earth” as the Newtonian universe that is perceived through Lockean single vision. This “earth” differs from what Heidegger refers to as “world,” which is the transcendent reality that Zuckerkandl and Mackey hold that tone or music points to, and which Romantics like Blake and Wordsworth assert can be perceived through imaginatively-heightened senses:
The world is not the mere collection of the countable or uncountable, familiar and unfamiliar things that are just there. But neither is it a merely imagined framework added by our representation to the sum of such given things. The world worlds, and is more fully in being than the tangible and perceptible realm in which we believe ourselves to be at home. World is never an object that stands before us and can be seen. World is the ever-nonobjective to which we are subject as long as the paths of birth and death, blessing and curse keep us transported into Being. Wherever those decisions of our history that relate to our very being are made, are taken up and abandoned by us, go unrecognized and are rediscovered by new inquiry, there the world worlds. (Heidegger 44-45)
Heidegger’s predilection for using nouns as verbs to indicate the ontological actions that the nouns perform, as in the world worlds, are attempts to both convey the existence of objects as events that occur within the cosmological field of an Idealistic universe and to blur the distinction between cause and effect regarding those ontological actions or events.
This distinction between cause and effect is blurred since such distinctions become meaningless within an Idealistic cosmology that is in basic agreement with quantum theory:
The chain of cause and effect could be quantitatively verified only if the whole universe were considered as a single system—but then physics has vanished, and only a mathematical scheme remains. The partition of the world into observing and observed system prevents a sharp formulation of the law of cause and effect. (Heisenberg 215)
Bohm expands on this acausal quality of quantum theory in a way that further points to the relation between the cosmology of philosophic Idealism—either Hindu, Buddhist, or German—and the cosmology that underlies quantum theory:
quantum theory has a fundamentally new kind of non-local relationship, which may be described as a non-causal connection of elements that are distant from each other [. . .]. For our purposes, it is not necessary to go into the technical details concerning this non-local relationship. All that is important here is that one finds, through a study of the implications of the quantum theory, that the analysis of a total system into a set of independently existent but interacting particles breaks down in a radically new way. One discovers, instead, both from consideration of the meaning of the mathematical equations and from the results of the actual experiments, that the various particles have to be taken literally as projections of a higher-dimensional reality which cannot be accounted for in terms of any force of interaction between them. (186-87)[10]
Essentially, the ontological components of Heidegger’s and Olson’s aesthetics exhibit an agreement with quantum theory’s ontology and, thus, with Korzybski’s concept of an object as a time-bound phenomenon that displays a multiplicity of structural differentiation within its form:
If we take [an object . . .] we find that the “scientific object” represents an “event,” a mad dance of “electrons,” which is different every instant, which never repeats itself, which is known to consist of extremely complex dynamic processes of very fine structure, acted upon by, and reacting upon, the rest of the universe, inextricably connected with everything else and dependent on everything else. If we enquire how many characteristics (m.o) [multiordinal characteristics] we should ascribe to such an event, the only possible answer is that we should ascribe to an event infinite numbers of characteristics, as it represents a process which never stops in one form or another; neither, to the best of our knowledge, does it repeat itself. (387)
According to
The principles Burroughs drew from Korzybski’s book, and on which he lectured Kerouac and Ginsberg, are evident in the form of the prose and poetry of all three Beat writers. Of course, the form of the work is not the “mad dance of ‘electrons’” that a tangible object is. However, within Kerouac’s and Olson’s implied ontologies, the form of the work is nonetheless an “event” that is to be considered as possessing analogous characteristics to those of a tangible object due to its spontaneous or projective nature. Thus, spontaneous or projective forms—such as those in Kerouac’s Doctor Sax, Olson’s Maximus, Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm, or Parker’s “Klactoveedsedstene”—possess qualities analogous to the multiordinal characteristics of a tangible object through the associational structure that the natural form (the non-artificial form) of the work necessarily dictates upon the comprehensive content, regardless of how much the superficial content originates from autobiographical material:
It comes to this: the use of a man [. . .] lies in how he conceives his relation to nature, that force to which he owes his somewhat small existence. If he sprawl, he shall find little to sing but himself, and shall sing, nature has such paradoxical ways, by way of artificial forms outside himself. But if he stays inside himself, if he is contained within his nature as he is participant in the larger force, he will be able to listen, and his hearing through himself will give him secrets objects share. And by an inverse law his shapes will make their own way. It is in this sense that the projective act, which is the artist’s act in the larger field of objects, leads to dimensions larger than the man. (Olson, “Projective Verse” 25)
Again, Olson’s point is both epistemological and ontological in that if artists conceive their relation to nature within an Idealistic philosophy where they recognize themselves as objects within a field—as participants within a larger force—then the universe of objects to which the artists “listen” naturally encourages art in which the form and content of the text have the same interplay between them as do the form and content of existence. Thus, through structures that accommodate a fluidic interplay between form and content, projective arts, such as those grounded in improvisation or spontaneous composition, are capable of carrying an Idealistic cosmology that immediately opens itself to depictions of the interrelation between the interior and exterior worlds of characters, or the implicate and explicate dimensions of quantum ontology as theorized by Bohm:
This order is not to be understood solely in terms of a regular arrangement of objects [. . .]. Rather, a total order is contained, in some implicit sense, in each region of space and time.[12]
Now, the word “implicit” is based on the verb “to implicate.” This means “to fold inward” (as multiplication means “folding many time”). So we may be led to explore the notion that in some sense each region contains a total structure “enfolded” within it.
It will be useful in such an exploration to consider some further example of enfolded or implicate order. Thus, in a television broadcast, the visual image is translated into a time order, which is “carried” by the radio wave. Points that are near each other in the visual image are not necessarily “near” in the order of the radio signal. Thus, the radio wave carries the visual image in an implicate order. The function of the receiver is then to explicate this order, i.e., to “unfold” it in the form of a new visual image. (149)
Within the projective field of Olson’s aesthetics, which Kerouac’s own aesthetics reflects, the implicate order of the work-object is projected as energy from the artist-object to be the reader-object whose function is to explicate the order—to uncover or unfold the “truth of beings setting itself to work” in the art (Heidegger 36).
Correspondingly, as the projective act leads to larger dimensions, or transcendent dimensions—“leads to dimensions larger than the man” (Olson, “Projective Verse” 25)—the works themselves become larger and more complex, or multidimensional, in their further correspondence with the cosmological paradigm:
if projective verse is practiced long enough, is driven ahead hard enough along the course I think it dictates, verse again can carry much larger material than it has carried in our language since the Elizabethans. But it can’t be jumped. We are only at its beginnings, and if I think that the Cantos make more “dramatic” sense than do the plays of Mr. Eliot, it is not because I think they have solved the problem but because the methodology of the verse in them points a way by which, one day, the problem of larger forms may be solved. [. . .] It could even be argued [. . .] that it is because Eliot has stayed inside the non-projective that he fails as a dramatist—that his root is the mind alone, and a scholastic mind at that (no high intelletto despite his apparent clarities)—and that, in his listenings he has stayed there where the ear and the mind are, has only gone from his fine ear outward rather than, as I say a projective poet will, down through the workings of his own throat to that place where breath comes from, where breath has its beginnings, where drama has to come from, where, the coincidence is, all acts spring. (Olson, “Projective Verse” 26)
Upon developing his spontaneous composition technique, his own composition in field, Kerouac conceived his Duluoz Legend—the type of larger form in the novelic that Olson sought in the poetic. Ironically, Kerouac stated his intention in the introduction to
Between Bombast and Babble:
Modernist and Postmodernist Searches for the Poetic Monad or Logos
Near the end of his career, in 1967’s “The First Word,” Kerouac termed his spontaneous prose a “Space Age Prose” that moves within the space-time continuum—acknowledging, perhaps, that the metaphysical ideology underlying his spontaneous technique, the open field of Olson, was implicitly linked, or implicately linked in Bohm’s terms, with the cosmological paradigm of quantum theory:
spontaneous, or ad lib, artistic writing imitates [. . .] the flow of the mind as it moves in its space-time continuum, in this sense it may really be called Space Age Prose someday because when astronauts are flowing through space and time they too have no chance to stop and reconsider and go back. It may be they won’t be reading anything else but spontaneous writing when they do get out there, the science of the language to fit their science of movement.
But I’d gone so far to the edges of language where the babble of the subconscious begins, because words “come from the Holy Ghost” first in the form of a babble which suddenly by its sound indicates the word truly intended (in describing the stormy sea in Desolation Angels I heard the sound “Peligroso” for “Peligroso Roar” without knowing what it meant, wrote it down involuntarily, later found out it means “dangerous” in Spanish) [. . .]. (“The First Word” 487)
Essentially, Kerouac’s claim is that the subconscious provides sonal babble that allows the establishment of a link between the sensual and the transcendent—because “words ‘come from the Holy Ghost.’” In one instant, he claims to have achieved this link between the exterior sensual world and the interior transcendent world through the sound p�-l‘-grÇ-sÇ that he heard rise up from his subconscious as an onomatopoetic word to describe the sound of the ocean during a storm, and he “wrote it down involuntarily” or spontaneously unconscious of the sound’s significance within the Spanish language. Through his spontaneous improvisational jazz-based narrative, Kerouac recognizes the role that sound, or tone, plays in establishing the “co-inherence of immanence and transcendence” that Mackey has expounded upon:
music bears witness to what’s left out of [. . . our] concept of reality, or, if not exactly what, to the fact that something is left out. The world, music reminds us, inhabits while extending beyond what meets the eye, resides in but rises above what’s apprehensible to the senses.” (195)
The choice of a musical structure for the form of projective art—whether it be prose, poetry, painting, or sculpture—reinforces the component of the Idealistic cosmology within which the projective art must operate. The improvisational structure of jazz becomes a microcosm of the Idealistic or quantum paradigm, with sound pointing to the transcendent realm that is implicit in the cosmology of the Idealistic and quantum paradigm.
Of course, quantum theory’s cosmological paradigm was not available to Modernists like Williams, Pound, and Eliot—other than in the Idealism of Eastern philosophies, German Transcendentalism, or the philosophic tenets of Romanticism. It is perhaps for this reason that in Modernist poetry Pound’s Cantos come closer to Olson’s concept of projective verse composed in field—not only due to Pound’s initial work in Imagism and Vorticism concerning the presentation of energy through images, but also to his interest in Chinese ideograms and Eastern thought that, like Korzybski’s General Semantics, is non-Aristotelian: “I am not proceeding according to Aristotelian logic but according to the ideogramic method of first heaping together the necessary components of thought” (ABC of Economics 194). Pound further implies his rejection of the Aristotelian method in favor of the ideogramic in a
Ideogram is essential to the exposition of certain kinds of thought. Greek philosophy was mostly a mere splitting, an impoverishment of understanding
[. . .]. Socrates a distinguished gas-bag in comparison with Confucius and Mencius. (Letters 447)
Despite the correspondence between Olson’s projective and the evolution of Pound’s poetic, the fact that the form of The Cantos ultimately confounded Pound in his attempt to make them cohere could be due, from Olson’s projective view, to the Modernist pursuit of form accommodating the content of a work. Although, the 50 year span of the composition of The Cantos would make a true projective approach to their composition nearly impossible since Pound would either have had to establish the formal process at the work’s inception in 1916,[13] or else rewrite the work to allow an eventual prioritized form to reinterpret the superficial content of the original material into a new comprehensive content once the projective form had been established.
However, the Postmodernist artist is also a post-Heisenberg artist, and the new aesthetics reflect quantum theory’s paradigm by necessity—whether consciously informed, as Burroughs was through Korzybski, or synchronistically influenced[14] as other Postmodernists may have been—allowing the content to accommodate the prioritized form. The distinction between Modernist aesthetics in which form accommodates content and Postmodernist aesthetics in which content accommodates form could actually place Bunting’s Briggflatts—rather than Pound’s Cantos—as a projective work written by a Modernist poet.
In an interview with Barbara Lesch, Bunting explained that his formal concern in Briggflatts was the creation of sounds, and the necessity of finding verbal meanings, or content, that would provide the sounds he needed once the form had been determined: “You can only imitate [a sound] in any normal system through the syntax, so you have got to have a meaning of a sort that can give you a syntax” (313). Bunting’s concern in finding a content that would give him the syntax he needed for the sounds that would accommodate the form he envisioned indicates that in Briggflatts he prioritized form over content. Of course, Briggflatts was completed in 1965—well after the Postmodernist aesthetic had been established—and Bunting’s attention on acquiring the sounds that would accommodate his form is essentially the same as Kerouac’s concern in Old Angel Midnight, “Sea,” and in several passages from his spontaneous novels—a concern for sound that Olson indicates is a necessary component in field composition:
It is by their syllables that words juxtapose in beauty, by these particles of sound as clearly as by the sense of the words which they compose. In any given instance, because there is a choice of words, the choice [. . .] will be, spontaneously, the obedience of [. . . the] ear to the syllables. The fineness, and the practice, lie here, at the minimum and source of speech. (“Projective Verse 17-18)
Of course, this desire for a poetry based in sound “the minimum and source of speech” is a goal of the pre-Heisenberg Modernists as well as the post-Heisenberg Postmodernists in the search of both groups for the Logos, or a monad, that represents not only the essence of language or poetry, but the manifestation of the sensual world. In his Autobiography, Williams alludes to such a monadic quality in his call for a “rediscovery of a primary impetus, the elementary principles of all art, in the local conditions” (146).
Pound’s first use of ideograms in The Cantos occurs in 1937 with the publication of “The Fifth Decad of Cantos” in the conclusion of Canto LI. His interest in using ideograms was at least partially intended as a means of approaching original thought, or the essence of language, since Pound believed that the compound characters of Chinese ideograms were still read with a sense of their original pictographic components. It was with this theory of ideograms in mind that Pound sought a poetic essence in conjunction with his own concern for sound—as he informs Kitasono in the
This attraction to ideograms seems a natural extension of Pound’s early work in imagist poetry since, through its original pictographic components, the ideogram is essentially an imagistic language—at least in its seminal development.[15] For Pound, the ideogram represents that non-Aristotelian method of “heaping together the necessary components of thought” (ABC of Economics 194)—with each component of the ideogram representing a single thought, or a monadic logos from which subsequent thoughts issue. However, the pursuit of a monadic Logos that would reveal the essence of language, poetry, and cosmos did not become a full aesthetic principle until the development of the various poetic approaches that were taken to achieve the goal by such Postmodernist writers as Snyder, Spicer, Olson, Clark Coolidge, Charles Bernstein, Bernadette Mayer, and Kerouac—all of whom must necessarily present an Idealistic ideology through their work in order for such a monadic principle to even exist.
Snyder’s Idealism is rooted in Japanese Zen Buddhism, and he was instrumental in furthering Kerouac’s understanding of Buddhism, as well as in developing Kerouac’s interest in the Ch’an texts.[16] Through the grounding of his poetry in Zen principles, Snyder has sought to reveal pre-verbal experiences as a connection between the sensual and the transcendent:
one is to the world of people and language and society, and the other is to the nonhuman, nonverbal world, which is nature as nature is itself; and the world of human nature—the inner world—as it is itself, before language, before customs, before culture. There’s no words in that world. There aren’t any rules that we know and that’s the area that Buddhism studies. (qtd. in Kherdian 35)
For instance, Snyder’s speaker in “Geese Gone Beyond” achieves a nonverbal communion with the geese “who talk first noisy then murmur” (5), and who later create “a rumble of dripping water/beating wings/full honking sky” as the speaker watches the geese (15-17). Snyder’s use of blank space within the poem’s fifth line, between noisy and then, illustrates the nonverbal quality of the experience even though sounds occur in the noisy talk, the murmur, the “rumble of dripping water,” and the honking of the geese in flight. However, these sounds are nonverbal and represent the pre-verbal sounds of nature that existed before the advent of language. This nonverbal / pre-verbal communion between speaker and nature occurs within the formalized construction of the speaker’s perception of the event—underscoring that the nonverbal quality of the event is significant, has monadic qualities, through the structural framework of the perception:
I kneel in the bow
in seiza, like tea-ceremony
or watching a NÇ play
kneeling, legs aching, silent. (10-13)
The formalized kneeling and posturing that is reminiscent of a Japanese tea-ceremony ritual, or of attendance at a NÇ drama, presents a framework through which the “silent” observation of the pre-verbal event projects the transcendent significance of the one goose who “breaks and flies up” (14), the “one who is the first to feel to go” (20). The flight of the first goose breaking forth from the pre-verbal event exemplifies the pre-verbal sonal monad that only becomes significant as Logos when sound and object are associated within human intellect—thus allowing Heidegger’s “truth of what is [. . . to] set itself to work” (39).
Snyder’s emphasis on the pre-verbal sounds of nature creates the sense of a transcendent experience through an Idealistic connection to the natural world. Similarly, Spicer’s search for the monadic Logos that underlies his own Idealism is revealed in such poems as “Morphemics” and “Phonemics” as Spicer reveals himself to be one of the Postmodernist poets who is the most concerned with this aesthetic of what Olson calls “the minimum and source of speech,” and what Kerouac’s refers to as “the babble of the subconscious [. . .] ‘from the Holy Ghost.’”
During his first
these poems are largely using the incarnation of Jesus as a metaphor for poetry. Metaphor means, you know, “bearing across.” Which is a nice pun in itself. And the soul and the body are two things which both have to be incarnated in the kind of poem which goes through. (
This idea of the Christian Logos, does not appear in the first of Spicer’s Elegies. However, the ancient Greek notion of 8`(@H—translated here as logos, from which the Christian concept was derived—makes a tangential appearance in Spicer’s first section through the image of “the continuous Platonic pattern of birds” (Collected Books 104). This “continuous Platonic pattern of birds” alludes to the Platonic Forms that exist outside the phenomenal world as part of the Nous—as G.B. Kerferd points out:
The identification of Logos and Nous was perhaps first made in the pseudo-Platonic Epinomis 986c4, although Plato had treated the two terms as meaning very nearly the same thing in his account of the human soul in the Republic. (83)
Rather than Eastern philosophic systems of Idealism, Spicer’s Idealistic thought is based in Platonic Idealism—a far more limiting form of Idealism, but one that gives Spicer the epistemological, ontological, and cosmological components he requires—as well as a direct link to the monadic principle of Christianity.
Spicer’s claim that his “Textbook” uses “the incarnation of Jesus as a metaphor for poetry,” clearly identifies his work with John 1:14:
And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.
Within Spicer’s “Textbook,” this association is established in the first stanza of his serial prose-poem in twenty-nine sections:
Surrealism is the business of poets who cannot benefit by surrealism. It was the first appearance of the Logos that said, “The public be damned,” by which he did not mean that they did not matter or he wanted to be crucified by them, but that really he did not have a word to say to them. This was surrealism. (Collected Books 169)
Of course, Word in John is also a translation of 8`(@H—and this Christian idea of the Logos informs much of Spicer’s poetry whether he cites it directly or refers to it in a homophonic pun, “words are not something which, in themselves, are anything but low ghosts instead of logos” (Vancouver 204). In calling words “low ghosts,” Spicer is playing upon the notion that Logos may be associated with the high ghost—either God or the Holy Ghost.
However, these “low ghosts” of mere words do not seem capable of supplying poetry with the creative power that Spicer desires. Spicer’s Faustian ambitions require the poet to have a stronger connection to the Logos—a connection that is possible only in an Idealistic universe that includes Spicer’s concept of poetry as magic that works in the achievement of acausal phenomena. For Spicer, such a connection seems inherent in language—which he demonstrates through the reduction of words into their elemental units of graphemes, morphemes, and phonemes that become types of tone-pointers similar to Mackey and Zuckerkandl’s “tone-pointing” musical sounds—not merely by pointing to an object or concept, as collected morphemes do when combined into words. Through the pre-verbal tones of phonemes within Spicer’s poetry, these elemental units of language act as pointers to the transcendent, as well as to the monadic Logos itself.
An intriguing aspect of Spicer’s poetry is this attention to the use of morphemes to often carry the informational essence of his poems. For instance, in the fourth section of “Morphemics,” Spicer reduces the word innocence into its morphemes:
The loss of innocence, Andy,
The morpheme—cence is regular as to Rule IIc, IIa, and IIb (cents) and
(sense) being more regular. The (inn-)
With its geminated consonant
Is not the inn in which the Christ Child was born. The root is nocere and
innocence, I guess, means not hurtful. Innocents[.] (Collected Books 235)
Spicer reduces the word innocence into its morphemes of in and nocence to show that in (acting as a negation) shows innocence to mean not “nocence”—nocence being defined either as “harmful” (as Spicer indicates) or as “guilty.” Thus, morphemically reduced, innocence means “not harmful” or “not guilty.”
By pointing out that the cence of innocence is regular to the rules which cents and sense are more regular to, and that the inn “Is not the inn in which the Christ Child was born,” Spicer seems to be pointing out that one possible reduction of innocence could be inn-o-sense (i.e. the transient lodging place /of any of the various definitions of the morpheme sense). Such a reduction of innocence (with all the myriad definitions of sense to be utilized) has its appeal in that it would create connotative meanings of the word to which we are unaware—and so act “magically” upon readers in a way that would seem to be in keeping with Spicer’s assertion that “poetry is magic”—but such a reading would be wrong according to what Spicer states he is up to in a fanciful letter to Garcia Lorca in After Lorca:
Most of my friends like words too well. They set them under the blinding light of the poem and try to extract every possible connotation from each of them, every temporary pun, every direct or indirect connection—as if a word could become an object by mere addition of consequences. (Collected Books 25)
However, while Spicer may not mean for innocence to be understood as the “inn of sense,” his way of denouncing such a reading sets up a third, but less radical, reduction of innocence. When Spicer states that inn “Is not the inn in which the Christ Child was born,” he makes what must be a deliberate error. In the nativity myth, the Christ Child was not born in the inn but in the manger of the inn because there was no room at the inn itself. This mistake on Spicer’s part is a play on words that indicates that while a reduction of innocence as inn-o-cence is wrong—since it does not break the word along morphemic lines, but is an attempt to find hidden words within the word—other connotations that may be derived from the word’s morphemic reduction as in-nocence are valid in that they are legitimate approximations of that valid reduction of the word in the same way that the manger of the nativity myth is in approximation to the inn.
Thus, Spicer’s repetition of the phoneme in in “the inn in which,” points to another possible way that in may be defined—as a locationary construct. Spicer’s “inn in which” (emphasis added), leads to the notion of innocence—indicating that the subject of innocence is located within nocere, and establishing an internal contradiction of meaning as the “not harmful” or “not guilty” subject is embodied within a part of the harmful or guilty.
This second reading of the morphemic reduction of in-nocence readily connects to an Idealistic cosmology in which objects that appear to be separate and oppositional entities are actually fundamentally contained within the other. It thus becomes possible to consider both readings of in-nocence as valid interconnected events within an Idealistic interpretation of the morphemic reduction. Spicer’s implied multiple use of in allows a word, such as innocence, to be interpreted as a contradictory ontological issue of the subject (if both meanings are taken to be valid simultaneously within an Idealistic cosmology), or as divergent efficacies within the poetic use of innocence (if the multiple meanings are taken as valid constructs operating independently of one another in an equally Idealistic manner)—the effect of the morphemic play is to create a sort of linguistic uncertainty principle in which the in prefix can either negate the concept conveyed by the root form of the word or demonstrate a location within that concept.
Spicer plays with the connotations of such morphemic reductions of words throughout his poetry—often involving words or phrases that utilize what appears to be his favorite morpheme, in, for the purposes of these reductions. Spicer’s attraction to the morpheme in most likely stems from its significance as a prefix of negation since the idea of negation, or what is not, is another prominent aspect of his poetry—as is evident in his poem “Ghost Song”:
The in
ability to love
The inability
to love
In love
(like all the small animals went up the hill into the
underbrush to escape from the goat and the bad tiger)
The inability
Inability
(tell me why no white flame comes up from the earth
when lightning strikes the twigs and the dry branches)
In love. In love. In love. The
In-
ability
(as if there were nothing left on the mountains but
what nobody wanted to escape from)[.] (Collected Books 73)
The significance of the morpheme in within the poem is revealed by the way Spicer separates in from ability in the word inability that spans the first two lines of the poem. The first line immediately registers in as having a definition distinct from its usual prefix definition of negation—especially since the line does not use a hyphen to indicate that the in may be a prefix to a root that will begin the second line. Thus, “The in / ability to love” is not only eventually understood as “not possessing the ability to love,” but immediately associates the locationary referent in with the ability to love.
Spicer then allows for the morpheme’s reverse effect with the fifth line’s phrase, “In love,” where in not only allows the interpretation of being located positionally within the concept of love, but is also carries the implication of negated love. For instance, the fifth line’s “In love” is followed by the parenthetical explanation of the sixth and seventh line, “all the small animals went up the hill into the / underbrush to escape from the goat and the bad tiger”—presumably, then, it is because these small animals are in-love, they do “not love,” the goat and the bad tiger.
In the fifth section of “Phonemics,” Spicer also associates this concept of negation with God as Logos in a manner reminiscent of the mystical implications of the Hebrew alphabet as described in the Sefer ha-zohar, or Book of Splendor from the Kabbala:
Aleph did not come before Beth. The Semitic languages kept as strict a
separation between consonant and vowel as between men and women. Vowels somehow got between to produce children. J V H
Was male. The Mycenean bookkeepers
Mixed them up (one to every 4.5)
(A = 1, E = 5, I = 9, O = 15, U =21)
Alpha being chosen as the queen of the alphabet because she meant “not.” (Spicer, Collected Books 238)
The one divergence from traditional Jewish mysticism that Spicer makes is the alteration of the Tetragrammaton YHWH, not only to its less appropriate form of JHVH, but to a trigrammaton of JVH—the significance of which is not readily apparent. However, what is significant is Spicer’s emphasis on alpha as a negation that reflects his favorite morpheme in.
This focus on the negation aspects of alpha and in is central to both Spicer’s cosmology and his aesthetic through his concern for the source or location of extraverted poetry. Alpha is otherwise a designation of that which is seminal or primary, a source; and Spicer’s principle uses for in are either as a negation or as a locationary marker, as in inside, interior, internal, within, et cetera. Consequently, the nature of the poetic source that Spicer seeks—the Alpha or the Logos—involves the same dialectic between negation and locationary placement, “I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last: and, What thou seest, write in a book” (Revelation 1.11).
Spicer’s insistence that the poetic source is a dictating “Other,” is essentially based on a negation or denial of the self as the poetic source. However, Kerouac is in agreement with Jung in placing the source for spontaneous composition, a technique that is similar to Spicer’s automatic poetry, within the writer’s subconscious where “words ‘come from the Holy Ghost’” through the spontaneity of the mind that has “no recourse to discriminative thinking.” Both possibilities for the location of the poetic source can be found in Spicer’s contradictory epistemology through his use of alpha and the morpheme in, and it should not be surprising then that the morpheme appears so frequently within the work that Spicer asserts is automatic, or extraverted. Through this extraverted work, and its concern with the elemental components of language, Spicer’s search for the God-like creative source of poetry seems to also be a search for a form of complete communication that he feels only poetry is capable of achieving:
A really perfect poem (no one yet has written one) could be perfectly translated by a person who did not know one word of the language it was written in. A really perfect poem has an infinitely small vocabulary. (Collected Books 25)
This search for creation and complete communication through his automatic writing and search for an infinitely small language explains Spicer’s interest in graphemes, morphemes, and phonemes as attempts at reducing language to its fundamental components in order to find the irreducible essence of language—the linguistic or poetic monad—from which all else automatically flows; and the idea is an echo of what Olson asserts in “Projective Verse”:
I say the syllable, king, and that it is spontaneous, this way: the ear, the ear which has collected, which has listened, the ear, which is so close to the mind that it is the mind’s, that it has the mind’s speed it is close, another way: the mind is brother to this sister and is, because it is so close, is the drying force, the incest, the sharpener [. . .] it is from the union of the mind and the ear that the syllable is born. (18)
These various searches for a poetic monad—Williams’s “primary impetus,” Pound’s poetically pure ideograms, Olson’s “minimum and source of speech,” Snyder’s pre-verbal sounds, Spicer’s search for Logos through morphemes and phonemes, and Kerouac’s Zen-like subconscious babble of the Holy Ghost—reveal an interest in approaching such a monad through primary language or primary thought. Of course, for such primary language or thought to be a poetic monad within an Idealistic universe, it must be accompanied by imaginative thought or reason. Thus, the principle of a poetic monad is founded on the same Kantian principles of the reasonable or imaginative intellect that support transcendent experiences—experiences that include Pound’s notion of a “‘magic moment’ or moment of metamorphosis [that breaks through . . .] from quotidian into ‘divine or permanent world’” (Letters 285), as well as Williams’s idea of “radiant gists” that are experienced through the contemplation of an object which becomes “radiant” through the poet.
Similarly, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets like Coolidge and Bernstein have utilized the concept of the imaginatively creative energy of a word as a monad—the word as Logos—in the development of their aesthetics:
[The ways] of releasing the energy inherent in the referential dimension of language, that these dimensions are the material of which the writing is made, define its medium. Making the structures of meaning in language more tangible and in that way allowing for the maximum resonance for the medium—the traditional power that writing has always had to make experience palpable not by simply pointing to it but by (re)creating its conditions. (Bernstein, “Semblance” 676)
Bernstein’s idea is Romantic in that the human imagination is the means for connecting with a monadic essence that can create (or recreate) an experience that has taken on at least an aura of transcendence through the creative poetic will—essentially agreeing with Mayer’s notion that “hints of great illumination in the medium mix with now erudite structure which betrays an inimitable synchronicity with the workings of the mind and its psychology” (659). Translated into unobfuscated language, Mayer asserts that an underlying order exists within the apparent chaos of the obfuscated poetry of the New York Poets—an order that may be traced to the connection of the poet’s subconscious, as a creative ordering agent, to the Idealistic paradigm of which the poet’s mind and the obfuscated poem are microcosms. Such a philosophy is, again, in agreement with the paradigm of philosophic Idealism and quantum theory, as well as with Jung’s notions of the role of the unconscious regarding the composition of extraverted writing and “the parallelism of time and meaning between psychic and psychophysical events” (“On Synchronicity” 518). Despite semantic contradictions between the various factions of Modernism and Postmodernism, the idea of a poetic monad that is associated with mundane sensual objects is prevalent in 20th century aesthetics, and was given its first Modernist voice in Remembrance of Things Past with Proust’s notion of an objective poetic essence.
Kerouac contributed to this notion of essential or primary thought through the ideas that he drew not only from the words of Buddha in the Surangama Sutra but from the words of Jesus in Mark 13.11—which Kerouac cited in “The First Word” in acknowledgment of his own search for a monadic source:
take no thought beforehand what ye shall speak, neither do you premeditate: but whatsoever shall be given you in that hour, that speak ye: for it is not ye that speak, but the Holy Ghost. (Mark 13.11)
While Spicer may have taken such a directive more literally than Kerouac in that, while he believed words were only “low ghosts,” Spicer took the notion of the Logos seriously as he sought the high ghost, or Holy Ghost, through morphemes and phonemes. Conversely, Kerouac read Mark 13.11, with the understanding that he drew from the Surangama Sutra, as an indication that “the Holy Ghost” is “the babble of the subconscious.”
These directives from Buddha and Jesus—whom Kerouac (as, alternately, a devout Buddhist and Catholic) would consider to be in tune to the universal monad that is buried within the human subconscious, or perhaps even within the collective unconscious of the universal Atman—shaped Kerouac’s reception of Milarepa’s concept of “‘First thought is best thought’” as the basis for his principle of supposedly not revising his manuscripts.[17] For Kerouac, this principle of first thought acts as the catalyst for spontaneous composition, “If you don’t stick to what you first thought, and to the words the thought brought, what’s the sense of bothering with it anyway [. . .]?” (“The First Word” 486), for from the first thought flow all subsequent thoughts in a stream of consciousness in which one associational thought follows another in the same way that one Proustian perception follows another—all of which springs from the monad of the first thought in a microcosmic structure that points to the Idealistic structure of the macrocosm.
Within an Idealistic cosmology like Buddhism’s, Milarepa’s concept of first thought essentially equates the notion of the flow of human consciousness to the flow of existence from the original monadic thought of the undifferentiated One or Atman—what Kerouac calls the Golden Eternity—and it was Kerouac’s pursuit of this monad that lead him to his supposed conviction of not revising his spontaneous composition, and then to his eventual experiments in nonsensical sounds as a means of revealing the subconscious in the manner of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.
[1] Olson’s first recorded use of the word postmodern appears to be in an
[2] Blake could easily be included in this list except for the fact that he is not a Modernist, but a Romantic. However, just as some critics argue that Blake is not a Romantic, but a pre-Romantic, the argument could also be made that Blake was a pre-Modernist in many ways.
[3] Of course, the spread of the plague was not random—starting in seaport areas with unsanitary conditions where flea-infested rats would carry the disease and infect the human population, with people then fleeing the infected areas only to spread the disease to the areas that they migrated to—but the means of infection were not known at the time, and appeared to be random to the general population.
[4] Eliot first began to work out the content in “Burnt Norton,” the poem that would become the first of the four quartets and which was published as the last poem in Eliot’s Collected Poems 1909-35 before he began to organize the entire four quartets into their eventual musical form.
[5] Essential item #22 from “Belief & Technique for Modern Prose” states, “Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better” (483).
[6] The sense of energy did not enter into Pound’s poetic until his development of Imagism into a literary component of Wyndham Lewis’s Vorticism. However, the energy presented within Vorticistic art is the energy of the machine, and this mechanical energy—artificial energy because it originates in the artifice of the machine—establishes a distinction between Pound’s poetic and Olson and Kerouac’s poetic where the energy is a naturally occurring energy that is transferred between objects within a natural field.
[7] Here, Olson’s notion of the spontaneous choice of words in the ear’s obedience to the syllables is analogous to Buddha’s directive in the Surangama Sutra of learning “to answer questions spontaneously with no recourse to discriminative thinking.”
[8] Although “Abstract Expressionism” is the generally accepted designation for this group of post-World War II American painters, it is not an accurate description of their collective works in that not all are abstract or Expressionist. Within this larger group, the smaller group known as the Action painters is of concern here—a group that includes Jackson Pollock, William De Kooning, Franz Kline, Jack Tworkov, and Bradley Walker Tomlin. Using Olson’s terminology, Action Painting might also be called Projective Painting.
[9] Olson establishes a correspondence with Heidegger’s concepts when he uses German to convey his sense of the accomplishments of “Projective Open or Field verse” in a May 1959 letter to Elaine Feinstein, “I believe in Truth! (Wahrheit) My sense is that beauty (Sch`nheit) better stay in the thingitself: das Ding—Ja!—macht ring (the attack, I suppose, on the ‘completed thought,’ or, the Idea, yes? Thus the syntax question: what is the sentence?)” (27).
[10] Of this concept, Bohm notes that it is possible to derive “the properties of the system from a 3N-dimensional ‘wave function’ (where N is the number of particles) which cannot be represented in three-dimensional space alone. Physically one actually finds the non-local, non-causal relationship of distant elements [. . .] which corresponds very well with what is implied by the mathematical equations” (Wholeness 217). A detailed review of this feature of quantum mechanics occurs in Bohm’s Quantum Theory,
[11] Five years later, in a
[12] An aspect of quantum theory that Kerouac alludes to when he describes “spontaneous, or ad lib, artistic writing [. . . as] the flow of the mind as it moves in its space-time continuum” (“First Word” 487).
[13] In a
[14] Jung’s concept of synchronicity—as opposed to the concept of a meaningless occurrence that is evoked through the common use of the word coincidence—is another by-product of the quantum theory paradigm in which cause and effect relationships breakdown at the quantum level:
experiments have demonstrated that space and time, and hence causality, are factors that can be eliminated, with the result that acausal phenomena, otherwise called miracles, appear possible. All natural phenomena of this kind are unique and exceedingly curious combinations of chance, held together by the common meaning of their parts to form an unmistakable whole. Although meaningful coincidences are infinitely varied in their phenomenology, as acausal events they nevertheless form an element that is part of the scientific picture of the world. Causality is the way we explain the link between two successive events. Synchronicity designates the parallelism of time and meaning between psychic and psychophysical events, which scientific knowledge so far has been unable to reduce to a common principle. (Jung, “On Synchronicity” 517-18)
[15] Although not as obvious as Pound’s use of ideograms, the Modernist poets who belonged to the Imagist and Vorticist schools with Pound would essentially be in pursuit of the same monadic principle.
[16] Snyder served as the template for the character of Japhy Ryder who instructs Ray Smith in Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums—one of Kerouac’s least projective or spontaneous novels from his spontaneous period, and, thus, one in which the content of the novel remains more at the superficial level of the autobiographical material upon which it is based.
[17] Milarepa was an 11th century monk and poet who founded the Kargyupta School of Buddhism in
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