, where material and spirit
come into being in nothingness. We write ourselves, our bodies, on
what we presume is a common darkness behind our eyes. All this
personality that we enact, which is in a sense other, is
superfluity; we are our genetic selves made complex in a surface
manner by patterns of self-organization and chance occurrences, and
accidents, and happenstance. These formations of other come
into being through things like the smell of a ripe Fuji apple and the
snap and crumble in the mouth as it is chewed by the teeth and moved
by the tongue, also there is the beat of the helicopter blades making
a roar as we walk through the forest where there are wild columbines
and white saxifrage. The mother's hand raised to make a blow in
cruelty or kindness is also part of this. In the meaning of
individuality of course there is other and in this sense, what
does it mean to us as artists, as poets, as thinkers, biologist,
adventurers?
In the 1950s, Charles Olson perfected the concept of projective verse and it was then that poetry, for many of us, began to transcend the notion of obscurity. What was obscure in writing took a new foothold as it was enmeshed with the breath of the poet and the energy bound in the inspiring object or new perception initiating the poem. At this time a change takes place in the reception of the poem and what is urgent is not the quantity of the poem that is understood. It is no longer how much one understands literally as one reads the poem. The issue becomes how much one uses the richness of one's being to have the experience of the poem. I think of the effect upon me when I first heard Charles Olson read his poem "The Kingfishers" in the late '50s. I re-experience how deeply I was moved at a level in which I am the other. I remember also how much I am partaking of the sensorium: that is, the sight; the sound, taste; touch; smell; memories; consciousness, of the poet Charles Olson during his reading. It is here that I am myself, using myself in the deepening and myriad experience of the poem in all of its images and directions. I do now know what or how many things happen in the "The Kingfishers" as I listen but they are rich and they move me to experience myself. After hearing "The Kingfishers" I am richer, deeper, broadened, I am living better in Alfred North Whitehead's sense. His meaning is that Reason is the desire towards the improvement of life.
In Robin Blaser's book, The Holy
Forest , his poem "Image-Nation 12" begins with these words:
Other is
an idea resembling a particle in physics that blinks in and out of
existence depending on stance or viewpoint or manners of observation.
Other is a fantasy just as the particle in physics is a
fantasy. More profound things, because we can experience them
directly, because we prove them to ourselves, are less of a fantasy.
In the opening words of his poem, "Image-Nation 12," Robin has
introduced, as he does so often, the idea of soul, and it is, of
course, not a soul that one is born with, which is a doubtful
proposition, but the soul that we are at liberty to create in what
John Keats proposes is a vale of soul-making. This is much less of a
fantasy, being more immediately palpable to those engaged in
soul-making, than is the physics of superstrings and hadrons, though
we take pleasure in such perceptions. We live in the insights of
yoga, Buddhism, agnosia, the paintings of Jess, the war on the
environment. Such a catalog is personal and is other and
without limit. This soul-making is a complex affair if we look
closely, and also it is the simplest thing if we look from a little
distance. When I read Robin's "Image-Nation 12" I am deepened; I am
given my experience of Robin's poem. What is urgent is not the
quantity that is understood as one reads this poem, but how
much one uses the richness of one's being to have the experience of
the poem. Blaser immediately continues his poem "Image-Nation 12"
with these lines: Even a body
inhabiting a soul is, as Whitehead would say, a point of novelty in
the mode of prehension of the universe. This feels more complex or
richer than the point represented by a boulder on the side of a hill.
It seems that we are richer in layering of experience and
consciousness. We are then more other: the poems that we read, write,
and listen to, to feed our soul making, such as "Image-Nation 12." or
"The Kingfishers," allow us to become more different. That is correct
and yet we also become more transparent fields of the world's
self-prehension. The complexity of the self-experience we have gained
has made us richer. In this case we are deeper in whatever is behind
matter, material, This is a
complex way to begin to express a series of thoughts in a set of
notes. Here is another way. Robin Blaser introduced me at a poetry
reading in Vancouver years ago and as part of his introduction he read
my poem "Action Philosophy." He presented the poem with more clarity
and more experience of the poem than I had ever accomplished in any
reading of mine. He showed me in this reading areas of experience in
the poem that I had not allowed myself. I did not know they were
there till his reading of the poem. Is this other Or is this
deepening? What strange vocabularies we use. In the mid-fifties
I came to San Francisco and the Bay Area of California. There were
few poets there but they were luminous poets, they dreamed and wrote
and battled and laughed into being the possibilities of a new art that
had not existed before . Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser,
Mary Fabilli, had already created a new archipelago of poetry in
Berkeley. Philip Lamantia, Kenneth Rexroth, William Everson, Madeline
Gleason, James Broughton and others were also active in making that
ground fertile for those of us who arrived as young men and women from
many parts of the country. Blaser begins a poem for bp nichol:
so the ground flows and the heavens are propositional
gifts of birth an accomplishment of thought where
one sits in silence a word-boundary
so the companions move
who belong to their work strange unfamiliarity
of the familiar
I make out a boat the soul's image a voice a residence
and the disappearance from a work over the last
blind note 'Oh, a boat of friends' the music of,
logos of a blinding instrument our words, mine
among them wash at the perilous social, political
hellish and heavenly parts
So:
These words of Robin Blaser's poem go deep and come from a deep place.
They seem to come initially from a dimension beyond the other
. They come from a place on another side where we all mingle as one.
It is here that we share a boat of matter, where material and spirit
are one single thing as best we can guess. At a profound level we
might imagine that each and every one of us is free-floating in the
universe. I imagine that there is nothing beneath us or above us,
that there is no floor, no substrate or ceiling, and that we are each,
as Alfred North Whitehead would have it, a point of novelty in which
we are the universe experiencing or prehending itself. In this
self-experience of the universe the other has disappeared, and
we are in the role of the total, knowing itself.
I am a boat out of an apple tree
both ends are golden (Veda
the labyrinthine differences
or I'm a horseman with prowess
in the rodeo,
but what is the shape of the horse
the uncertain Wavering swift to harry
gods and goddesses at the ends of our worlds
dead or alive
discoursing that is to say, running around arranging
things, ourselves among them centrifugal, after our brief
hangup among things working again and again with that
operational language always, and incorporeal matter, sharp
as sticks and stones
visible visible visible heart-heartless
a wreckage, if he goes there and I love these instabilities
of unstable institutions we speak
a washboard
the Sudden radiates the work of it
drinks us up
the
world is in accordance with my
perspective in order to be independent
of me is for me in order to be without me
These lines of Blaser's poem, "Image-Nation 12," are a picture and
description of soul-making. Yet it is not at all a simple thing to
describe, and words are not the means to describe soul-making.
Soul-making is itself, and it exists in itself, as we become more
complex. What is it? in the forest under the giant evergreens there
are tiny, five-petalled, red-pink roses in a patch of sun -- they are
gleaming. In a car on top of Telegraph Hill in San Francisco one
finds the body of young man with bullet holes in his head. One smells
the strench of the street where an old woman in rags is lying asleep.
There is the taste of ripe orange mango on the tongue. One walks
through a small herd of wild zebra. One takes peyote and doorways of
experience open into the previously unimagined. There is the memory
of the sound of rain from childhood as cars pass in the evening. The
soul is made from many interlayerings of countless events. The soul
does not continue to live after our bodies are gone. The soul is
what, as Robert Duncan pointed out, our body inhabits. Our body
inhabits the soul we make. Others lend their gifts and enrichments to
that soul. Then when we have a soul, when it is accomplished, we are
more other . We are more unique, specialized, original,
different. The other has then been achieved. , and we are less other than we would
have dreamed before our creation and experience began.
My regards to you, Robin Blaser.
'the universe is part of ourselves
we have been everywhere, suddenly,
and twisted the clarities into bottles
and casements
it was the lintel that concerned us
we walked through and wondered
Michael McClure