from
The Fire
Collected Essays
of
Robin Blaser

Edited with an Introduction by Miriam Nichols

Univeristy of California Press, 2006

The Violets: Charles Olson and Alfred North Whitehead

(1983)

“a cosmological reading of a cosmology”<1>

The American poet who has made the most profound use of Whitehead’s thought is Charles Olson.  On this occasion, when I am to mull over the interchange between them, I am reminded of John Russell’s remark as he begins his book on the meanings of modern art:  “. . . in art, as in the sciences, ours is one of the big centuries”(9).<2>  Out of the gloom, so to speak.  Olson and Whitehead are not, of course, alone, but they stand there among the most important figures.  And I like to note that Olson many times expressed his view that the finest compliment one can pay to another mind and work is in the use made of them.  When he died in 1970, just turned sixty and by his own reckoning ten years short of the time he needed to complete his work (Boer 137), he was well into the third volume of a major verse epic, The Maximus Poems, which stands alongside Pound’s Cantos and Williams’ Paterson as a major poetic world.  Besides The Maximus Poems and the poems that did not find a place in that epic structure, there are the essays and letters which propose the necessary poetic and record the struggle to find it.  Olson’s poetics are argumentative about the way we stand in the world and how we belong to it (stance and ethos).  I wish to emphasize the word “world” for reasons that I hope will become clear.

            For Olson, as for any poet, the poetry is primary, but this poetic places before us the argued ground both of practice and of world-view.  Poets have repeatedly in this century turned philosophers, so to speak, in order to argue the value of poetry and its practice within the disturbed meanings of our time.  These arguments are fascinating because they have everything to do with the poet’s sense of reality in which imagery is entangled with thought.  Often, they reflect Pound’s sense of “make it new” or the modernist notion that this century and its art are simultaneously the end of something and the beginning of something else, a new consciousness, and so forth.  It is not one argument or another for or against tradition, nor is it the complex renewal of the imaginary which our arts witness, for, as I take it, the enlightened mind does not undervalue the imaginary, which is the most striking matter of these poetics; what is laid out before us finally is the fundamental struggle for the nature of the real.  And this, in my view, is a spiritual struggle, both philosophical and poetic.  Old spiritual forms, along with positivisms and materialisms, which “held” the real together have come loose.  This is a cliché of our recognitions and condition.  But we need only look at the energy of the struggle in philosophy and poetry to make it alive and central to our private and public lives.  We need not, I think, at this point be trapped by that view of which Geoffrey Hartman writes:

Artistic form and aesthetic illusion are today treated as ideologies to be exposed and demystified--this has long been true on the Continent, where Marxism is part of the intellectual milieu, but it is becoming true also of America. (Beyond 358)

            The reality of Marxism remains, as it began, the other face of Hegel.  To put it unphilosophically, the practice of either of these nineteenth-century prophecies in the twentieth century maintains one side of a dualism, on both sides of which the profound place of the aesthetic, understood as the reach of our “perceptual faith" (Merleau-Ponty's phrase) in human life is short-circuited.  Marxism is an instrument, and an excellent one, for social analysis and the understanding of the problems of necessity for large social bodies, and, perhaps, when the wreckage of its twentieth-century practice has been cleared away, it may become an instrument for the founding of social justice.  In the meantime, the problem of reality--what do we mean by the real?  Part of what is meant is a valuation that includes the world of earth and sky.  In the greatest poetry, ancient or modern, the sense of the real is certainly not limited to that other terrifying face of humanism, necessity, an abstract word for the very real limit and terror of poverty and deprivation.<3> The pleasures of art, of philosophy, and of science are joined to us insofar as we are freed from necessity.  In Europe and North America, where necessity, as yet, does not widely rule, we have the curiosity that mercantilism controls form, and art, philosophy and science do not belong to the daily round.<4> Yet they are, indeed, the elements of a reality, if we try to put one together.  (I have in mind Hannah Arendt’s moving sense of the possible “recovery of the public world.”)  I think the fundamental problem here is a “scientism” of the real, from which, in my reading, the gift of Whitehead’s searching thought, as corrective, was to allow us to escape: that is, to see and work whatever real we can manage differently.  It is this broad, general, rumoured sense of Whitehead, summed up in his word “process,” that I believe brings him so forcefully into American poetics.  Of that “demystification,” which I am here identifying with a scientism of another order, we need to take mind. René Girard writes:

The cultural heritage of humanity is regarded with suspicion.  Its only interest lies in its “demystification”. [. . .]

Humanity, we are told, has fallen victim to a vast mystification unrecognized until now.  This is cultural nihilism, and it is often associated with a fetishistic cult of science.  Because we have discovered the “original sin” of human thought, we think ourselves free of it.  What is now needed is a radically different mode of thought, a new science that will allow us to appreciate the absurdity of all previous thinking.  And because this lie was until recently immune from detection, the new scientific approach must be altogether unconnected with the past.  Inevitably, it will take the shape of a unique discovery by some inspired being who has little in common with ordinary mortals, or even with his own past.  In severing the cord that attached us to the matrix of all mythic thought, this liberator of humanity will have delivered us from dark ancestral falsehood and led us into the luminous world of truth.  Our hard and pure science is to be the result of a coupure épistémologique, an epistemological revolution that is totally unexpected and for which we are entirely unprepared. (Violence 233)

This he names “scientific angelism” (233).  It is an apocalypse of the objective or of a generalized humanity which can be seen as an objectivity.  It is also a disguised superstition.

            What I have noticed in the poetry and poetics of the most important poets is that they are arguing, weaving, and composing a cosmology and an epistemology.  Over and over again.  There is no epistemological cut-off or gash in our deepest natures, nor in our engagement with life.  Nor is the ambition of what is known short on its desire for cosmos.  It is this structuring, large and deep in the nature of things, that still thrills us in Hesiod’s struggle for the sense of it.  Such concern, because it does tie to experience, is central to the historical role of poet and poetry.  I am not denigrating the song of poetry, for the sense of self is always a part of poetry and reality, and so one sings.  But repeatedly in the history of poetry, we find ourselves returning to epic structures and the bases of epic in the shape, size and feel of the world,b cosmos, I suggest that great poetry is always after the world--it is a spiritual chase--and that it has never been, in the old, out worn sense, simply subjective or personal.  Of course, Whitehead’s subjective principle, his theory of prehensions, and his notion of the ingression to the real do not leave the subjective to itself alone.  It is this aspect of poetic experience, its yen for largeness and fullness, that has brought poetry throughout its history into close proximity with the modes of theogony and theology, with science in its deepest concerns, and with philosophies which propose a world.  The density of meaning in the texts has increased for us, as the gods, that wondrous vocabulary of the world, fall, but not without a trace, and the autonomous mind has had to re-pose itself.  We may, then, sit in this corner of things to understand the way in which Whitehead enters so commandingly into Olson’s poetic world.

            I have arranged my essay to include copious quotation.  My reason is that I have found in talking about Olson and teaching his poetry, singular assertion is not enough.  And certainly, where his relation to Whitehead is concerned, there will be disparate views.  The world of twentieth-century thought involves a huge companionship.  I have tried to put together some pieces of that companionship here.

I. WHITEHEAD AND OLSON

Whitehead’s sense of reality as process, which stands to correct both materialism and idealism in their command over us, does not enter upon our thought and imaginations unprepared for.  Hugh Kenner in his discussion of the importance to Ezra Pound of Fenollosa’s “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry” notices the depth of preparation for such a view:

The Descartes who (Boileau complained) had “cut the throat” of poetry, and the Locke who made poetry a diversion of relaxed or enfeebled minds, lived among learned men. . .[who thought] of words naming things, and words as many as there were things, and language a taxonomy of static things, with many an “is” but ideally no verb.  And it was just such notions. . .that Ernest Fenollosa, encouraged by ideograms, set out to refute, on behalf of “the language of science       which is the language of poetry. . . .” (Pound Era 224-225)

The subject-verb-object structure of language, along with its world view, tends to impose itself very strongly in our speech, even in those cases in which some attention would reveal its evident inappropriateness. [. . .] 

Is it not possible for the syntax and grammatical form of language to be changed so as to give a basic role to the verb rather than the noun? (29)

          This involves, I think, a renewed sense of literature, particularly poetry, in which the work of an active, undistanced language goes on, a parataxis.

            I note Whitehead’s currency in these contemporary cosmological concerns, in Bohm, in Ruth Nanda Anshen’s beautiful essay “Convergence,” and in Bernard Lovell’s Emerging Cosmology.<6>  Lovell closes his book with this quotation from Whitehead:

There is no parting from your own shadow.  To experience this faith is to know that in being ourselves we are more than ourselves:  to know that our experience, dim and fragmentary as it is, yet sounds the utmost depths of reality:  to know that detached details merely in order to be themselves demand that they should find themselves in a system of things:  to know that this system includes the harmony of logical rationality, and the harmony of aesthetic achievements:  to know that, while the harmony of logic lies upon the universe as an iron necessity, the aesthetic harmony stands before it as a living ideal moulding the general flux in its broken progress towards finer, subtler issues. (Lovell,197)

And behind that effort.  Behind it, preparing for it, a chain of philosophers, a chain which “leads back through Hegel, Lotse, Schelling and Herder to Leibnitz (as Whitehead constantly recognized), and then it seems to disappear”:  seems to disappear because we are looking for European predecessors, and Leibnitz was indebted to China.  So runs Joseph Needham’s remarkable hypothesis, which attributes European organicism, via Leibnitz’ Jesuit friends of the China Mission, to neo-Confucian Li and the school of Chu Hsi. . . . (Kenner 231)

Kenner is surely right to point to the history of this receptivity, however much modern relativity theory, interpreted by Whitehead, placed a premium on process.  Olson, modern as he is, is also New England.  He had that ground.  In an old fashioned American education, Emerson was simply among the books on the family shelves.  In terms of poetry and process, Olson’s first debts are to Pound’s Fenollosa and Confucianism and, then, to William Carlos Williams’ early interst in science, reflected in his poetry, as a means to gain objectivity and emotional accuracy.  Mike Weaver has finely drawn these concerns together in his discussion of science and poetry in Williams’ early work. There, we find out that Williams requested a copy of C.P. Steinmetz’ book on relativity in 1926 and that he was given a copy of Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World in December, 1926.  Williams wrote in that copy: “Finished reading it at sea, Sept. 26, 1927--A milestone surely in my career, should I have the force and imagination to go on with my work” (Weaver 47, 48 n.2).<7>  Because Whitehead’s science of reality influences stance and, thereby, form in so powerful a poet as Williams, it is fair to say that the currency of Whitehead in poetry has something like a date just there.

            Among Olson’s books, now collected in The Charles Olson Archives in the University of Connecticut Library at Storrs, only two of Whitehead’s titles turn up:  Process and Reality: an Essay in Cosmology and The Aims of Education and Other Essays (Butterick, "Olson's Reading" 88).<8>  This tells us only so much: that certain titles remained in his library, others did not, and that his personal collection is not the record of the breadth of his reading.  Charles Boer in his fine memoir of Olson’s last months in Connecticut recalls an evening’s conversation on Whitehead.  His narration is addressed to Olson himself:

The Wesleyan University undergraduate curriculum in your day had been revamped along “general education” lines and Whitehead’s book, published in your freshman year at Wesleyan, became one of the core texts in this curriculum.  Its “philosophy of organism,” its “subjectivist principle,” and especially its scientifically minded efforts to offer a cosmology for the twentieth century, were facets of Whitehead’s thinking that remained with you throughout your life. (Boer 108)

I am the more persuaded of the importance and use of Whitehead’s thought that I did not know his work --except in snatches and by rumor, including the disappointment of a dinner and evening with him when I was 25 and he was what, 75!-- until last year.  So it comes out like those violets of Bolyai Senior on all sides when men are needed, that we possess a body of thinking of the order of Whitehead’s to catch us up where we wouldn’t poke our hearts in and to intensify our own thought just where it does poke.  He is a sort of an Aquinas, the man.  He did make a Summa of three centuries, and cast his system as a net of Speculative Philosophy so that it goes at least as far as Plato.  And his advantage over either Plato or Aquinas is the advantage we share:  that the error of matter was removed in exactly these last three centuries.  I quote Whitehead:

“The dominance of the scalar physical quantity, inertia, in the Newtonian physics obscured the recognition of the truth that all fundamental quantities are vector and not scalar.”

(Scalar, you will recall, is an undirected quantity, while vector is a directed magnitude as of a force or a velocity.)

So one gets the restoration of Heraclitus’ flux translated as, All things are vectors.  Or put it, All that matters moves!  And one is out into a space of facts and forms as fresh as our own sense of our own existence. (Qtd. in Charters, Olson/Melville 84 - 85)

The breadth and comprehension of Whitehead’s metaphysical thesis in Process and Reality suggested to Olson another manifestation of the new will to cohere.  Whitehead proposed to explain through his philosophy of organism how all the evolving forms of the totality are tending toward some final harmonious order    which, he argued, will be the material embodiment of God. [. . .]  The movement toward harmony is not directed from any outside force acting upon the chaos; it is occurring through the success of its own accidental combinations. [. . .] 

It is not this thesis by itself that stimulates Olson;  rather it is the very grandeur of the act of Whitehead as he “takes thought” on his own perceptions.  His speculation is that the bewildering prehensive activities of all levels of matter do have a goal, and he speculates boldly on what the goal might be.  Part of Whitehead’s argument has to do with the precise formative event in nature;  to explain how it is that some entities receive formation and others deny it, he ascribes to any entity or formal group stages of “feeling.”  Olson finds this explanation the most compelling feature of Whitehead’s book. (63-64)

How can we accept Einstein’s theory of relativity, affecting our very conception of the heavens about us of which poets write so much, without incorporating its essential fact--the relativity of measurements--into our own category of activity:  the poem.  Do we think we stand outside the universe?  Or that the Church of England does?  Relativity applies to everything, like love, if it applies to anything in the world. (Essays 283)

[. . . ] the unfinished, in-process look of the pages, the large leaves, the workbook appearance express the nature of this poetic composition.  The poems are the partially stated connections between objects in the Gloucester field; they are “soundings” or, for that matter, the “field notes” of its metaphysical and cosmological exploration.  The infinite potentiality and complexity of the field make any one effort at best a fragment of understanding; and the final books are just this, the partial filling in of a vast totality. (139)

In the pleasure of these substantiations of Whitehead I should like myself to gather up in a basket--or all it will take is a hand--my own pre-propositions to a knowledge of his thought.  And it might be interesting to someone else in this sense, that, like violets we are a bunch!

It comes down to fact and form.  A writer, I dare say, goes by words. That is, they are facts.  And forms.  Simultaneously.  And a writer may be such simply that he takes an attitude towards this double power of word:  he believes it is enough to unlock anything.  Words occur to him as substances--as entities, in fact as actual entities.  My words were space, myth, fact, object.  And they were globs.  Yet I believed in them enough to try to reduce them to sense.  I knew they were vector and in Ishmael [Olson’s first book, Call me Ishmael, 1947, scholarly on Melville and directive to his own work] treated them as such, but they didn’t, for me, get rid of scalar inertia.  Whitehead, it turns out, would say that I was stuck in the second of the three stages in the process of feeling: 

“The second stage is governed by the private ideal. . . whereby the many feelings, derivatively felt as alien (the first stage of a  response, the mere reception of the actual world), are transformed into a unity of aesthetic appreciation immediately felt as private.” [Olson’s parentheses]

I cannot urge on you enough to remind you that these stubborn globs one sticks by, and is stuck with, are valid, at the same time that urge you, one day, to           recognize them as “losses” of the vector force in exactly the sense in which Whitehead goes on to characterize this second stage further:

“This (the second stage described above) is the incoming of 'appetition,' which in its higher exemplifications we term 'vision.'  In the language of physical science, the 'scalar' form overwhelms the original 'vector' form; the origins become subordinate to the individual experience.  The vector form is not lost, but is submerged as the foundation of the scalar superstructure.”

So they sat for me, space      myth      fact      object.  (Charters, Olson/Melville  85-86)

In more familiar language, this principle can be expressed by the statement that the notion of ‘passing on’ is more fundamental than that of a private individual fact.  In the abstract language here adopted, for metaphysical statement, “passing on” becomes “creativity,” in the dictionary sense of the verb creare, “to bring forth, beget, produce.”  Thus, according to the third principle, no entity can be divorced from the notion of creativity.  An entity is at least a particular form capable of infusing its own particularity into creativity.  An actual entity, or a phase of an actual entity, is more than that; but, at least, it is that. (PR II.X.III, 212 - 213)

Without doubt, if we are to go back to that ultimate, integral experience, unwarped by the sophistications of theory, that experience whose elucidation is the final aim of philosophy, the flux of things is one ultimate generalization    around which we must weave our philosophical system. (PR II.X.I, 208)

I cannot at the moment recall one immortal phrase which expresses it with the same completeness as the alternative notion has been rendered by Heraclitus.  This other notion dwells on permanences of things--the solid earth, the mountains, the stones, the Egyptian Pyramids, the spirit of man, God. (PR 11.X.I, 208)

It is actually form that I am seeking to draw out of the thought--to seize a tradition out of the live air, or something, the Bejewelled Man once said--the thought which, I have suggested, and Whitehead has the system to demonstrate, man is now possessed of after the last three centuries once again. (I suppose because I am a mythologist and least of all a philosopher.  The seasons of man also recur, even if it will be some time before we know them as deliberately as we do those of nature. . . . )  (Charters  87 )

            That is, I am not aware that many men’s acts of form yet tap the total change of stance or posture (postulate or premise) of which Whitehead’s “philosophy of organism” is one completed exemplification.  Mind you, be careful here.  Remember the violets.  A philosophy, even of his order, or because of his order, a philosophy, just because it is a wind-up, it does seek, as he says, to be so water-tight that, “at the end, insofar as the enterprise has been successful, there should be no problem of spacetime, or of epistemology, or of causality, left over for discussion,” form, in the sense in which one means it as of creations, can have no life as such a system.  It is like the moon, without air.  Or a mother.  It has had to be like Whitehead has to find God as wisdom to be, “a tender care that nothing be lost.”  The creation of form by man could hardly let this statement of his operative growth cover him just because he is not God, and his third stage of feeling-- “the satisfaction,” Whitehead calls it--can only assert itself, even as a “completed unity of operation,” in a new actual entity.  In other words has to go back to the vectors of which it is a proof.  Taking off from the thought one can define an act of art as a vector which, having become private and thus acquired vision, ploughs the vision back by way of primordial things.  Only thus can it have consequence.  It cannot, by taking up consequence, into itself. (Charters 88)

And each makes up the matter:  the objective immortality of actual occasions requires the primordial permanence of form, whereby the creative advance ever re-establishes itself endowed with initial creation of the history of one’s self. (Charters 90)

But creativity is always found under conditions, and described as conditioned.  The non-temporal act of all-inclusive unfettered valuation is at once a creature of creativity and a condition for creativity.  It shares this double character with all creatures.  By reason of its character as a creature, always in concrescence and never in the past, it receives a reaction from the world; this reaction is its consequent nature.  It is here termed ‘God’; because the contemplation of our natures, as enjoying real feeling derived from the timeless source of all order, acquires that ‘subjective form’ of refreshment and companionship at which religions aim. (PR I.III.I, 31 - 32)

. . . the process of integration, which lies at the very heart of the concrescence, is the urge imposed on the concrescent unity of that universe by the three Categories of Subjective Unity, of Objective Identity, and of Objective Diversity.  The oneness of the universe and the oneness of each element in the universe, repeat themselves to the crack of doom in the creative advance from creature to creature, each creature including in itself the whole of history and exemplifying the self-identity of things and their mutual diversity. (PR III.I.VII, 228)

. . . to supply you with what I don’t think has had to be faced before, perhaps because the humanism of the Renaissance was sufficient until a few years ago, even if it had run down by Keats’ day.  The anti-humanism which I have dubbed Hegelian has been made the most the poet’s enemy.  It is only recently, we might say, in which a pro-humanistic possibility has emerged. (SV 35)

Two epigraphs open the argument:  Heraclitus’ “Man is estranged from that with which he is most familiar” and a passage from Keats’ famous letter on “Negative Capability,” “when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact or reason. . . .”  (SV 14). These become pointers in Olson’s effort to enter upon a measured humanity within the process of things.  In practice, this becomes a reversal of our condition, both “backward and outside” our present cultural condition.  Sherman Paul has best discussed this active part of Olson’s poetics:

This was Olson’s advice to students in the Greek tutorial when they confronted Homer and the other great writers who appeared later in the fifth century B.C.:  “take both backwards and outside em, not get caught in that culture trap of taking them forwards, as tho all that we are depends on em.”  He himself went back to the Sumerians and Hittites and outside to the Mayans, thereby escaping the “Western Box” in which he felt Pound was trapped. (28)

Where in The Special View, with its play on Einstein’s title, he [Olson] argues the change, in the poetry he effectively pursues it.  One may lose track of this if one does not understand the dynamics of the thought and stance his method of backwards and outside proposes.  This he summarizes in his “impression that man lost something just about 500 B.C. and only got it back just about 1905 A.D” (SV 15).  Thus, Olson goes backward to a turning point as he saw it:  Heraclitus who died in 481 B.C. and the loss of the familiar.  In “A Comprehension,” written in 1966, he clarified:  “. . . the ‘attack’ by Plato on poets & poetry already has asserted itself in fragments 57, 40 & 41 of Heraclitus, dating say 505 when he was in his 40s or at around 480 when in his 60s. . . .”  It is useful to remember these fragments, which Olson was studying in G.D. Kirk’s Heraclitus: The Cosmic Fragments:

13:       Teacher of the most men is Hesiod:  they are sure he knows very many things, who continually failed to recognize day and night: for they are one. . . [in the Theogony, 123ff, Night is mother of Day]
14:       Learning of many things does not teach sense. . .
15:       for Wisdom is one thing: to be skilled in true judgment, how all things are steered through all. . . (Kirk 155, 386, 386)

And that the stance which yields the possibility of acts which are allowably historic, in other words produce, have to be negatively capable in Keats’ sense that they have to be, they have to be uncertain.

Thus the consequent nature of God is composed of a multiplicity of elements with individual self-realization.  It is just as much a multiplicity as it is a unity; it is just as much one immediate fact as it is an unresting advance beyond itself.  Thus the actuality of God must also be understood as a multiplicity of actual components in process of creation.  This is God in his function of the kingdom of heaven. (PR V. II.VII, 350 Olson’s underlining)

There died a myriad
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization. ("Hugh Selwyn Mauberley," Personae 191)

Will is the innate voluntarism of to live.  Will is the infinitive of being. (Specail View 44)

If order is not the world--and the world hasn’t been the most interesting image of order since 1904, when Einstein showed the beauty of the Kosmos and one then does pass on, looking for more--then order is man.  And one can define the present (it does need to be noticed that the present is post the Modern) as the search for order as man himself is the image of same.  Whitehead, then, makes sense in proposing a philosophy of organism. . . . (Specail View 47; original emphasis)

            The three stages of feeling which Olson derives from Whitehead. . . can be usefully recalled.  The poem [Maximus: Volume III] is taking its turn into the third stage.  He says: “The first is that in which the multiples of anything crowd in on the individual; the second is that most individual stage when he or she seeks to impose his or her own order on the multiples; and the third is the stage called satisfaction, in which the true order is seen to be the confrontation of two interchanging forces which can be called God and the World” [SV  50].  The first and second stages of feeling are obviously the dominant modes of experience in the first and second volumes respectively.  The paradox of the third volume is that the end of the personal process is a denial of the personal.  The form which begins to emerge excludes every perfection but its own.  The Maximus Poems, Volume III is perhaps the first religious poem to have been written since the seventeenth century.  Of course, an abundance of poetry has been cast in the dilemma of belief or has asserted a belief which the poet wished he had, but no one has so successfully established himself in his own being that he becomes an agent of “two interchanging forces which can be called God and the World.”  “I believe in religion,” Maximus says, “not magic or science I believe in/society as religious both man and society as religious” (Maximus III, 55).  The God which appears in the Maximus, however, is “fully physical” (Maximus III, 13).  It is the God which Whitehead describes “as the lure for feeling, the eternal urge of desire” [PR V.II.II].  He is not a final cause or creator but a principle of continuation which is no sooner manifest than it becomes a new beginning. (169)

We are able, I take it, to establish a cosmology without letting God in as creator in the old sense, in the old static sense of the universe.  I believe we are equally enabled today to establish a mythology without letting God in as a primordial nature in the old static sense, but only an image of Primordial Nature in the prospective sense of the absolute as that which is included in the relative. (Specail View 55; original emphasis)

The secularization of the concept of God’s functions in the world is at least as urgent a requisite of thought as is the secularization of other elements in experience.  The concept of God is certainly one essential element in religious feeling.  But the converse is not true; the concept of religious feeling is not an essential element in the concept of God’s function in the universe.  (PR  II.IX. VIII, 207 Olson’s underlining)

“It is the mark of a high-grade organism to eliminate, by negative prehension, the irrelevant accidents in its environment, and to elicit massive attention to every variety of systematic order. . . .  In this way the organism in question suppresses the mere multiplicity of things, and designs its own contrasts.  The canons of art are merely the expression, in specialized forms, of the requisites for depth of experience” [PR  IV.IV.III].  When he read this passage Olson wrote in the margin: “The egotism of creation.”  But the egotism was more Olson’s than Whitehead’s. (von Hallberg 115, Olson’s underlining added)

The philosophy of organism abolishes the detached mind.  Mental activity is one of the modes of feeling belonging to all actual entities in some degree, but only amounting to conscious intellectuality in some actual entities. (von Hallberg 115, PR II.I.VI, Olson’s underlining)

This is the problem of the solidarity of the universe [Olson writes in the margin, “Wow!”].  The classical doctrines of universals and particulars, of subject and predicate, of individual substances not present in other individual substances, of the externality of relations, alike render this problem incapable of solution.  The answer given by the organic philosophy is the doctrine of prehensions, involved in concrescent integrations, and terminating in a definite, complex unity of feeling.  To be actual must mean that all actual things are alike objects. . . .  (PR II.I.VI, 56,  Olson’s underlining)

from the induction
  (ground for a probability judgment)
the statistical--  is The Actual World
       status  I   locus     I                throwndown      scattered
                                                                 (strewn)
                                                                              pavement
                                                                              (ground)
I
            (the world)   /
                                 1.) the tePAS
           II    (God)     ___________      _____________
                  the non-statistical  (for such a judgment):
                       the graduate ‘intensive relevances’
                             appetitions   (starting           
                                                    with     G    (cow)
                  constituting the primordial nature of God
                       thus some ‘novelty’
                            (otherwise none----
                                  & without it . . .
[opposite page]                            the condition is
                  hunger--stretching, straining (intensive relevances)
                                    Mouth 56

We have recovered in anthropology and archaeology the truth that primitive man lives in a world totally alive, a world in which one talks to bears and reindeer, like the Laplanders, or to Coyote, the sun and moon, like the plains Indians.

            In the seventeenth century we discovered that a drop of water is alive, in the eighteenth century that all of nature is alive in its discrete particles, in the nineteenth century that these particles are all dancing a constant dance (the Brownian movement), and the twentieth century discovered that nothing at all is dead, that the material of existence is so many little solar systems of light mush, or as Einstein said, “. . . every clod of earth, every feather, every speck of dust is a prodigious reservoir of entrapped energy.” (26-27)

For the loss of the city-state is now calculable, that man has had restored to him, since 1875, of a unit of place and time to make up for it. [. . . ] He has this traction or friction innately:  he either gets his time and place out of himself or via that trope of himself he calls God, and it is the vertu of history as it can now be understood that it restores God as well as locality, and in so doing rids us of two other phonies of discourse, the infinite and eternal which diluted Him in distracting man from that with which he is necessarily most familiar--what he is. (25-26)

The inside of a region, its volume, has a complete boundedness denied to the extensive potentiality external to it.  The boundedness applies both to the spatial and the temporal aspects of extension.  Wherever there is ambiguity as to the contrast of boundedness between inside and outside, there is no proper region.<16>

The inside of a poem, its volume, has a complete boundedness denied to the extensive potentiality external to it.  The boundedness applies both to the spatial and temporal aspects of extension.  Whenever there is ambiguity as to the contrast of boundedness between inside & outside, there is no proper poem. 

Either your experience is of no content, of no change, or it is of a perceptible amount of content or change.  Your acquaintance with reality grows literally by buds or drops of perception.  Intellectually and on reflection you can divide these into components, but as immediately given, they come totally or not at all.  (PR II. II.II, 68, Olson underlining)

Returning to the section under discussion, Olson stops over this:  “The quantum is that standpoint in the extensive continuum which is consonant with the subjective aim in its original derivation from God.  Here ‘God’ is that actuality in the world, in virtue of which there is physical ‘law’” (PR IV.I.I., 283, Olson’s underlining).  It is important to emphasize that the subjective aim is the “inherence of the subject in the Process” (PR, III.I.V, 224), which Donald Sherburne further clarifies:  “Process doesn’t presuppose a subject; rather, the subject emerges from the process” (Sherburne 244). The inherence of the subject in the process is fundamental to Olson’s sense of himself in The Maximus Poems.  We have Olson and the figuration of Maximus in the poems.  George Butterick, citing Olson’s own words in his essay, “The Gate and the Center,” writes:  “Maximus is the ‘size man can be once more capable of, once the turn of the flow of his energies that I speak of as the WILL TO COHERE is admitted, and its energies taken up’” (Guide xxvii - xxix).

            In Whitehead’s chapter on “Strains,” Olson once again adapts Whitehead’s vocabulary to the concerns of poetry.  Here he draws attention to his sense of poetry as contest:

The poem established by geometric contents the possibility of ‘rests,’ a physical content, in order of space, or ‘quantitative’ verse.  In the previous discourse it was all flow (song), bec’z there was no ‘strain locus.’  Thus the ‘flow’ was without the character of ‘flow’ (song without song).  (Written in PR IV.IV.V)

III. THREE PIECES FROM CHARLES OLSON

A Later Note on
Letter #15

In English the poetics became meubles--furniture--
thereafter (after 1630

& Descartes was the value

until Whitehead, who cleared out the gunk
by getting the universe in (as against man alone

& that concept of history (not Herodotus’s
which was a verb, to find out for yourself:

‘istorin, which makes any one’s acts a finding out for him or her
self, in other words restores the traum:  that we act somewhere

at least by seizure, that the objective (example Thucidides, or
the latest finest tape-recorder, or any form of record on the spot

--live television or what--is a lie

as against what we know went on, the dream:  the dream being
self-satisfaction with Whitehead’s important corollary:  that no event

is not penetrated, in intersection or collision with, an eternal
event
            The poetics of such a situation
are yet to be found out

January 15, 1962
(Maximus Poems, 249)

This is the opening poem in Maximus V.  He calls it a note, referring back to an earlier letter on American poetics in the first volume of Maximus.  It has already been noted that Olson’s poem-structure allows for such openess in finding a new structure.  I take the choice of the German word for dream to be Olson’s way of removing the poetic softness that has come to envelop that word in English and possibly of allowing us to hear the sense of “trauma” in order to remind us that poetry is not easy--that it emerges from contest.  The word also means vision in German and it may hold within it a salute to Jung whom Olson studied with care alongside his repeated readings of Process and Reality.  There is evidence among his notations that Olson was trying to relate Jung’s interpretation of dreams to Whitehead.  At the end of the chapter on “The Ideal Opposites” (PR V. I.IV, 341),  Whitehead is discussing the final opposites of his cosmology, “joy and sorrow, good and evil, disjunction and conjunction . . . the many in one,” ending in “God and the World.”  Whitehead gives to the opposites “a certain ultimate directness of intuition,” except for God and the World, which “introduces a note of interpretation.”  Olson underlines and down the page, he writes:  “Wow, of Jung/says on the interpretation of dreams/M, D, R, p. 310.”  He adds the date June 23, 1969.  The book is, of course, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, wherein we find Jung writing:  “Mathematics goes to great pains to create expressions for relationships which pass empirical comprehensions.  In much the same way, it is all-important for a disciplined imagination to build up images of intangibles by logical principles and on the basis of empirical data, that is, on the evidence of dreams” (   ). Olson may also have in mind a passage from William Carlos Williams’ essay, “The Poem as a Field of Action”:

. . . let me remind you here to keep in your minds the term reality as contrasted with phantasy and to tell you that the subject matter of the poem is always phantasy--what is wished for, realized in the “dream” of the poem--but that the structure confronts something else. (Selected Essays 281)

Olson would probably not have used the word phantasy.  In this poem, the self-action is then attached to “an eternal.”  Whitehead’s proper term would be “eternal object,” god in the world.  This brings me to think that Olson is reflecting on earlier works by Whitehead in which, Donald Sherburne points out, the notion of event is central (Sherburne 222). But then Olson has returned to his own situation in which the “intersection or collision” would be an event.  He ends, movingly, reflecting on the work of his poem of which “the poetics [as practice] of such a situation/are yet to be found out” (Maximus Poems 249)

             ‡‡‡‡‡

history as time
alchemy of
slain kings roots
planets
“through time and exact definition”
(explicitness and
analogy like to like

the Lake Van Measure

I reject nothing.  I accept it all (though there on rejected.  What man’s senses of examples--the demonstrative categories of employment which have all descended into the organization--of Time for plutocratic purposes and the result is the Americans are simply examples of the 7 Deadly sins)  One means rather smelling entirely different--both a fantastic sweetened possible difference development, inner powers and explanations.  The spiritual is all in Whitehead’s simplest of all statements:  Measurement is most possible throughout the system.  That is what I mean.  That is what I feel all inside.  That is what is love.

                        Charles, Saturday morning
                        December 13th
                               LXIX

This is a note drawn from a flyleaf of John Philip Cohane’s The Key, which Olson had been given as a gift.  An unorthodox book on ancient migrations, which links ancient civilizations by way of etymology, the gift was well chosen.  It meets Olson’s fascination with global migration, the history of place, but the text appears to have gone unread during those last few weeks.<17> Instead, all over the inside cover, flyleaves and title page are notes that approach poems.  In this lovely testament and tribute, I think the only difficulty is with “Lake Van Measure,” which turns up several times in Olson’s work.  George Butterick has straightened the matter out for us.  Lake Van is in far eastern Turkey and is the site of the Armenian cruciform church at Achthaman.  The “Measure” is an “Ideal Scale,” also called “Armenian,” as Butterick tells us, “in the general sense of ‘northern,’ or non-Greek, non-classical,” which Olson drew from Josef Strzygowski’s Origin of Early Christian Church Art.18 There, Olson found that Christianity in the early years included Semites and Iranians, as Butterick notes, “neither East nor West in the modern sense. . . .”  This is another piece of Olson’s complex effort to escape the “Western Box.”  Butterick further notes that Olson took the “church of Achthaman, built 904-938 A.D. . . . [to] summarize the achievement of non-Western art”  and he quotes Olson:  “for an American the Northern condition at this point is more interesting than any Mediterranean. . . .”  In this testament, then, Lake Van Measure, which was prepared for in The Maximus Poems, becomes a code phrase for a new measure of man outside the present Western condition.  Then, in what is a fine tribute, Olson attaches that measure to Whitehead’s sense of measurement.  This takes us back to the chapter “Measurement” in Process and Reality (PR IV.V.V, 332), where among many underlinings and notations, Olson circles “Measurement is now possible throughout the extensive continuum.”  This chapter, argued in terms of  “mathematical relations involved in presentational immediacy” (PR IV.V.III, 326) is once again translated by Olson into the spiritual human order.  “There is a systematic framework,” Whitehead writes, “permeating all relevant fact” (IV.V.III, 327).  The human being and poet, entering that process among “enduring  objects--electrons, protons, molecules, material bodies--at once sustain that order and arise out of it.  The mathematical relations involved in presentational immediacy thus belong equally to the world perceived and to the nature of the percipient.  They are, at the same time, public fact and private experience” (PR IV.V.III, 326).   I am reminded here that “Experience realizes itself as an element in what is everlasting” (PR II.VII.III, 163).  At the end of the chapter on “Measurement,” the argument is summarized:

That perception in the mode of presentational immediacy solely depends upon the ‘withness’ of the ‘body,’ and only exhibits the external contemporary world in respect to its systematic geometrical relationship to the ‘body.’  (PR IV.V.VI, 333, Olson’s inderlining)

Beneath this, Olson writes:  “sta.”  With Olson’s propensity to turn to etymology in order to make a word in the language move again, this is easily understood.  It is the Indo-European base ‘sta’ of the word stand.  To stand in the process--that is to say, in the vertical of one’s acts.  It is also the root in Olson’s important word “stance,” as a good dictionary tells us:  in such words as status, state, circumstance, constant, instant, destiny, exist (Onions, Oxford “stand”). Lovely.  So, Olson builds the measure of ourselves within the process to stand against the wreckage which the human order has become.  A few pages later in Process and Reality, Whitehead brings up the “contrivances for stunting humanity” and remarks:

It belongs to the goodness of the world, that its settled order should deal tenderly with the faint discordant light of the dawn of another age.  Also order, as it sinks into the background before new conditions, has its requirements.  The old dominance should be transformed into the firm foundations upon which new feelings arise, drawing their intensities from delicacies of contrast between system and freshness.  (PR V.I. III, 339)

When do poppies bloom I ask myself, stopping again
to look in Mrs. Frontiero’s yard, beside her house on
this side from Birdseyes (or what was once Cunningham
& Thompson’s and is now O’Donnell-Usen’s) to see if
I have missed them, flaked out and dry-like like
Dennison’s Crepe.  And what I found was dark buds
like cigars, and standing up and my question is
when, then, will those blossoms more lotuses to the
West than lotuses wave like paper and petal by petal
seem more powerful than any thing except the Universe
itself, they are so animate-inanimate and dry-beauty not
any shove, or sit there poppies blow as crepe
paper.  And in Mrs. Frontiero’s yard annually I
expect them as the King of the Earth must have
Penelope, awaiting her return, love lies
so delicately on the pillow as this one flower, petal and
petal, carries nothing
into or out of the World    so threatening
were those cigar-stub cups just now, & I know
how quickly, and paper-like, absorbent
and krinkled paper, the poppy itself will, when here,
go again and the stalks stay like onion plants oh
come, poppy, when will you bloom?
                                                   The Fort
                                                   June 15th [Wednesday]
                                                   XLVI
          (From The Maximus Poems: Volume III, 550) <19>

Notes

1.  So George Butterick, Curator of the Olson Archives, University of Connecticut, remarked when we were considering one of Charles Olson’s mythological notations in the margins of Whitehead’s Process and Reality: i.e. “iotunns for iotunns” in the margin of the chapter on “Propositions” (PR II.IX.VII).  Iotunn is the Norse word for giant.  Permission to quote unpublished material from the Olson Archives has  been granted me by the University of Connecticut which holds the copyrights.

2.  [Russell] is writing about painting and sculpture.  I have expanded his meaning to include literature and poetry.

3.  Here, I am reflecting on some of Hannah Arendt’s arguments in On Revolution. 

4.  Take note of Jean Clay, Modern Art, 1890-1918 on “art’s radical effacement" (23).

5.  Olson asks that we read Benjamin Whorf, “An American Indian Model of the Universe,” International Journal of American Linguistics 16, no.2 (April 1950).

6. Ruth Nanda Anshen’s essay is the statement of purpose for the series “Convergence,” of which Lovell’s book is one volume.  The Whitehead quotation is from Science and the Modern World (London, 1962), pp.23-24.

7.  Cited in Robert von Hallberg, Charles Olson: The Scholar’s Art (234, n. 47).

8. Olson purchased the copy of Process and Reality now in the Olson Archives early in 1957 (Cambridge University Press, 1929).  If one is trying to follow Olson in his interest in Whitehead, it is important to have that edition.  The New York Macmillan edition of the same year is differently paged and, in at least one important instance, lacks a Whitehead note.

9.  The text of the lecture quoted here is included in Ann Charters' “Postscript,” in Olson/Melville: A Study in Affinity (84-90), copyright by The Charles Olson Estate.

10.  Butterick has searched these out and noted them in The Journal of the Olson Archives, no. 6 (Fall 1976), entry under Whitehead.

11.  These definitions and Olson’s earlier definitions are taken from the same source: Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 5th ed., Abridgement of Webster’s New International Dictionary, 2nd ed. (Merriam, 1945).

12.  I am not unaware of William A. Christian’s sense of “presystematic,” “systematic,” and “postsystematic” types of discourse in Whitehead.  This layering of argument is one of the pleasures of reading Whitehead, but they remain aspects of an explanatory discourse, whereas Olson wishes to remain closer to the flux itself.  See Christian, “Whitehead’s Explanation of the Past” in George L. Kline, ed., Alfred North Whitehead:  Essays on His Philosophy (Prentice-Hall, 1963), pp.93-101.

13.  My colleague, Rob Dunham, a Coleridge and Keats man, drew my attention to the etymology of the word companion--with bread.

14.  I must thank George Butterick for helping to decipher this notation.

15.  This point is implied in Sherman Paul, in Don Byrd’s important reading of the poem-structure of Maximus, and see especially Charles Altieri, “From Symbolist Thought to Immanence: The Ground of Postmodern American Poetics” in Boundary 2 (Spring 1973), pp. 605-641.

16.  Unfortunately, the 1929 Macmillan edition of Process and Reality does not include this explanatory note by Whitehead.  [Ed. note:  The note can be found in PR IV.II.IV, 301 in the "corrected edition" of Process and Reality, edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne, 1978.]

17.  The passage is also quoted in Boer 134, where I first saw it.

18.  Butterick, Guide, entries under Lake Van and Armenian.  Butterick’s scholarship is an invaluable aid to readers of Olson.

19.  Copyright for “A Later Note on Letter # 15” is held by The Charles Olson Estate.

Copyrights for the “note” and for “When do poppies bloom” are held by the University of Connecticut.

For full bibliographic references and notes, please consult the book.