George
Oppen's "Of Being Numerous" is a poetry of constructive witness:
the witness
of a social becoming that "presses on each" and in which each,
all, are impressed.
Oppen's
achievement has little to do with speech or sight, but for
speech as sight,
site of the social. Not perception but acts of perception, not
the given
but the encountered, as Oppen suggests in "The Mind's Own
Place".
Sight in Oppen's work is not a passive looking onto the world
but a means
of touching that invests the world with particular,
site-specific (historical,
material) meanings. Without this touching -- tooling, tuning --
the world becomes empty, voided.
"Near
is / Knowledge" [CP 176]. Or, as Holderlin has it in "Patmos",
"Near is / And difficult to grasp." Oppen's engendering witness
stipulates both the integrity of things seen and their
contingency --
"the known and unknown". "Because the known and unknown
/ Touch, // One witnesses -- " [CP 172]. The intersection of
these
vectors of response creates the "here" of a "real"
we confront, a real which we come to know by participating in
its making.
("Here still" [CP 177]). This poetics of participatory, or
constructive,
presentness -- akin especially to Creeley's -- is Oppen's response
to "the shipwreck / Of the singular" [CP 151]. The "singular"
that has been lost is, in one sense, a unitary system of value
or knowledge
based on reason or theology ("The unearthly bonds / Of the
singular"
[CP 152]). For Oppen, there is no neo-Nietzschean rejoicing in
this loss.
Rather, "The absolute singular" is related to what Walter
Benjamin
has called the Messianic Moment -- out-of-time, out-of-history.
"To
dream of that beach / For the sake of an instant in the eyes"
[CP 152].
For Oppen, however, there is another singularity, the potential
for social
collectivity: "one must not come to feel that he has a thousand
threads
in his hands, / He must somehow see the one thing; / This is the
level
of art / There are other levels / But there is no other level of
art"
[CP 168]. "Not truth but each other" [CP 173].
Which
is to say that, in "Of Being Numerous", the loss of the
"transcendental
signified" does not necessitate the abandonment, or absence, of
knowledge
but its location in history, in "people". This view entails
both a rejection of the crude materialism of things without
history and
the crude idealism of history without things. Materials in
circumstance,
as Oppen puts it [CP 186]: the "actual" realized by the
manipulation
of materials by human hands, tools. It is this process that is
played
out in Oppen's poetry by the insistence on the constructedness
of syntax:
the manipulation of words to create rather than describe.
"Of
Being Numerous" forges a syntax of truthfulness without recourse
to the
grammar of truth -- "that truthfulness / Which illumines speech"
[CP 173]. The poem's necessarily precarious project is the
articulation of
a form that would address the commonweal, a project most fully
realized
in the two long poems in Of Being Numerous. For Oppen, the
demands of
the articulation of an ideal communication situation necessitate
a winnowing
of vocabulary and tone that entail the exclusion of anything
that would
extend, displace, amplify, distort, burst -- indeed, question --
the vocables of an enunciated truthfulness. At his most
resonant, Oppen
creates a magnificent, prophetic, imaginary language -- less
voice
than chiseled sounds. His writing evokes not the clamor of the
streets
nor the windiness of conversation nor the bombast of the
"dialogic"
but the indwelling possibilities of words to speak starkly and
with urgency.
Yet
Oppen's often claimed commitment to clarity, however qualified,
annuls
a number of possibilities inherent in his technique. He hints at
this
when he writes, "Words cannot be wholly transparent. And that is
the heartlessness of words" [CP 186]. ("Clarity", he has
just said, "In the sense of transparence" [CP 162]). In
contrast,
it is their very intractability that makes for the unconsumable
heart
(heartiness) of words. Inverting Oppen's criticism that Zukofsky
used
"obscurity in the writing as a tactic" , I would say that Oppen
uses clarity as a tactic. That is, at times he tends to fall
back onto
"clarity" as a self-justifying means of achieving resolution
through scenic motifs, statement, or parable in poems that
might, given
his compositional techniques, outstrip such controlling
impulses.
Oppen's
syntax is fashioned on constructive, rather than mimetic,
principles.
He is quite explicit about this. Carpentry is a recurring image
of poem-making.
His poems, as he tells it, were created by a sort of collage or
cut-up
technique involving innumerable substitutions and permutations
for every
word and line choice. The method here is paratactic, even if
often used
for hypotactic ends. This tension, which can produce the
kinetic, stuttering
vibrancy of some of Oppen's most intense poems, is at the heart
of his
use of the line break as hinge. In contrast to both enjambment
and disjunction
-- as well, of course, as more conventional static techniques --
Oppen's hinging allows for a measure of intervallic "widths"
of connection/disconnection between lines. The typical Oppen
hinge is
made by starting a line with a preposition, commonly "Of").
At its most riveting, this hinging taps into a horizontally
moving synaptic/syntactic
energy at the point of line transition.
Discrete
Series uses this orchestration of lacunae in the most
radical and open-ended
way. (Could the 25-year gap between Discrete Series and The
Materials be Oppen's grandest hinged interval?) In some of
the later works, he abandons
any angularity in his lineation, at the same time allowing an
almost symbolic
or allegorical vocabulary ("sea", "children") to take
hold. Nonetheless, the possibilities of his use of the line as
hinge are
omnipresent in the work -- and influential. Indeed, the hinge
suggests
an interesting way to sort through aspects of Oppen's influence,
since
there is some work that may resemble his but which misses the
radical
(in the sense of root) nature of his lineation.
The
following stanzas
were generated using an acrostic procedure (G-E-0-R-G-E
O-P-P-E-N) to
select lines, in page sequence, from Collected Poems. I
have borrowed
this procedure from Jackson Mac Low. That these poems are so
characteristically
Oppenesque is, I think, less the effect of familiar lines or
typical references
than the way single Oppen lines can be hinged to "each other"
to create the marvelous syntactic music found throughout his
work. I hope
the structural allegory is apparent: the autonomy of the root,
of the
individual, allowing for the music of the social, the numerous.
Grasp of me)
Eyes legs arms hands fingers,
On the cobbles;
Reaches the generic, gratuitous
Geared in the loose mechanics of the world with the
valves jumping
Endlessly, endlessly,
Outside, and
so beautiful
Populace, sea-borne and violent, finding
Passing, the curl at cutwater,
Ends its metaphysic
Nature! because we find the others
Generations to a Sunday that holds
Exterior, 'Peninsula
Of the subway and painfully
Re-arranage itself, assert
Grand Central's hollow masonry, veined
Eyes. The patent
Of each
other's backs
and shoulders
Planned, the city trees
Proud to have learned survival
Effortless, the soft lips
Nuzzle and the alien soft teeth
Glassed
Echo-like history
One by one proceeding
Rectangular buildings
Growing at its edges! It is a place its women
Early. That was earlier.
Out of scale
Picturing the concrete walls.
Plunge and drip in the sea, carpenter,
Enduring
New in its oil.
Good bye Momma,
Each day, the little grain
Of all our fathers
Ring electronically the New Year
Grows, grass
Enterprise
On the
sloping bank
— I cannot know
Pours and pours past Albany
Perhaps the world
Even here is its noise seething
Now as always Crusoe
Gave way to the JetStream
Entity
Of substance
Rectangular buildings
Generation
Exposes the new day,
Of living,
Paris is beautiful and ludicrous, the leaves of every
tree in the city
move
in the wind
People talk, they talk to each other;
Even Cortes greeted as revelation ... No I'd not
emigrate,
Now we do most of the killing
Glass of the
glass
sea shadow of water
Elephant, say, scraping its dry sides
Of veracity that huge art whose geometric
Recalling flimsy Western ranches
Gravel underfoot
Enemies in the sidewalks and the stars rise
Other
Piled on each other
lean
Precision of place the rock's place in the fog we suffer
Early in the year cold and windy on the sea the wind
Night -- sky bird's
world
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