Looking at Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ Draft 1: It again this morning, I realize that what I’d previously taken for a more abstract drawing that comes later in the text is, like the pair of drawn Ns at the front, letters, in this instance Ys. In each case, one letter is much larger than the other, with the smaller inscribed in a wedge of the larger. It’s funny how you can look at something off & on for 15 years, before a detail this basic jumps out at you, but there you have it.

The Ys occur at the end of one of the more curious passages in Draft 1:

The struggle from whiteness

into whiteness

via black wit-

ness

I

ching.

Nothing in my prior experience of DuPlessis gives me reason to believe that she has an interest in what I’ve called the alternative wisdom traditions, so the appearance of the old Chinese system of chance divination gets my attention because it is unexpected. Further, the idea of “black witness” – a phrase I can easily imagine DuPlessis speaking – refers on a very different level to the civil rights movement of the 1950s & ‘60s. But from whiteness into whiteness suggests that other meanings have to be given precedence here. There is a discourse of color in Draft 1 that is worth cataloging: “sunlight / silver backed,” “it / lettered on green up hillside’s social lining,”  “Black // coding inside         A / white fold open,” “A white house seems / to be a further / coagulation of mist / Lucite see-thru overlay,” “CANO*, can o,       yes     no,” “’sea-blazed gold’,” “clouds       for fat and white,” “space white and open a flat / spot a lite on / it,” “Object (pronoun) / squeaks its little song its bright white / dear dead dark,” “theater of the / / page    cream    space    peaks,” “where in the placement of saffron / . . . and black tuft of heide,” “one point is to achieve a social momentum of switched / referents and (merry coral        white clover / ding ding ding) commentary,” & then this remarkable passage:

a kind of orange it happens

a kind of orange

IT HAPPENS

rose rinse, vertical green

Away anyway has shadow

“a typical Rachel shadow”

blue starts limb long and torso struggles

its window when all around there’s not a single

wall, NO blockages

hardly stopped at all except by the pleasures

of color are you getting the picture

it hppns BLUEW one from the sequences of looming

comes            longing

White & black are of course unique hues, white figuring as the undifferentiated presence of all color in light, but as the absence of color in pigmentation. Light/pigment, white/black, yes/no (Y/N), sound/silence – a string of threshold points appear to surround & pass through that simplest, most self-effacing of pronouns. It’s in this sense that I begin to understand the allusion to the I ching. Of all pronouns, it most completely functions as a lens, directing sight, refracting color, offering nothing (or very little) of itself as object.

In a way, DuPlessis is playing with the idea of language’s ostensible transparency, but only to point up all the problematic catches, the moments where the signifier itself happens (or, for that matter, “hppns”) – meaning, sound, sight, desire, the whole of the world trying to come through – “a plot,” as she notes, bracketing the phrase in quotation marks, “a plot / against the reader.”

* Spanish for “white”