The ninth and final work in Proprioception is in some ways the strangest precisely because it isn’t. Composed for the most part in – for Olson – relatively straightforward prose paragraphs, Olson argues for a history of letters that, as I read him, divides roughly into three periods: from the Second Millennium BC backwards perhaps as far as the Sixth, this being the time of the gods; the two millennia after that; the two millennia that lead up to our own time. It’s not as clean as that, though, since for Olson the central figure reporting on that first period is the poet Hesiod, who lived around 700 BC. At the very least, Hesiod is nearly as far from the end of the Second Millennium as we are from, say, Anne Bradstreet. At the other extreme, Hesiod is as far from its start as we are from 700 AD, which is to say well before the English had English, let alone writing. Roughly as far as the Battle of Tours, where Charles Martel in 732 turned back the Islamic army that sought to expand its European empire beyond Spain northward.

Olson states his motivation forthrightly:

Immediately my purpose is only to wake up the time spans and materials lying behind Hesiod, so that they can seem freer than they have; but essentially I’m sure a line drawn through Hesiod himself will already demark the difference the materials and times behind him will yield.

The Second Millennium is key, according to Olson, because the wars of the gods were all concluded & this was the time of “the general overthrow of the ancient settled world, which was neither East nor West.” Considering just how attentive Olson is to agency and case in language, his wording is almost startling: “Around about 1800 things shook up.” But the gist is unmistakable:

This [Zeus’ victory over the Titans “322 years before the siege of Troy”] then can be taken to be the line of the end of God-Father change and or transmission, as well as a good controlling date for the emergency of the Mycenean (sic) or Aegean Greek governance of the Mediterranean: 1505 BC.

Olson sees this correction as necessary, because

With that one can then begin to work Hesiod back – as well for that matter as the Iliad – and at the same time come forward toward Homer and Hesiod’s day (850-800 BC) from a ‘true’ origin of much which they include, the thousand years of writing some of which is now known which precedes them by a term of time as long as 1000 years. In other words Indo-Europeans and Semites had, for that long before Homer and Hesiod, power and governed an earlier literary and historical tradition which itself preceded them by two full millennia, the 3^rd and the 4^th.

The implication as I read it is that to get “from the old discourse to the new,” one must in fact identify the oldest discourse of all, the alleged “’true’ origin.”

If one were to align Olson’s nine pieces in Proprioception according to their focus on time, one would see that we are proceeding backwards. We start with the self, a present fact, before it can even identify itself & we end with the origins of writing, the founding of cities & the emergence of civilization out of Paleolithic man’s bigger “brain-case, like the present / porpoise’s” & the implications hidden in primitive art, “the so-called ‘Venuses’.”

As I read here, Olson’s desires are two: first, to understand how the new occurs; second, to carry into the present all of the knowledge of the past. In a sense, Olson is proceeding as though he thinks the first sentence of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus cannot be true. If the world indeed is all that is the case, as Wittgenstein postulates, then it is complete. There is no way in that equation for the new to occur. Olson’s strategy here – and elsewhere in his work – is to focus on the tectonic shifts in culture & see what arose where & if possible how, an anthropological refutation of positivism. Second, Olson is trying mightily here – it is his most postmodern impulse – to break free of the myth of progress. Where a generation before people would have seen only gain in the arrival of the new – think of how Williams uses the term in Spring & All – Olson marks it always as a site of forgetting & of loss. But it’s not that he doesn’t want to engage it. Rather, he wants to understand the process & to recognize it always as two-sided.