Being Approached

Being Approached

A line of poetry is related to the structure of a sentence, and may or may not need the assistance of another line or lines in order to complete this resemblance. Therein lies the groundwork for the realization of a proposition. A poem may be made-up of a single proposition or a series of propositions–or no propositions at all. This is the juice of poetry–let us say, its advantage over prose, which in general must adhere to fixed grammatical forms in order to be approached. And it is this ‘being approached’ which I am attempting here to uncover. There is a certain recklessness going on in poetry which questions (or denies) the need for being approached. And I’m talking comprehension–many is the time we have read through perfect nonsense and come away with a smile. That nonsense had been approachable. But first, continuing my original tract–and in order to reveal an approach to what seems inapproachable, I must first raise this question: Is it possible for a poetry to exist which contains, exhibits or makes use of no ‘statements’ whatsoever?–And, is it possible for a poetry to exist which is made up wholly of no other physical (grammatical) structures or objects than ‘statements’?

I will begin with the first line of "hu][bris wo][man"’s poem, [_arc.hive_] _m.burr cha][r][nnel_:

 ::][b][liz][z][ard m.burr channel.ling + ca][r][t white s][f][izzling

I have it from a good source (my wife) that this first line is inapproachable, rendering the entire poem inapproachable–so that there is a solid collapse. But let us grasp something out of the midst of this collapsing. Something from the structure (the reader) has already disappeared as if dust. And I am the worst pillager of all, having a priori bestowed upon the piece the precious title of ‘a poem’–I admit that sometimes shopping lists fascinate me, and I hold conversations with my cats. So I am quick to grab hold of something recognizable, the first recognizable thing, and to hold it up like a fly caught mid-air by the wing. And this is not a frivolous connection–it is an object, it moves, and may contain (although alien) thought. I glance to its neighbor–No help–even skim a bit, become blurry, and quickly come back and focus on the wriggling thing all alone which I’ve grabbed. ‘My precious.’ So a relationship is formed. But what is it? ‘It’ being the thing–our relationship is simple–it is my need. Pronouncing it is a symbol, or code, or object, brings little satisfaction–afterall all things are symbols, all things are made up of codes, and ‘objects’ reveals nothing. Is it a sentence?–A proposition?–These we can guess at, and even if we are inclined to be very forgiving of grammatical experimentation, at this point now, with nothing else but this ‘thing’ caught in our fingers, only the one distinct certainty arises–that it is a ‘statement.’ This is fragile, of course. If we had failed to approach it, it would not have been a statement at all.

One may question my absolute certainty concerning this huge label I’ve attached to this innocuous little thing. Let me say that it is based on the idea that were it not a ‘statement’, it would not exist in the least–as anything–as if it had never been approached.

Then one goes running out through to the edges of thought, and imagines what this statement ‘means’ or ‘does’ or ‘is’–How is it a statement?–What is the relationship between the author and (his) statement?–And all the usual blather which has led us to this point in time–namely to the imminent unavoidable extinction of humankind. So we must begin again.

This statement has built within it this unavoidable extinction and little else–or, perhaps, since we ourselves have chosen not to avoid it, has it turned this extinction on its head–so that we have avoided extinction simply by reading (or reciting) it. Afterall, Ippen proclaimed that the reading (or reciting) of “namu-amida-butsu” is the complete vehicle–is God–is life and its meaning captured and moving through us, so why not give the grasping of this statement which moves through us a similar position as a statement ensuring the emancipation of humankind? We often give power to others, to our emotions, our pains, our thoughts–we imagine a flow of electricity coursing through our body as if our veins were power lines and, quite simply, having invented no deeper understanding of the structures involved in upholding reality, we conceive of this electricity as an alternating ‘power’ and ‘unpower’–as innocent and ignored as our heart beating and our breathing. Like an ancient Poet brought forward in time to witness an automobile driving who can come up with no other explanation than the idea of friction. ((The greatest contribution of the invention of the computer and its wide-spread use has been our resulting acceptance of the Truth that human thought itself is nothing more than a procession of alternating “1’s” and “0’s”–“on’s” and “off’s”–))‘power’ and ‘unpower’.

And all of this resides in the statement we have just grasped. We cannot begin to move on to the next statement until this is clear to us. Now we can proceed. Now, a whole new world opens up–from the relationship between the two statements (a birth, a life, a death). And once we have discovered in this relationship the mirror which reflects some ‘other’–we begin to grab the next statement…

Sounds exhausting, impossible. But afterall this is the same process a child goes through when first learning how to read.

Linguistic signs are arbitrary–any attempt to present them arbitrarily already becomes a system. If an arbitrary system could be constructed–it could only exist within the confines of a sign. An entire language, made up of such signs, could then be used to outline the theory behind an arbitrary language. But note, the arbitrary language could never truly come into being before being consumed by a system.

We can imagine a world in which individuals invented signs and corresponding sounds for speech minute to minute–where each individual invented their language on the spot and wholly reinvented it each new minute, without adherence to the hierarchy of a system evolved historically by a society. In this instance communication would no longer be a matter of language. Language would exist as an independent thing, an individual thing, of no real communicative power. This would free thought and experience from all constraints. And perhaps then we would begin to read each other’s thoughts, and the reading of these thoughts would in turn become communication.

The opposite would be to create a shared language based on exclamations and onomatopoeia. Here, names, for example, would be shouted–one would not be called Mark, but Mark! And any description, any story or conveyance, would be made up of approximated sounds from our environment. The screeching of a train stopping, for example, would come forth from a human voice in anticipation of something occurring or occurred, used to pronounce the statement “We have arrived.” This would take us in the direction of the language found in dolphins and whales. “Ouch!” “Aw!” even “Shit!”–would be the human imprint.

But as it now stands, we cannot change language simply by throwing at it its own well-worn signs, its historically derived being. Even if one were to invent new signs within the language, they would simply fall into the system. And rearranging signs within the canon is rightly ‘nonsense’–unapproachable.

It is this ‘unapproachable’ which consumes us. Poets have begun to take on the idea that writing poetry which cannot be read, or a poem which may take a lifetime to decipher–is really cool. It erases that thing called ‘genius’ which has plagued inventive minds for so many centuries–but circumnavigates desire in its full. Now is it no longer necessary for an audience–that the unending lines of ‘gibberish’ is enough–Being a poet becomes so superficial that it vanishes–even machines can produce it. This is our current future. Like opening a stuck jar with screw-cap, it’s a matter of will.

Attempting to reinvent traditional poetry is a loss–See the Language Poet’s struggle (3 decades). There is nothing to be gained by disinheriting them and trying to move on–as I’ve illustrated–there’s no place to go. They themselves have gone no place. And yet is all there is left the regurgitation of the past? Is everything a poet can now write immediately void of meaning, of feeling–simply because, to tell the truth, Shakespeare did it long ago and so much better, than all of us combined could ever hope to achieve? What a load of nonsense–the Trads have it wrong. But I agree with them.

Now that I am in the midst of an opinion, let me reify the losses. Let us examine ‘democracy’–not as an idea, a concept, or emotion–but as a burden–I do not doubt that a hundred years from now this will be known as ‘The Age of Democracy’–but in their eyes, then, they will equate Democracy with what we now equate ‘Fascism.’ Sorry to say it–Hope I’m wrong–But I see nothing differentiating their structures.

I’m not saying Democracy is not a needed solution for the moment. I am saying Democracy is not our future.

And it is exactly this digression which leads us to the Truth, which is actually a digression from the truth of itself, no longer binds, and can no longer facilitate meaning beyond itself, like that game of whispering in a circle a story which ends up far from the original–but if we trace history, and give up trying to be archaeologists of emotion, dig instead for facts, find out that facts are distilled truths, and therefore search through the various methods of distillation, and present our findings as history–still we end up with no proof of our existence. Quite simply, we are not organic matter adhering to a planet spinning in an expanding void…

Vico wrote ‘Truth and fact are convertible.’ What I delineated somewhere earlier is that facts are somehow filtered truths. The truth is Truths change with time, Facts are unchangeable. Radical concept! It’s radical to point out that facts are empirically implied–applied–and swallowed¸ that Truths, on the other hand, are simply reused, refurbished ideas. If we could arrive at that place Vico has already prepared for us, we might be better off.

Or perhaps not. For he was one of the empiricists. Now, we are phenomenologists or followers of the Analytical Tradition. We struggle over: ‘Which came first, the chicken or the egg’–a child’s riddle–while the world goes to pot.

First published in arc_hive 1/2-03