Precis

I like the way the blog plays around in the writing with memory. I did it after reading Susan Schulz’s Dementia Blog in which she points out that a blog is written forwards but read backwards.

So the coagulation around “Place; & Names” (the “complementarity’” in Olson’s equation) of memory viz history viz event viz body viz name/naming viz dementia, detoxify (i.e. de- as opposed to re-) viz time/timing viz cleft and juncture viz experience viz bio viz doorway viz verb, noun, etcetera viz “Mountain” and back to the False Laws of Narrative.

So, to begin again, the blog sets up off of Olson’s reading the morning of July 29, 1963 at the Vancouver Poetry Conference of his “short piece” called “Place; & Names” in answer to Creeley’s question – “what is history.” I was as struck by that piece as I had been earlier by Snyder’s poem “Riprap” for the possibilies of engaging the local, the immediate, and the physical. In other words, I could write about the Kootenays, about the palpable surfaces of the place, and, eventually, about a self that wasn’t contained by someone else’s history.

Apropos of “Place; & Names,” I point to a discussion I had with Louis Cabri for his edition of my selected, The False Laws of Narrative, around some notions about “naming” that arise from a discussion of my poem “Akokli (Goat) Creek.”

Then, reading forwards, I shift to “Proprioception,’” mentioning how that whole run that Leroi Jones published in Kulchur and Yugen (Proprioception, Postscript to Proprioception and Logography, Theory of Society, Bridge Work, the hinges of civilization to be put back on the door, and GRAMMAR – a book.” So the contiguity of the physical and the linguistic (verb, noun, nominalize, etc.) came into the scene.

I get briefly, with the help of reading Meredith’s hit on “simultaneity” for this roundtable, to the biotext and the “axe” of synchronicity.

I shift here to Charles Stein’s book on Olson’s “Secret of the Black Chrysanthemum” and Jung and synchronicity and the White Queen saying to Alice: “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.” The resonating questions re my mother’s dementia.

All those “places” mentioned above (event, body, history, nominative power, and so forth) start to swirl around one another and I’m reminded again of the multiple and generative expanse of Olson’s intellect.

What has all been so OPENING for me. Not that these puncta are always apparent, but somehow have become embedded (somagenetically?) into what is, for me, some kind of soul food.

“Story” in other words

Inserted “Cosmology and Attention”
in the tripartite paradigm with
a dotted line to the minor third
semology.

So story all jibed with syllable,
vowel, thought suffixing
and the little rocks and places
to breathe into.

Name; the Place, even
standing in the doorway
Mister In Between.

measure/memory

from reading Daphne Marlatt’s journal in Olson #1 for July 29, 1963, a.m.

place is now now now now, i.e here, historical, and cellular. And in the p.m. session “…as B. Hawkins later asked Olson: “You mean you write from all the cells in your body?”

history is the memory of time (John Smith)

history is the measure of time (cld be Williams)

breathin’ my name with a sigh

your name is my name
our name is bones
bones alone names
left over slowly
to send signs forward
found out needed
knowing names
parts family imprint
left shape all over
us within it
name signed
me name
as our name
added-up knowns
become truths
said-again things
left over after
sedimentary hard
embedded rock to tell

live her

Fiddling around with that “nominative power” I called Ralph Maud who put me back to the first issue of Olson (No.1, Spring 1974) and Duncan’s letter to Jess about his last visit to Olson in the New York hospital, 1970. I was thinking of  ”nominative determinism,” of use to Jung’s thinking on “synchronicity” as “the compulsion of the name,” where your name is what you do. For example, an article on incontinence in the British Journal of Urology (vol 49, pp 173-176, 1977) written by J. W. Splatt and D. Weedon.

I had heard the rumour that Olson had asked for a sex transplant as a means to detoxify his liver cancer. Duncan mentions the liver/live her connection in the letter:

“He wants to find a doctor who will understand (as he askt me to understand) the meaning of himself, his poetry, and Mother Liver. He tried to write out a formula, but he stopped, for tho he read out loud Liver he had written tumour.

Not so far from “histology” after all.

memory as event

Early on in the ’63 session “On History” (was it Ralph, in transcribing the session, calling it that?) Olson and Duncan explain to Ginsberg that it is the event of language we are producing, and that is more interesting than the events of history, which, after all, can only be experienced here and now.

“Otherwise we’re simply getting caught in the event either of the society, which is one form of what’s boringly called history, or the event of ourselves, which is also that damn boring thing called personal history.”

So I’m trying to get a better understanding of how my mother’s “history” of her own life has largely disappeared and pretty much all she has is the here and now, but the present, for her, seems almost languageless. When she wants a word, it is an “historical” word that she can’t remember. In other words, the “event of language” ironically becomes historical, takes on guises of the past, and the cellness “which can decant total experience” deteriorates” (or changes) into a seeming silence.

Seems.

tessurae commissure

Tracking around his interest in “synchronicity,” behind, I sense, “–nominative power–& landschaft/ expderience (geography)…” I read in Charles Stein’s book on “The Secret of the Black Chrysanthemum”:

“In March of 1961, Olson read closely the chapter in Jung’s Aion called “The Sign of the Fishes.” In Aion, Jung explores the connections between the archetype of The Self and the significance of the Christ figure in Christian civilazation.”:21

And then Stein offers this note on Olson’s reading, which is useful apropos “Place; & Names”:

“He was very interested in the notion of “synchronicity” as it pertains to history: that events which occur at the same time but are not otherwise connected causally, are nonetheless brought together within history by the projection of a single archetype upon them. The “synchronistic” view of history used by Jung in this chapter is very close to Olson’s own method of seeing historical events in such a way that they appear to reveal inherent schemes of order. The value of “synchronicity” for Olson (and astrological reckoning as its cosmic prototype) is that it gives a primary ordering function to the concrete data of space and time and at the same time provides a scale of reference broad enough so that the earth, with its view of the heavens, and both its geologic and human history, can be grasped as a unity.

As there is very little in Maximus IV, V VI and less in The Maximus Poems (1960) to make explicit the relationship between Olson’s view of history and Jung’s notion of synchronicity (other than Olson’s practice of them) the knowledge of the source of the term “commissure” is an important key to an understanding of The Maximus Poems as a whole.”:23

In Olson’s dictionary: “commisure:”

A joint, seam, or closure; an interstice, cleft, or juncture.

But, apparently Jung liked, in reference to “synchronicity,” what the White Queen says to Alice: “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.”

So I’m flipped back to another blog thing a did a couple of month’s ago re my mother’s “dementia”: http://fjwah.wordpress.com/

Now the synchronicity of place, naming, bio, and mind within the “junctures” of my own attention start to vibrate.

What!

exp/exp

Note discrepancy (mistake?) between Allen/Friedlander version of “Place; & Names” in their _Collected Prose_ and what Olson uses in his reading of the poem in ’63 of “experimental”/”experiential” on the 8th line of the piece. I’ve always thought of it as “experiential.” I’ll leave it to the researchers but I can’t think of Olson saying the word “experimental.”

and that this is so

for physical & experiential reasons of

the

[he interjects here in the Vancouver session]

(which is the only thing I don’t like in this thing)

the philosophia perennis, or Isness

…

His yurp-ean problem with the “one.”

The “many” and the “double” (particularly the double) resonate through much of the thinking and poetics, for me, since. Eg. the genetics of the biotext “be as parts of the body, common, & capable/ therefore of having cells…”

…

I know now

I’d better find that double edge between you

and your father so that the synchronous axe

keeps splitting whatever this is the weight of

I’m left holding.

Middle Voice

One of the most haunting features in this synchronicity of poetic language has been, for me, the “middle voice.” Olson mentioned it during our seminars in ’64-’65 but I could never quite figure it out. Just had some intuition that there was something there. This has come to lap at the shores of my interest in hybridity and “inbetweenness.” A concise Wikipedia description:

Some languages (such as Sanskrit, Icelandic and Ancient Greek) have a middle voice. The middle voice is in the middle of the active and the passive voice because the subject cannot be categorized as either agent or patient but has elements of both. An intransitive verb that appears active but expresses a passive action characterizes the English middle voice. For example, in The casserole cooked in the oven, cooked appears syntactically active but semantically passive, putting it in the middle voice. In Classical Greek, the middle voice is often reflexive, denoting that the subject acts on or for itself, such as “The boy washes himself”, or “The boy washes”. It can be transitive or intransitive. It can occasionally be used in a causative sense, such as “The father causes his son to be set free”, or “The father ransoms his son”.

I had studied some Latin so I’d been into “case,” but the closest I think I’ve come to zoning in on it was through Sam Levin’s “paradigmatic thought suffix” or something like the paragram in bpNchol, anything in language that happens “while standing in the doorway,” the contiguity of being able to see both rooms.

Here’s Olson’s page with its push toward the proprius.

Wrds

The other run in the proprioception package is language as both history (civ and its movements) and a description of parts of speech, etymons, voice, grammar/syntax. But in that sense that language is “in” whatever place, action, feeling surfaces in the poem. I got so excited by this phenomenological doubling that I did a degree in linguistics. It had started for me as prosodics but with the Olson stuff. Meredith Quartermain in her paper for this rountable talks about it as “simultaneity”and usefully quotes from “Against Wisdom as Such”:

…a poem is one example of a man-made continuum “which contains qualities or basic conditions manifesting in themselves simultaneously in various places in a way not to be explained by causal parallelisms (HU 70)

But the range of Olson’s discourse in that “Proprio” chunk was intellectually curious and inviting. The “study” became pretty much what he suggested in “Bridge-Work.”

And peppered throughout:

“creation/ a verb”

“The other knowing is NOUN, proper (proprius)

“nominal-ize”

“& roots:             the linguistic values or Indo-

European languages, the

original minting of words

& syntax”

Proprio

After that first kick with “Place; & Names” at the Vancouver conference in the summer of ’63, I came at “Proprioception” in the fall of 1964 when, via Don Allen, I had a photocopy of what I guess was one of Allen’s collations of what was eventually published by Four Seasons. It starts with “Pieces of Time” as Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka) then titled and published in Kulchur as ”Proprioception” and “Logography,” and then my copy goes on to include the others in that series, “Postscript to Proprioception and Logography,” “Theory of Society,” “Bridge Work,” “the hinges of civilization to be put back on the door,” and “GRAMMAR – a ‘book’.” I recall some of us using these photocopied pieces during Olson’s fall ’64 Mythology seminar, though the text he was using as foil was the o.p. Richard Payne Knight’s Worship of Priapus (i.e. as Olson remembered it).

Again, I didn’t quite know what he was saying in these pieces of prose, notes, reflections, research, etc. There’s a whole bunch of stuff there. But.

“Proprioception” jumped the local for me in two ways. Primary was an opening into place and poetic for the body. The physical noise of climbing through the bush on a cruise fit happily with a music I wanted to tap into in poetic language. The poem should be physical and on the move. Echoes of Williams’ “Desert Music” also.

…
cut side‑hill
ditch run‑off
move down
ricochet track
line shove
spin out fall
back fall side
saw the forest
clear the creek rock
split the sky
open roll dig
cover burn
fill the fill
and cross the bridge turn up
turn into turn
at it

(from “Poem for Turning”)

I liked particularly that sense of being “one” with yourself and your place, the inner as outer, the gut not the head, and above all movement, action. How to get that into the poem. My final “paper” for Olson’s class was my first long poem, “Mountain.” I think that’s why I was given “Earth” in the “Curriculum of the Soul.”