live her
June 2, 2010
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.
