Coleridge gave us the first city, while Leo Frobenius (the turn of the century’s Robert Ardrey) and, more recently, Neil Gaiman in his Sandman comic, The Doll’s House: Prologue — Tales in the Sand, brings the second to our attention.
29. Jabès’s Book of Questions, Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler…, and Silliman’s The Alphabet all seem to share something. The Silliman, by keeping the furthest from argument, seems the most radical to me right now. (I have moments when reading the fragments that compose The Book seem all too much like reading The Journal of Albion Moonlight — which unfortunately is not to praise either.)
30. In human society, there are two forces constantly in conflict: One always moves to socialize the sexually acceptable. The other moves to sexualize the socially unacceptable. Over any length of time, these two forces are always at play, revising the contours of the socio-sexual map.
31. Quasimodo’s tercet,
Ognuno sta solo sul cuor della terra
trafitto da in raggio di sole:
ed è subito sera.
[Each alone at the earth’s heart,
fixed there on a sun ray:
and it’s suddenly evening.]
seemed to describe a romantic stance when I first read it at age 19 or so. Here, weeks before my 50th birthday, it seems a harsh metaphor for an all too hard-edged situation.
“And it’s suddenly evening” has the same number of syllables as “ed è subito sera.” But the English has more than twice the number of consonants and takes almost twice as long to say.
32. Here in Amherst, the present slides between the leafy and layered fact of immediacy and the drowsy retreat through darkness.
33. What does it mean, now that it takes me so much longer to remember things than it did even five years ago? I ask my mind to call up facts; where once they were yielded up to me in two, three seconds, today it’s ten, fifteen, eighteen seconds before thought arrives in the brain, words mount the tongue. And occasionally they will not come at all without prompting — recently: the last name of the late actress Ruth Gordon; the term “certified” for a letter. When I was thirty-five, I recall noting that my dyslexia was substantially worse than it had been at 25. Is the memory situation a continuation of the same phenomenon — or is it some other development entirely?
And will I ever know?
What about the malaise, the extra weight, the free floating anxiety, all of which have their current forms in my life — if I’m honest — as much as they did when they last put me in the hospital at 22?
34. “Well, you can’t see the sex / for the heterosexuality,” writes Isaac Jackson in his poem “The Birds and Bees (Blues Poem).” How pleasant, a year after I read it, to run into the poet at MIT working as a computer jockey!
35. Four writers who, each reaching in an entirely different direction, achieve a sentence perfection that dazzles, chills, and — sometimes — frightens: William Gass, Joanna Russ, Guy Davenport, and Ethan Canin.
36. The poet sees two things: the world’s absolute wonder and beauty in the way its edges and surfaces almost fit together in a purified geometry of desire appeased; and, at the same time, the poet sees through the world’s interstices the banalities and uncomprehending stupidities with which its subjects constantly blat out what it’s constituted of. Language — in its blather and breathless suspension — is at once villain and hero. Perhaps this is why reticence is such an overarching element of modernist esthetics.
37. The unarticulated myth of the American poet currently controlling so many American poetic non-careers is that anyone who has it together enough to teach regularly, edit anthologies, and write criticism cannot possibly live passionately enough to write a truly interesting poem — a good deal of this, doubtless, a holdover from the personal catastrophes of the once popular “confessional poets.”
But even as “confessional” works grow less and less interesting with time, what sediments in the literary psyche still drags and dredges our ideas through its flour and egg.
As someone who has taught for four years now, there’s something to the argument: only I would like to see it leave the realm of unspeakable myth and enter the pinball-courts of articulation: certainly I’ve never been happier that I’m not a poet since I’ve been a professor…!
Silliman is the first poet I know who really breaks through these constraints. He does it, basically, by writing such impassioned — and intelligent — criticism. He does it by embracing — passionately — the insights of contemporary literary theory and difficult discourse. He does it by eschewing as intellectually wimpy the notion that criticism itself is not as potentially passionate as poetry. What he convinces us of, in his criticism, is — quite apart from its relevance and rightness — he lives the most passionate life of the mind in America today!
He is a political poet par excellence.
At the same time, he takes the poet niche shaped by Valéry and lurches with it to the American coast.
Poets I read for pleasure: Auden, Van Duyn, Howard, Hacker, Heany, Neidecker, Bernstein, Hudgins, Levine, Cummins, Ashbery, Michael Dennis Browne…
But Silliman is a poet I read to break through into new halls and colonnades of verbal richness that, before, I simply didn’t know were sealed up behind those walls and dead ends in the palace of art. His work must be studied, lived with. Its pleasures cannot be simply lapped up off its surfaces. But they are the subtler, sharper, and more resonant for the time they take to taste.
I wonder if I shall ever actually meet the man…?
38. Too developed a sense of the usefulness of things militates against the preservation (rather paradoxically) of bourgeois order.
The sock lies in the middle of the rug. It’s easy to say that the slob who’s left it there simply wasn’t thinking. But much more likely some nether thought of the following order did, indeed, occur: I don’t know where the mate is. If I put it away, i.e., out of sight, if the mate turns up they will never get back together! Leave it lie there, then, and if, in an hour or a day or a week, the mate comes to light, I can put them together and then put the pair away. And sometimes — in an hour, or a day, or a week — that’s what happens.
The problem is that, at such a tempo, the forces of disorder will simply swamp the forces of order.
The person maintaining neatness, however, must constantly go through some version of the following: That sock has no mate. Out it goes. Now I shall forget it. And if — in an hour or a day or week — the other turns up, out it goes too! And I shall forget it, too!
It is worth remembering that bourgeois order is only maintained at the expense of a ruthless, if not outright violent, attitude toward the objects — if not the people — which deviate from it.
To the extent that history is basically written in the detritus of things, maintenance of bourgeois order represents a constant and unflagging, if relatively low-level, destruction of history.
That is where the barbarism, as Benjamin originally spoke of it, comes from.
39. There are three things writers do not write about.
First, what everybody knows.
We all know fire engines are red. Thus, it is the mark of a bad writer to write “the red fire engine.” Should a green fire engine come by, then the writer might be justified in remarking it. But not otherwise. With this in mind, at London University (back in the midst of writing “Shadows”), I once got into an after-lecture argument with Saul Kripke, who maintained that we could know things for certain about imaginary objects. Kripke’s cited example came from Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky.” Carroll had written: