by Steven W. Burgess
With the following scrap scribbled in pencil I am off to say something too brief about the concerns of my late dearest friend and associate, Gordon Keller:
Notes Respecting a Natural Order of Archeo-Pithanological Analysis.
A definition, and the brief MS, folded or stuffed as in hiding between the brittle leaves of something antique––
––that subject or type of a special study not so well received hereabouts, left off the usual curriculum or the extravagant find to recall, perhaps, of a familiarity with old catalogs and boxes, paper cards or things akin to delicate versions of old butterfly wings. For the scholar, the one who must have the last blot: publisher Orpheus (1957).
––follow GK’s musings, their entirety, unedited but for scattered commentary on my part; not so much interpretive as what I took to be the gist or tenor in situ, what I can yet have of whatever it was I should think I then had:
–– Ace Dreare
A Note On Excellent Lying: Poet As Philosophical Anthropologist
People imagine the danger, the risk, of being subjective when they say they are being objective with their reading of a work … that they are really or merely objective about their subjectivity with regard to their response to “a closer examination of the work”; but they are never so cleanly, so observed to be, positioned. Who is objective about their own inner, hidebound, fearful assessment of anything – least of all their own work, or failure. The working failure.
They imagine: the danger is a flip of the coin. The trick, if it were a fluent, instinctive, unconscious one, should snatch the coin in the air so imparting another random toss.
Not the spin, but the toss. As if the hand were the hand of someone else.
I mean of course the untaught mercy that passes for an appraisal from another and disinterested quarter: one is never so lucky, bound within one utter exasperation of living, as to know the peace or happiness of aught but self-invested interest, meddling, design.
The spin is beyond us, a celestial backdoor.
Well, you work and work till no more work – works.
I mean to say, we are as a mirror to each other even while we fog the glass with our unexamined selves (since we are a congeries of hidden aspects, duplicity, “reflective” inversions).
––And here, did I not have my first key, my newer even if feeble light upon the predicament that was Gordon Keller? The words both revealed and betrayed any convention of his “sickness”, also that he had seen enough of himself to know he was, as it were, outside or beside his original, true nature. The coinage of an “egotic”, – as distinct from what? – category of being.
Objective assessment, its native acumen, with the subjective plenum, a greatness staring the observer back – this surely is the imagined, desired form of things; it is beyond doubt, this desire, that lay at the root of imagination as such.
––In spite of my earlier ideas, impressions, I couldn’t help but see originality, eagerness, in these words. Had I known this much all along; was I jealous?
A Platonic ideal: imagine a world of no imagination, all Object prior and suspended in open space.
For, truly, there is no original memory, a picture or recollecting medium, respecting the advent of form, the predisposing of whatever is to be arranged or presented to an abstraction, a “seeing” of the “impossible” vessel, shape, array i.e., that which is meant and otherwise does not merely import the lesser idea of meaning itself, what it is only to mean some “thing A or B”, some “nothing C or D”. Its sliver of sharpened string, presence, the bright resolve, hanging as from that first and holy tree, incarnate, a blazing.
One points as a child points: “this is mine”:
Q : (Q) / Q : ( ) / (Q) : ( ) > self directed
Q : ( ) / (Q) : Q / ( ) : (Q) > other directed
––I hadn’t thought he had it in him, the philosopher. Did he know? The symbolism tacked onto the end was the sort of graphomanic output I had come across somewhere, perhaps seen in myself. Yet – see it for itself.
Nietzsche talked Abyss, and did not mean to suggest a Void. His was certain that brand of investigative and inquisitorial critique that comes back to upbraid the philosopher, a quarrel so much with Aristotle leaving the finer or more delicate figures in Plato’s obsession behind. One is to ask the question only in asking: of what nature that is not already outside of nature this eternal, hermetical trauma of utterance – given that any one particle of imperfection, the work of homo, the loquacious human, must not participate in the design, or intercession, of higher truth.
––I was quite beside my earlier impressions with this; it was not possible to agree, to disagree. This was no convention respecting any interpretation of the formidable nihilist’s work. GK was, surely, a morally grounded person. One never embellishes, embraces a meaningless world in cultivating, fashioning thought itself. Existential philosophy famously fashions its own absurdity.
“We”, on the other hand, speak of and about and around nothing. The canny philologist likewise took objection with Aristotle in the matter of theory, the higher art of speculation, that probable drama passing before the critic’s eye. Such as we, far too rigorous, letting our theories as they do predict and model the alleged reality of a very small idea – escaped, ethereal creature of the dialog itself, a phantom of the world’s broken, misshapen handicrafts – thinking too much that we have founded a Truth. Where, to those old Greeks, but the rule and game-board of logic: their greater desire for scientia, the labyrinth of signs. Meanwhile, empire of vaporous objects to arguments made false, negation of negation that should pass for light.
Better, some think, to make the poet an hypothesis in fact, foundation if misplaced witness to all that stirs or disturbs the inky fabric of night. There is much in the way of reasonable science here, a rational nerve. If reasonable to a degree, less of knowledge; if rational enough, a bog of abstractions.
Up from the womb a more complete conscience: Speak the song in zero-dimension, voice prattle not of triangles conceived – but imagine if image imagination imagining imagined: (yet) single posits in breathless space to come.
Yet.
Wishing more than is lately permitted, even in evidence, we are as like to proffer the magical talisman of “reality”, a kind of literary charm. Dearest brother: the philosophers tossed Reality soon as they ventured to know what was Good.
So saying, all that follows from a world of momenta, that occupies the arrowhead of the logic: [All that is NOR Nothing at all].
––Where, you see, the argument seems at a glance to fall apart, to unravel from the windings of its core. But, wanting to enter into the spirit of the thing, unfamiliar with the matter of the book itself, I waited, gave the novelty a decent chance.
Plato is throwing everything with, at, the poets because his cosmology, a nascent ontology prior to becoming art, proves too practical or efficient, maddeningly comprehensive,complete; it is also the essence of literature, that undefined line at which logos is scrabbling at the smooth-finish tiles of a literary irruption which artificial sentiments, bound to elemental forms of repetition and redundancy, typology and reification, occlude an original voice aimed ostensibly towards a spontaneous truth defying the self, a present conscious that would function as a paraphrasis of the self inhabiting as inhabited by the poem , i.e., a “being spoken” rather than a “pretending to communicate” the existential predicament of vocalization.
Much tragedy that defines the world turns on this reclusive nature of the written word. Any truth for which the poet speaks – for the speaker is not conscious or in possession of a logical truth value – is an utterance that speaks “for truth” and no asserting a particular prescription for “this truth”; the encapsulated written word, its husk and shape as the unspoken sign, is incapable of defying the self, so that the imaginary construct escapes the fictive self as poseur of the fact.
But such a move is impossible, the fact ignored lingering as a fossilized, invincible artifact.
The artifice of self we may say is merely mortal. While the defying of the self is consciousness becoming other than mortal, other than whatever it originally observes only to be.
Thus, we recognize the agony and frustration of every single element in the poem, a letter or bit of punctuation, the minute architecture that fashions the very shape and articulation of the chosen elements, from manuscript to air, syntactic form to musical measure.
There is no end to the poet’s utter perplexity with the craft, nor the daemon’s composure.
In time, the Poem shall glow of amber.
––I had to stop here, any least particle of doubt, the meanest suspicion, dead to the mind as stir rumor of the whirlwind. Here was extraordinary insight for all the sumptuous fare that had made the weird table, an assay in what should be incalculable quantity; paradox or paraphrase enlightened with the finest sense ( ironic as the impression should be) of self-possession. Gordon Keller, crucible at hand, enjoining the alchemy’s immaterial stone.
The poet is blamed, persecuted, ritually murdered for this celestial project of articulating the tragedy of an awakened consciousness of the false self. The transcript frozen as it is meant, captive to the dead form of an abstracted presence, is the analog type of a conscious body, the cogitans through which a functioning body is merely conscious. But the articulated voice, the expired moment of meaning once given to the air, is the origin of a discovered consciousness, the cogito by which a perception being a conscious self pretends also one’s self-to-be.
Contingency, as memoria, an arrangement of stones, makes the grave; breath, lost to time or moment, faithless, escapes.
The written word, then, taken for being other than a passing self, thus rectified, is placed away, bound immediately to the imagined objects and circumstances of its existence as such – as paper, ink, time, syntax, semantic, accident, occasion, value, residence.
Never measured by music, respiration, fear, passion, mediation with the living world … action, love: the ultimatum of a tomb.
None of these.
Still, qualification: the man who is the admiring student takes the words (much as we take them at second hand) from the mouth of the gregarious, agreeable sage, the old soldier who has “been it all” – yet sees with and through the shame of defeat. In spite of all warnings from the spoken world of living creation, the injury is to be cast in the language of signs, in the insecticidal patter of permanence, idee fixe.
His old, rough teacher a contemplative bird, this wide-shoulder secretary metamorphoses, scruffs, frills a weather of his crow’s feathers the bluff all a poem writ day-lit.
Thus the fatal stroke, the first and the last voyage of anything approaching what is now but a happenstance and no love(r) nor fatal mystery yet wise.
The poet, one sees, always has waited in order to be whatever so finds him waiting.
––So finds him waiting. As do all, I thought. We, the web spinners, counting our beans and seconds, our grains of sand. Then, in answer, there was this:
The poets tell the graven truth, question nothing, embrace totality: the meaner poets consumed by words yet incorporating the air, swearing as they nibble at truth.
The Bard himself spoke of nothings and with his time meant notings – that ear on the high beam, breathless eavesdropper, spectral voices that would measure dead passage of days.
Pound, that infamous megalo-phone of an entire Cosmopoly birthed in rime and music, went astray with the Chorus but weird honey in his waxen ears. Whereas, with the advent of a mathematical comprehension, as the Cartesian disjunct pervade a geometer’s perplexed motivation of a physical world, the trade-off in certainty towards a gens poetica, a poiesis (inhabitation) of the conscious life, is made articulate: Cogito ergo sum, no doubt; but, all the same ( a companion and note no longer held to scrutiny): Sum res cogitans – to the dismay, the proposal, of a phenomenal realm of objects but suspiciously invigorated, causally linked; inversely a causal field of objects but suspiciously observed, phenomenally arrayed. Passion to conjecture, action to evidence: “thought” to explain the simplest description, “thought” to describe the simplest explanation.
Theory is thought to explain the described, thought to make evident.
The theory but husk, circular, a jug to paint the story’s water. T.S. Eliot could not keep the good one nor reject the bad one.
The plowman mark the e’en hallow / seed the furrow leave the fallow / furrow e’en the plowman hallow / in the fallow o’ t’ e’en.
There is no cure for these.
––Could it be? The lunatic speaks the wiser truth for the prophet; a sane teacher idiocy spouts, inverts the one sign with the other. I was reminded, saw before me rather than knew the words or the phrase thus composed to be – that sort of instant completion, the whole idea, which comes to one in a flash and in a flash is lost, fragments bloodied ends for all time. “Plowman turn, unfurl your earth”. It knows what is conscious of everything thereof to be thinking.
Of.
A miserable body that hurts, suffers, starves and dies.
Dream Xanadu, I hear, comes a busy man to fling Obituary at the door.
They first to last to death put are to be, made whole (which is holiness), prematurely silent.
The Ontic given, that blind mass and rite of the world: stone, derelict, biblion, obscene.
They are to be as death to be.
Hallowed to be.
We encounter this obstacle, know its intractable feature as the primary locus of a conscious awareness, the form or spirit of a Cartesian problem, first instance of an alleged turn to the modernist, neurotic obsession of “thinking through” what is obviously given, consummate, in experience.
We cannot be thinking through thinking. …through thinking (through)––
––And, there it was, the volume in quicksilver innocence, a fattened worm undulate, globus longus, the feeling a troubled fact in me:
Anything worthwhile in the Socratic mood and temper, all that no longer is tolerable to us, is what has been displaced, cast aside, vanquished in the flight from Eros, the inheritance most agreeable to a human nature lived, undisclosed, and the evolved form of virtue.
––Reading on I was positive, ready, for a revelation turning on this hyper-conscious insight, some indication of the search for what is often conceived to be an erotic, a real, Cosmos.
In some new sense, I knew: this was my decrepit insight all along.
First, there is the setting and the mood of the Dialogues, the environs or native place for any of the great queries descended to us. These were people first and foremost thinking on their feet, but equally at their leisure. Yet, with the contemporary mood? We are only suspicious, and mostly that only to ourselves, knotted minds of public guilt and private shame ( which is a mode of the Law) and so toxic elixir against life, that distilled malevolent of ego. Still, whatever else is true in spite of any misperception, these problems and solutions are matters of the voice and the irretrievable situation of speaking, organic encounters translated or worse; and such transcriptions as are extant constitute the only definitive record we have of what we are when we are not being obsessively literate, too close to the page, erotically involved with the symbol that exists merely in and of the surface and too near Nietzsche’s terrified, displaced Ecce Homo, a nameless belligerent who must stare, polyglot, myriad, all-eyed-to-eyed-all and to a blindness blazing.
––Say what one must: all the health and ease and engagement of the world for a thousand years mayn’t touch the truth: It is not right that anything in this universe dies.
Contemporary knowledge, not much into the real heart of a Golden Age, begins to take the form, the very ideal of being a document somewhere else – of existing in time and consequently not organically connected to life, to the mortal shadow. Much as one should say, read, even hear that Homer “says ‘it is so’” – and thus all utterance becomes subordinate to the idealization, to the singular, monolithic obstruction itself, a complex habit of thought and the received body of alleged wisdom. Whereas, but a sick temper or tonic, this ideal, this fixed temper, by a general consensus is less respected than the action, any conceivable act, in that event’s compass. There appears no stage, no extent, in which the act, its root, (dis)appears.
It is here the conflict is most in evidence: for while imagination is itself neither right nor wrong, the act, and actor, as separable entities, are never successfully imagined.
Acting is no intent of any act. While an entire edifice of evidence seems to support this conclusion, a familiar world lately at the surface of alleged forces, perhaps quanta of relation settled before the first breath is drawn, the clean knife pulled from the scabbard.
The Law, much of laws, may retire to the madhouse.
Thus, we inherit the vast accumulation of Metaphysic as commonly misconceived; inherit the painstaking and significant “production” of Heidegger and his attempt to make a substance of the Ontic obtrusion into awareness, a tangible artifact plausible enough to resist the idiom of consciousness itself, evade containment of the mundane fact.
Still, with the physicists, are we left with phantoms of our own handiwork, fields littered with names shadowed by our guttering candle.
No wonder that instinct, the sum that haunts us, must a fiddler play at every funeral.
(The older Greek has it, I am told, that techne is “craft” or “aesthetic design”, maybe much in addition. Modern Greek has it as “listen”, perhaps submit, or heed. The first form is a matter of some notional freedom, which achieves the semblance of what we mean when we say we are acting, responding freely enough, certainly. The last is at least ambiguous, a murkier kind of instruction or regulation.)