fragilekeys

ROMANTIC POESIE

Do you ask how I was at this time?
As one who has lost everything so as to gain everything.
—Friedrich Hölderlin

I miss the sun-dial, the moving moon, the actress:
The secret of accessing the ineffable.
Here I invoke her— but who, I wonder, have I named?
Diotima, Sophia?— or that irreducible kernel
These thinkers tried to access (Hölderlin, Novalis, Schlegel)—
The difference of the world to itself, felt within oneself,
Running the whole gamut of human emotions and reflections?
Whereas many remain assured of the provisional labels
They’ve saved for the sacred and profane worlds,
These thinkers felt an urgency that could not.
The time comes to save our voice of heartfelt intuitions
From lapsing into oblivion—
It is the urgency of this time-coming from out of it 
That links their time with ours and the hereafter.
As they are: signals from the dead,
Redresses from the bed-rock of accepted nomenclatures
To give us a new breath again, to begin thinking.

Romanticism firstly rejects that the I is merely transcendental.
They sought to situate “it” in a more holistic view of nature,
A nature liberated from its caricatures as a causal mechanism
Divorced from the world we live in; or as an object
Upon which the human is written. They sought a nature
That is active and autonomous only as we are taken in by the poetic spirit.
This began a new orientation towards embodiment
(Yet which drew from a wealth of tradition),
One that extends the “I” to the “non-I” without surrendering
The function of each— an organic whole where each part functions
For the maintaining of the “harmoniously opposed.”
Thus, Fichte’s structure that relates the subjective “I”
To the objective “this one here,” mediated by
An immanently “transcendental function”— yet here seen as the bridge between,
The symbol of a gap in being more than any thing.
They realized just the same that even this formulation
Is situated in language, where the grassy “fields” get their signification
In the field of embodied language which is far vaster, which opens
“As if on a Holiday…”

And yet, with language, they sought a truth inside truth’s fictions
To serve a witnessing function outside the merely linguistic,
Where words unravel, expose themselves in their nakedness
As would have formerly the mystic’s. Against this movement
We ordinarily find nothing but resistance,
For all our truths (and gods) are embedded in it.
Of all the romantics, Hölderlin was the clearest
To recognize the deep implications of this predicament:
The gods— and significations— have fled.
They find themselves as we do: in the middle times
Before the gods come, if ever, again. We
Are to flesh out what is to be said (and left unsaid)
In this interim period. But by this recognition
We have already entered a liminal state
Where time sheds its differences by realizing them
In the spacing out of presences:
The dislocating absence of us and our essence,
Poetically spread across a borderless countryland
To be shared in finding finally a resting place
In the movement of a beckoning process without stasis.
There remains much to be written and read still,
Where longevity can only mean the resurrection
Of the body from the chains of the world
And of the word from the chains of usage,
Where both find their home
In an urgent, deeply felt, yet-to-come relevance.
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Poetry is a step beyond paraphrase.

In my more radical moments of pursuing the purity of the unparaphrasable, I tried to differentiate within a given poem which of its elements tend toward the prosaic (or ‘sophic’) and which are purely poetry. At that time, I came across a line from a poem by Michael Laver that seemed perfectly elucidative of this: The frost tattoos its sermon on the rose. This line stood out at me amidst thirty others which, so I felt then, lent themselves more to paraphrase— whereas that line absolutely resisted it. The reason Paul Celan has been my go-to figure in poetics is because his work manifests this resistance to paraphrase to a maximal degree, and he has the vision to back it up.

Over time in my own writing I have complicated these distinctions between pure poetry and the sophic, but still I would say the most rewarding experience as a poet is to write something that is so much its own thing that not even you can say what it means besides. This obviously creates certain issues when it comes to sharing the poem— it can seem like nonsense, a riddle, an empty game. But this is a risk the poet runs in order to communicate, convey, evoke, something beyond the “ambitions and expectations” of prose and escape “prosodic capture” (cited from Jonathon Tillotson in conversation).

I view poetry as intervening at the very level of our linguistic imagination, as potentially breaking down barriers at the frontier of language-comprehension, thawing the frozen images in common consciousness and restoring the flow of living signifiers to life.

Hence poetry is a challenge to any conceptual grip on meaning (“interpretation” broadly speaking, if it pretends to closure). Poetry manifests a remainder of communication that cannot fall under interpretation’s control. Here one lacks the categories to describe the nature of this remainder. Is it a restoration of archaic conjuration? Is it a novel eruption from a future or superior cognition? Is it a concretization that transmits something more solid than the sophic ever could? Is it a spiritualization of sense transcending whatever we could put our finger on as corporeal?

Poetry investigates this borderland, and this is why it remains exciting to me, even if pursuing it does not provide much sure ground to stand on, and even if the temptation is always there to retreat to the safer ground of prose, which inevitably we do.

*

It is tempting to make difficult things seem easier than they are, but it is not by lowering standards and upholding simplistic platitudes that we liberate ourselves. Nor by producing one-offs that are the equivalent of one-night-stands in the world of Eros. Poets through all time have labored over their works, they’ve wrestled with them until the sounds and words yielded to the vision. Those are the works that stand the test of time because they speak from a core that can’t be simulated. If we only want ephemera, we can get that anywhere. To achieve something that can survive the fleeting moment, takes time and effort, humility, risk, and a willingness to constantly grow as a person and in one’s craft. It means the opposite of boasting in one’s skill or verses, rather something more like a constant dissatisfaction and striving for perfection that only renewed efforts to write and edit can answer and master. Perhaps the most accomplished poet could say who is or isn’t a poet, but I venture to guess they would not bother doing so, since everyone must find out for themselves if poet they are and, more importantly, what poetry is and really can do.

*

There is a labor of the image that increases the precision of a thinking, though it may also appear extravagant from the perspective of conceptual utility. Philosophy generally wants to pin insight into its discourse, whatever the degree of rationality presumed; it wants to fulfill knowledge in an abstraction purporting a fixed universality. That is its dictum, its almost tawdry vocation, worthy of much respect. Whereas the image – may it never be “tasteless” – flutters down. Metaphor is greater than its intellectual adaequatio, yet the tragedy of this greatness is that it has nowhere to stand, no ground to claim. It invariably recedes into the background of more urgent matters, whether they’re hot off the presses or pressed into the strata of philosophical habit. The runaway effect of metaphor, of images, risks leading the philosophical writer away from philosophy to literature. But literature imposes different demands. Though it share the common vocation of logos, to gather, its “rightness” seems of a different order. Its images are not illustrative of thought but the thought itself, just as its phrases are not made for paraphrase but stand, unabstractably, in their own universe of unprovables. (from July 2020)

*

One of the enjoyments of writing poetry—which is quite a lot different from reading it—is the pursuit of that moment when, suddenly, regardless of the poem’s specifics, it touches the whole, you seem to touch the whole, everything you could say about being and language and world is, in that flash, condensed into some fixture on a page, and it is like there is a portal opened up to the real world, to an instant of communion, nativity, and undeceit.

It may be a fanciful moment, and often proves so later when one reads again and sees only the details. Incidentally, this is why poems often endeavor to ruin what they’re “about”, so that they rather “are” what they intend. Perhaps you could say (I speak only for myself), one edits and edits away at the poem until it more reliably gives way to such moments of feeling linked with the whole—that feeling that ranges deep reflection to enchanted pleasure, that fascinates us, that is whimsical and profound and, if felt deeply enough, change the whole trajectory of our saying.

Poems are perhaps machines for reestablishing contact with the reality that gets lost in the parceling out of beings, words, and things into the informations that compose the world. Suddenly language is strange, it does the unexpected, what it refers to isn’t what we thought or previously understood, it is something new and immemorial, all-pervasive, rejuvenative. We’re reminded of ourselves, of our relations, of our mortality, we are awakened both to the tearing precious moment and to whatever sort of eternity beings like us can experience—we intuit, we enter, the whole.

Or, if “whole” is inadequate (it is), say we become aware of the permeality of the border between our self and what is not us and we traverse it somewhat (we transverse it), we exist where inside is outside and outside is inside, somewhat like a touch past death, a living touch on all-life, and there arises a sense of openness with completion at that point or across that borderspace (cf. Bracha Ettinger’s concept). It is like time was not wasted on us, like we have healed from something, from a gross deficiency or myopia in the normal cognitions, the vistas are back and with them our heart. It is like we have accepted a word from elsewhere, and finally something true, something irrevocable, has been said.

It is unpredictable as a lightning bolt, where it will strike and when, but all along one works up the cloud and the rain, preparing for the sound of thunder—that we give the rather flimsy name “poetry.”

*

There is a discrepancy in speech, over which no one has mastery because it cannot be mastered. The discrepancy is that speech seems to us to stem from our ‘livingmost essence’—when we speak it feels to us we are saying what we mean and are—, while at the same time the medium of speech is language, which is a shared and generic medium, a zone which negates any supposed singularity of subject, and hence divides us supremely from whatever intimate essence we suppose we have (which we hence suspect is a mere illusion of an unconscious language). We try to overcome this through higher degrees of precision in our discourse, but then, ironically, the discrepancy becomes even more pronounced. The more one seeks to express oneself actually, the more one must submit oneself to a language and a logic that seems at odds with one’s own; except that again, in writing, one realizes there is no logic of one’s own whatsoever, only the logic which language lets you express by failing you. Language is a zone wherein all of us (finally) are dead, yet we seem unable to anticipate this (how many years hence have I tried to prove it to you, yet still you do not see). Language as a medium we believe of self-expression forever fails before language as a medium of silencing singularity; this is something no one can reconcile with living speech, but nonetheless it haunts every word with the suspicion that these are, inescapably, the words of a dead man. Proof is apparent: no matter how I read them, I can never say that they are me, my speech. I can only witness that “it speaks”—and it has no need for any sustenance from the supposition of my life. My speech works perfectly without my living; ironically, this is proof that I am, already, as good as dead. A death that is unforgettable, although no one remembers it.

A RICH INFINITY OF BLANKS
Note on Wilfred Bion and Knowledge of Infinity

1

The question of ‘thinking the infinite’ is a common concern among philosophers, mathematicians, and theologians. The issue they constantly run into is: How can we know the infinite using finite minds and finite means?

The tendency on the religious side is to place significance on a symbol which links the two sides. The only trouble is that, for the symbol to function, one must believe it. One must believe that one’s symbols, one’s idiom, one’s discourse makes the link. Indeed, that God on the other side of the link “guarantees” that the symbol holds, makes the relationship true. Infinity “funds” it. But where faith is needed, there is doubt; and where there are symbols there is symbol-critique. (One reason why Carl Jung refused to make metaphysical truth claims and restricted himself to seeing how the psyche made use of symbols to connect finite and infinite, in his terms, the conscious and unconscious parts of the self, Atman.)

On the philosophical side, the solutions are diverse and it would be impossible to give a survey. Alain Badiou has attempted to transpose the mathematical theory of infinite sets into the realm of philosophical discourse. Roughly, he says a “truth-event” can erupt from the “known situation” the way infinite exceeds finitude (truth pierces a hole in knowledge); and that “eternal truths” are constructed with the “launch point” of infinity in the situation, the point which does not belong to the situation.

But I am not here to discuss Jung or Badiou, rather one of Wilfred Bion’s theories. The purpose of this post was to share it with you, but there are detours to infinity.

2

As a psychoanalyst influenced by Melanie Klein, Bion takes the relationship between the baby and the mother as the prime analogy of psychic life. (Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar also takes the baby-mother analogy as the primary one for the believer’s relationship to God, despite his tradition’s Father-centrism and lack of a female God-image.)

For Bion, the mother-baby relationship is essentially one of container-contained. The baby experiences a threatening excess of stimuli (both sensations and proto-thoughts), and there is not yet an adequate structure to handle this excess. The thoughts overwhelm because there is not yet an apparatus to think them. Now this apparatus is what the mother provides. He refers to this as the mother’s “reverie,” and that reverie is basically what the psychoanalyst tries to replicate in the clinic: a sort of open space where the baby/patient’s emotions can be received more or less graciously, so they can be helped in the direction of being “thought through.”

For Bion, the crucial decision is always between thinking-through the excess (developing a thinker for the thoughts), or act out out of frustration, the passage-‘a-l’acte.

Now from the analogy Bion develops a whole theory of “learning from experience.” He formalizes it through the symbols ♂ ♀. Note that these symbols do not intend anything gendered but simply represent the relationship Contained-Container. They are not logical but simply a useful convenience; they are a formalism.

The question then, for Bion, is how ♂ ♀ can grow “commensually,” like how mother and child learn from each other, but also how (for example) the Unthought content of a philosophical system grows as the philosophical system itself advances in its Thinking.

The easiest way to picture this, at a primitive level, is how we “mate” pre-conceptions (♀) with sense-data (♂), simply put: words with the real phenomena. Bion’s idea here is that our awareness of sense impressions could not develop if we had not also developed a mental Container for Contained sense-data. (The benefit of the abstraction is that he does not need to say exactly what that Container is; it simply designates a function empirically observed.)

The Container ♀ he describes as a series of sleeves, of blanks to be filled like blanks in a questionnaire. The connecting threads of the sleeves, the structure of the questionnaire, are emotions. The Contained ♂ he describes as a “medium for suspended contents that protrude from an unknown base.” These elements are not seen to cohere and so are punctuated by doubt. There is an inconsistency there. (Note that the description does not describe ♂ as filling ♀; rather there seems to be two mutually instances: a structure of empty sleeves, and a discrete series of unknowns.)

The process of learning is described as “commensual” growth between ♂ and ♀. For learning to occur, ♀ has to be integrated yet not lose rigidity. Its different moments are held together by emotion, but an emotion that must be capable of changing. The capacity of ♀ for re-formation depends on the receptivity of the emotion(s). Likewise, “penetrability” in ♂ requires that the emotion of doubt be tolerated. Since it represents the element of the unknown, I take this to mean that the unknown cannot be penetrated by thought without a tolerance of doubt that one penetrates it. In other words, there’s no knowing it without highly doubting one knows it: such is the paradoxical non-knowledge we encounter everywhere in the thinking of infinity.

Bion writes (yes, I have written all this simply to expound upon this quotation): “Tolerance of doubt and tolerance of a sense of infinity are the essential connective tissue in ♂ if Knowledge is to be possible.”

But note also that without ♀, this unknown excess would have no place. ♀ is like the manifestation of the knowledge of ♂, a bit as if it knew it where we don’t. (I think anyone who has labored over some artistic construction having in mind to represent the infinite, will sight a deep breath knowing exactly what I mean.)

3

After advancing far along the path of formalization (see his “Grid”), Bion would later move away from it and write fiction, but still I find all this an interesting construct to think about.

I don’t think it is as simple as describing ♀ as finite and ♂ as infinite. Taking sense-data as the starting point, the latter would simply be chaos without the former. In any case, there is no Knowledge without both.

Two parallels worth noting. One, in religion, the thought of Shakti-Brahman in the Hindu system (see Sri Aurobindo especially. Two, in philosophy, Derrida’s aporetic thinking of the khora (the spacing of space, so to speak) together with messianity (the invincible desire for justice).

Having come to the end, I should reiterate that the symbols Bion uses (aggravated by Facebook’s requiring they be gender-colored) may suggest more than they mean in this context– but they are simply for convenience to represent the Container-Contained function. They are no more gendered than the one who provides reverie for a child, or the analyst who provides a mirror-ear for the patient. Moreover, at that stage of evolution of his thinking, Bion viewed the pinnacle of ♀ as the scientific deductive system which, while highly complex, retains the receptive qualities of ♀.

The draw of this psychoanalytic rendering is to show that ‘thinking the infinite’ requires emotional growth. On the side of ♀, a great flexibility between ♀ + ♀ + ♀, between different moments of emotion (+) as it changes, is required; otherwise it will not be integrated and capacious enough to receive. On the side of ♂, a great tolerance of doubt ( . ) between ♂ . ♂ . ♂, between instances of the Unknown, is required; otherwise it simply cannot be known as unknown, it will be “believed” to be something it is not.

Abstract as the schema may be, I think anyone who works with a material to create with something unknown in mind will recognize this pattern of growth.

How then, would Bion answer the question: How can we know the infinite using finite minds and finite means? Clearly, there is no method of ‘how’ to give here, but the schema he provides is a helpful tool — for the construction of, and the filling in of, our own blanks.