fragilekeys

A BUTTERCUP FOR YOUR SUFFERING
After William Gass

“Disguised as fiction the truth occasionally slipped through.”—Wilfred Bion

It has been said that writing is a way to relieve oneself of self, to find a reprieve from the onus of being “somebody”. Conversely, as one who has made this quest can attest, writing can also be a way of doubling down, rooting in, affirming one’s self-twist, despite the motive and motion toward self-effacement. Gestures of relieving selfhood can be made without ever reaching that threshold where those gestures come alive—without ever giving language the attention it ought to deserve, in following that realization.

**

The most obvious miss of the mark is to equate this realization with spiritual quietude, with actionless calm that never thinks about why it’s calm, about why it’s been granted its reprieve, or about what purpose the null center of self prepares one for, what it may devote itself to, like: going fishing in the ocean of signifers for gales.

The ascetic’s ideal was to finish with the world and not need language. It goes no further than that: traceless absorption in (non-)existence.

But what is easier than not-being? It all does it every day. Whole epochs, empires, dynasties, star clusters, have accomplished it so comparatively quickly that, from our perspective, they took no time at all.

The self one is to be relieved of, is a fiction written in a book quickly closed, a book lost in a vast, diffident shelf.

And non-being is even more immediate than that—it needn’t wait for a thing’s demise, the book’s close.

For the writer, too, the evaporation of the fictional character is built-in to its unfolding. Only by the stroke of the pen, by directed mental attention, by recitation, does one restore life to that character and its fictional world.

Just as one never secures the difference between inarticulate animal and articulated speech, just as every effort to secure that difference requires a new act of speech, a new cry uttered in the abyss between pure sound and failed sense—for the voice cannot be located anywhere else.

Non-being is the basic return state of an anthropogenesis never complete, of a language that has never been. To dream of having any other being takes the creative work of speech, of a word nonetheless still lost to the void the minute it leaps from one’s lips.

**

According to Berkeley, the last idealist, unless I’m looking at the forest-green candle half-burned on the table, with wax trickling down its side, stuck in a dusted bronze Arabic candleholder whose feet and head fan out like seashells, its grooves holding a few wooden sticks left over from the incense I burnt yesterday—unless I turn my head and summon my gaze to take in the hourglass python, it does not exist. Esse est percipi.

This doctrine might have consoled us, might have told us: God’s watchful eye is over us always, continually bringing everything into existence through his omnipresent perception. But intellectual history took a more dismal turn, a realist turn, which assures us that everything is out there whether we say it is or not.

Indeed today—when Texas-sized slicks of microscopic plastics loiter like gargantuan eye-masks on the Pacific surface (never mind the cognoscenti of plankton out there, wolfing it down with their mastaxes)—to assert not only that a falling tree makes no sound without our hearing it, but worse, that no falling tree exists in the absence of its perceptual registry (never mind the tree’s capacities in that area)—that nothing “is” apart from our attention of it, well, this stabs as the epitome of scientific naivety.

Or think quarks (though it’s not clear how to do that): without microprocessors and Hadron colliders, not even God could see them. It has been speculated that God did not think we’d sharpen our sight to such a degree, and now he’s got to backfill all the missing data: hence the gift and mystery of quantum geometry. These quarks so small, so unlike things, so ubiquitous and impenetrable, so invisible, we don’t know what perceiving them would mean. They vanish into thin air like the magician’s genial assistant in a shark tank when the curtain’s pulled.

What’s more, thanks to the Buddhist doctrine of pratītyasamutpāda, we know there’s no self-intrinsic existence to anything. What came will go and what comes will came, twice, once, the countable aspects when and where, the nameable aspects to whom and for what, the question taken by the form—all this not so relevant when “form is emptiness, emptiness is form,” a slogan I quite like since it proves my point: Not-being is the easiest way to be. (Just think of how many things have ceased existing since you started reading—candles, quarks, Berkeley!)

Now imagine the Bombs-A’-Way Coaster stuck at its rickety summit, right before the steep incline plummet, and you’re there 200 feet high, alone and exposed to the winds whipping up stronger now (is that a Tornado forming in the distance I see?), unable to budge an inch with these bars across your shoulder, and your belly’s grumbling with sugars of cotton candy, and you’re wondering if you remembered to put out the candle at home and feed your pet plankton, it’s all too much trying to reconcile climate change with the Buddha’s teaching, when suddenly you realize: if you closed your eyes now, it would change nothing.

Observe closely, now, what everyone knows so horribly. It takes literally nothing for me to kill that poor sap stranded up there on the coaster: heart attack, stroke, battering ram of a 2×4 launched by the thunderstorm’s winds, or the wooden girders collapse beneath him (termite damage), a screw comes loose at the loop, a heartache he’ll never recover from haunts him from the next over empty seat (now there’s a long story)—it’s all easy, so easy, that “relieving the self” barely counts.

For while it is true that everything “is” out there, whether or not we say it is, or perceive it —though, rigorously speaking, isn’t this too an unfalsifiable belief?—the bigger issue is: it’s all about to not be, anyway.

A thing that makes a noise makes a dissipation of noise too. What occurs is a sign of the coming dead. What we perceive is a mark of the thing-perceived, but exhausted. Being is what we attribute to non-beings that aren’t gone yet.

**

The spiritualist dreams about the “peace of the graveyard,” like in Kafka’s fantasy of being free of writing before he died. But no, when Kafka picks up his pen, it’s not then that he’s killed, that he’s relieved of selfhood. When he’s walking to the office, bearing with some insufferable family difficulty, begging for Felice to understand why he can’t…, he knows unconsciously already: non-being is everything. So much so he can write, “There is no having, only a being, only a state of being that craves the last breath, craves suffocation,” though in truth it’s the opposite: the only state of being is suffocated already. One needn’t want that. If nothing is had, not even one’s own being, then not-being is the easiest thing out. Why crave what all being announces? Whatever you are, you blend into the given. The givenness of non-existence begins in completion; call it excompletion.

Just like our man up there trembling on the edge to nowhere, forgetting own-existence is easy. Just pick up the story elsewhere.

**

Relief of selfhood is rife with so many pitfalls that the whole game appears to be a performative bunkering down, one big act of suffocating oneself or freeing oneself—all the same deceit.

Just listen to the self-lackers, the gurus with their 109^th bead, clever poets and proud saints abnegating themselves to Kingdom Come: Look at me! How I’m figuring out the self is plural and inconstant! The I is always different, I’m that difference—and I’m not it! The universe is me, but what the universe is is not. All I have is how I’m me, and I don’t have it!…

Well, “relieving oneself” also means taking a piss. The stream leaves a sign as yellow as any buttercup’s petals, and—depending on one’s drink—a scent much stronger.

If you can love the gardener out there wobbling on his own pond, good.

The writer, however, thinks otherwise: it is not “I” who is relieved, but Pain itself. Through the power of metaphor, its transmutation into images, into petals capturing the essence of non-being, of the quest of the inarticulable voice yoked into the incorporeal of language, the full range of the sayable, Pain itself resurrects as Life in the Call.

It turns the story into no one’s—a fictional character steadied for the fatal plunge.

**

Relieving oneself of selfhood through language—I’m referring to writing, not the existential issue—requires one get explicit about this relief, but only so far as one is not yet non-being. One must come to understand its role in the linguistic practice, that’s all.

Past that, non-existence becomes another project—and then not a good word gets written—and without a word getting written, how can the house in flames sing its song? How can the magnificence of meaning show its feeble arms, if they are always being plunged into black soot and jars of nirvana?

Relief of selfhood is a central, a priori “disaster,” as Blanchot has it—not relief at all but the unfulfillable imperative of a writing whose responsibility exceeds whatever self might think it knows it—though luckily for it, it need not know that. The reason why one feels it remains forever unknown.

That feeling is what the writer bears over into images and chases down like a hunter on the trail of the last nutritious meal left, though it be ash.

The disaster is active at every instant of thought in language, in thinking existence at all. The writer’s experience is of the indestructible, but not an ontologized indestructible, not the indestructible of God or of the now. It is too modest to accept this, it takes skill and will and luck to detect it, for what it refers to is the most nondescript block party this side of Sagittarius. It is this unbelievable thing called literature: the working of thought in images.

**

Without some relief—and please, Exister, don’t forget! I would never disallow any of your meditations…—, without some Einsicht in dass was ist, regarding the centrality of Nothing to the experience of things, a writer never sees the language in what they work, but only themselves: their struggle, their story reflected in it, however multiple and speedy they believe they are.

The role of the excomplete mediator, the floating signifier, the shifty whistle in the referee-free jam, the void of sense, the subatomic necromancer, the avalanche of freshly stubbed toes, the noematic altitude of the aleatory ribbon, the symphonic virtue streaming time’s most intimate pow, fiddler and conqueror of the No-man’s-land’s Cello, delightful sorcerer of the yellowing page salvo who, organon for endless relaunches of portentous stealth, last anterior tense for the viviparous and wounded, feels into our unutterable nearness to the sore, to the source, to the sword of exited worlds—well, one cannot escape writing toward that, on and on and on, using the only rule there is in the study of images: never believe it is really there. (Yes, this means you up there, stranded in the coaster, eyeing the grizzly mechanic, mounting slowly with his dubious wrench to get you down.)

But the minute these zeros become themes, thematically dominant, or self-relief appear like a goal—or you get convinced that literature is the royal road to suffocation (when really it’s much easier than that, just snap your fingers); the minute the linguistic-shifter-attitude becomes an empty set on display, instead of merely gluing mind and sensitivity to the literary impulse as it presents itself, to best work it out; at that minute one loses the fecund cheery-picker stretching into the heavens of deft phrase, the industrious giddyap of the leaderless horse, the yellow tornado tossing scraps of emotion into your whirlwind-without-end, unblocked, whisked into the paramount absurdity of just say what it is.

Otherwise, all this quickly proves overbearing, a vain performance of realizing a non-existent state, and little else.

Because this fundamentally “structural” insight was perverted so often into a substantialist notion, into a mysticism, some thinkers of 20th century had to insist: structure never hangs together without its void-force-genesis remaining suspended in the unlocalizable middle, shifting, punching through signification and trimming all established wreathes of meanings. Trouble is, to name it (“void-force-genesis”, “truth”) puzzles you. And there the reader is right to wonder if I’ve not snuck God back in by the backdoor, offered him a free martini or two, so long as he doesn’t get too belligerent with the hostile crowd.

That is, nothing can be explained without an image; and everything an image can’t explain.

**

My advice, then, for the zero-bound writer, doughty and laughable, is this:

Don’t let what is erasure of self become a stockpile of narcissistic erasers—for if you let that happen, writing (I mean the speech of a life) will imprison itself in dull diatribes and dufus-made diaries, clever shows that are only cornerstones and mementos for a self that believes it has been relieved of itself for good, substantially, not having grasped the adventurous role of the velleity, the letter’s drive-driven dance.

Granted, there’s a buttercup that still dreams of standing tall, of letting its pollen out onto all the flowers, to feed all the bees! And what a view from up there! It shivers in the rain before it freezes in the snow. A buttercup very much like you and me. For it is pleasurable to evacuate oneself, we all know that. To let go.

—July 11, 2020 / August 23, 2023

In 2017 I embarked upon a fresh adventure in poetry. This publication marks the first conclusive results of that adventure. The Altar-Gray Gaze of a Showman on the Brink collects work from 2017-2019 into three books. I’ve described it thus:

Soul-searing quest and daring poetic experiment mix fearlessly in the first full-length published work by American poet Timothy Lavenz.

Tracking through aftershocks of grief, epiphanies of freedom, excoriations of world and faith-filled vows to future beauty, and all the inner tangles and glimmers of masterpiece in between, this book takes nothing for granted. Not meaning, life, universe or God-nothing is known until the poem invents the sonic landscape where its discoveries will be revealed in a surprise dawn. Authorial voice ceaselessly morphs its engagement, style digs deeper into the unspeakable nerve, tone intensifies its passion and gives way to exultation as it molts-here is a mesmerizing necklace of intimate ciphers, an ever-fresh “ritual of amazements unborn.“

This poetry calls out from the shell of assumed position into an encounter of gazes colliding in the tumble of truth. It catches its bearings only to tumble further, as the author and showman, that “joyous pawn,” lists heavenward with his magic-calm giggle, porting over a healing signal with a whole host of human hopes.

Here the Mystery is not solved or reasoned out: it is unfolded in its vividness so that another heart can sing along. Here is a soul’s progress through the gauntlet of pain and love, conducted by an audacious investigation of the limits of language, which stretch here to mirror that soul’s vision, so it may share it with a fellow pained pilgrim who loves.

I would be honored if you would purchase my book and, if you deem it worth your time,  write a review on the Amazon page or elsewhere so that more people will find my work.

Readers of this blog will know that my work in the area of poetry extends back a very long time. While I often use the medium of philosophical essay to express my thoughts, my poetry is the most novel contribution I feel I have to make to this world. I view poetry as a form of psychic alchemy. The poems in The Altar-Gray Gaze… are the most potent potions for the alchemy from that time-period. My hope is for it to draw others to think outside the normal categories, especially as regards God, freedom, self, and expressivity. As filtered through the medium of metaphor and sound, I believe the product of such questioning can do more to the reader than the mere abstraction of philosophy can accomplish, even if this result is more ambiguous.

I will collect on this page a few pieces of mine which have to do with the theory of poetry:

Adventure of Poetry (podcast with Daniel Tutt)
The Swerve of Poetry Matures
With Them Without Words: A Non-Dual Heritage of Future Language (on Epoche Mag)
More than Words: On Poetry w/ Tim Lavenz (podcast with Owls at Dawn)
Silent Consonants of the Named: on Paul Celan (conference paper at Tulsa University)
Utopic Expressivity: Laruelle and Paul Celan (paper published at Oraxiom Journal)
Sparing Language
Joy and Justice (on the relation of poetry and philosophy)
Nontology (same)
The Grill of Language
On Poetry by Rene Char (translation)
Poetry as a Spiritual Exercise by Jean Wahl (translation)
Hindu Bhakti tradition and its sant-poets
Poem as Place / Pictures of a Face (on poetry and Wittgenstein)
“Medicine” (2008 non-fiction account of how I first started writing poetry)

I thank you very much for reading my blog and engaging with my work.

I dwell in Possibility – Emily Dickinson

Unlike prose, which adheres more nearly to linguistic habit and causal determinism (linearity, denotation, univocal meaning, unambiguous reference, etc.), poetry endeavors to cut through the habits of language and our expectations about worlding in order to say – not old thoughts and feelings in a new way – but new thoughts and feelings altogether – new possibilities.

Poetry differentiates itself utterly from reportage of the actual. It does not seek to represent a past experience or give elevated words to things already known. Nor is poetry the mascot of identity, a tool for manipulating the world. Rather, poetry invokes a future experience – its cause unknown, its recipient undetermined. At the limit where the mind and its expectations break down, poetry promises a reality not yet come. The poet who dives into the pursuit of such, does not yet know what to say or how to say it. And so we might wager a definition: poetry is the on-going discovery of the not-yet-sayable.

To better imagine my thesis, I wish to invoke the clinamen or swerve. The concept originates in Lucretius (d. 55 BC) who thought that, were it not for the swerve, nature would not produce anything. Atoms would merely fall through the void, were it not for the collision between them. Moreover, the swerve is what explains free will among living things. It is the very principle of inauguration – of the “new start” that can “sunder the covenants of fate” (De Rerum Natura, Bk II. 254). Cause does not succeed from cause everlasting, nor are we led on in a straight line; rather our desire leads us on, at our mind’s urging. Our decisions have the power to revamp the world. Encounters between new lovers or friends, a horse bucking its rider, a serendipitous accident, the decision to write a poem – all swerve-like phenomena introduce indeterminacy into what might otherwise look like a deterministic system. Better yet: they introduce a new causal chain, a new sort of (in)determinacy, a new chance which breaks however subtly from all the causal chains preceding it. The swerve is thus the creativity in things – the risk of life, the very courageousness of ‘to be’.

The most potent poetry, which changes our very conception of what language can ‘do’, is a phenomenon of swerve, for it reveals all these powers: by the freedom and fresh determinacy it introduces, our perception of reality is intensified, the discourse of the possible is altered and, finally, we merge with the movement of the unknown, we say the not-yet-sayable so it sings.

*

In the following meditation, I wish to convince you that poetry is a listening for the swerve of potent-being through the falling atoms of words. I hope you will bear with this metaphor, as I believe it can bring a greater adventurousness to our poetry and our process of writing it. My use of abstract vocabulary is not meant to overtax your patience; I only mean to enact the spirit of poetry myself in precising my thinking.

By potent-being I mean something as-yet-unknown and unmanifest. Potent-being is first only an inchoate possibility, a nothing that is nowhere and doesn’t exist (yet). We might call it an idea or an intuition, a whisper from the beyond or an explosion from within, but however we figure it, one thing is certain: If we do not listen for its swerve and find words for it, it will never manifest. The knowledge and vision it contains in potentia will never emerge, never impact human thought, if we do not give its incipience traction, if we do not cinch the swerve into words. Incidentally, this is the vital importance of practicing poetry. How many poems have never come to be, just because we did not listen to their potent-being when it called? How many potencies of language have we let lie fallow? One trembles to think how much beauty is lacking in this world, simply because we did not heed its potency…

The potent-being that swerves through words is, before we set to work, not yet actualized in any discourse. Unlike a real object, it cannot rely on factual existence. It is not an object of language, nor do other objects of language refer to it. However, it is not a matter of ineffability or any alleged inadequacy of language – the poet’s very vocation refutes this hypothesis. It’s not that we don’t have words for potent-being; rather, potent-being forces into language new modes of ‘putting words to’ as such.

Potent-being, faithfully listened to, forces into existence that inaugural arrangement of words we call the poem. Every poem is inaugural in this sense: it manifests something – a thought, a sense, a feeling, an imagination – that did not exist before it and could not exist without it. That is why, in principle, the poem resists all paraphrase, and why the best ones so resist translation. Only this poem corresponds to this potent-being, and vice versa – any other arrangement and you will have actualized something else. Poets will recognize this fact of the craft: Only this sound corresponds to this sense, and vice versa. Only this image corresponds to this idea, only this experience to this spacing on the page, only this word (in all its polysemy) to this semiosis of thought (in all its paratactic prismation) – and vice versa. Every element in the poem – whether of the rawest material nature or of the most rarefied and spiritual – redounds causally upon every other element.  When all these elements swerve together to capture the swerve of potent-being, the poet succeeds, for then the manifestation of the previously unknown is complete. The finished poem – this novel collision between words – actualizes the potent-being that inspired and gave rise to it – and that the poem now is.

In sum, potent-being convokes a possibility that does not yet correspond to words. Creating this correspondence will be the poet’s task. Its existence will demand our creative participation. The referent of the poem is sui generis: it emerges only in writing and perfecting the poem. Only the act of poetry puts the potent-being there – on the page, in our notebooks, in the ruins of our manuscripts – finally, in the unique potency we will have actualized in language as our life’s work.

*

Having set this theoretical groundwork, I would now like to explore the writing of poetry, with a specific emphasis on the maturation of poetry’s swerve through the editing process.

When, as poets, we labor over the right word choice for a passage – when we seek the right enjambments, the right rhymes for our meaning and tones for our passages – when we select for the right matrix of metaphors, the right epiphanies to match our idea or intuition – what are we doing if not listening for the potency we discern behind our drafts and sketches, behind the words that are already there on the page or floating in our heads?

Let me offer a simple example. Say, in the course of listening, we hear the sound ɛər or ɪər. We sense something in that phonemic area ought to exist where we hear it in the flow of the poem. So, we think and listen in – both at once, in the same creative gesture – for which word best fits. Not just sonically, but in all the registers that communicate in the Gestalt of the poem: phonemes, graphemes, morphemes, noemes, etc… Is it glare, share, fair, bear, blare, repair, pair, stare, tear, beware…? This swerve through the falling atom of words concludes only when we collide with the most fitting word, the word that best corresponds to the potency we know lies latent behind the sound we heard.

The poet keeps listening to the swerve for the poem – then listens even more, until the end. At times, the right word (or the right anything) is not forthcoming. Some other thread must be tugged, recolored, or torn – perhaps at the very opposite end of the poem – before we can discern where the swerve is really taking us. Perhaps we get lots of things wrong about it along the way – but that is to be expected. It takes time to hear the swerve into words. The swerve of poetry must mature from approximation to exactitude, from latency to manifestation – from the kernel of its future expression to the full expression of its possible.

At first, the swerve can only be approximated by words and sounds we hear as we listen. We cannot do better than to write down what we hear – though without any assurance that what we write down is what we hear. Perhaps I write down “glare” but can’t yet decide; so I run through a list of plausible ɛər or ɪər words, until suddenly it dawns on me: “forbear.” The example is primitive, but we could extend it to any element we like – an element of enjambment, signification, tone, etc. Out of the innumerable, we first choose possibles, then plausibles, until we have found exactitude. We begin with approximations–and no matter how we might be pleased by them in the moment, they are all approximations until the poem has been heard in full. For while approximations draw from the lexicons we know, from the extant set of thoughts, ideas, images, associations, etc. – from all the actualities floating around bedazzled in our writing brain – the poem, as the vehicle of a potent-being (and certainly not of our brain), has much more to say than all that. And so the poet must trust that behind the approximation – behind the kernel futural of the not-yet-sayable that the drafted poem on the page represents – there is the swerve itself, calling us and the poem to an exact and unprecedented articulation.

The swerve – the dynamicof the poem-to-come – never stops swerving through the poem’s extant approximations. In this maturation process, the poet must recognize which elements are to be eliminated for the poem to gain in proximity and resemblance to the swerve. The poet seeks that arrangement of words that will give access to the listening to the swerve. If we trust it, if we listen to it, the swerve will transport the poem past every extant sense, past all of our own thoughts and experiences, indeed, past every known world and into the futural. It will usher in the exactitude of the swerve itself.

So, by now, we’ve listened, and there is something on the page – the kernel futural generating sayables out of the unknown. These new sayables are only swervingly dependent on the extant grammars and syllables that approximate it in the course of our work. Surprising poet and language, they are emerging from trusting listening – the poet synthesizing attention to the kernel futural (the poem in process) and the swerve itself (the potency). The swerve edges grammar, nudges the poem into the grammarless. New sayables swarm conception and page, gilded with strikes, carets, dashes, slashes, marginalia, rewrites – the whole punctuation of trusting listening in action. The not-yet-sayable there burgeons. It awaits its full emergence and final ordering. At our behest, in virtue of us, it plays freely within all the determined elements, lending indeterminacy to every approximation and inventing its own precision. This invests the work with the authority, not of an authorial voice, but of the swerve maturing, for it seeks sayability: its language is yearning.

To edit the poem, then, is to rehear the kernel futural in light of its great yearning. It is to let the approximated swerve mature into actuality – to birth its fecund fantasy and truth as a new seeable and hearable. Gradually, the poem transcribes exactly the grace in the yearning – the gift of words for a new seeing and hearing. Then the approximation nears being the swerve. Potent-being itself is becoming language – and we are dwelling in possibility.

*

If we want a genuinely inaugural poetry – a poetry that can spread wide its “narrow Hands / To gather paradise” – we must learn how to listen to the poem, rather than trying to make it say something.

In its vocation as Dweller in Possibility, poetry does not steward actualities (opinions, trends, identities, etc.), rather, it restores us to the genetic moment of language – its genesis as the genesis of the human. Then poetry can become a force for the imaginative transformation of linguistic habit, rather than losing itself in mirroring extant selves and worlds. Then, words do not just fall through the void predictably saying things we’ve already heard, but collide for the inauguration of the unheard-of, in the tension between the not-yet-sayable and the poetically said.

Past the grammatizable, past the interpretable, past all paraphrase, the poem’s destiny is to conjure a not-yet-sayable potent-being. The finished poem shelters it in a husk of words. Its reader strips away and devours the husk, leaving the revelation of that potent-being which only this poem swerves into. The poet’s task is to discover, not their own voice, but the swerve of potent-being that the poem yearns to express, the sayable it sings to invent.

Every poem, therefore, is an invitation to swerve. There is no restriction on how this is done or its content – except to say that the poet must listen not to self but to the poem for the swerve it sketches, and so let the swerve of poetry mature. Then the not-yet-sayable will unleash an open pleroma of affirmations of potent-being – the on-going discovery of poetry.