Hoa's last day of work was Friday. She's off 8 weeks or so to have our baby (second). Hence these letters will become even less frequent than they've been of late. But I mean to ramble a moment here, to clear a space for "the holy month of March." That's what Olson called it (Hoa reminding me). And green goose grass crops up again as it does this time of year, grey sky drizzle soaking the black clay ground.
Just finished reading four days of John Latta's Chicago notes over at his exceptional hotelpoint.blogspot.com. It and Wood's Lot are a couple I attend regularly. Chris Murray's is another I read most days, and Ron Silliman's site—I attend it like a rubber necker driving by a car wreck. John's distinction between scene and community is important, particularly in regards to Silliman's obsessive categorizing. There are often surprises though at all of these blog sites, little jewel-like clusters that make the daily e-trek worth my slow modem connection. Wood's Lot particularly is a vast treasure of divers sources.
Latta's wrap on Lyn Hejinian's The Beginner was great to see, among other things. This little book has been with me more than a year. I've wanted to write about it (and two Kit Robinson books, The Crave and 9:45). Lyn's book brings up for me something I've always admired in great writers, I mean people like Hardy, Melville and D.H. Lawrence, to name a few. And her language does carry over through that nineteenth century word plough, pushing up the earth inside ourselves to uncover something Gille Deleuze finds native to Anglo-Saxon literature. That need to flee, to be on the move, is essential. The Beginner points a way out into process, the removal of deadly second-guesses.
The beginner makes a beginning, and if optimism is in the air (or pessimism, that mordant state of mind that says things can't possibly improve), the beginner proclaims it a good place to begin.
That is beginning.
Something and other things in a sequence simultaneously.
Ants on a white sill buried.
A harbinger in the light.
A child composed nudely.
A side of a tree cut into squares at a shout from a man under an umbrella.
A furtive marked moth fluttering into a beam of light.
A woman at a door falling.
The beginner is diverted.
Follow me. (12)
Deleuze suggests Anglo-Saxons begin in the middle of a line. The French come at language from both ends, seeking to join beginning and end. I don't much care for his comparisons, though it's interesting to think of Spanish literature in terms of dismemberment, or German in terms of intestinal twists. Nevertheless, Lyn's work here moves within a line. Her beginner comes from a middle ground, centered. This small book is a working out of that condition, moving around the thing until it transforms her, movement by absorption and release in words. That bit about optimism or pessimism is essential. If around us the world plunges into an absolute negative—the negrido of alchemic lore—there must be a positive charge lifting through it, our own ability and desire for good within an increasing black. These conditions though—optimism, pessimism—are not central to the action of the beginner. The beginner is a finder, a wanderer who shares with Ishmael a curiosity for the depths he's capable of experiencing, whether it be a placid Pacific, the roiling guts of a whale or Ahab's sadistic craving urge to destroy everything. "There's an infinite connection to perform," she writes.
No stop.
We subtract, loop, erase, rope, return to zero, tug, and begin over again.
Things give way, then things assert.
They appear in photographs.
"When I was 14 I went to Spain.
"Once early morning in Seville I left the hotel (of which I remember nothing but deep gloom) and walked into the exhilarating but devastating sunlight that seemed to hover, to cascade, to penetrate like some philosophical quandary.
"Could fate exist without us?
"No matter the answer, I was frightened.
"I was a small donkey; though it was trotting toward me—because I was sad—it was absolutely still" is such a photograph.
But now the things in it have given way, yielding to different assertions. (25)
This short book condenses and pushes out on themes others have addressed, as certainly we must, in our way. Why is it peculiarly American or English, or is Deleuze full of shit? To remove it from his generalizations for a moment, there is something in Melville or Lawrence always on the verge, at a limit where they risk exposure at all times in their writing. They seek transformation, becoming—anti-stasis. The key's to keep on movin', on the road etc, (I could mention Pierre Joris' A Nomad Poetics, but it will have to wait). Lyn's work puts into motion these things in us, in our (our?) language.
Having begun I've blinked further.
There is too much light—the sun brings out the unwillingness of things. (29)
It's in this unwillingness that great writing occurs. Listen to me—"great writing." Does anyone still believe in that? To be capable of it, perhaps, is the point. The writers I've mentioned here are great because they persevered in unknowing circumstances. They chipped away at that black stone until the violence of their strikes sent sparks flying out. To be a self is simply to be something in the world and yet yearning for it.
The Beginner
Tuumba Press
1-931157-03-0
$10