JOHN BLOOMBERG-RISSMAN Reviews
“#5” in Dispatch by Marci Nelligan / Nicole Mauro
(Dusie, Switzerland, 2006)
#5
Just this minute
a verb without antecedent
conceived a vast object system
of explanatory referents,
your name synonym
for “a casualty of time”.
Anxiety distributes all the parts
mapped of casuistry and wire
another landmass fiction
charging the air
with lost language.
A bad connection
in paragraph form
saying “hello,”
and “hello?”
*
This is one poem in a series of poems, or one section in a serial poem. The whole thing seems to unfold chronologically. It seems to be a conversation between the two poets, a kind of call and response. #2 responds to #1, #3 to #2, etc. I have no idea, really, if one poet is responsible for one section, or if it’s just meant to look like two voices.
I chose #5 not quite at random. I chose it because of its ending, which suggested several things to me, vis-à-vis call and response. First, that one can never be sure that when one calls, another will respond, and that even when there is a response, that it really is one (I mean something quite simple by this: how many conversations have you been in which were really two monologues?) Second, I immediately thought of the telephone, which brought to mind Avital Ronell’s The Telephone Book, which I’ve always found very interesting. One of its questions is: when our phone rings, what is our responsibility? So, I thought: in a series of poems (or a serial poem) that enacts communication, this poem foregrounds it …
“Just this minute”: we are in “real time”, in the presence of the present moment. We don’t know yet whether this is important, but we are given a sense of immediacy and, perhaps, even urgency.
“a verb without antecedent”: this is a slightly odd construction; I had to think a moment. What might a verb without antecedent be? Well, it would be a verb which does not have to “agree” with a syntactically prior “subject”. It is a verb cut loose … But I think there’s more to it than grammar simpliciter. I think that the most complete definition of a verb without antecedent would be “any existing thing, considered processually, in its absolute uniqueness.” A good example would be you. A good example would be me.
But when are we absolutely unique? When we’ve never been before, will never be again. At least, not like this. Since I read #s 1-4 to get to this poem, I believe that this is a love story, so to speak. It just so happens that love is one of Alain Badiou’s four “truth procedures”. Without getting too deep into the philosophy, you and I are verbs without antecedent when we experience the event (in this case, of love). We are “born again” as long as we are faithful to the truth procedure/event. So this may be the narrator’s way of suggesting that she (again I essentialize, sorry (not really)) is “new” at “just this minute” …
Where, or to what, does this lead? To the conception of “a vast object system / of explanatory referents, / your name synonym / for “a casualty of time”.”
This is not easy to parse, nor do I claim that I do so all that successfully. But I do believe, somehow, that the “vast object system” is the beloved, seen with all karmic strings attached. That is, in her entirety.
I know why I read these lines this way. I have had that experience. I was lunching with a new friend, and she started to talk about her daughter. Suddenly it was as if all the lights in the world went on, or the sun got really bright, or something. I was blown away by the strength of her love, and how she wore it. To this very day, I believe I saw her, heart and soul. After lunch, when we were walking back to my office, he caught her she on some crack in the pavement, and her she came off. As she stood there, in that instant, I was blown away by how that loving heart was fully embedded in all the slings and arrows and joys and sorrows of her life (I think it was because of her instant of helplessness, trying not to fall, etc).
In that moment I became a “verb without antecedent”, etc. conceiving her exactly as “a vast object system …” etc.
[The most mysterious part of the experience, for me, was, “Why did I see all that in her, when the same thing happens every day?” I’ve never been able to answer that, except by saying, “Well, she was she, and I was me, and it was a Tuesday ….”]
Anyhow, back to the poem:
Anxiety distributes all the parts
mapped of casuistry and wire
another landmass fiction
charging the air
with lost language.
Again, this isn’t easy to parse. But, if my “reading” of the last stanza was at all on track, then here we have the author doubting her vision. How much of what I saw was really there? How much did I cobble together (the way I’m cobbling together this reading, maybe)? Was this really just a fiction?
I was not made as anxious by my encounter as the narrator seems to be here, because the woman with whom I had lunch was not my beloved (tho of course how could I not love her after seeing all that? But that’s a whole different story. There are many “kinds” of love – just think of all the many words the ancient Greeks had for it – almost as many as those (mythical?) Eskimos supposedly had/have for snow …)
For one reason or another (I’d have to engage with the whole poem to have a chance of finding out) the narrator’s anxiety causes her to say, with Pound, Canto CXVI, “I cannot make it cohere.”
Now to the last stanza, which is even more interesting than I originally thought:
A bad connection
in paragraph form
saying “hello,”
and “hello?”
At first I read this “bad connection” as being with the other. Now I read it as being with herself (and the other). She cannot make it cohere because her anxiety caused the truth procedure/event of love to evaporate before she could pronounce her fidelity to it. For Badiou, it is not the event itself, it’s not love, that makes one a coherent subject; it’s fidelity to the event. She herself was unfaithful to the event. Now she doesn’t know who or what is out there. Perhaps it’s the beloved, not her, who’s on the phone, getting more and more desperate with her hellos …
Of course, I have to add that it’s also probably possible to read this poem in exactly the opposite sense from which I’ve just read it. Imagine that the narrator is a verb without antecedent because she has suddenly been dumped. In that case the anxiety is justified (was there ever any real to this situation?), and the beloved dissolves, as a casualty of time in a very literal sense.
In which case, the ex will not pick up. “Hello. Hello? HELLO?” (for God’s sake, do NOT leave a message …)
I have to add yet another possible reading. This poem pretty well parallels one of Theseus’ speeches in A Midsummer Night’s Dream:
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact.
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold—
That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt.
The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to heaven.
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy.
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!
“The lunatic, the lover, and the poet” … this could also be read as a poem about poetry, which “gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name” …
I will end by saying that, just as biologists have said that you don’t learn about the essence of life by dissecting a corpse, I can’t learn all there might be to know about this poem by reading it separately from the whole collection. Unfortunately, the nature of this project (“50 Poems In 50 Days – Or So”) makes it impossible for me to be definitive. Tho I’d be surprised if I had to discard everything I’ve written, I wouldn’t be surprised if I needed to do a lot of rewriting and a lot of revising … This is a case in which I should be feeling a lot of Readerly Anxiety …
*****
[Editor’s Note: This is one of 50 reviews written, mas o menos, in 50 days. While each engagement can be read on a stand-alone basis, there’s a layer of watching the critic’s subjectivity arise in a fulsome manner if the reviews are read one after another. So if you have insomnia and/or are curious about this layer, I suggest you read the 50 reviews right after each other and, to facilitate this type of reading, I will put at the bottom of each review a “NEXT” button that will take you to the next review. To wit: NEXT. And an Afterword on John's reading process is also available HERE!]
John Bloomberg-Rissman is somewhere towards middle of In the House of the Hangman, the third section of his maybe life project called Zeitgeist Spam (picture Hannah Hoch painting over the Sistine Chapel) The first two volumes have been published: No Sounds of My Own Making, and Flux, Clot & Froth. In addition to his Zeitgeist Spam project, he has edited or co-edited two anthologies, 1000 Views of 'Girl Singing' and The Chained Hay(na)ku Project, and is at work on a third, which he is editing with Jerome Rothenberg. He is also deep into two important collaborations, one with Richard Lopez, one with Anne Gorrick. By important he means "important to him". Anyone else want to collaborate? He blogs at Zeitgeist Spam.
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