A poem from THE VAST PRACTICAL ENGINE by ERIC HOFFMAN

JOHN BLOOMBERG-RISSMAN Reviews

The Vast Practical Engine by Eric Hoffman

(Rag & Bone Books, Manchester, CT, 2010)

The Vast Practical Engine

1.

the wood must be
frost-bitten and
dried, the
seeds must wither
and decay,
the action of leaves
reversed

the fragmented world
is in ruin, the same
world
intact is born

“never use the words
higher and lower” for

“the wind bloweth
where it listeth”

what is most continuous
is most profane, bundles
of observations

words and not world

the cosmos
is empty of idols

the universe
is weather

2.

o haunted and prolific world
of violent machinations,
you are no child,

you are a rock in the sun,
jaguar sheathed
in jungle leaves,

soft globule,
tender bead of sweat,
indifferent to an indifferent sun

3.

Swedenborg’s Damascus
was a tavern
where he received celestial wisdom
from angels and apparitions

“I enjoy perfect inspiration”

yet for all his knowledge
of the geo-thermal core
he never found a hell
quite so punishing
as the human heart

said Emerson: “He turned the universe
into a gigantic crystal”
like some cosmological alchemist
“the universe in his poem
suffers under a magnetic sleep”
reflecting the magnetizer’s mind

4.

All men are equal in their political rights
Negroes are men:
Negroes are equal in their political rights
            C.S. Peirce


Agassiz the empirical
the vast practical engine
in love with Morton’s crania

the Caucasian burden
scribed in hollow bowl

far below, the Indian
“restless, vengeful, fond
of war, wholly destitute of
maritime adventure”

and the “joyous Negro,
resplendently simple in
his African sun,
his climate incompatible
with the intellect,
deleterious, his fat lips
and grimacing teeth,
the wool on his head,
his bent knees and
the livid color of his palms”

too much difference

not to be distinct, placed

here and there at the time
of creation and Time
does not alter organized beings

God improved his hand
fashioning a lighter kind,
yet Nachash, that black gardener,
waits with coiled urgency,
listening for a voice of childlike wonder
and joyous simplicity

5.

process without mind:

the struggle not to evolve

evolving because of struggle

one cannot stop
to chase doubts
like rabbits
or to paint the surface
of law

even though it were
cracked and rotten

God or reason

edifices atop
mountains of data

the possibilities open,
Agassiz,
where you would
have them closing

6.

every bit of us
at every moment
is part of a wider self

quivering along
various radii

a compass wind-rose

and the actual
is continuously one
with unseen possibles

7.

what are the physics
of violence? or

are we the embodiment
of need, our tenderness

merely an apparition
approximate

to appetite’s defeat?

so many games

we go about learning

so many philosophies

“There is no certainty
only those who are certain”

that the heart is small

that the world
cradles and destroys

that the triumph of breathing
rescues
and buries

8.

those that survive maintain a sense

of life available beyond all repute

of a God blessing them by name,

instructing them to go into the world

as angels among men

they do not know

that survival

is not something to be counted

among the riches of this world, they

cannot imagine that sin might taste

crisp as a wet apple drawn from a keg

of sweet water

each has the memory

of that visitor always arriving

at an unwelcome hour, waking them

from dreams of verdant glens

supple with the bounty of a greening rain,

haunted by water spirits and watched over

by a young king

drawing back the shades

of their windows, contented to wait,

a child of their children not yet born, the fruit

of all their awkward and sordid fumbling,

there with an almost absent love

9.

o my soul
Nothing but a child’s cry

such purity in not knowing
but seeking knowledge

and once in its possession
it is only by degrees
knowing its mutability
and limits — the lungs expel
and draw back in again

dangling above the dragon’s mouth
licking honey

all vales dressed in mourning
all teeth in the museum
some fated living victim

forms of horror fill the world
even here in our hearths and gardens
an infernal cat plays with a panting mouse
or holds a hot bird
fluttering in her jaws

10.

the world is certain
yet we cannot know
for certain its certainty
is all there is
to be known

things happen

and Truth is a thing

11.

nothing is so precise
as imagination
but what demon

hides in the most
precise equations,
what infinitesimally

small loss occurs
at that invisible edge
maps the distance

between the mind of God
and the limits of
absolute reason

12.

the masonry’s stone traces
ancestry, the efforts of
intention versus the weight

of rock against the mind that,
boneless, imagines no limits
to exertion, pressed between

the motory of flexion
and the force of a stubborn
permanence, yet we are a

product of this radiance,
a pebble in the boulder’s core,
the thin mean of survival,

a dynamic of the distance
from this monstrous indifference
to the smallest seed of hope

13.

mind engenders truth
upon reality

like the caramel glaze
upon a candy apple

it makes little difference
whether or not we say

a stone on the bottom of the ocean
is brilliant,

that the stone may be fished up
tomorrow

yet there are gems
at the bottom of the sea

and flowers in the untrammeled desert

14.

the ribcage robbed

of its incarcerated breath

the locomotive

and its steam

likely as not

the wraith-like aftermath

of the ghost

in its machine

*

While typing out a poem is a really good way to get to know it, I would never have typed this whole thing had I not found an earlier http://the-otolith.blogspot.com/2010/12/eric-hoffman-vast-practical-engine-1.html version at Otoliths 20 I could simply add to and fuss with. I’m not wanting make anything important out of my laziness, except to note that sections 8 and 14 were not part of that earlier version.

There is a lot going on in this poem. One thing, which complicates my reading endlessly, in fact makes my belief in its adequacy, is the back cover blurb:

“This compact, penetrating glimpse into the minds of William James and Charles Saunders Peirce, the founders of pragmatism, is a profound and masterly constructed meditation on the origins of modern American thought.”

And no, it’s not the use of the words “compact”, “penetrating”, “profound” and “masterfully” that cause me problems (the poem is very well done), it’s the minds of James and Peirce thing. While, yes, I do have a fairly decent grasp of turn of the century pragmatism, and while yes, I’ve read Cavell and Rorty, etc. and can see how this could be a “meditation on the origins of [a certain strain of] modern American thought”, I really know nothing about these philosophers’ minds. I haven’t read their journals, or letters, etc etc.

So I can only read what’s on the page, while knowing I’m missing what might be James, what might be Peirce, and what might be Hoffman. While every reading of every poem has its shortcomings, it’s a bit daunting to recognize significant grounds for failure / inadequacy in advance.

But I guess the key word here is “Nevertheless.”

Nevertheless, I’m going to look at The Vast Practical Engine section by section, and report back on some of what I find there.

1.

the wood must be
frost-bitten and
dried, the
seeds must wither
and decay,
the action of leaves
reversed

the fragmented world
is in ruin, the same
world
intact is born

“never use the words
higher and lower” for

“the wind bloweth
where it listeth”

what is most continuous
is most profane, bundles
of observations

words and not world

the cosmos
is empty of idols

the universe
is weather

I think there are two main things to note here: first, that God and purpose are dead. We are in a “nihil unbound” sort of determinist universe. Second, all we have our “bundles of observations” (i.e. we are phenomenological/trapped-Kantian) and the language which we use to describe them (“words and not world”). We must be very careful with those words, we must fit them to the universe in which we actually live, not in some previous divine-teleological-pre-nihilist version.

2.

o haunted and prolific world
of violent machinations,
you are no child,

you are a rock in the sun,
jaguar sheathed
in jungle leaves,

soft globule,
tender bead of sweat,
indifferent to an indifferent sun

This section continues the first, but complicates it. We may live in the universe described in section 1, but can we? In the inhuman terms of the first section, it is indifferent, but it sure doesn’t feel like it. If feels full of “violent machinations”, dangers (the hiding, waiting jaguar); at the same time it feels soft and sensuous … it’s hard to tell whether it feels this way because we (and our language) are still caught in a world with God(s) and significance), a world we should transcend, or whether, well, we are humans with a survival instinct, and we want to survive and thrive nevertheless. The last line reminds us that either way, the universe is indifferent.

I am reminded here of a Stephen Crane poem, written around the same time as the works of James and Peirce:

A man said to the universe:
“Sir I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”

This was also the more or less the time of Neitzsche, Marx, etc. who dealt with similar problems.

3.

Swedenborg’s Damascus
was a tavern
where he received celestial wisdom
from angels and apparitions

“I enjoy perfect inspiration”

yet for all his knowledge
of the geo-thermal core
he never found a hell
quite so punishing
as the human heart

said Emerson: “He turned the universe
into a gigantic crystal”
like some cosmological alchemist
“the universe in his poem
suffers under a magnetic sleep”
reflecting the magnetizer’s mind 

Here’s the first example of where my ignorance of the minds of Peirce and James might hurt. I get this stanza, I can even make up plausible reasons why it’s here, but I don’t have faith that those reasons are in fact relevant. But, in the spirit of nevertheless again, Swedenborg had an optimistic philosophy, which appealed to those in the 19^th century who found themselves in need of a new optimism. But there were flaws in his thinking, one of which is here noted by Emerson. Apparently, his thinking couldn’t account for change. This is a problem for philosophers, and Peirce and James were definitely philosophers. I don’t see the problem, if problem it is, in “he never found a hell / quite so punishing / as the human heart.” Who has?

I know this isn’t the whole story, not by a long shot. I just Googled “Swedenborg Peirce” and “Swedenborg James”. Swedenborg was well-known to each, and it’s easy to find articles describing his influence on them. I’m not going to follow these leads; this is just “a” reading, and since this project is called “28 Poems in 29 Days – Or So”, I don’t have time to be more definitive.

4.

All men are equal in their political rights
Negroes are men:
Negroes are equal in their political rights
            C.S. Peirce


Agassiz the empirical
the vast practical engine
in love with Morton’s crania

the Caucasian burden
scribed in hollow bowl

far below, the Indian
“restless, vengeful, fond
of war, wholly destitute of
maritime adventure”

and the “joyous Negro,
resplendently simple in
his African sun,
his climate incompatible
with the intellect,
deleterious, his fat lips
and grimacing teeth,
the wool on his head,
his bent knees and
the livid color of his palms”

too much difference

not to be distinct, placed

here and there at the time
of creation and Time
does not alter organized beings

God improved his hand
fashioning a lighter kind,
yet Nachash, that black gardener,
waits with coiled urgency,
listening for a voice of childlike wonder
and joyous simplicity

5.

process without mind:

the struggle not to evolve

evolving because of struggle

one cannot stop
to chase doubts
like rabbits
or to paint the surface
of law

even though it were
cracked and rotten

God or reason

edifices atop
mountains of data

the possibilities open,
Agassiz,
where you would
have them closing

I’m going to read sections 4 and 5 together, because they are arguments with Louis Aggasiz, a very important 19^th century American thinker. I will take these sections as the pragmatist rejection of him (and, by the way, of Emerson’s Swedenborg’s sleeping crystalline universe). I don’t think Agassiz is rejected merely for essentializing race / racism. I think the key to his rejection is in the last stanza: his universe was as frozen as Emerson thought Swedenborg’s was.  

6.

every bit of us
at every moment
is part of a wider self

quivering along
various radii

a compass wind-rose

and the actual
is continuously one
with unseen possibles

I take this section to be part of a refutation of Agassiz. And part of a new way of feeling the universe and one’s place in it. (We’ll leave aside how new this really is: it sounds a lot lie Buddhist dependent co-origination. But I should note that Buddhism first became important in Western thought in the 19^th century …) 

7.

what are the physics
of violence? or

are we the embodiment
of need, our tenderness

merely an apparition
approximate

to appetite’s defeat?

so many games

we go about learning

so many philosophies

“There is no certainty
only those who are certain”

that the heart is small

that the world
cradles and destroys

that the triumph of breathing
rescues
and buries

Here we are eavesdropping on some important pragmatist questioning. It is clear that, given the current state of knowledge (then and now) some if not all of these questions cannot be answered. Another question arises: do we need to be able to answer them? Or do we know enough as-is? We also eavesdrop on some important answers: “There is no certainty / only those who are certain” … and nevertheless … we live.    

8.

those that survive maintain a sense

of life available beyond all repute

of a God blessing them by name,

instructing them to go into the world

as angels among men

they do not know

that survival

is not something to be counted

among the riches of this world, they

cannot imagine that sin might taste

crisp as a wet apple drawn from a keg

of sweet water

each has the memory

of that visitor always arriving

at an unwelcome hour, waking them

from dreams of verdant glens

supple with the bounty of a greening rain,

haunted by water spirits and watched over

by a young king

drawing back the shades

of their windows, contented to wait,

a child of their children not yet born, the fruit

of all their awkward and sordid fumbling,

            there with an almost absent love

This stanza was not in the Otoliths version. I find it confusing. The first half (the first two stanzas) seem to be some sort of attack on Swedenborg, as if written by one of Nietzsche’s “New Men”. The third and fourth stanzas seem written from another, different, direction. At first, with “the memory / of that visitor arriving / at an unwelcome hour” put in in mind of Coleridge (also influenced by Swedenborg) and his Person from Porlock. But then we are in some sort of early Yeatsian place. And then we are in a place where we have forgotten entirely everything we have learned so far (e.g. “never use the words / higher and lower”) because sex, which one would have assumed by now to be a simply naturally function, is “awkward”, “sordid”, etc. I am nearly positive that my ignorance of “the minds of William James and Charles Saunders Peirce” is killing me here.

9.

o my soul
Nothing but a child’s cry

such purity in not knowing
but seeking knowledge

and once in its possession
it is only by degrees
knowing its mutability
and limits — the lungs expel
and draw back in again

dangling above the dragon’s mouth
licking honey

all vales dressed in mourning
all teeth in the museum
some fated living victim

forms of horror fill the world
even here in our hearths and gardens
an infernal cat plays with a panting mouse
or holds a hot bird
fluttering in her jaws

Once again, I wish I had more insight into the specificities of the minds/lives of Peirce and James. But I can read this section as tying a proper relationship with knowledge to a proper relationship with life. You can’t live intelligently if you can’t think intelligently. And in a world in which we “dangle above the dragon’s mouth” it’s important to know how to live and think. Though one might think, “what’s the point?” if “all teeth in the museum” belonged to “some fated living victim”, i.e. all of us, I’m reminded of the zen koan which in one version goes something like this:

A man walking across a field encounters a tiger. He fled, the tiger chasing after him. Coming to a cliff, he caught hold of a wild vine and swung himself over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Terrified, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger had come, waiting to eat him. Two mice, one white and one black, little by little began to gnaw away at the vine. The man saw a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine in one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. How sweet it tasted!

 
10.

the world is certain
yet we cannot know
for certain its certainty
is all there is
to be known

things happen

and Truth is a thing

This seems to repeat some of what we’ve learned above, about certainty. But it goes further, in that if things happen and truth is a thing, then truth isn’t a concept, it’s an event. The later 20^th and early 21^st century continental philosophers from the time of Deleuze on have been very interested in truth as an event. I believe that the importance of this section is to reiterate how important it is for pragmatism to relate theory and practice.

11.

nothing is so precise
as imagination
but what demon

hides in the most
precise equations,
what infinitesimally

small loss occurs
at that invisible edge
maps the distance

between the mind of God
and the limits of
absolute reason

I think here we are reminded that there is always a distance, a difference, differance itself, between the real and our mental representations. I don’t know how God has crept back in, tho I get that the mind of God is another way of saying “things as they are” (Spinoza, not Wallace Stevens). Once again, that whole “mind of Peirce and James” thing … My ignorance is hurting me here. I can feel it.

12.

the masonry’s stone traces
ancestry, the efforts of
intention versus the weight

of rock against the mind that,
boneless, imagines no limits
to exertion, pressed between

the motory of flexion
and the force of a stubborn
permanence, yet we are a

product of this radiance,
a pebble in the boulder’s core,
the thin mean of survival,

a dynamic of the distance
from this monstrous indifference
to the smallest seed of hope

Oddly enough, all I can think when I read this is “I really ought to read Susan Howe’s “Pierce-Arrow”. I mean, I get what this section is saying, but I have nothing to say about it. Well, not quite true. There must be something in pragmatism that accepts and rejects a nihilist universe, both at once.

13.

mind engenders truth
upon reality

like the caramel glaze
upon a candy apple

it makes little difference
whether or not we say

a stone on the bottom of the ocean
is brilliant,

that the stone may be fished up
tomorrow

yet there are gems
at the bottom of the sea

and flowers in the untrammeled desert

Perhaps this is a way of rejecting the importance of philosophy altogether, in terms of describing the universe. Perhaps it doesn’t matter what we say about it, in terms of how we life. It is what it is, we are what we are, we hope in spite of everything (section 12) …

14.

the ribcage robbed

of its incarcerated breath

the locomotive

and its steam

likely as not

the wraith-like aftermath

of the ghost

in its machine

This is another section not in the Otoliths version. It appears to indicate a disbelief in the immortal soul and any real sort of afterlife. Though I’m not quite sure what the “wraith-like aftermath”. Again, I attribute the significance of this section to something beyond my ken.

*****

[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.