1-Year Plan 
 Post 16: 7/10/05

Correlation of 
Paterson, Book 1
[excerpts]

In this correlation, I unlink by means of random numbers the continuous argument of William Carlos Williams's Paterson, book 1, in order to access and reconstruct some of its underlying assumptions in the social space of the present. Random numbers give me, as well, guidelines for how many lines to write in response to the samples as a form of continuous reinterpretation. 

I

In regard to the poems I left with you; will you be so kind as to return them to me at my new address? [7]

Communication proceeds apace, regardless the 
missed encounter. The poem you did not read is 
information, a lack of reading become knowledge. 
Acknowledgment is the necessary complement to 
knowledge, apart from which the poem is mere 
information. The poem which you did not read is 
(disavowed) my own, my own best self, who I am.

II

I have said that the artist is an Ishmael; Call me Ishmael, says Melville in the very first line of Moby Dick; he is the wild ass of a man;—Ishmael means affliction. [28]

Our intentions wildly miss the point, of necessity. 
The poet is one who can tolerate the missed encounter 
and end up writing of it—overcoming his disaffection.

III

                                          and
a photograph-holder with pictures of himself
between two children, all returned
weeping, weeping— [36]

The placeholder of the human is its loss of self, 
figured in terms of another. We go out of our minds 
looking for a lost memento of presence to ourselves, 
as we were known to another. In the space between 
another and ourselves, something has gone missing; 
we go out of our minds to replace and preserve it.  

IV

Excursions came from great distances in the United States and even from Canada to see the wonder. [16]

The distance to the sublime event unites them and 
brings them together. Hence, prodigies, wonders, 
miracles, capacious views, dynamic eruptions, freaks 
of nature, disasters, earthquakes, hurricanes—allow 
them to find a common place in awe of that which 
exceeds them. Communication is incommensurate.

V

                                but apart, observant of
the distress, sweeps down or up clearing
the spray—

                   brings in the rumors of separate
worlds [25]

Mind’s closed captioning tracks the ineffable vision 
and assigns values to it, which emerge into knowing. 
But these forms have never been here before, hence 
the rumors of the great and strange from which they 
must have been sent forth. Mind can only understand 
what mind presents to itself in a form of recognizing 
that which has originated from entirely elsewhere.

VI

He has never been able to sit up, as he cannot support the enormous weight of his head; but he is constantly in a large cradle, with his head supported by pillows. [10]

Mind becomes unwieldy to the point it is pure body; 
quality devolves into quantity, springs forth again.

VII

keeping nevertheless to the stream, they
retake their course, the air full
of the tumult and of spray
connotative of the equal air, coeval,
filling the void [8]

Bits streaming forward over bandwidth create a frame 
for cognitive mapping in surges that do not cease by 
reason of interruptions but modularly press forward.  

VIII

                                                            Refused
she shrank within herself. She too refused. [32]

Even so, the event of a missed encounter takes on 
the attributes of a completed act of communication.

IX

Boys in bathing had often reported the bottom as full of big snakes that had touched their feet and limbs but they were without doubt the eels. 
            Those who prepared the nets were not the ones who got the most fish. [34]  

Content, trope of the most familiar, most estranged. 
Philosophers cast their nets but it is the random and 
contingent throw that brings the undisclosed content 
into the light. These thoughts are indescribably base, 
but we knew they were at bottom all along, certainly!

X  

                And derivatively, for the Great Falls,
PISS-AGH! the giant lets fly! [10]

Second-order discourse is the song of the great, 
predicated on the distance from greatness to small. 
The people sing the song of the great as overflowing 
greatness into the pool of their being, and it flows. 
Second-order discourse becomes our primary song.

XI

I found her in bed. However, she had helped “Billy” do up the work. My mother has always tried to do her part, and she is always trying to do something for her children. [26]

Connate to the mind of the native is thought as the 
structure of shared reality—affirmed in the telling, 
but latent nonetheless. Each fragment they utter 
unfolds the world in which communication makes 
sense. Language is a theory of the people, without 
which they would be aimless and without direction. 
Language organizes the people in their unthinking.

XII  

                                       And the myth     
that holds up the rock,
that holds up the water thrives there—
in that cavern, that profound cleft,
                                     a flickering green
inspiring terror, watching     .     . [39]

In being the most terrible authority on earth, matter 
splits us from our place in it. Matter makes void the 
substance of our relation, which has no substance. 
Therefore we search out voids and incommensurates 
in order to chart the record of our loss. Everything we 
say echoes with this fundamental substrate, missing.  

XIII

                                                        where the deer run
and the wood-duck nests protecting his gallant plumage.
                                                                              [9]

Sensed immediacy is supported by the substrate only 
of dream as the matrix all figures of mind are cast in.

XIV

The twaalft, or striped bass was also abundant, and even sturgeon, of a huge bigness, were frequently caught:— On Sunday, August 31, 1817, one seven feet six inches long, and weighing 126 pounds, was captured a short distance from the Falls basin. [11]

Producing content beyond our understanding of it, 
each eruption is dated to a particular time and place.

XV

                    (Thence Carlos had fled in the 70’s
leaving the portraits of my grandparents,
the furniture, the silver, even the meal
hot upon the table before the Revolutionists
coming in at the far end of the street.) [26]

At the end of the protocol of questioning the world 
there is a constructed scene that mimics the whole 
into which we are being drawn. Revolution would 
be to bring the whole into the present as its missing 
double, a ghost effect we carry with us at all times.

                                                                                [ . . . ]

[Original text copyright © Barrett Watten 2005. Quotes from William Carlos Williams, Paterson, book 1 [1946; New York: New Directions, 1992}. Not to be reprinted without permission, except in short excerpts in electronic media.]

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