1-Year Plan
Post 39: 7/16/07
A
Fractal Reading
of Spring & All
[excerpts]
I continue to work with strategies of unlinking that I pursued in an earlier reading of William Carlos Williams's Paterson, book 1. Here, I bring the method of random selection and metapoetic reconstruction to his classic of modernist poetics, from which I reread equally the poetry and prose in a form of continuous reinterpretation. Page numbers refer to the New Directions edition of Imaginations, along with the position of the page within the 64 pages of the work by itself.
I
and we degraded prisoners
destined
to hunger until we eat filth [133/46]
Materiality is the crux: I do not know what to want.
II
The only answer is that form in prose ends
with the end of that which is being communicated—If the power to go on falters
in the middle of a sentence—Or if a new phase enters at that point it is only
stupidity to go on.
There is no confusion, only difficulties. [140/53]
Discontinuous with ourselves, we take up the burden
of making our continuity manifest to others—insofar
as it is mapped onto the world of things. The caesura
is a device they use to bring discontinuity into order.
What you left out returns in the desire for the content
of the message, which you must complete regardless.
III
Through the orderly sequences of
unmentionable time EVOLUTION HAS REPEATED ITSELF FROM THE BEGINNING.
Good God! [93/6]
A discontinuity exists within the very nature of who
we are: in the failure of continuity with themselves,
which we reinvent daily. I am the perfect plagiarist
of orders of being that create and guarantee myself.
Nothing she has done can anticipate the task that
faces her at the moment of supreme undoing: art.
Hence you can imagine you never experienced this.
IV
It is alive, venomous
it smiles grimly
its words cut— [148/61]
Outside the limits of being is what will destroy it.
V
It is typified by the use of the word “like” or that “evocation” of the “image” which served us for a time. Its abuse is apparent. The insignificant “image” may be “evoked” never so ably and still mean nothing. [100–101/14]
The death of likeness takes place at the crux of
materiality—as a form of unknowable desire. Any
parallel statement will be false to what it represents.
Thus the image is only an epiphenomenon of the
conflicts revealed in what it cannot contain. Death
to the image cannot be an image of its own death.
“Death to the image” is their banner of unlikeness,
opening to the materiality it cannot comprehend.
VI
Even the most robust constitution has its limits, though the Roman feast with its reliance upon regurgitation to prolong it shows an active ingenuity, yet the powers of a man are so pitifully small, with the ocean to swallow—that at the end of the feast nothing would be left but suicide. [106/19]
Materiality is the violent undoing of intention—yet
the material is comprehended in all forms of desire.
VII
It is not onion soup
Your sobs soaked through the walls
breaking the hospital to pieces [114/27]
His desire for health kills the patient in literal ways:
by the overplus of response to a material incursion.
Tissues are inflamed to the point of our dysfunction.
VIII
Nature is the hint to composition not because it is familiar to us and therefore the terms we apply to it have a least common denominator quality which gives them currency—but because it possesses the quality of independent existence, of reality which we feel in ourselves. [121/34]
The dynamic of a crisis takes its cue from a rejection
of familiarity—and we are kicked out, on the street.
IX
and there, wholly dark, the pot
gay with rough moss.
A terrific confusion has taken place! [96/9]
Still life: trope of the most familiar, most estranged.
Looking from outside through the window onto the
arrangements that have been made to deny you.
All violent responses stem from the act of exclusion.
X
But the thing he never knows and never dares to know is what he is at the exact moment that he is. And this moment is the only thing in which I am at all interested. Ergo, who cares for anything I do? And what do I care? [89/2]
Freedom is radical violence at the crux of materiality
—a trope that offered its assurances for generations
of artists. The material is the nonbeing by which I act,
even as my actions are not grounded in its priority.
You had better look out for occasions of the material,
the only invitation you will ever get for your new life.
XI
In this mass of philosophic data what one of the listeners was able to maintain himself for the winking of an eyelash. Not one. The inundation of intelligence by masses of complicated fact is not knowledge. [139/52]
Form seeks discrepant facts to organize its nonbeing.
XII
To hell with you and your poetry—
You will rot and be blown
Through the next solar system
with the rest of the gases— [146/59]
Nonbeing seeks form as a release of discrepant fact
to its preassigned destination as irrelevant. The crux
of the decision endures by which separation is made.
All this counts as the latest version of the individual,
now divided as subject into what inherently coheres
and what does not—and which is most compelling.
XIII
The fragility of the flower
unbruised
penetrates space [109/22]
Art divides being with nonbeing: that is its formula.
Therefore, art is an infinite expansion of being when
inversely factored by that which it is not. Death and
the maiden is the type of all beauty—and the young
man becomes the patient handmaid of its necessity.
XIV
It is
this that engages the favorable
distortion of eyeglasses
that see everything and remain
related to mathematics— [118/31]
Perversions are structured as a dictate of necessity.
XV
I can’t die
—moaned the old
jaundiced woman [129/42]
Necessity is beyond our comprehension, and we have
no choice but to distance ourselves from it. Creating
a distance from necessity only brings it to proximity.
The distancing device is the staff of life, for the poet,
dying in the distance effect of his rigidifying devices.
I have no choice but to remain open to my undoing.
XVI
whose catholicity is
progress since
destruction and creation
are simultaneous [127/40]
Progress contains the seeds of its own destruction,
its negativity. The modern condition, which we must
accept, allows us to realize their necessary relation.
Whether any church could be raised on their relation
is a mystery of religion—which art in its particularity
excludes. Therefore, progress demands modern art.
[ . . . ]
[Original text copyright © Barrett Watten 2007. Quotes from William Carlos Williams, Spring & All, in Imaginations [1923; New York: New Directions, 1971}. Not to be reprinted without permission, except in short excerpts in electronic media.]