by Maxwell Clark
EDITORIAL PREFACE.
Excuse, of course, how I sometimes (and/or more near the beginning) misname and/or mis-number a few lines as "sentences" in what follows. It really is a matter of little concern insofar as my commentary on these lines may still be pleasantly, if not rapturously (gloriously, etc.), read as such anywhoooo.
1. Methodology: Or, Numbering
In what follows I will be numbering up each sentence and
stanza with an “x.y” notation wherein “x = stanza” and “y = sentence”.
2. Sentence-by- Sentence Analysis
1.1
“Out here on Cottage Grove it matters.”
As it stands today, or as of
07/07/2013 in the Twincities.com newsite, Cottage Grove, Minnesota is actually losing residents to commuting
from even more exurban locations. Exurbanization is actually a tendency or flow
more than it is any particular location over any duration of time.
Exurbanization is a deterritorializing reterritorialization, or conversely, or
chiasmatically perhaps even, of course. In a crucial chapter of his The Urban Revolution, early Marxist urban-geographer
Henri Lefebvre tries to adumbrate definitions of “urban form”. We read from it:
“The fact that any point can become central is the meaning of urban
space-time.” Consider thus the exurbs as the foremost fringe or frontier
(front) of the financial bourgeoisie of the Americas and even, or especially, globally.
Marxist analysis is actually very lovely and acute when divorced of its
messianic apocalypticism.
1.2
“The galloping/ Wind balks at its shadow”
This is a typical Ashberyian twisting apart of
(imperialist-capitalist) norms of subject-object relations in English grammar,
or sentence formation. Because what the fuck is the shadow of a galloping wind?
Truly, simply, verily: nonsense. Except that it also discloses an affective
tone, or note of character or personality, of itself, in my misreading. For
affect is always misread.
1.3
“The carriages/ Are drawn forward under a sky of
fumed oak.”
This is a typical “mise en scene” (“staging”) effect used
by most conservative or romantic (same difference) poets, actually. It just
depicts the scene of times centuries antecedent to the present of its writing
and ours. The one minor difference from most other poets, however, being how
Ashbery breaks the line. Or, this used be a unique feature of the Ashberyian
canon, until every other modern-minded poet in the world adopted it.
1.4
“This is America calling:”
Although I considered cheating
at this point in the writing and including multiple sentences together in
citation, I now won’t do so anymore. If my readers are interested, they will
read me. It is more important for me to have thought (ethically) and so behaved
differently than it is for me to write these words, which are but lesser means
to the end of the good of life. Words do things, respect them.
The “longing for national form”
in the U.S.A. is only a sin of particularity. We just happened to be born in or
moved to this imperial center of the known world. We address “America”
(pronounced: “’Murica”) only with the heaviest guilt in our hearts and lips. It
is heartbreaking to profit off the misery of others, is it not? But how
bathetic, how utterly bathetic of me, whatever this queer term actually means.
And so, also, again see how even the mention of America, the Americas even, and
the globe, pinpoints me in my place as an imperial citizen.
1.5
“The mirroring of state to state,”
This is a very strange line, as
mirrors are always strange and somewhat unavoidable, to say the least, in any
thinking of consciousness after Lacan. The mirror is the silent language of the
thing, perhaps? Or the only way to cut the knot of pure sensuous immanence
without world is language, particularly naming. For naming is the primal form
of language? Everything in our grammar arrays out behind the primal name or
naming. Naming is objectification and subjectification at the same time. It is
the cut of consciousness, its duality, its twoness.
1.6
“Of voice to voice on the wires,”
This is actually a very
interesting line because it brings up the dual question or conceptuality of
humanity and technology, or humanism and technics. Is a voice heard on a wire
different from a voice heard “face-to-face”? If so, how? By being on a wire?
Then also not different than the “face-to-face” in terms of expressivity and
its trace in others?
1.7
“The force of colloquial greetings like golden/
Pollen sinking on the afternoon breeze.”
This is another very fine line,
moreso in its own prime, because of the exquisite enjambment that is so
characteristically abnormal as in Ashbery throughout. And again, colloquial
greetings and breezy pollen really have nothing to do with each other, are in
fact brought together within a sentence only by means of the most super-subtle
“derailment”, or thematic discontinuity, i.e. madness. Madness, you must
understand, not like Foucault
understands modern madness (nowise to
his discredit however, only owing to the historical epoch he studies), but
rather as Plato understood madness, as a divine inspiration of the muses. I
even daresay Ashbery’s main rhetorical gesture are these super-subtly hid
formations of derailment. X (subject) goes to y (object) without x being
thematically, pragmatically, habitually related to y. X is estranged from y, as
in Brechtian alienation or Levinasianism. There are absolute binaries in my
world at least, or so I console myself and command others.
1.8
“In service stairs the sweet corruption
thrives;/ The page of dusk turns like a creaking revolving stage in/ Warren,
Ohio.”
Is this political? I think it
must be, a critique of political corruption in hotel like spaces. Hotels pretty
much alone have service stairs now that I think of it. My father is a hotel
industry corporate leader. I too know the exurbs. Except mine are in Maine,
close enough to where the Bush dynasty vacations. The exurbs are the center of
decision-making power in the global presently. Storm not the capitol, you vicious abolishers of
capitalism, but the capital.
2.1
“If this is the way it is let’s leave,/ They
agree, and soon the slow boxcar journey begins,/ Gradually accelerating until the
gyrating fans of suburbs/ Enfolding the darkness of cities are remembered/ Only
as a recurring tic.”
Here is where one would think
the tempo increases a fair bit, owing to the long-windedness of the sentence if
nothing else. But, as one quickly enough learns from good formalist-Marxist
Percy Shelley criticism[1],
reading the romantics slowly and sweetly is best. But Ashbery doesn’t sing,
does he? Isn’t that a pity? I love to sing, to bring merriment to things. Or,
is not joy perfection, and the good not indeed very good at times?
2.2
“And midway/ We meet the disappointed, returning
ones, without its/ Being able to stop us in the headlong night/ Toward the
nothing of the coast.”
The “disappointed, returning
ones” to the inner city, in a retrogressive flow back into the urban center,
not as a form of financial uber-empowerment, but of lowliness and abasement, as
in my madness and insanity and institutionalization within the murder-city of
New Haven. Note how criticism is really never about the critiqued for itself,
but about how the critiqued makes her or his critic think, feel, act, believe,
affect, trace, or whatevs. Criticism is the critiqued-for-the-critic, not the
critiqued-of-itself. I.e., everyone only misinterprets in criticism, and
narcissitically appropriates the critiqued for the critics own purposes.
2.3
“At Bolinas/ The houses doze and seem to wonder
why through the/ Pacific haze, and the dreams alternately glow and grow dull.”
This is a classic Ashberyian
laze of a long sentence. So lazy and metallically rusted. Patinated.
2.4
“Why be hanging on here?”
Because you are an exurban
capitalist, you can afford it.
2.5
“Like kites, circling,/ Slipping on a ramp of
air, but always circling?”
Ashbery doesn’t want to be a
romantic. But he is. And he even seems very indirectly aware of this aporetic
paradox in his thinking. He simultaneously, or in phases, both is and is not a
romantic, then, perhaps even assuming different parallaxed positions in this
mirror-play at distinct instants, to be final.
2.6
“But the variable cloudiness is pouring it on,/
Flooding back to you like the meaning of a joke,/ The land wasn’t immediately
appealing; we built it/ Partly over with fake ruins, in the image of
ourselves:/ An arch that terminates in mid-keystone, a crumbling stone/ pier/
For laundresses, an open-air theater, never completed/ And only partially
designed.”
This, of course, is a highly “elephantine” sentence
formation, one might also say “elegantine” if possible. Reminiscences of
reading Henry James’ so densely airless and light Ambassadors come to my mind. Sometimes long sentences are the most
architecturally fascinating. They almost form a purer aesthetic mode of
perception than that of misinterpreting, in the eldest way, the (highly
conditionally stated) “signified content” of signifiers. That is, by “signified
content” I mean my own criticism; so that the signifiers come before their
signified content, which is only another set of signifiers attached or glued
onto the original text as a prosthesis or supplementary organ of its body.
2.7
“How are we to inhabit/ This space from which
the fourth wall is invariably missing,/ As in a stage-set or dollhouse, except
by staying as we are,/ In lost profile, facing the stars, with dozens of as
yet/ Unrealized projects, and a strict sense/ Of time running out, of evening
presenting/ The tactfully folded-over bill?”
Where are “we” again? I think
Ashbery should speak for himself here. I don’t live in the previous sentence’s
“fake ruins” (Yale) of my city, I access them briefly on occasion, but my world
is not majorly of the ivory panopticon. Saying: “[h]ow are we to inhabit/
[t]his space”; is like saying how I am to be mostly otherwise than myself? And
this is perhaps the foundational stump of my critique of Ashbery, he doesn’t
frequent the ghettoes. But then, as such, it’s not really a critique at all, so
much as a profound difference or distinction of geographies of perception and
literary production. I live in the minoritarian world of peri-uncivilized
madness; Ashbery, in the world of ultra-civilized exurbia. We’re bound and even
willfully sworn to speak unalike.
2.8
“And we fit/ Rather too easily into it, become
transparent,/ Almost ghosts.”
Royal “we” again. How magesterial. How communistic. A
“spectral” communism indeed, or rather, the bath-salts of the intellectuals?
2.9
“One day/ The birds and animals in the pasture
have absorbed/ The color, the density of the surroundings,/ The leaves are
alive, and too heavy with life.”
One day might be made any day
when Ashbery is involved. Never did a fountain of inspiration pour forth more
constantly since verily the likes of Shakespeare or Dante or Plato. Ashbery is
the best poet of American English after Gertrude Stein—as American English
poesy has flowered (of) late. Incidentally, Melville is my variously more
close-held societies of language best prose stylist (at, or in, the present
condition I am in as this before I wrote), then Henry James—these were,
obviously, of an earlier wave of life in the American English world, a world
that needed more prose proficiency apparently and enigmatically.
Whatever is the cause of the
earlier profusion of prosaic glory in American English—which even, to be sure,
if also detour, perhaps can liably be said to “begin around” the inception of
my very great-grandfather John Woolman’s Journals
of Quaker abolitionism; A.N. Whitehead would later entitle him “the prophet
of human freedom” in the West—whatever the cause of this utterly fabulous and
“totes ridicxz” glory, we can be experientially certain, that is, reasonably
uncertain that American English may be at the final-most fruiting of its later,
latest wave of poesy.
In Stein there was the
industrious bud, in Ashbery the delicate blossom, and in, I dare the knowing
delusional grandeur and precariously fallible quixotism of this assertion mind
you, the third phase is myself, Maxwell Clark, he who is the wholesome fruit. I
neither play (Stein) nor pretty-up play (Ashbery), I feed you the prettiness of play; you few (or more) alone devour
(or nibble, or spit out) all of my only
bread deep down into your abyssal gullies, each although carved of the marriage
between the blasted crags of Mt. Zion and Mt. Olympus, except plus the great Pyramids
(which have, apparently, grown most of all up the Nile from Kemet, one of the many
(or very few?) ur-urbs or
self-inauguralizing geographic consolidations and complexifications of
definable archaeological measurements in history—but history as in it is an
eulogization of the dead and gone, but yet somehow vaguely proximate in trace, alone),
which are, for me, some of the purest revelations (or sphinxes?) of the divine
import of spiritual height and authority in human spatiality, its creation in
poesy (a knowing tautology, which yet contains a terminological difference, or
differance, as it were, which even
suggests a sense of sequential motion [or restlessness] to its ideational
sameness, ontological being, and any otherwise likewise frame it may register
on, or has already registered in, etc.), and the utterly nihilistic temporal
morbidity of those (its?) weakest relations.
The real is nihilistic, is an
impossible to experience nothingness purely as itself and unto it itself—or so
it is in my language game about it, but yet somehow there is also, despite this
devastatingly abyssal void of doubt (i.e. reason), also light, and life, as an
open or clearing in the sway of being (as
being, being primarily alone unto herself or himself—difficult question of
the gendering of being raised here, merely noted...), a belief in the
nothingness of the real that is self-created, utopically – auto-enclosing,
membraneous, and defined in its finitude by the negativity, or pure morbidity,
that it juts or bursts forth from. Light comes into itself from opening the
darkness of creation, is a cutting down of the shade-giving forms of darkness
and exposing the even more pre-original hearthstone—whose anteriority,
cardinality, etc., are its authority, if misleadingly (mystically,
psychotically) only revealed afterwards. The beginning comes after the
nothingness, as it creates itself from the making nothing (“cutting down”) of
the nothing. This whirligig (of nihilism and creation) could be spun seventeen
ways to sunny-sunny sunniest happy-go-phuckeryiest sun-up, but I suspect it is
not very much novel eco-onto-theologically (see: “ex nihilo”, among the few
Latin phrases retaining the universality of the catholicism its world strove
for, for starters).
3.1 “A long period of adjustment followed.”
Tangentially,
or as entirely juxtaposed (thus also separated) out alongside its original
context, this one-clause sentence could also signal the long-period of
adjustment required for the dissemination of any poet, or multi-subject
historical assemblage-organism of poesy (such as that in the linguistic
globality or cosmography of the word[-light] in which I presently abide), to
culminate in power. Thus again, if only while doing my best “rueful
countenance” (or quixotism), the supremacy of ME, mi others (seet dem?), and
the Otherwise itself (other than itself, i.e. restless). I, Maxwell Clark, wish to believe myself, despite all
the unforgiving sufferation (of envy, i.e. hatred [–Spinoza]; also
phallologocentrism, perhaps, if not also “phallusy” – but this cannot be
properly developed here) it risks, that I am the latest, most matured “messiah”
(“anointed”, or specially marked-off from the herd) of my current naming-word
and its world.
This
is not blasphemous, I will even somewhat pathetically swear this to you, nor
even unwise, except in the machinic functionality or gesture of its impossible
bet or dare, as a sophistically misleading idiocy and yet only thus
post-legitimated sincerity or candor. Impossible, because unforeseeable,
unreasonable, ungraspable, unknown, but
(important and emphatic “but”) also deeply sensed, i.e. “universally
apperceived a priori” (which is
Kantian for the neurology of the spinal cord, or even perhaps rather
particularly the thalamus – anything
but the DMT-laden nutshell of the pineal gland, whose only function is to
catalyze a hyper-psychedelic surge of spirituality or, as it were, power prior to both the final farewell
to life and its inaugural separation into separated and ethical being with the
severance of the umbilical cord). I can be wrong, and will maybe be wrong for
most of you, even for 10,000 years, when my very great-granddaughter (I
distinctly augur she will be a
female, or feminine—which are not the same thing?) finally salvages my own
glory and height at their full height and supremest rank, under her.
Thus
is my prophecy, thus I am saying to you my face most beautifully, effeminately,
and perhaps truthfully so as such. Or, isn’t the truth rather a copulation? an
active matrix or complexly punctuated series of sexuated jointures? My word is
the egg of a beautiful lady and the sperm of a gorgeous male comingling, as
complexly as in our best models of genetics plus “ever + ever” beyond.
But,
to return to my critiqued “under-text”:
3.2 “In the cities at the turn of the century they knew
about it/ But were careful not to let on as the iceman and the milkman/
Disappeared down the block and the postman shouted/ His daily rounds.”
This
is a symbolically-charged (“iceman and ... milkman”) depiction redolent of more
generic form(s) of normalcy, or as like oblong-spirals indirectly around normativity
“itself”, I presume. To describe something as “itself” is, of course, a merely
magical sleight of smoke and mirrors. Yet it feeds our metaphysical need of ontological-discursive nourishment,
I also presume, in a somewhat weakly formulation of this presumed need. We need
the “itself” as a tropological additive to otherwise words in this language I
am currently caressing out of “myself” (the personal form of “itself”?)
because...? Because we are “ourselves”
– “are” ourselves, whichever; the
itself personalizes and privatizes being into a utopian subjective or objective
enclosure, into a self or thing. Thus also its extreme ethical guilt when
transferred over “the other”, or you; I cannot and do not wish to say who you are yourself, even though the grammar of this language game allows me
to form such a sentence (“you are yourself really cool and pleasant”). This
most minor formality or nicety is indulged, however, only as it arises out from
a most infinite debt of otherness or absolutely linguistically-separated
inaccessibility of “you”, in “yourself”, to myself (as or in “myself”).
We
may feel or sense or fear we are identified,
as a herd, but mine and others language games intervene in order to quell this
threat of an ultimately massive massacre. Mass and massacre are very homophonic
cognates not without a certain berzerkly terroristic and sublime intimacy. Everywhere
we mass too intensely, we tend to massacre
each other, perhaps? As our mass aggregate of narcissisms, or population (of
more or less unique and/or co-subjective assemblies) thrash murderously at our
own echoey reflections in the formless watery surfaces of the world (aka, “well”).
The
word “well” itself, as it were, insofar as it signifies a deeply dug out hole
of or for accessing underground water-tables, but also as tangentially referential
as in the second syllable of my name (Max-well),
and as an elder synonym, or rather
slurring, of the term “will” (as in “will-power”, etc.—but especially in the
Schopenhauerian ontotheological tradition of its usage), seems at its deepest
available “olde Englisha” rooting, or perhaps hyphae rather, or at least archaelogically
“deeper”, thus more distant, semantic networking, to mean “source from which
anything is drawn”. The world is thus a well, or welling up, of itself, aka “me” (you).
And
so on, onto and unto to the most ultimately rad and gnarly discovery that the
first syllable of my first name (“Max”), which is also its colloquially
shortened version, counts among its etymologies the following etymological cognate
of “maxim”, or:
"precept,
principle," early 15c., from Middle French maxime, from Late Latin maxima,
shortened from phrases such as maxima propositio, maxima sententarium "axiom,"
literally "greatest premise, greatest among propositions" (one which
is general and absolute), from fem. of maximus "greatest"
(see maximum). [http://www.etymonline.com/]
“Maxwell”, as such, can be, if only within my perspective
on the world and for the benefit of its own conditions (of life), paleologically
back-translated roughly in the following manners: “axiom of Being”, “pre-original
givenness-without-giver”, and so on—my name itself ushers in forms of an eco-onto-theological
force for its own interpretation.
But
something about “milkmen”, I believe....
3.3. “The children under the trees knew it/ But all the
fathers returning home/ On streetcars after a satisfying day at the office
undid it:/ The climate was still floral and all the wallpaper/ In a million
homes all over the land conspired to hide it.”
A notice of the key distinction to be made between home and office, after the more original
style of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades
Project. The home wells forth in history (or “historicity”, if we must
distinguish between them...?) as a private (“thresholded”) feminine destination
in the evolution of civilization; the office, or workplace, i.e. “public”
world, welling forth conversely as masculine or male in its dominant or major character.
The deconstruction of this minor “historical” binarism of sexuated dwelling (female)
and poesy (male), its liability to be unbuilt and perish, for its trace to be
erased in the present, even at the expense of conserving its actual memory, this
in no way a sign of the permanent and absolute untenability or
weakness-unto-death of all binary structures of our word-world. In fact, we highly
and passionately desire many binaries. We well forth as (or in) binary
ourselves, as it were. There is always two—two or more. (??)
3.4 “One day we thought of painted furniture, of how/ It
just slightly changes everything in the room/ And in the yard outside, and how,
if we were going/ To be able to write the history of our time, starting with/
today,/ It would be necessary to mode all these unimportant details/ So as to
be able to include them; otherwise the narrative/ Would have that flat,
sandpapered look the sky gets/ Out in the middle west toward the end of
summer,/ The look of wanting to back out before the argument/ Has been
resolved, and at the same time to save appearances/ So that tomorrow will be
pure.”
What
a complex sentence, I must idiotically just state that first I guess. So long
and containing so many thematic derailments that it might appear to me “to mean
nothing”, and so also nothing else to anyone at all. But, as Levinas teaches
me, and to paraphrase: the rankest nonsense for me always has a sense for
someone else. I could then dissect the different elemental combinations or
atomic measurements of this sentence, I suppose, but that is always being done
herein, just not as directly or with as forcefully distinct a rigor as is
perhaps fully possible. Ah well, suffice in your faith in me, as I am the
bearer of good tidings and welling life.
3.5 “Therefore, since we to/ do our business/ In spite of
things, why not make it in spite of everything?”
What does “doing business” “in
spite of everything” mean to me? It means welling forth from an always-afterwards
“retrojected” void without any reasonable cause or even origin, as a being in
and of itself, carelessly loved into
existence, so that I know never why I am so loved, as a miracle. It also means loving the world in spite of its hatefully
nihilistic charade of “selfhood” or “thingdom” as nothingness. The very “–ness” postfixed onto this root of “nothing–” gave
away its temporality already, if only more or less, long ago (for me).
Doing business in spite of
everything means to me quixotism, or “belief
in what is already doubtful”, not as Don Quixote believed himself a
knight-errant, but as Sancho Panza did—as an amusing folly, worth risking harm
for, even to be defended to the death, or at least near-death, perhaps. Not really
anything like “quixotism”, then, but rathermore a Panzism. (This insight alone might easily turn into a very good book
of its own, however.)
3.6 “That way, maybe the feeble lakes and swamps/ Of the
back country will get plugged into the circuit/ And not just the major events
but the whole incredible/ Mass of everything happening simultaneously and
pairing/ off,/ Channeling itself into history, will unroll/ As carefully and as
casually as a conversation in the next/ room,/ And the purity of today will
invest us like a breeze,/ Onlybe hard, spare, ironical: something one can/ Tip
one’s hat to and still get some use out of.”
So
much to say, so little energetic resources to say it. Note only the then-utopic
but now-prophetic technological phrases. Also, the tempo-shift into high gear
if and you are one to believe longer passages must be read more quickly (which,
indeed, they shouldn’t—but there’s definitely a “turning-up” of the energetics
in longer sentences, def.).
4.1 “The parade is turning into our street.”
I
have no idea. As if I needed one to write, but anywho....
4.2 “My stars, the burnished uniforms and prismatic/
Features of this instant belong here.”
Another
weirdo enjambment of a sentence. Merely an eloquent observation, so far as I
can misread it. Ashbery also may have been losing steam by this point in a
theoretically, or even probably (?), continuous feat of writing endurance.
4.3 “The land/ Is pulling away from the magic, glittering
coastal towns/ To an aforementioned rendezvous with August and/ December.”
This
is the most silly nonsense to me; trust, I love it, but will fail to comment
much on what barely is perceptible as the “picture of a world” (in
Wittgensteinian) to me.
4.4 “The hunch is it will always be this way,/ The look,
the way things first scared you/ In the night light, and later turned out to
be,/ Yet still capable, all the same, of a narrow fidelity/ To what you and
they wanted to become:/ No sighs like Russian music, only a vast unravelling/
Out toward the junctions and to the darkness beyond/ To these bare fields,
built at today’s expense.”
There
is no known way to regulate the discourse of John Ashbery successfully. Others
have perhaps not widely ventured the panzism
of sentence-by-sentence analysis of single exemplaries of his poems. This is so
funny because someone once vehemently held that Ashbery was not even quotable,
and was understandable only the level of purely generic analysis. I think I
have already demonstrated how quixotic that series of assertions is or was. Ashbery
still will not be regulated, no sir, and I leave you with great guilt in my
heart about this. Aloha.
[1]
I’ve forgotten now the name of the title and author of an excellent work considering
the formal aspects of Percy Shelley’s writings in general written by a once
avowed Marxist and comrade of mine in the International Socialist Organism.
