of Maxwell Clark
“I
was an unsuccessful man, to be sure, but the failure was all theirs. Had they
intended my success, it would have been something else again but, as it was,
the failure belonged to them.”
—Robert
Creeley
0.
I do not so much (s)wish to recommend any of the texts of
Eileen Tabios to you each, but to recommend Eileen Tabios herself to you, as her texts are merely the traces thereof. She is
a good person, thus also a good poetess. The more important aspect of any
hermeneutics, in any case, is the authority of a text, as since this personage
is only afterward or retroactively revealed in their decipherment. Authority
before revelation, that is, in both senses of “before” – temporality and rank. Eileen
Tabios is a good person, I know this from her texts (online and otherwise),
thus she also expresses herself in her poesy as good.
0.2a
About colonialism, as it is definable theme of Tabios’s
canon. Beyond her ability to write in the grandest classical Western style, and
thereby deconstruct the notion that the Western Canon is ethnocentric (it’s
actually a most archaic form of universalism). Beyond this, I wish to also a
very little situate my known family history (my father’s adoption renders his
genetic inheritance anhistorical, for now; while his cultural inheritance is
nonetheless English [e.g., my last name is Clark]), that is to say, my
matrilineal claims alone (see previous parentheses) which is, in so few names,
Welsh (Quaker) and French (Hugenot); the Welsh side having arrived on Penn’s
very Mayflower even. Without dilating
this personal (i.e., otherwise than directly literary-critical, if only for a
moment) history much farther unto its properly infinite unicity; however, I may
hereby already brusquely remak that the pre-original condition of Oneness that
Infinity is the restlessly incomplete permutation of is also a fancy name for
our unity as humans, as life, as creatrion—as well.
That
sickly-sweet sentimentalism inducing truth-fiction said, however, my family
history is exceedingly colonialist, especially when once in the Americas; but,
yet it equivocally also confesses the trauma of being colonized, especially in
the late history of Wales, or rather the first tributary of British colonialism—its
most archaic manifestation as such. Colonialism, or (a) civilization, as
Husserl remarks in his Origins of
Geometry, is defined foremost by its (/our) being a normalized linguistic
community: wherein similar objects are normally recognized by similar names,
and so on. Although I am French and Welsh then, I speak neither of those
cultures languages, nor do I live anywhere but an immense periphery to their
geographic centers—how so?—colonialism, as it cuts both ways: (1) my ancestors
were expropriated of their ownership over vast plots of culture-sustaining
land; (2) their landlessness brought them to seek to reproduce their landed
possession in “new” or otherwise weakly inhabited territories. Thus, I believe
(if at an abrupt tangential angle) that all cultures, in the process of their
becoming civilized (by and with that most generic technical acceleration of
life by humanity) exist in some major or minor (or what have you...?) mixture
of colonialized traumas and colonialist traumatization. If you are a U.S.
citizen, or even an official guest in this same nation-state, your/our
demonstrable docility and mass disorganization around the issues of U.S.
imperialism cannot but stigmatize you as a participant in U.S. colonialism. If
you are reading me from a member-nation of the United Nations, you too are
participants in the restless and unceasing redivision of the globe; as if the
Earth itself were composed only of so many hoards. If economic value is not
universally shared between its individual holders, as it is not (and perhaps
never can be [perfectly]), then the Earth is itself a discrete set of many (more
or less centralized) finite sets of value (hoards).
0.23nv
Somehow finition has overcome infinity, it seems, until
one realizes: (1) you yourself are one such a bodily finition; (2) the process
of finition is never final; finition is thus so very much a perfect expression
of infinity that it becomes so in a way infinitely otherwise than in the
traditional Cartesian/deontological “Idea of Infinity” (about which I recommend
his 3rd discourse). Finition is ontological infinity, otherwise (but
inspired by) metaphysical infinity—finition is the inspiration of metaphysical
goodness through ontology, i.e. physics plain. Metaphysics names the
pre-original coordinates of infinity which creation (poesy) obeys as the
infinitization (transcendence) of itself (as infinity) and thus becomes
finition. Unless I am wrong, in which case I was then at least right enough to
remark of the possibility of my error, if indeed the proofs of my error(s) are
not also so very close to being absolutely Necessary, as it were, ... but yet
not quite.
1.101b
Colonialism is then a great issue for life on Earth, is
almost its absolute physical condition as a planet-sized (let’s say) set of
many (nonsensically many even) charged spins: at the subatomic scale of (our)
Being (/our Civilization?) chaos propagates itself over its every remnant trace
(aka order) transcendentally (of itself), thus is also grows (differentiates);
and as in metaphysics—so then too in the ontological world of space, except
hereafter also as finition (instead of “pure” infinity).
2.024xyz
Back to Tabios, however (so soon?); I believe in her
influence over me—therefore my glory (if any?) is shared with hers (whereas any
opprobrium against me I restrict unto myself, having as it does none to do with
my already well-stated admiration of Tabios).
2.7887ci
So, Eileen is a goodness of herself—however little I have
cited her texts to prove this, the better I prove her valor through its
indirect affect over my letters herein (but, again, if at all).
“Queen. [...]
As,
though on thinking on no thought I think[...]”
—Shakespeare,
Richard II
