"Catch Back The Quantity": Our Prose Now, Djuna Barnes' Nightwood, and the Poetic novel

"The tear of wine is still in his cup to catch back the quantity of its bereavement" wrote Djuna Barnes in the Watchman, What of the Night section of Nightwood. That single fragment catches me (to speak of "catch back the quantity". . . ) and the layers of implication in this combination of words astonishes me. I will not go into these layers here. I will offer that, while parts of Nightwood (the Plainfield book sale edition I now have touts Nightwood's successful run at twenty-eight printings [so far]) are not in my normal line of content, the language does tell me a lot about where I know my roots to be.

As some readers will in Che., I have picked through Barnes' text pages at a time. For me, reading is about what's potent there. (The physical object of the original book [small and thick for a side pocket, purple--but with minute splatters of ink] is another thing to behold, aroma and care. . . something that grace gifted age and handling; even that book I have opened sparingly, perhaps a bit like a special garment, with purpose.)

As a side note, it's liberating to identify the still-present typo [page 82, "And why. . . "] in New Directions' twenty-eigth printing (as if the minor technicalities of production don't matter: Let us bring your attention to the content, beneath and inside the word.)

Try giving your ear and tongue to this, by--of all fluidity!--Mr. T.S. Eliot: "One is liable to expect people to see, on their first reading of a book, all that one has come to perceive in the course of a developing intimacy with it. . . What one can do for other readers. . .is to trace the more significant phases of one's own appreciation. . . For it took me, with this book, some time to come to an appreciation of its meaning as a whole." This, remarkably, is from the New Directions introduction to Barnes' Nightwood. He begins to clarify: "In describing Nightwood for the purpose o attracting readers to the English edition, I said that it would 'appeal primarily to readers of poetry.' This is well enough for the brevity of advertisement, but I am glad to take this opportunity to amplify it a little." Here's how the master poet Eliot continues, in prose, about Barnes' "prose":

"I do not want to suggest that the distinction of the book is primarily verbal, and still less that the astonishing language [blogger's aside: perhaps this is where I got the "astonishing"--though it feels apt] covers a vacuity of content. Unless the term 'novel' has become too debased to apply, and if it means a book in which living characters are created and shown in significant relationship, this book is a novel. And I do not mean that Miss Barnes's style is 'poetic prose.' . . . A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel-reader is not prepared to give. To say that Nightwood will appeal primarily to readers of poetry does not mean that it is not a novel, but that it is so good a novel that only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it." This was thoughtfully composed in 1937.

What happened to the reader between 1937 and, say, now? The reader of popular fiction in 1937 faced many of the same overwhelming choices readers confront (or ignore) now. The reading population since the industrial printing press has been sold and educated on a mass market of theme and type, character and rhythm, text and context, content and form. But here in Nightwood, another century forward, there are voices and perceptions--phrases and words--in the tribe that spark, astonish, echo, repeat. . . and pick for their instruments and tune a vibe that is potent, that is now, that we enliven (even in our pause to accept it) ourselves and each other to the blast of reality or to the sublime of a reverie and insight we have found there. May the goodness continue.

Pushed Buttons: Che as friend or foe; the book is not a wall but a gate.

Have you yet been blinded by a word? There have been times the sight of a name has made me sick. In Dublin, Ireland, it was 1984, as my friends and I could not believe America would accept more and more restrictions (in education, particularly) from President Reagan—a bully leader, we felt, who appeared to have little sympathy for anyone who couldn’t rise from struggles without help (those dying from AIDS, or those raising a family on a welfare check, or students trying to pay for four years of an education themselves). In recent past years it was difficult news whatever followed “W” and “Bush.” There was a human story on the other end of it, someone who was suffering unnecessarily as a direct result of a strident decision—and things were not going to work out so well for them.

What is the good reason why those who would be friends, great friends, attending each other’s births, birthdays, memorials and holiday vacations, consign sides—the dispute over a split hair’s width of supposed idealistic entrenchment—cannot admit a place of mutual sympathy over three letters? If the same letters were found in a Chinese alphabet they’d be uttered in forty different ways, yes? and each way would offer a new meaning. Since when must we destroy curiosity in order to preserve our strict identify, line-drawn-fact-of-opinion, our suffering?

If you’ve ever felt you’ve been on the outside of things—the norm, the popular, raise, place, merit, a culture, economic expectation; if you’ve ever been on the downside of social security affording not meds or your own bed, if you’ve ever identified with the homeless, heard the news of the family place burning down to the ground to nothing—well, then, you know the beat. Our chambers keep a tight muscle. Love and forgiveness begin to express the common language, through any context.

Che, El Che, is an icon and opinions are strongly divided (to understate the unfortunate fact) as to the degrees to which he may have been “terrorist” or “saint” at any measurable point in his living. I invite you to the Wikipedia site, which reflects edited collected scholarship in an array of evidence and assertion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Che_Guevara). We find the words attributed to Susan Sontag: Che’s “goal was nothing less than the cause of humanity.” Of course, the family members of any victim of violence could understandably take issue with “[an act of] the cause of humanity” taking the life of their loved one. Yet do we reasonably argue with one who noted the icon’s “inspiration for every human being who ever aspired to freedom”—particularly when the human being saying that was Nelson Mandela? Freedom is difficult for any extreme, but to one who has been oppressed and then imprisoned (a matter of speech, too) there must be at least some sympathy for the links between struggle and liberation.

Text, and any art that won’t destroy a human being in the mortal and ontological sense, is sad paranoia’s gift-elixir and candor’s masterfully ordinary muse. Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading and Lewis Hyde’s The Gift relieve us of time’s baggage, if we are open to reading the same stars together—one by one, in awe.

So how do we “inflect” ourselves/our breath/these syllables mono or many so that we do not invite reactive rejections of our observations, unique in rhythm and melody, especially in a tide of text that seeks love and forgiveness?

Singer Richard Shindell’s song (using the same three letters that challenged my reader even before a page was turned) describes a man imprisoned longer for, it would seem, carrying in his wallet a photo of his girlfriend who is wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt.

Perhaps it is not the rebel’s violence we celebrate (it cannot be), perhaps we celebrate power to the powerless by voice and by raised fist that declares: We are human beings and we will live humanly, not by force or dictate. Perhaps it is the notion of the underdog against brutal inequity. There are brutalities across class, economies, cultures. Each should be questioned.

My Che. is about observation, texture, sensuality, image, musicality, gesture, invention, evaluation, imagination, dream, people, friendships, renewal, joy, recognition, struggle, fruition. The novella Che. is an invitation to kindle your sensual relationship with a world of your making through language. Where there is a blood stain, we pause. Where there is tide on clear days we become thankful for what tide has brought .

The poetic is never too tightly bound in prose as to prompt wars (and if it does, it becomes something else, something it never was). The poetic encourages matters of loving where there had previously been dispute. The poetic leaves you in a space for astonishment, where love takes place.

Twenty-three years ago I donned a beret, in India. A friend I’d met in Hyannis had worn it in the India national touring company of Jesus Christ Superstar. In Bombay, he thought I should wear it while hanging on to the back of his motorcycle (I suppose to keep us out of trouble [the idea being I might pass for a police officer as we sped along]). Of course my father, a Marine—now in his 80s—introduced the concept of men in hats and uniforms when I was a boy (he became a teacher, and: a Veteran For Peace). Twenty-four years ago I began wearing a beard (before I met Ginsberg, before I ever thought about Che in these terms). And, yes, I own two “Che” t-shirts, neither of which revels in any particular version of the history of El Che, Che Guevara.

Yevgeny Yevhushenko—whom I saw and met at the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater panel and reading last week (I’ve posted video of Yevhushenko reading, in a unique but poetic presentation—made possible only because I could not see the man himself: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Che-A-Novella-In-Three-Parts-by-Peter-Money/135794669796997). . . Yevhushenko (interesting that there is hush in the middle of his name. . . ) said, while describing the soccer game between Russian soldiers and German soldiers after the war, “It Is Never Too Late For Forgiveness.”

Don’t you ever build a wall between you and the gifts of words in expression. Nothing is worth that coldness and isolation.

Provincetown Arts Magazine and Che: A Novella

I want to thank Chris Busa and Provincetown Arts magazine for writing about the novella in the "Buzz" section of this year's issue. Busa selects a section of Che's text and describes the novella as "a hybrid of poetry, fiction, and cultural commentary. Some moments offer startling insight into how language itself can expose fresh thoughts." And Che is in extraordinary company: Nick Flynn (The Ticking Is The Bomb [Norton], Another Bullshit Night In Suck City), Sebastian Junger (The Perfect Storm and War), Nicholas Meyer (The Day After and Star Trek II and IV), and Howard Zinn (A People's History of the United States) all appear in the same "Buzz."

Giving The Grammazons Some Love: Clark (& Shea) on the Grammar of Effect and Intent

Waves bringing in the full moon high tides as we approach midnight on this spit of land/sand/island, with the force of Mailer and O'Neill and Hofmann and Motherwell. . . and into this I welcome the Whitmanic joy and defense of language in sense and exuberance: Ammon Shea's description of Roy Peter Clark's The Glamour of Grammar, to celebrate our motives and intuitions (I still find it hard to excuse the use of the hyphen as a dash--for it misses the length of the breath by the minus of it; so, driftwood, be raft more than fragment; rope instead of snip). Here's what we mean:

The visual nature of word-space-punctuation not only contains reference but leaves an impression, suggests--linguistically--allusion, acts--itself and in juxtaposition--as metaphor. . . and as potential. The grammar is as much past as it is present and potential. The Greek/Pound's three-fold reasoning ought to still hold here: Does the structure have a music? Does the structure have a logic? Is there enough about the structure that feels new? And do we guide the reader in making sense as much as the reader must accept a new measure of rhythm and threads of logic that seem found--frayed or whole--in an entirely new land?

Roy Peter Clark writes, according to Ammon, the relaxed "grammar of purpose, a grammar of effect, a grammar of intent. . . [that] gives you a little push and says, 'Go, go, go.'" Ammon Shea: "Clark wholeheartedly endorses breaking the commandments that make no sense, as long as in the breaking the writing itself holds up": in the progress of our evolution we question "rules that have little influence on the making of meaning" (Clark feels).

In other words (or: in words): "encourage. . . more joy."

Go out and voyage, my friends. The language is ready, and sensual.

"Magnifying and applying come I,
Outbidding at the start the old cautious hucksters,"
--Walt Whitman

Message in the Bottle: Analogy of Tides, Traps, Teasing -- And This Poetic, the flight & song of being (the contexts of text, ontology of word--)

So, in cleaning out a section of my barn—the one mice declared their feed and dumpster—I found, again (one of the loveliest phrases to me: found, again [nearly as winning as found, anew]:—here the comma enters a little sorrow, a vague-knowing surprise, a lot of “epiphany” at the anticipation of one’s next breath), I found again old things that meant so much: The Message in the Bottle, writings by Walker Percy. I say “writings” as much as “thinkings”—and as much, in this way, as the ontological act fused in language . . . or expressing oneself as vital as blood, as necessary as “job,” as central as courage, conviction, personality and sense of self. As essential to the bird as flight or song.

At the same time I found things that meant so much, once, but had to be thrown away—without a thought. There was thought, even contemporarily. Attachment had to be severed.

Some things survive, others go the way of compost—and then survive newly. To sever attachment is what Walker Percy says to me when he urges himself to think of metaphor as a natural happenstance, the coincidence or irony, sleight of hand or “mis-”/understanding of language. What lingers in one ear bears. What got left out by apostrophe indicates—even an absence.

That a record player is called a “seabird” by its users, but was itself a product of the Seeburg manufacturing company, is a matter of sublime translation. That a text “becomes” an animal that will not immediately sit (the cat [who] circles your lap before it curls to rest). The eyes & ears of individuals love and yearn in gears greased with their own oil. Who knew such baby’s breath would become such force of will, declaration—if by innocence or empowerment, authority or audacity. “Misreadings”—Walker Percy thought—offer “the regular experience of that heightened, that excited sense of being which we find in poetry.”

Walker Percy suggests the “prolonged analogy” that Aristotle and Dante were inclined to use, a subtle kind of metaphor over a mixed geography of words instead of what has become a pill of instant cunning. The prolonged analogy is the work of the poem but it is also the work of storytellers, epics, a band’s “lp” recording, dances and imagistic films, the sum and parts of visual works of art, and—partly because their sum is an accumulation of parts: the novel if, at its base and in the force/being of every word, the language unfolds in the innocence of first discovery. . . or anew.

Percy: “the action takes place among the common things of concrete experience and yet yields an analogy”—“by the very thingness of the action” (which brings us back to William Carlos Williams, naturally, and the role of poetry in everyday language).

This considered, “Sentences refer to different worlds.” (1.522, “A Triadic Theory of Meaning” [Walker Percy]).

The message in the bottle is not the comprehension of a statement only, it is—as well—the experience of the entire vessel and passage, the finding, the uncorking, the amazement of ratio of air/moisture amid the fact of its existence, the unfathomable minute by minute journey by tides/traps/teasing, the wet sand as fellow passengers, the sheen of your own reflection in the bow of glass—looking “into” the artifact of assumed words, a creature within an astronautical womb, a context emerging in the imagination. A set of circumstances that constituted a moment in a life—and now another moment, breathing, configuring, a tongue to the mind in a passage of time.

The "story" is in the language. . ./ And we begin in "rain" (noting, now, that important moment in Fahrenheit 451)

I read my novella anew today: "You like the rain?" the book-burner conscript Montag retorts, as if to offer an irrefutably universal dislike to the inquisitive teacher Clarisse in Fahrenheit 451--as if rain, to the annoyance of everything, clearly follows its own course (and therefore to no good. . . ). . . as if liking that which we cannot control would be crazy; --as if giving-in to something whose nature amounts, contributes, and does not at its base reduce or destroy is a form of weakness? Or do we disavow the barriers enforced to contain us? "You like the rain?" he cites as if to seal any argument for liking rain. Yet Clarisse's joyful reply is as loose as rain, "I adore it!" So now Che and this moment come to language in common. (Che begins with rain.) I had not realized it, but this was the fitting note to begin a textual revolution.

If I may, the story is in the language.

Word & Ear: Beckett, Markson, Olson, Louis Armstrong, Calvino, Argueta, Kafka, Cid Corman [by suggestion] & Miss Pond's Oyster. . . ,

There's a lone sentence in the novella Che that speaks from the forest and the tundra in the same moment: "To realize, of course, is to give word." The line is its paragraph's only voice, so to speak (there are also other one line paragraphs in the novella but they are the rarity). I suppose, in this context (one word, one breath; one space of time), I've been thinking about David Markson (his brilliant and lovely, I think, This Is Not A Novel)--and Italo Calvino's Mr. Palomar (a favorite of mine since roughly 1985). With these, I've been re-reading passages of William Empson's opposite-of-critical Seven Types of Ambiguity. Empson "states a case" in the way inventive novels do, in the way most poems do; the way a garden does! When a person pursues his or her own construct(s), a person enacts the daily renewal that would seem to sustain their thinking, engagement, sense in place. I've been editing the next Across Borders journal and I came across this line, in a musician's assessment of Louis Armstrong's writing using Charles Olson's perspective: "verse will only do in which a poet manages to register both the acquisition of his ear and the pressure of his breath" and "of the breathing of the man who writes as well as his listening." This last part interests me the most and refers to something else I had written on this blog ("on" this! --as if this is the deck of a boat, yes?) but which I cannot exactly call to mind without having two computers before me (one can only "jump" back and forth so much in one mode, one mind, one time-frame). So we listen to the hand, the hand remaining, the slate given and to wipe clean.

When we listen to what we read we read it again, instantaneously with slight echo, and we hear the breath of the voice--not only the artifact of the word.

Lately I've been reading passages of the novella "in Irish," in my Irishness, realizing a fluency--or maybe a result of a tendency, aural inclination, propensity--from an influential time in my life. Teaching, to the extent the writer teaches, Beckett brought the joy of the realization of each word (as a lengthy music, in each breath, bearing--) back, entirely. The emotional lyricism, the traveling melody within the smallest units of narrative, the breath-pause--which is the mental-emotional-ontological pause--become fully comprehended only as a listener. The writer is a listener, choosing her or his words sound by sound--and not unlodged from the sound of bay, the solid of mountain base, and yet willingly giving that up for the sake of getting on, to travel in the line or the narrative, to tell the parts of it--in melody and refrain--as a body with eyes and ears and lungs does. This is the kind of text I mean. If text had skin, brain, chemical; it "gives" if we are open to listening for that. Like Kafka's hunger artist below the straw, barely heard and--until then, at the end the whisper confirmed--completely unseen (in fact, thought to be disposable).

While a listener (and reader) at a cello lesson, I found a book I'd not seen or opened before: One Day of Life by Manlio Argueta. What I was able to read there, in the moments of music, were these (and I certainly hear their breath): "The dog is my brother." "A cloud is wrestling with the sun." "Until you appeared. . .you have brought fresh air."

You have to get and bring fresh air. You do it in living, why not do it in reading.

I listen to the lungs of text.

I was stopped in "my tracks" when I read Markson's lone line (among many there), repeating history--without any feeling of being dated: "Please, sir, I want some more."

The words ask a simple request. The writer lived-dying in this simple moment of request, line by line, word by word, syllable by syllable, sound by sound, breath by breath.

In this morning's paper a person writes to complain about children using "frozen trout" for an art project (prints) at a local public library. "In this economy!" the citizen chides. I have to admit to admiring the letter writer's name. It is "Pond." I want to write to her, via the paper, saying, "Dear Miss Pond, The word is your oyster"--(["hoist ear!"]; Why not world and word at the same time? It's possible!); and a painted fish is an opportunity in a child's imagination. This will feed nations, eons, even the embers. And so, we take a breath. Breathe, and listen to what breathed. Make a life of this. Discover text, breathing.