Charles Stein
George Quasha’s Preverbs
One might recall that Augustine’s deepest probings into the matter of “eternity” occur in his attempt to understand how our relation to both time and what is not time are involved in the act of reading a text. George Quasha’s preverbs enact within the reader’s attention an atemporal exigency through language. Playing intra-syntactically upon the intimacy between time and linguistic structure, Quasha’s lines and fields of lines fold and wrinkle wavelets of a level of being that he often refers to as “undertime.” What is unveiled is returned at once to its appropriate obscurity in moment after moment of utterance whose mode of declaration provokes the concrete coursing of our thinking toward a certain gaiety of inescapable inquiry.
What is it that is suspended across the vanishing interval between a phrase, whose meaning shimmers, hesitates, and sometimes insists even as it deliquesces within that interval, and a new phrase, which resonates the first with an ever-efflorescing transformation of sense? It is as if the lion’s roar of awakening rumbled forth in the mute but eloquent interstices between ordinary morphemes — where the syllables that carry meanings are also vocables, but vocables that percolate intimations of the meaning of meaning itself.
*
I think what distinguishes Quasha’s preverbs from other poetry is that the lines of these poems depend in a remarkable way on the concrete acts of reading them, in the very moment that these occur, whether we are gazing at the page silently or uttering them out loud to ourselves or one another.
Something like a twofold program or implicit agenda emerges: that the work must induce its discoveries upon or pass all the way over to the reader; that it must refuse the antitheses between content and occasion, between intelligence as disembodied thought and concrete sentience as fully embodied but deratiocinated presence.
So much here seems ambiguous, multi-valent, polysemous. One hears a thing meant, but then it shifts and means something else. It is tempting to try to gather these meanings, to decide between them or hear them together, to produce for oneself a thought surmounting them or including them all. But I think this is often to miss their most radical possibility: there is an edge between no meaning and too much meaning, and events on this edge might be inhabited just as they occur to us, in us, as us.
Thus I would suggest that we not try too hard to prepare ourselves to read these pieces, but rather we should read them with the idea of introducing ourselves to the concretely open instance of our reading them, moment to moment, and to each other, giving ourselves permission to hear them, to dwell in the questioning of them, even letting ourselves repeat them, pausing within and around them.
Don’t do anything TO them, to PERFORM them.
Responsibility
The following is a way to see Quasha’s preverbs’ precarious situatedness among their own cognitive and ontological emanations:
Our poets’ capacities to invest in their own invention (I mean how they wear the garments of their poetry, not how they expect to profit from it) relates to what attitude we take towards our own ontological originarity. (Ontological originarity: the not so obvious circumstance that how being seems depends on each of us. How being seems is the site of a precarious poetic responsibility: responsibility for the reader—who will become implicated in the work’s sense of what seems to be—and responsibility to the further life of the poetic content.) If poets treat their own invention ironically—i.e., by disavowing its ontological force—well then, what the reader gets to “put on” is that PUT-ON, that irony. When poets intend the literal assertion of their imaginings, the work becomes a work of enthrallment —enchanting if you find it so — but a kind of binding-spell to freeze the reader’s ontological will and align it to the specific orders of the poem’s take on what is.
To release the poem from these two boondoggles — ironical disavowal and ontological fundamentalism — is where the intellectual responsibility of the poetry lies and where the ontological seriousness of poetic practice must lodge itself.
Quasha’s Preverbs project is the continuous registration of one poet’s shouldering of this responsibility.
The Trajectory of Literal Meanings
Literal meanings have envelopes of possible extraneous meanings or wisps of other thoughts that hang in there along with them.
The Preverbs poet’s art of articulation manages the micro-spaces among these main thoughts and their extras.
Even the lines that seem to have but a single literal meaning often have auras accruing to them by the evanescent fields of thoughts in which they are tremulously situated.
The other thoughts that show these evanescent qualities resonate, accumulate, or produce atmospheres where further other thoughts flare and vamoose.
Self-reflection transitions to the intransitive. No unique sequencing can unscramble their cognitive inevitabilities.
Lines that seemingly “go flat” rather than satisfy a conventional expectation for prosodic harmony or rhythmic closure nevertheless enlist proverbial diction for preverbial intervention and allow further meanings to arise via subtraction.
The sense it doesn’t make increases the meaning scene.
Consider the line “Language makes no promise to communicate” (Glossedalia Attract 1, p. 5). But what if in spite of it all, a missive from otherwhere were apparently delivered to my bewildered yet receptive understanding? Do we have here the fulfillment of a promise never made? But can language make promises and thereby show itself to be an active subject by denying it ever sent the letter received?
*
Multiple meanings may yield a complex of mutually implicating propositions;
or :
Instead of a multiplicity of positive meanings creating a polyphony of semiotic possibilities, a line might proliferate its own obscurities and then offer to clear them up by referring to them, or by inducing attention to the readerly events the line perhaps has just caused to occur.
Or the darkness itself might be made of a kind of light, the light of attention alert in cognition’s darkness.
Ambiguities become local tools of the line and change as they are temporarily resolved in a given moment’s reading.
*
Quasha’s Preverbs series not infrequently speaks of “seeing through.” Here’s a line from Glossodelia Attract: “This is the time of alternative obscurities to see through” (p. 5).
To see through : as through a mist or some space of obscure cognition.
To see through : as to overcome a deception.
But in either case, “see through” to what? And what “time” anyway is this “this”? Anything from the present historical moment to the present readerly event? Or the timeless time of the line itself? Or the proverb-time of the expression “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country”? The poet’s line presumes to see through, say, such rhetoric, offering alternative obscurities to the obscure assertion of the proverb it denigrates and abuses.
Here an entire rhetorical, proverb-like construction suffers its variants.
Or this proliferation of possibilities might function more concretely than rhetorical ambiguities or even instances of polysemous polyphony or counterpoint. The mind must toggle among the sentence parts or among its own construals so that a kind of movement native to that line is allowed to occur. And the ambiguities or meaning possibilities occur as vibrations propagated by that movement--more ghosts and auras; meanings in potentia, affordances for readerly adventures.
The line about obscurities to see through is followed by:
Through thoroughly, as a word weighs. (p. 5)
One might return to the “seeing through” of the previous line, but, reading on, one just keeps on going. Thoroughly through with seeing through, further contemplations follow.
For instance, a sense of a certain lexigraphic resonance: “through” and “thorough” look like misprints of each other;
or:
This lexigraphic self-penetration is itself a kind of salutary misdirection so that the ponderable matter of the lexigraphic items impends and measures: “weighs” — has weight—“weighs in” (like a boxer, possibly), measures what other matters pertain about it. But the line now wants to leave its previous ravishments behind and keep on going without sustaining the weight or momentum of the freight of cognitive baggage hefted up till now.
*
Every ontology enshrines principles of value. Conversely, where values are asserted, a correlative ontology is implied. Therefore, in work where ontology is emergent or tremulous or in process of being discerned, the very values that such work enacts—participates in, encourages, embodies — remain tremulous, in process, as well.
In the very matter of syntactical hesitation and invention, values appear and shimmer, disappear and are transgressed. And the reader is drawn into this play of ontology, meaning, and value, at the site where being, meaning and value are in play in his or her own being.
Axial Reading
[. . .] Axial, a word I use somewhat idiosyncratically to call attention to a certain state of being — free being, or being
coming into its natural state as free [. . .]. What is clear is that the axial is not a thing: not a philosophy; not a religion;
not an aesthetic; in short, not itself any of the many ways that can be used to understand it. It's more like a space,
a worked space — an intentional state of awareness in which something unpredicted occurs: a unique event resulting
in what seemingly embodies its origin and yet itself is original. At once unchanging and nonrepeating.
Axial Stones: An Art of Precarious Balance[1]
My remarks about an emergent or tremulous ontology (above) lead me to the following discussion of Quasha’s axiality, which is for him a principle.
I want to say that axial writing induces axial reading.
If you think yourself competent to read, well, anything at all, your confidence in your competence might impede your reading of preverbs. An exaggeration no doubt, but consider: Slowing down the pace of reading, as one might do ordinarily in order to pick up nuance in a difficult passage, alters the sense of the text as you read it. Your cognitive faculty stutters, forgets what it thought to have thought but an instant before. Alternatively, reading preverbs at a normal pace may well make things slip by that you are aware that you are not aware of. It is almost as if a certain despair of understanding must set in, or a surrender, rather, to whatever it is that is happening in your reading mind, which cannot be grasped in advance of your struggle to understand it. The words go by, or you go by the words, and if the stars are right, a sense of meaning flashes.
Preverbial lines tend to break up inside the syntax they ride on, and in a way that not only plays upon the intimacy between time and syntax, but also inundates the mind with deep and turbid cognitive waters—waters that, as one continues to inhabit preverbial texts, begin to feel like they must have always secretly been churning both within syntax and within time. How does the beginning of a sentence — any sentence — conjoin to its end? How can what has already gone by — the first phrase of an utterance — be altered by what comes later? For it is not only the strangely disrupted morsels of preverbial language that exhibit this temporal anomaly, but ordinary language as well.
The categories of grammar that ordinarily identify the utterance one is confronted with are suddenly of little use. One reads, for instance, declarative sentences that function essentially in the mode of inquiry. The sentence is not asking a question syntactically, but the actual course of utterance induces an interrogative “mood” — a state of querulous openness in the very ground of one’s intelligence. In this way, the phrase ceases to be an “object” that, through the spontaneous application of grammatical categories, one can identify and begin to understand; rather, its strange disequilibrium becomes a part of one’s own cognitive apparatus. One becomes the “subject” of the utterance — not the grammatical subject and not the subject matter of the text but, instead, through a kind of axial induction, the text insinuates itself into one’s own being at the sight where one utters speech and where one assumes the posture of understanding through the use of language. And again, this appears not as something peculiar to the language of preverbs, but something that might always have been true of ordinary declarative utterance, but in an unnoticed way.
Where syntax and time fold over on themselves and the very being of utterance shifts from object to subject, the deep relation between sound and sense, or in linguistic terms phonology and phonematics, seems to plummet into the poem’s already turbid waters. “Vocables” are language-like sounds included in poems that do not function as morphemes — minimal units of meaning. Of course, poetry has always toyed with the borderland of linguistic sound — assonance, alliteration, rhyme, and rhythm; irrationalities, liminalities, twilights — teasing the noonday mind beyond the rational. But the interplay of “sound and sense” has generally worked to enfold the sounds of the poem up into the sense of the poem, so that these prosodic elements qualify or in other ways serve meaning, even if to render it ambiguous or polysemous. In this way, poetry reiterates the transformation of phonetic sounds into phonemic systems, a transformation that is supposed to be, according to the dominant school of linguistic theory, the very essence of language.
But in the disruptions of linguistic functioning in preverbs, an abyss opens in language such that the recuperation of sound by sense is almost suffered not to occur. The sounds of words do not actually function as vocables, as for instance in the sound poetry that Quasha has (as have I) over the years sported with in abundance; but almost does so. With preverbs one must have an ear for an abyss without actually falling into it—or rather, without only falling into it. Or the falling occasions its own recovery (if it does), according to the reader’s capacity to profit from the poem’s ludic hazard. And, as in Nietzsche’s famous remark to the effect that if you stare long enough into an abyss the abyss will stare back at you, it is almost as if in listening to that which opens in language through the preverbial exigency, language, at the edge of sound, and where objectivity itself has turned subjective, listens back. And why not? The activity of cognition no longer yields a thing cognized, but one’s own experience inverts and, becoming itself thing-like. . . .
Authenticity and Simulation
I want to situate, if only for a somewhat extended discursive moment, one dimension of the Preverbs within the ambience of a philosophical conundrum that has had enormous play in thinking about language and being over the last forty or fifty years — the problem of whether authenticity can be represented or even if it exists; whether appearances are merely simulacra. I think that the explorations enacted in preverbs may prove pertinent to this matter.
A noun may stand for a concept and a concept index the objects that fall under it; but if I want to think of the difference between a mental event as it actually occurs and the content of that event, a noun has a devil of a time assisting me in maintaining that difference, for although thought as I think it is a singular occurrence, it can re-occur: I can remember the moment of thinking it and I can repeatedly direct my attention to its concept — its informational content — without particularly focusing on its original occurrence.
If I distance my thought from the actual event in which it occurs, rendering it repeatable and capable of communication, even the most authentic thought, thus severed and served up for perusal or expression in language, becomes its own simulacrum. But a thought then is its simulacrum, not merely its occurrence. The incapacity of a noun to distinguish between a thought and its occasion is of its essence.
A corollary: A text both re-presents the occurrence that produced it and presents the informational content that authentically motivated its production. The poem (pace Wallace Stevens) is not only “the cry of its occasion, the very res itself,” but also “about it.”
Today the tendency to reduce all manner of things to their content as information is the last result of this coupling and uncoupling of thoughts from their occurrences. Information cannot distinguish authenticity, and this incapacity is of its essence. (Hence the famous Turing test that continues to addle the intelligence of Matrix aficionados.) We could say that the problematic concerning authenticity is the coupling of an immediate occasion with its information in such a way that the occasion remains distinguishable from its simulacrum, but that then the occasion vanishes into the trace that supplies its information, so the coupling cannot appear except as a distinction within information. There is information all the way down, until it disappears in a bottomless bottom, a passage beneath information where, vis à vis information, authenticity becomes logically ineffable. The authentic as the actual occasion of thought vanishes as well — into a subsequent occasion. However, the streaming of radically transitory occasions remains not only as a ghost to haunt information, but, were it to cease its haunting, as that which would spell the death of information itself. Information itself is a ghost, not only the authentic occasion of its content. But the ghost has its occasion too; thus the coupling.
The reign of the simulacrum involves the denial of the difference between the authentic and the simulacrum in this way: the authentic act and occasion of thought, if taken as an object and distinguished from its simulacrum, has already been removed from its authentic ground. If the evanescent occasion is indicated, referred to, treated as an object — even to declare its inauthenticity — then that treatment is already inauthentic. But then the accusation (pace Adorno) that authenticity is mere “jargon” stands on the same ground as the simulacrum itself. The indication that something is authentic (or inauthentic) is already verbalized, but the fact of its authenticity—that something (a thought, say) really did occur — is liminal to that verbalization. It does not fall on its own to the side of the simulacrum, but it cannot stand on its own through the assertion of some verbal token of it.
And yet it would speak.
Preverbs speak from and in and through the problematics of language and thought taken as occurrence and language and thought taken as content, inhabiting a liminal region that refuses reduction to either or neither or both.
To speak from that liminality — to hold to the authentic while recognizing its logical impossibility — cannot guarantee one’s own thought’s authenticity. But such speaking can draw its interlocutors into the liminal realm, where, as readers or hearers, they may discover within their own problematical being, the problematical arousal of intelligence actuated in its languaging.
All-Night Diner Quandaries
From Glossodelia Attract 7: “Every thought rethinks reversing further” (p. 11).
From Glossodelia Attract 8: “Nothing is the way it’s always been said” (p. 12).
1
I cannot say what it means, even its many meanings, even its shifting senses. I can only report the meanings that in actual hearing arise in my mind, or seem to be called forth by me as I respond to their momentary impressions. I regard their trace in hearing them, reading them. I myself am personally drawn into the fractiousness and quandary of their poetry.
2
In trying to say what the poetry says I myself am drawn into the inquiry of saying what the poetry primarily is. I myself become the subject that inhabits the poetry.
3
First I hear it one way, then I check the trace of what I heard and hear it another. Then I make a move: I think I must choose how to negotiate the traces of these hearings. And how I choose, conditions what comes next in the reading. Or no, I do not choose. I do not think that I must choose. Thus in my own way, the lines’ time passes.
4
What I retain of one line — of the meanings I have allowed to come to cognition as I read it — conditions the very meaning-context of what follows. And these conditionings either accumulate or dissolve, according to how I feel them accumulate or accumulate them, or feel them dissolve or dissolve them. In every attempt to describe this, the active and the passive change places.
5
Who is speaking in these lines? The trace of an inquiry into the relations between self and speech inhabits them essentially. But the readers play the line upon their private readerly instruments, becoming for the moment of reading, the speakers of them. The inquiry thus passes over from writer to readers, left to their own devices to conduct a further inquiry, along the lines the lines have opened.
6
Or, no, there is no inquiry. I stop, startled, and am happy with the interruption followed by a kind of light or lightness that my thought, inspired by the line, has effected. Next line, not so happy. The poet himself perhaps was not so happy, but left the line to sit there anyway, perhaps to further something unbeknownst to me, unbeknownst even to him, unbeknownst to my current reading.
7
Accumulation and recontextualization press their own delete buttons. One cannot in general say how the fielding of many lines in sequence functions. The light changes. The wind stops. But then one is in the Diner and the choice to recall the weather of a moment ago seems impertinent or doesn’t seem at all. It was cold outside. Now you are warm. You are waiting for a menu. Now you choose among listed soups. Now you’re eating pumpkins. The sequence is pertinent or not according to events/decisions you are the site of. Now it is Wednesday, back a week, remember? The weather and the pea soup mix and merge, enter into forgetfulness. The eruption of meaning in the mind compels its own time only, one time only.
8
I cannot give an accurate picture of what happens when I read a preverb without providing a complete report of my own being as I read it, and that is patently impossible. I can make a picture of what is happening as I read these lines, but that is another thing. I make a picture. But then I seem to enter into the poetics of the text by abject submission to its orderings, its ontological demands. And what I say is a trace, a record of such abjection.
9
Two impossibilities thus face off: that to give an account of the poems as if they were objects capable of adequate description is impertinent, impossible; that to present a concrete report of the spontaneous and reflective cognitive events that attend and in fact are that reading is also impertinent, impossible.
In this way preverbs inflect the impertinent, the impossible.
A New Imagination of Intelligence: An Addendum
Though the apparent stance of the language in Quasha’s Preverbs would seem to be what one might call an aggressive neutrality in regard to the many potentially volatile topics that are alluded to, preverbs nevertheless perform, as we have seen, a certain intervention upon the concrete mentality of its readers. This intervention is not without its possible effect upon the concrete condition of human intelligence quite generally, and therefore it is perhaps not remiss to add a few remarks regarding what I see as its historical relevance. The following is a first attempt to elaborate these matters, and I am well aware there is plenty more to think about regarding them.
We are living at a time in which the circumstance of public language itself has darkened and threatens to lose, if it has not already lost, what the medieval thinkers knew as “the good of the intellect.” I need only mention the monstrous babel of electoral politics that we continue to suffer within, but also a confusion of tongues in philosophic discourse, in the becoming dubious of popular scientific writing through political and economic contamination, and indeed also through the passing of a certain threshold of complexity in science itself that turns even critical and responsible thinking into factors contributing to their collective incoherence. Something like the emergence of a new imagination of intelligence itself is achingly called for.
The work toward this has been prepared by contemplative sciences and poetries and the inner work of art and other practices from immemorial times, though no single source for this necessary emergence can be articulated. What characterizes this preparation is an attention to the concrete processes in sensation and intellect, intuition and feeling (to evoke the four Jungian categories, just for the convenience and rough completeness of them) not so much as oppositions but as complements to the contents of these faculties. Whereas the Western intellect originating in fifth century Greece develops the abstract powers of thinking, disconnected from the concrete act of taking thought, to a degree that today seems almost to break off from the organic life that sponsors it (AI, robotics, etc.), ancient India treated intelligence primarily as a process of the concretely functioning mind. Mind in one cultural history came to mean the thing that produces adequate and logical texts, in the other what intensifies its own nature through concentration upon its immediate being. I want to say that the work of our time must be the bringing together of these modes of mentality: thought as perfection of representational content; thought as perfection of the inner ground of thinking. If that might occur in the production of texts, it would have to be through textual liminalities such as those evinced in the Preverbs. The wish that such poetry might truly counterbalance the world-threatening aspect of science and its technologies (nuclear toxicity, global warming, the contamination of the ecosystem in innumerable ways, being the most obvious) — the wish that poetry might correct all this — may seem a forlorn dream, but work that transgresses the boundary between thought as act and thought as content and accomplishes this by suffusion, resonance, radiation, radiance, microdosing, and the setting of almost inaudible spells may indeed be the locus where such hope resides.
The practical site of this work would have to be interchanges between consciousness, intelligence, imagination, and speech that actually occur for each of us in our reading and hearing. I see Quasha’s Preverbs project as offering such a site, where, in not necessarily a merely small way, this work might be undertaken.
[1] George Quasha, Prologue to Axial Stones: An Art of Precarious Balance. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2006, p. 20.
One might recall that Augustine’s deepest probings into the matter of “eternity” occur in his attempt to understand how our relation to both time and what is not time are involved in the act of reading a text. George Quasha’s preverbs enact within the reader’s attention an atemporal exigency through language. Playing intra-syntactically upon the intimacy between time and linguistic structure, Quasha’s lines and fields of lines fold and wrinkle wavelets of a level of being that he often refers to as “undertime.” What is unveiled is returned at once to its appropriate obscurity in moment after moment of utterance whose mode of declaration provokes the concrete coursing of our thinking toward a certain gaiety of inescapable inquiry.
What is it that is suspended across the vanishing interval between a phrase, whose meaning shimmers, hesitates, and sometimes insists even as it deliquesces within that interval, and a new phrase, which resonates the first with an ever-efflorescing transformation of sense? It is as if the lion’s roar of awakening rumbled forth in the mute but eloquent interstices between ordinary morphemes — where the syllables that carry meanings are also vocables, but vocables that percolate intimations of the meaning of meaning itself.
*
I think what distinguishes Quasha’s preverbs from other poetry is that the lines of these poems depend in a remarkable way on the concrete acts of reading them, in the very moment that these occur, whether we are gazing at the page silently or uttering them out loud to ourselves or one another.
Something like a twofold program or implicit agenda emerges: that the work must induce its discoveries upon or pass all the way over to the reader; that it must refuse the antitheses between content and occasion, between intelligence as disembodied thought and concrete sentience as fully embodied but deratiocinated presence.
So much here seems ambiguous, multi-valent, polysemous. One hears a thing meant, but then it shifts and means something else. It is tempting to try to gather these meanings, to decide between them or hear them together, to produce for oneself a thought surmounting them or including them all. But I think this is often to miss their most radical possibility: there is an edge between no meaning and too much meaning, and events on this edge might be inhabited just as they occur to us, in us, as us.
Thus I would suggest that we not try too hard to prepare ourselves to read these pieces, but rather we should read them with the idea of introducing ourselves to the concretely open instance of our reading them, moment to moment, and to each other, giving ourselves permission to hear them, to dwell in the questioning of them, even letting ourselves repeat them, pausing within and around them.
Don’t do anything TO them, to PERFORM them.
Responsibility
The following is a way to see Quasha’s preverbs’ precarious situatedness among their own cognitive and ontological emanations:
Our poets’ capacities to invest in their own invention (I mean how they wear the garments of their poetry, not how they expect to profit from it) relates to what attitude we take towards our own ontological originarity. (Ontological originarity: the not so obvious circumstance that how being seems depends on each of us. How being seems is the site of a precarious poetic responsibility: responsibility for the reader—who will become implicated in the work’s sense of what seems to be—and responsibility to the further life of the poetic content.) If poets treat their own invention ironically—i.e., by disavowing its ontological force—well then, what the reader gets to “put on” is that PUT-ON, that irony. When poets intend the literal assertion of their imaginings, the work becomes a work of enthrallment —enchanting if you find it so — but a kind of binding-spell to freeze the reader’s ontological will and align it to the specific orders of the poem’s take on what is.
To release the poem from these two boondoggles — ironical disavowal and ontological fundamentalism — is where the intellectual responsibility of the poetry lies and where the ontological seriousness of poetic practice must lodge itself.
Quasha’s Preverbs project is the continuous registration of one poet’s shouldering of this responsibility.
The Trajectory of Literal Meanings
Literal meanings have envelopes of possible extraneous meanings or wisps of other thoughts that hang in there along with them.
The Preverbs poet’s art of articulation manages the micro-spaces among these main thoughts and their extras.
Even the lines that seem to have but a single literal meaning often have auras accruing to them by the evanescent fields of thoughts in which they are tremulously situated.
The other thoughts that show these evanescent qualities resonate, accumulate, or produce atmospheres where further other thoughts flare and vamoose.
Self-reflection transitions to the intransitive. No unique sequencing can unscramble their cognitive inevitabilities.
Lines that seemingly “go flat” rather than satisfy a conventional expectation for prosodic harmony or rhythmic closure nevertheless enlist proverbial diction for preverbial intervention and allow further meanings to arise via subtraction.
The sense it doesn’t make increases the meaning scene.
Consider the line “Language makes no promise to communicate” (Glossedalia Attract 1, p. 5). But what if in spite of it all, a missive from otherwhere were apparently delivered to my bewildered yet receptive understanding? Do we have here the fulfillment of a promise never made? But can language make promises and thereby show itself to be an active subject by denying it ever sent the letter received?
*
Multiple meanings may yield a complex of mutually implicating propositions;
or :
Instead of a multiplicity of positive meanings creating a polyphony of semiotic possibilities, a line might proliferate its own obscurities and then offer to clear them up by referring to them, or by inducing attention to the readerly events the line perhaps has just caused to occur.
Or the darkness itself might be made of a kind of light, the light of attention alert in cognition’s darkness.
Ambiguities become local tools of the line and change as they are temporarily resolved in a given moment’s reading.
*
Quasha’s Preverbs series not infrequently speaks of “seeing through.” Here’s a line from Glossodelia Attract: “This is the time of alternative obscurities to see through” (p. 5).
To see through : as through a mist or some space of obscure cognition.
To see through : as to overcome a deception.
But in either case, “see through” to what? And what “time” anyway is this “this”? Anything from the present historical moment to the present readerly event? Or the timeless time of the line itself? Or the proverb-time of the expression “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country”? The poet’s line presumes to see through, say, such rhetoric, offering alternative obscurities to the obscure assertion of the proverb it denigrates and abuses.
Here an entire rhetorical, proverb-like construction suffers its variants.
Or this proliferation of possibilities might function more concretely than rhetorical ambiguities or even instances of polysemous polyphony or counterpoint. The mind must toggle among the sentence parts or among its own construals so that a kind of movement native to that line is allowed to occur. And the ambiguities or meaning possibilities occur as vibrations propagated by that movement--more ghosts and auras; meanings in potentia, affordances for readerly adventures.
The line about obscurities to see through is followed by:
Through thoroughly, as a word weighs. (p. 5)
One might return to the “seeing through” of the previous line, but, reading on, one just keeps on going. Thoroughly through with seeing through, further contemplations follow.
For instance, a sense of a certain lexigraphic resonance: “through” and “thorough” look like misprints of each other;
or:
This lexigraphic self-penetration is itself a kind of salutary misdirection so that the ponderable matter of the lexigraphic items impends and measures: “weighs” — has weight—“weighs in” (like a boxer, possibly), measures what other matters pertain about it. But the line now wants to leave its previous ravishments behind and keep on going without sustaining the weight or momentum of the freight of cognitive baggage hefted up till now.
*
Every ontology enshrines principles of value. Conversely, where values are asserted, a correlative ontology is implied. Therefore, in work where ontology is emergent or tremulous or in process of being discerned, the very values that such work enacts—participates in, encourages, embodies — remain tremulous, in process, as well.
In the very matter of syntactical hesitation and invention, values appear and shimmer, disappear and are transgressed. And the reader is drawn into this play of ontology, meaning, and value, at the site where being, meaning and value are in play in his or her own being.
Axial Reading
[. . .] Axial, a word I use somewhat idiosyncratically to call attention to a certain state of being — free being, or being
coming into its natural state as free [. . .]. What is clear is that the axial is not a thing: not a philosophy; not a religion;
not an aesthetic; in short, not itself any of the many ways that can be used to understand it. It's more like a space,
a worked space — an intentional state of awareness in which something unpredicted occurs: a unique event resulting
in what seemingly embodies its origin and yet itself is original. At once unchanging and nonrepeating.
Axial Stones: An Art of Precarious Balance[1]
My remarks about an emergent or tremulous ontology (above) lead me to the following discussion of Quasha’s axiality, which is for him a principle.
I want to say that axial writing induces axial reading.
If you think yourself competent to read, well, anything at all, your confidence in your competence might impede your reading of preverbs. An exaggeration no doubt, but consider: Slowing down the pace of reading, as one might do ordinarily in order to pick up nuance in a difficult passage, alters the sense of the text as you read it. Your cognitive faculty stutters, forgets what it thought to have thought but an instant before. Alternatively, reading preverbs at a normal pace may well make things slip by that you are aware that you are not aware of. It is almost as if a certain despair of understanding must set in, or a surrender, rather, to whatever it is that is happening in your reading mind, which cannot be grasped in advance of your struggle to understand it. The words go by, or you go by the words, and if the stars are right, a sense of meaning flashes.
Preverbial lines tend to break up inside the syntax they ride on, and in a way that not only plays upon the intimacy between time and syntax, but also inundates the mind with deep and turbid cognitive waters—waters that, as one continues to inhabit preverbial texts, begin to feel like they must have always secretly been churning both within syntax and within time. How does the beginning of a sentence — any sentence — conjoin to its end? How can what has already gone by — the first phrase of an utterance — be altered by what comes later? For it is not only the strangely disrupted morsels of preverbial language that exhibit this temporal anomaly, but ordinary language as well.
The categories of grammar that ordinarily identify the utterance one is confronted with are suddenly of little use. One reads, for instance, declarative sentences that function essentially in the mode of inquiry. The sentence is not asking a question syntactically, but the actual course of utterance induces an interrogative “mood” — a state of querulous openness in the very ground of one’s intelligence. In this way, the phrase ceases to be an “object” that, through the spontaneous application of grammatical categories, one can identify and begin to understand; rather, its strange disequilibrium becomes a part of one’s own cognitive apparatus. One becomes the “subject” of the utterance — not the grammatical subject and not the subject matter of the text but, instead, through a kind of axial induction, the text insinuates itself into one’s own being at the sight where one utters speech and where one assumes the posture of understanding through the use of language. And again, this appears not as something peculiar to the language of preverbs, but something that might always have been true of ordinary declarative utterance, but in an unnoticed way.
Where syntax and time fold over on themselves and the very being of utterance shifts from object to subject, the deep relation between sound and sense, or in linguistic terms phonology and phonematics, seems to plummet into the poem’s already turbid waters. “Vocables” are language-like sounds included in poems that do not function as morphemes — minimal units of meaning. Of course, poetry has always toyed with the borderland of linguistic sound — assonance, alliteration, rhyme, and rhythm; irrationalities, liminalities, twilights — teasing the noonday mind beyond the rational. But the interplay of “sound and sense” has generally worked to enfold the sounds of the poem up into the sense of the poem, so that these prosodic elements qualify or in other ways serve meaning, even if to render it ambiguous or polysemous. In this way, poetry reiterates the transformation of phonetic sounds into phonemic systems, a transformation that is supposed to be, according to the dominant school of linguistic theory, the very essence of language.
But in the disruptions of linguistic functioning in preverbs, an abyss opens in language such that the recuperation of sound by sense is almost suffered not to occur. The sounds of words do not actually function as vocables, as for instance in the sound poetry that Quasha has (as have I) over the years sported with in abundance; but almost does so. With preverbs one must have an ear for an abyss without actually falling into it—or rather, without only falling into it. Or the falling occasions its own recovery (if it does), according to the reader’s capacity to profit from the poem’s ludic hazard. And, as in Nietzsche’s famous remark to the effect that if you stare long enough into an abyss the abyss will stare back at you, it is almost as if in listening to that which opens in language through the preverbial exigency, language, at the edge of sound, and where objectivity itself has turned subjective, listens back. And why not? The activity of cognition no longer yields a thing cognized, but one’s own experience inverts and, becoming itself thing-like. . . .
Authenticity and Simulation
I want to situate, if only for a somewhat extended discursive moment, one dimension of the Preverbs within the ambience of a philosophical conundrum that has had enormous play in thinking about language and being over the last forty or fifty years — the problem of whether authenticity can be represented or even if it exists; whether appearances are merely simulacra. I think that the explorations enacted in preverbs may prove pertinent to this matter.
A noun may stand for a concept and a concept index the objects that fall under it; but if I want to think of the difference between a mental event as it actually occurs and the content of that event, a noun has a devil of a time assisting me in maintaining that difference, for although thought as I think it is a singular occurrence, it can re-occur: I can remember the moment of thinking it and I can repeatedly direct my attention to its concept — its informational content — without particularly focusing on its original occurrence.
If I distance my thought from the actual event in which it occurs, rendering it repeatable and capable of communication, even the most authentic thought, thus severed and served up for perusal or expression in language, becomes its own simulacrum. But a thought then is its simulacrum, not merely its occurrence. The incapacity of a noun to distinguish between a thought and its occasion is of its essence.
A corollary: A text both re-presents the occurrence that produced it and presents the informational content that authentically motivated its production. The poem (pace Wallace Stevens) is not only “the cry of its occasion, the very res itself,” but also “about it.”
Today the tendency to reduce all manner of things to their content as information is the last result of this coupling and uncoupling of thoughts from their occurrences. Information cannot distinguish authenticity, and this incapacity is of its essence. (Hence the famous Turing test that continues to addle the intelligence of Matrix aficionados.) We could say that the problematic concerning authenticity is the coupling of an immediate occasion with its information in such a way that the occasion remains distinguishable from its simulacrum, but that then the occasion vanishes into the trace that supplies its information, so the coupling cannot appear except as a distinction within information. There is information all the way down, until it disappears in a bottomless bottom, a passage beneath information where, vis à vis information, authenticity becomes logically ineffable. The authentic as the actual occasion of thought vanishes as well — into a subsequent occasion. However, the streaming of radically transitory occasions remains not only as a ghost to haunt information, but, were it to cease its haunting, as that which would spell the death of information itself. Information itself is a ghost, not only the authentic occasion of its content. But the ghost has its occasion too; thus the coupling.
The reign of the simulacrum involves the denial of the difference between the authentic and the simulacrum in this way: the authentic act and occasion of thought, if taken as an object and distinguished from its simulacrum, has already been removed from its authentic ground. If the evanescent occasion is indicated, referred to, treated as an object — even to declare its inauthenticity — then that treatment is already inauthentic. But then the accusation (pace Adorno) that authenticity is mere “jargon” stands on the same ground as the simulacrum itself. The indication that something is authentic (or inauthentic) is already verbalized, but the fact of its authenticity—that something (a thought, say) really did occur — is liminal to that verbalization. It does not fall on its own to the side of the simulacrum, but it cannot stand on its own through the assertion of some verbal token of it.
And yet it would speak.
Preverbs speak from and in and through the problematics of language and thought taken as occurrence and language and thought taken as content, inhabiting a liminal region that refuses reduction to either or neither or both.
To speak from that liminality — to hold to the authentic while recognizing its logical impossibility — cannot guarantee one’s own thought’s authenticity. But such speaking can draw its interlocutors into the liminal realm, where, as readers or hearers, they may discover within their own problematical being, the problematical arousal of intelligence actuated in its languaging.
All-Night Diner Quandaries
From Glossodelia Attract 7: “Every thought rethinks reversing further” (p. 11).
From Glossodelia Attract 8: “Nothing is the way it’s always been said” (p. 12).
1
I cannot say what it means, even its many meanings, even its shifting senses. I can only report the meanings that in actual hearing arise in my mind, or seem to be called forth by me as I respond to their momentary impressions. I regard their trace in hearing them, reading them. I myself am personally drawn into the fractiousness and quandary of their poetry.
2
In trying to say what the poetry says I myself am drawn into the inquiry of saying what the poetry primarily is. I myself become the subject that inhabits the poetry.
3
First I hear it one way, then I check the trace of what I heard and hear it another. Then I make a move: I think I must choose how to negotiate the traces of these hearings. And how I choose, conditions what comes next in the reading. Or no, I do not choose. I do not think that I must choose. Thus in my own way, the lines’ time passes.
4
What I retain of one line — of the meanings I have allowed to come to cognition as I read it — conditions the very meaning-context of what follows. And these conditionings either accumulate or dissolve, according to how I feel them accumulate or accumulate them, or feel them dissolve or dissolve them. In every attempt to describe this, the active and the passive change places.
5
Who is speaking in these lines? The trace of an inquiry into the relations between self and speech inhabits them essentially. But the readers play the line upon their private readerly instruments, becoming for the moment of reading, the speakers of them. The inquiry thus passes over from writer to readers, left to their own devices to conduct a further inquiry, along the lines the lines have opened.
6
Or, no, there is no inquiry. I stop, startled, and am happy with the interruption followed by a kind of light or lightness that my thought, inspired by the line, has effected. Next line, not so happy. The poet himself perhaps was not so happy, but left the line to sit there anyway, perhaps to further something unbeknownst to me, unbeknownst even to him, unbeknownst to my current reading.
7
Accumulation and recontextualization press their own delete buttons. One cannot in general say how the fielding of many lines in sequence functions. The light changes. The wind stops. But then one is in the Diner and the choice to recall the weather of a moment ago seems impertinent or doesn’t seem at all. It was cold outside. Now you are warm. You are waiting for a menu. Now you choose among listed soups. Now you’re eating pumpkins. The sequence is pertinent or not according to events/decisions you are the site of. Now it is Wednesday, back a week, remember? The weather and the pea soup mix and merge, enter into forgetfulness. The eruption of meaning in the mind compels its own time only, one time only.
8
I cannot give an accurate picture of what happens when I read a preverb without providing a complete report of my own being as I read it, and that is patently impossible. I can make a picture of what is happening as I read these lines, but that is another thing. I make a picture. But then I seem to enter into the poetics of the text by abject submission to its orderings, its ontological demands. And what I say is a trace, a record of such abjection.
9
Two impossibilities thus face off: that to give an account of the poems as if they were objects capable of adequate description is impertinent, impossible; that to present a concrete report of the spontaneous and reflective cognitive events that attend and in fact are that reading is also impertinent, impossible.
In this way preverbs inflect the impertinent, the impossible.
A New Imagination of Intelligence: An Addendum
Though the apparent stance of the language in Quasha’s Preverbs would seem to be what one might call an aggressive neutrality in regard to the many potentially volatile topics that are alluded to, preverbs nevertheless perform, as we have seen, a certain intervention upon the concrete mentality of its readers. This intervention is not without its possible effect upon the concrete condition of human intelligence quite generally, and therefore it is perhaps not remiss to add a few remarks regarding what I see as its historical relevance. The following is a first attempt to elaborate these matters, and I am well aware there is plenty more to think about regarding them.
We are living at a time in which the circumstance of public language itself has darkened and threatens to lose, if it has not already lost, what the medieval thinkers knew as “the good of the intellect.” I need only mention the monstrous babel of electoral politics that we continue to suffer within, but also a confusion of tongues in philosophic discourse, in the becoming dubious of popular scientific writing through political and economic contamination, and indeed also through the passing of a certain threshold of complexity in science itself that turns even critical and responsible thinking into factors contributing to their collective incoherence. Something like the emergence of a new imagination of intelligence itself is achingly called for.
The work toward this has been prepared by contemplative sciences and poetries and the inner work of art and other practices from immemorial times, though no single source for this necessary emergence can be articulated. What characterizes this preparation is an attention to the concrete processes in sensation and intellect, intuition and feeling (to evoke the four Jungian categories, just for the convenience and rough completeness of them) not so much as oppositions but as complements to the contents of these faculties. Whereas the Western intellect originating in fifth century Greece develops the abstract powers of thinking, disconnected from the concrete act of taking thought, to a degree that today seems almost to break off from the organic life that sponsors it (AI, robotics, etc.), ancient India treated intelligence primarily as a process of the concretely functioning mind. Mind in one cultural history came to mean the thing that produces adequate and logical texts, in the other what intensifies its own nature through concentration upon its immediate being. I want to say that the work of our time must be the bringing together of these modes of mentality: thought as perfection of representational content; thought as perfection of the inner ground of thinking. If that might occur in the production of texts, it would have to be through textual liminalities such as those evinced in the Preverbs. The wish that such poetry might truly counterbalance the world-threatening aspect of science and its technologies (nuclear toxicity, global warming, the contamination of the ecosystem in innumerable ways, being the most obvious) — the wish that poetry might correct all this — may seem a forlorn dream, but work that transgresses the boundary between thought as act and thought as content and accomplishes this by suffusion, resonance, radiation, radiance, microdosing, and the setting of almost inaudible spells may indeed be the locus where such hope resides.
The practical site of this work would have to be interchanges between consciousness, intelligence, imagination, and speech that actually occur for each of us in our reading and hearing. I see Quasha’s Preverbs project as offering such a site, where, in not necessarily a merely small way, this work might be undertaken.
[1] George Quasha, Prologue to Axial Stones: An Art of Precarious Balance. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2006, p. 20.