Robert Kelly
Imaginary Interview With George Quasha Starting With Preverbs
RK: Preverbs seem to be saying one thing after another. Why do you say things?
GQ: Things need to be said.
RK: How do you know?
GQ: They speak, they say themselves.
RK: And you write them down?
GQ: I write it down, whatever it says.
RK: It says only one thing?
GQ: Only one thing at a time.
RK: Why is that, do you suppose?
GQ: Because there is only one time at a time.
RK: Most of us ordinary poets write down something and then one thing leads to another and it keeps going till it stops.
GQ: I guess with me there is no and then. It just says something. An immeasurable silence later, it says something else.
RK: I think if I heard right there are something like thirty thousand something elses. Lines in Preverbs. Is that true?
GQ: That many lines, yes.
RK: That’s longer than the Odyssey.
GQ: Actually it seems shorter because there is no story to weary the reader. Every line is a new beginning.
RK: Doesn’t the reader have to carry something in mind, from line to line?
GQ: What could she possibly carry? Where could he carry it?
RK: Have you ever written the same line twice?
GQ: How could I do that? It would be another line, wouldn’t it?
RK: Have you ever tried to do that, repeat something, to make it clear, or remind the reader?
GQ: Again, it would always be a different reader in a different reading, even if they’re in the same body. Besides, who am I to be reminding anybody of anything?
RK: So you don’t think of yourself as the master of this ship, the poem, determining where it’s going and what it’s carrying?
GQ: I think that’s so, as you say it now — I try not to think too much about my relationship with the poem — that just gets in the way.
RK: But in the way of what?
GQ: Of the hearingspeaking of the next line.
RK: Nice word.
GQ: It feels like that to me. Remember those old movies set in technicolor deserts, where robed figures salaam and say To hear is to obey? For me, to hear is to say.
RK: I’ve read many of the Preverbs, far from all, and I’ve seen a few dozen, I guess, of your Dakini drawings, those (I gather) late-night acts of obedience of the hand to the mind. I’m struck by the similarity — the single complex visual gesture, the single verbal pronouncement, bearing its own intricacy. Am I right to think in such a way?
GQ: I think so. Quietly, I think so. When you say obedience of the hand to the mind, I suppose you’re implying a like obedience of the written word to the mind. I’m only afraid you’ll ask me if they’re the same mind.
RK: I wouldn’t do that. Mind is not something that comes in same and other.
GQ: Buddhadharma? Ordinary Mind?
RK: Exactly.
GQ: So I guess — quietly again — we can guess where the Dakinis come from.
RK: Calling the drawings Dakini drawings seems to suggest that kind of sur-normal inspiring going on. On the other hand, the Preverbs don’t do anything like that, as far as I read them. Still, they must come from somewhere. Could it be you?
GQ: I’d hate to think so. What about you?
RK: What about about me?
GQ: Do you think all the poems you write, all those thousands of lines in your poems, do they come from you?
RK: I know they come by way of me, I’m conscious of myself as present, somewhat, in their utterance, I’m conscious of my own feelings, desires, fears, as a sort of static in what you’d call the hearing of the poems— static I want to get rid of. I don’t know much more than that. Maybe I don’t want to know. At least for a while.
GQ: I think I do want to know. I think I’m devoted enough to, concerned enough with, philosophy not to take refuge in a vague feeling of Other Source—-I guess that’s weird for me to confess, since I’m the one who attributes the pictures to the Dakinis. But when it comes to language, I do want to know. I think I do. I know you tend to say you’re just a part of language languaging along. And you have some strange word you’ve made up, hylo- something, to say something about the relationship of humans with the physical world.
RK: Hylonoetic, Everything is imbued with some sort of consciousness it behooves us to listen to, write down. Language is the integument that links us, binds us, to the world of things and living beings. Enough about me.
GQ: That word seems interesting, stimulating, useful, heretical, probably wrong.
RK: You must indeed be concerned with philosophy to find an idea wrong! Or even right.
GQ: Well, you know, and well you know, we’ve been over some of that ground together. Heidegger, builder of hedges. Blanchot, bleacher out of false distinctions.
RK: You’re raving.
GQ: Probably to cure my philosophy.
RK: I wonder what Heidegger means…
Q, Everybody does.
RK: No, I mean the name itself. Heide is heath, or heathen, someone who lives out on the heath, far from the legalisms of churches.
Q, Like our friend Heide Hatry.
RK: Heathen.
GQ: What about the –gger [growling]?
RK: I want it to have something to do with hedges, yes, building living walls on the empty heath. Creating live distinctions were there are none. Or were none.
GQ: Sounds like our guy. I called him builder of hedges first.
RK: So you did. But we’re getting far away from Preverbs.
GQ: No, we’re not. Preverbs are all about speaking/thinking, and that’s what we’re doing, sort of.
RK: Speaking as thinking — yes!
GQ: Sometimes I think there is no other kind.
RK: When I read Herr Heidegger talking with Herr Fink in the seminars, I feel comforted in a curious way — thinking appears, appears out loud, and appears to have no goal but its own instantiation.
GQ: You can’t step into the same river even once.
RK: That’s just it. You’re caught, we’re caught, in the sayable, and only have language to say our way out. That’s why there have to be so many preverbs, to say anything at all.
GQ: They don’t seem to stop coming along to be said.
RK: Thank goodness. Do you have a sense of where they’re going, what the final size or shape of the assembled epos of the preverbs will be, in the way (for instance) that Chuck Stein seems to know in some detail the ultimate size of his Tornado Island, and even the constraints or processes that each of the thirteen books engage?
GQ: Chuck is a prodigy of procedure! He can make plans so detailed they look random, like his drawings that seem almost the result of some chemical process of shrinking or crinkling of material, a willful craquelure. I don’t think I can do anything like that by intention, so I’ll say no, I don’t know the plan of the books to come. If any. If somebody up there (in here?) knows, they’re not telling me.
RK: That determination to go on pleases me. You tunnel through time with nothing but language—towards what? You can’t or won’t say. It’s heroic, slightly fou, admirable. I think I’m a little like that too.
GQ: Everybody is like that. Everybody pushes the wagon hard as they can, keeps talking, hopes for the best. Only a real fool knows the shape of what he’s trying to say—and if he succeeds in saying it, it’s only what he means, not at all necessarily what is meant.
RK: Now you’re talking!
GQ: Or lying. I don’t know. Let that be my epitaph: He said. He didn’t know.
RK: Maybe: He said he didn’t know.
GQ: But we know better. We always know better.
RK: Augustine said something like that.
GQ: Maybe, but it doesn’t help us, what was said. The only thing that helps is what we say now.
--RK, 2016
RK: Preverbs seem to be saying one thing after another. Why do you say things?
GQ: Things need to be said.
RK: How do you know?
GQ: They speak, they say themselves.
RK: And you write them down?
GQ: I write it down, whatever it says.
RK: It says only one thing?
GQ: Only one thing at a time.
RK: Why is that, do you suppose?
GQ: Because there is only one time at a time.
RK: Most of us ordinary poets write down something and then one thing leads to another and it keeps going till it stops.
GQ: I guess with me there is no and then. It just says something. An immeasurable silence later, it says something else.
RK: I think if I heard right there are something like thirty thousand something elses. Lines in Preverbs. Is that true?
GQ: That many lines, yes.
RK: That’s longer than the Odyssey.
GQ: Actually it seems shorter because there is no story to weary the reader. Every line is a new beginning.
RK: Doesn’t the reader have to carry something in mind, from line to line?
GQ: What could she possibly carry? Where could he carry it?
RK: Have you ever written the same line twice?
GQ: How could I do that? It would be another line, wouldn’t it?
RK: Have you ever tried to do that, repeat something, to make it clear, or remind the reader?
GQ: Again, it would always be a different reader in a different reading, even if they’re in the same body. Besides, who am I to be reminding anybody of anything?
RK: So you don’t think of yourself as the master of this ship, the poem, determining where it’s going and what it’s carrying?
GQ: I think that’s so, as you say it now — I try not to think too much about my relationship with the poem — that just gets in the way.
RK: But in the way of what?
GQ: Of the hearingspeaking of the next line.
RK: Nice word.
GQ: It feels like that to me. Remember those old movies set in technicolor deserts, where robed figures salaam and say To hear is to obey? For me, to hear is to say.
RK: I’ve read many of the Preverbs, far from all, and I’ve seen a few dozen, I guess, of your Dakini drawings, those (I gather) late-night acts of obedience of the hand to the mind. I’m struck by the similarity — the single complex visual gesture, the single verbal pronouncement, bearing its own intricacy. Am I right to think in such a way?
GQ: I think so. Quietly, I think so. When you say obedience of the hand to the mind, I suppose you’re implying a like obedience of the written word to the mind. I’m only afraid you’ll ask me if they’re the same mind.
RK: I wouldn’t do that. Mind is not something that comes in same and other.
GQ: Buddhadharma? Ordinary Mind?
RK: Exactly.
GQ: So I guess — quietly again — we can guess where the Dakinis come from.
RK: Calling the drawings Dakini drawings seems to suggest that kind of sur-normal inspiring going on. On the other hand, the Preverbs don’t do anything like that, as far as I read them. Still, they must come from somewhere. Could it be you?
GQ: I’d hate to think so. What about you?
RK: What about about me?
GQ: Do you think all the poems you write, all those thousands of lines in your poems, do they come from you?
RK: I know they come by way of me, I’m conscious of myself as present, somewhat, in their utterance, I’m conscious of my own feelings, desires, fears, as a sort of static in what you’d call the hearing of the poems— static I want to get rid of. I don’t know much more than that. Maybe I don’t want to know. At least for a while.
GQ: I think I do want to know. I think I’m devoted enough to, concerned enough with, philosophy not to take refuge in a vague feeling of Other Source—-I guess that’s weird for me to confess, since I’m the one who attributes the pictures to the Dakinis. But when it comes to language, I do want to know. I think I do. I know you tend to say you’re just a part of language languaging along. And you have some strange word you’ve made up, hylo- something, to say something about the relationship of humans with the physical world.
RK: Hylonoetic, Everything is imbued with some sort of consciousness it behooves us to listen to, write down. Language is the integument that links us, binds us, to the world of things and living beings. Enough about me.
GQ: That word seems interesting, stimulating, useful, heretical, probably wrong.
RK: You must indeed be concerned with philosophy to find an idea wrong! Or even right.
GQ: Well, you know, and well you know, we’ve been over some of that ground together. Heidegger, builder of hedges. Blanchot, bleacher out of false distinctions.
RK: You’re raving.
GQ: Probably to cure my philosophy.
RK: I wonder what Heidegger means…
Q, Everybody does.
RK: No, I mean the name itself. Heide is heath, or heathen, someone who lives out on the heath, far from the legalisms of churches.
Q, Like our friend Heide Hatry.
RK: Heathen.
GQ: What about the –gger [growling]?
RK: I want it to have something to do with hedges, yes, building living walls on the empty heath. Creating live distinctions were there are none. Or were none.
GQ: Sounds like our guy. I called him builder of hedges first.
RK: So you did. But we’re getting far away from Preverbs.
GQ: No, we’re not. Preverbs are all about speaking/thinking, and that’s what we’re doing, sort of.
RK: Speaking as thinking — yes!
GQ: Sometimes I think there is no other kind.
RK: When I read Herr Heidegger talking with Herr Fink in the seminars, I feel comforted in a curious way — thinking appears, appears out loud, and appears to have no goal but its own instantiation.
GQ: You can’t step into the same river even once.
RK: That’s just it. You’re caught, we’re caught, in the sayable, and only have language to say our way out. That’s why there have to be so many preverbs, to say anything at all.
GQ: They don’t seem to stop coming along to be said.
RK: Thank goodness. Do you have a sense of where they’re going, what the final size or shape of the assembled epos of the preverbs will be, in the way (for instance) that Chuck Stein seems to know in some detail the ultimate size of his Tornado Island, and even the constraints or processes that each of the thirteen books engage?
GQ: Chuck is a prodigy of procedure! He can make plans so detailed they look random, like his drawings that seem almost the result of some chemical process of shrinking or crinkling of material, a willful craquelure. I don’t think I can do anything like that by intention, so I’ll say no, I don’t know the plan of the books to come. If any. If somebody up there (in here?) knows, they’re not telling me.
RK: That determination to go on pleases me. You tunnel through time with nothing but language—towards what? You can’t or won’t say. It’s heroic, slightly fou, admirable. I think I’m a little like that too.
GQ: Everybody is like that. Everybody pushes the wagon hard as they can, keeps talking, hopes for the best. Only a real fool knows the shape of what he’s trying to say—and if he succeeds in saying it, it’s only what he means, not at all necessarily what is meant.
RK: Now you’re talking!
GQ: Or lying. I don’t know. Let that be my epitaph: He said. He didn’t know.
RK: Maybe: He said he didn’t know.
GQ: But we know better. We always know better.
RK: Augustine said something like that.
GQ: Maybe, but it doesn’t help us, what was said. The only thing that helps is what we say now.
--RK, 2016