I have a theory, or, as I actually
think it, there's a principle that has had a grip on me for decades:
In time everything turns itself around to
know it's repressed, suppressed or excluded other(s). This may happen
unconsciously and with uncertain, even unknown results, or it may happen
consciously and with a definite thrill of recognition, radiating outward
until, for one charged instant, nothing seems unchanged or unchangeable.
Of course things do not remain turned around, but, once turned, they retain
a trace, a possibility of further turning - as if already in communication
with their future. If the turn is unconscious, fear clings to everything
valued; if conscious and willing, excitability rises in the sights, showing
movement within identity. You might say, in the latter case, things breathe
freely, even as a spirited stillness gives over to the torque of awareness.
Language tends to take on the condition
of things in a world, and especially the active view that holds a world
together. One's own language perpetuates one's world; indeed, this may
be a primary function of language, world-preservation. To assess the condition
of one's world, one might examine the state of one's language, its degree,
for instance, of flexibility. It follows that the very possibility for
conscious change can be read in the functional range of one's language.
Poetry, then, is an art form of this possibility, registered in the sense
of verse as intentional turning, including conscious
reversal.
This theory of inevitable turning (around)
has the functional status of principle rather than concept,
which means that it translates easily into personal practice, but does
not imply a particular style or technique or any other "self"-defining
orientation.
That's the general view, and in time I intend
to write further about the role of intentional turning and conscious
reversal in poetry at large, particularly as the Axial and
its specialized execution as Poetic Torsion. For the moment, I'm
concerned only to discuss how the principle operates in a particular work
of my own. This statement is created to accompany the publications of
The Preverbs of Tell: News Torqued from Undertime and its alternate
version, Preverb Posters. Let me say once and for all that, for
me, the purpose of theory or a particular poetic principle is not polemical
but dialogical, by which I mean "metapoetic" - the non-exclusive principle
by which any given poetics is an imagination of possible poetry. Or as
Blake said: "All things possible to be believed are images of the truth."
Poetics, or metapoetics, is the declared (non-competitive) space in which
all possible poetics are in conversation.
Each "Preverb" - that is, each line of The
Preverbs of Tell or each page of the Preverb Posters - works
in its own way on an AXIAL PRINCIPLE - a principle with both linguistic
and non-linguistic expression. In regard to The Preverbs, a working
definition might be: the principle by which freedom of being discovers
itself as self-aware language turning freely upon its occasion. The
AXIAL is not a technique or style or device, but it may acquire certain
technical or stylistic tendencies relative to individual practice. Where
an AXIAL act is true to its own principle, it will eventually subvert
these tendencies, so that at times it may appear unfaithful to its own
modality. The AXIAL functions as a declared space of practice -
here I am referring to language practice - in which language may discover
itself as alive and willful and free of accumulated habits, free, that
is, of the dominant tendencies of the generating personality and its received
traditions. The space is self-interruptive, self-(re)organizing, self-(re)orienting.
It shuns its own success as a danger to principled survival, yet it is
in love with its own production, which generates further instance of its
possibility. For that reason every AXIAL statement stands alone. That
is, even when it stands in a field of resonance and collaborates with
statements all around (as in a composed series of lines in The Preverbs
of Tell, which may have a "pooling" tendency around certain words
or themes or sounds, or a published group of Preverb Posters),
it retains its aloneness as a freedom of being and source of immediate
energy.
So an AXIAL LINE is indeterminately
situation specific. It has open resonance with its environment.
Its form (as line or "poster") is intended to "free" it into local specificity
while retaining self-variance. Such open resonance is a principle
of "construction" as well as placement, individually and as a body of
work.
An AXIAL LINE suffers every unitary,
referential or surcharged connection as if it might be an instance of
"original sin" - principle of a first wrong turn - ready for a process
of self-immolation. Its cleansing of pattern ends in a free embrace, enacted
within appropriate reading.
What, then, is appropriate reading? An engagement
free of extraneous constraints and somehow truly "in the moment" - outside
the tug of prepatterning momentum yet following the momentum of
the moment (the instant-specific "movement") itself. Something
discovered on the spot. A leap into the fire and out at once, a flight
in Between. Every flight invents a sequence ordering the data of the topos,
a periplus, a mapping of actual bodily trajection, the concrete "presencing"
that reverses our thrownness in an instant of time. But we are not necessarily
stuck with any one of these orderings - therefore they are free to be
truly meaningful, belonging as they do to their moment, where real meaning
arises. Chosen meaning exists here by force of self-action. If I map the
actual territory I travel, my map is the most accurate possible plan of
my occasion, where I fall true. Here is the one place on the map that
maps itself, maps truly in my act of pointing (to) it. My condition thereby
is AXIAL, and the language I speak in the irreducible event of self-tracking
is Preverbal.
Preverbal? Preverbial? The latter tells
the tale that is itself to the degree of being before itself. It rides
the edge of its own possibility, between pre- and not, tells the tale
that alone takes you along the further edge. We could talk here of something
like preverberation -, as an AXIAL neologism of original turning,
a lexicographic rendering of intensive resonance at or near zero point,
accorded by freed speaking. Such resonance is projective of its occasion,
it throws its possible connectedness before it / around it, it fills out
its field and is radial. That is why anyone who hears it may feel
"chosen" by it, as if something is "meant" to be, synchronistic, aligned
in the expression. Resonance at the event horizon creates radical context.
Everything surrounds itself with meaning. This might be called the poetic
condition itself.
The Preverb - like its predecessor the "Proverb
of Hell" in Blake's invention - is the site of a certain focus, a moving
"point" within a radial field, and despite its single-line declarative
force, attracts reading by field. The "full meaning" (a quality
rather than a quantity) is never fully sourced at the spot of its occurrence.
However no account of the "meaning" is richly relevant without reference
to the site of exposure to the specific language. The site attracts the
meaning. Yet the meaning is not a thing but an occurrence in this time
and in this place that makes it possible to think a certain thing in a
certain way. A site/situation specific assemblage, a local performance.
But where is the locus of the local? The
AXIAL as a pure force field creates a liminality at the surface - between
on and under, conscious and (un)(sub)conscious, above and below. The
torsional force (like a twister) joins the contents of above and below,
indifferently. No hierarchy of important contents; also no exclusions.
Torque busts attitudes.
So a Preverb occupies the space of wisdom-mouthing,
twisting the tongue of truth to include its field of variants, even those
not yet considered, yet inevitable. AXIAL wisdom includes its contraries
as true friends, baptizes its devils in their own blood. It drives out
sanctimonious closure, such as the priestly voice on Sunday that encloses
divine words in pretended pre-human tonality, the lure of ultimate comfort.
Such closure cannot reach into the heart of present being. We need a crack
to crawl out through, a flawed bell to sing its cracked peace, to remind
us we are here. The AXIAL self itself cracks, listens in on itself through
the new aperture, hears itself by tracking what it lacks, knowing itself
as never more than a sound away. A given AXIAL line can lead us out, and
pushes a surface toward its outer.
An AXIAL utterance may seize attention below
the threshold of syntax, in the moment before a reading knows it is in
a sentence, and carry it over the abyss of unintelligibility by sheer
synaptics. When the mind lands, so to speak, it may flood with multiple
syntactics as a condition of realizing that real meaning is never
without (perhaps unexperienced) choice. An AXIAL moment tends to be self-instructive
in the valences of elective likeness. And thinking or speaking about it
itself tends to slip into AXIALITY, which can feel a little like dreaming
awake. Meaning showing up at once as absolute, vanishing and at variance
with itself. A syntactic act can have the structure of sensing that one
is being followed, a sudden turning, and catching one's own mind bearing
down upon one.
Of course we can't catch the present moment;
the thought that we should be able to is a lure of the Limiter. Non-limitation
is a ride of another kind along a vanishing edge. AXIAL poetics is the
practice of talking ourself [sic] through. This is a journey
in conjunction, and we join our multiplicity to take it at all.
Poetic engagement in non-limited/non-linear field dynamics - a participation
afield - draws on the energy of possible reading as something like
a virtual fact of interconnectedness, the sense and sensing of how we
are already "cross-wired" as it were "by nature." The AXIAL keeps these
doors swinging.
The simulations of being thrown into free
space may even be training for the great cutting loose at the end of our
efforts. At least it does no harm to allow art that kind of force of destiny.
One must consider that the mind may be incapable of divesting itself of
the wisdom impulse, with all its opportunity for addictive self-delusion,
chateau-like constructs where the ego glowers in secret luxury. So faced
with an impulse toward wise saying, one can choose among the paths, including,
perhaps:
- to give
in to a known thought, a wise way tested on enough minds to assure a
certain restfulness;
- to think
better, according to a philosophical or theological method, to accept
the challenge of wise saying;
- to resist
with, say, a blank stare, or otherwise (meditatively) allow space to
show, to sidestep the habitual, to seek a shift below the threshold
of experienced wisdom;
- to ride
it wild till its root (or branched) knowing twists free.
The Preverbs test-drive the latter. One tries
to develop a certain touch - perhaps to stimulate, even if necessary to
provoke, the thinking impulse to further awareness in saying itself. It's
a kind of persistence in folly, to paraphrase Blake, giving the fool his
realized moment. If not to see the full face of one's private angel, at
least to read its lips.
The sound in which one's individual folly
is spoken is first of all that of one's own voice. The integrity of that
voice is profoundly at stake in the AXIAL. Poets are often obsessed by "finding
one's own voice," which usually means something like distinctive style or
a sounds-like-me tone. Success in this direction can be effective, charming,
even powerful. It promotes the sense of a stable self. In the AXIAL, however,
the notion of knowable stability of self is continuously in question. Yet
the actual voice individuates, in unpredictable ways, as if its source precedes
the known personality. AXIAL utterance aims in any way possible to revive
that source at the surface of speaking awareness, or to keep the channel
open. Perhaps primary poetic function may be just that maintenance of the
open.
In meditating this possibility of openness
I have come to a notion of ZERO POINT VOICE, which stands
for the point of origin in speaking that allows an optimal release, negligible
pre-patterning and minimal momentum. Each line is generated on the spot
from an energy arising just now. In my theory this "point" (of course
not really a point) accesses what I call the UNDERTIME of the poem,
the non-temporal "time" that runs "below" any formalized rhythmic time,
perhaps a sort of ur-time, but in any case a full-potential time that allows
radical particularity in any given line. This degree of particularity serves
a METAPOETIC PRINCIPLE that allows every poetic act the possibility
of an original poetics and, therefore, is non-exclusive as regards
poetic possibility.
With respect to "minimal momentum", there
may of course be actual momentum in the carryover from line to line. (I
am speaking here of AXIAL lines grouped in apparent sequence, as in The
Preverbs of Tell.) On the other hand, there also may not be
any line to line momentum; there is the continuous possibility of zero
momentum. So the AXIAL as poem space has no built-in principle of beginning
or ending or even continuing. It is open, in a potentially unlimited number
of ways. The mystery of continuance, then, is particular and ultimately
arbitrary from an aesthetic point of view--leaving only an ontological or
somehow magical possibility. The line therefore can be AXIAL in the sense
that its center of gravity is open, locally reversible, and variously in
motion. Because everything is locally reversible, gravity is complementary
to levity. What weighs in a voice gives rise to it.
The actual energetic base here is the physical
voice, and where there is intentional engagement at the level of what I
am calling AXIAL POETICS, there is a complexity of voice-urge
- what makes it begin. It arises out of itself, as it is, where it is
and in relation to anything whatsoever, with no obligations to continuity,
logic, or any other principle of linkage/necessity, therefore open to all
continuities on an immediate basis. In practice, this means that the voice
gathers itself anew in each line. There is uninterrupted risk. The wish
is to avoid stabilizing and intrinsically coercive forces such as stylized
voice, e.g., literary/musical elevation, "personal voice" as carrying
the thrust of personality, etc. The voice arising from its zero point is
in some sense transparent to complex intentionality, and optimally avoids
manipulating in the direction of fore-given aesthetic. The key here is "optimally,"
and the interest in OPTIMAL POETICS or a "poetics of the optimal"
is not purist but open-that only in the condition of openness can
a thing be optimally itself. Hence the AXIAL, which is the condition
created by an open matrix. In an AXIAL situation the voice can perform itself,
its "presence" in multiple ways within the verbal matrix.
The notion of ZERO POINT has a range of implication,
especially with respect to poetic function in the environment, however defined.
To be conscious of it implies a discipline of attention that goes beyond
a conceptual focus on the zero point itself. It implies a state of
listening to and through the voice that returns at every opportunity to
the condition of freedom from extraneous momentum. I am suggesting that,
as is argued in Zero Point Physics, the zero state paradoxically holds the
greatest energy potential, and in that way is the foundational state of
poetry itself. Poetry in this view is the result of a discipline of attention
that draws on the what is available in the actual voice before constraint
by "form" or technique; it could be called an intrinsically charged speaking
with listening. This attention allows a potential deepening of participation
in the undervoice and the source of the rhythmus, a radical
reformulation of the rhythmic impulse itself as singular event. One taps
in to the self-refining nature of a poem's energy, which is stepped up energy
in many degrees of living intrinsic modulation. To be able to go with it
one must discover the special attention appropriate to the poem by joining
in the poem's own listening. Its listening requires its zero
point. Optimally, poet/reader in each instance entrains to the voice of
the poem as close as possible to its zero point. This involves a kind of
release into the source of voice itself.
The intention of this release is to induce
a state of AXIALITY. The underlying assumption would be something like the
view that freedom of movement, at root (or point of branching), is the STILL
POINT / ZERO POINT of primordial possibility. In this state the "wisdom
impulse" is AXIALIZED, which means that it is introduced to its basic, you
could say primordial, energy in such a way that opens dogma and indeed thinking
to being itself. And that could be an original role of the poetic.
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