Lyn Hejinian's "The Distance"

Philosophy can be seen as the history of struggles over the definitions of certain words: not just "knowledge," "being," "value," "right," but more crucially "think," "I," "thing," "eye," and just as crucially "with," "in," "as," "from." And "music," "human," "some." Lyn Hejinian's "The Distance" (the second of two long pieces in her new book, Saga/Circus) adds the rarely-considered emotions and passions, regret, pathos, cowardice, enthusiasm, forgetfulness, understanding, shock, love. This addition isn't her major philosophical innovation. That comes with the ways in which she sets every idea, feeling, variety of situatedness into motion. Everything is deployed, and what a concept is can no longer be a question of definition, but must instead be seen in the way it moves, happens, acts, its form of concretion in situated time. There's no general description of its motion; it's always what it is as a particular event, an event being a context thought of not as a "place" but as the whole structure of an occurrence (we are at sea, on a groundless ground).

I haven't mentioned that "The Distance" is the name of a ship, and that the poem takes place as an ocean voyage, without stated purpose or any end in sight.

We are passing through cascades of animation
And even that which is 'merely imaginary'
And that which is overlooked
Soak us.
(138)

on the other hand,

We are surrounded by immobilized projections.
(139)

There is the water, and there are icebergs and islands, frozen water and land at which it laps.

The emotions and concepts, so evanescent in themselves that they can barely be spoken of, let alone examined via direct observation, are deployed in "The Distance" via methods that are truer than definition and more radical than metaphor. Feelings and inclinations are bluntly personified, so that Pathos and Regret as animals simply do things, behaving in ways that aren't any less complex than real-life behavior, and therefore not reducible to allegories for the emotions that gave them names. Emotions are externalized through characters (Madoud, Feliz, Miroire, etc.) who don't embody them, but rather pass through them from varying directions. Or concepts are depolyed in propositions, but those propositions run into figures (the horizon, the wake, the dip and swell of the water beneath the boat, the sunrise, auditory and visual illusions) which take over the definitional aspect of the propositions and replace it (so that the push-forward and pull-back of a particular aquatic turbulence becomes the essential description of ambivalence--and not as a metaphor in the usual sense: ambivalence is, for the moment, nothing but that dynamic, and the water is still the water, not merely an object of comparison).

All these deployments and attempts at definition happen in and as context, and so they're transient and provisional. Once, however, a provisional statement has been made, it will always have been made--so that the essence of a concept or emotion is found in the aggregate of its provisional manifestations, in the dialectic between provisionality and always-having-been.

This is the kind of thinking that even the most far-out philosophical writing can't quite enact (Deleuze, writing brilliantly about thought in terms of speed and dynamics, coining slippery terms that are only defined by their contextualization throughout a text, still falls on the side of the propositional, and so his concepts always risk freezing into thingliness)--but art can.

Life can't be studied
As if it were the nonlife of something
Lived by someone studying.
(141)

The sentences are beautiful.

...I pass the camera
To others so as to emancipate the point of view. Trade is relevant
Everywhere. We can't escape economy, economies.
As far as we can see the world
Is unsparing of things to see, reality
Is profligate, ubiquitous, vivid, prolix, it's all too much, vista
Without terrain, the "too much," the "neither given nor giveable"
World we can neither approach nor leave. We live
Then through. Then having lived, we will always have
Lived. The only immortality is absence.
(118)

Where the colors driven by the wind
Apply, history returns, and so can I, having told myself these things
And keeping them in readiness to tell again.
(120)

...I remember
Patches of my own adolescence as I catch glimpses
Of patches of turbulence the wind is picking up, tearing
At the surface of the sea
But in those days my imagination drew thick forests
Into which I would dash
Into a secret future
Between trees, walking the forest floor on the outer edges of my feet--
Silent, invisible, in an infinite process of disappearing.
(112-113)

Pursuing a vibration that we take for a grebe
(131)

I want to understand
What I have seen and understand
That nothing I have seen explains what I have seen.
(131)

I can tell you
Everything we know about rats but I can't tell you what rats know
About themselves.
(135)

The thinking here works in distances and at limits. Thoughts, words, things and unthingly phenomena call out to one another across them, need one another.

...The northern waters are black as ink,
The southern waters are pale in contrast--but the contrast itself is nowhere
To be found.
(146)

I know these words.
My thoughts are dead without them.
(126)

...I feel all that I feel but there's nothing
There, nothing
Could be there: an emotion is held
In an absence together only
With the strength of an interior--anterior--presence.
But happily the world has poles
And they draw things out
Just as night draws
Bats from barns...
(144)

The bats are encountered, though (in the next lines), at dawn. While most of Hejinian's recent work has been "night work," full of sleep and dreams, this is a day poem, full of waking, sunrise, the coming into visibility of things.

...There is nothing here
But exposure. Every wave, even as it curls over the light, produces exposure,
Every thought is crossed by its own frame of illimitable
Transient foam...
...The sun
Is always prejudiced in favor of appearances--change, eventfulness
And destination.
(142)

A journey with a beginning and no end. Saga flowing into the beginning of history. Exposure of prison, war. Music, the interdependence of what it does and doesn't say, bringing the latter to light.

I'm again struck by the positivity of Hejinian's thought as a writer, her light courage to do and think, to help inquisitive enthusiasm carry itself out. It makes possible a 37-section take on the "life is a journey" figure that gives that figure more life than it may have ever had.

So much of her recent work is concerned with the border, distance, limit as productive, as the source of possibility--of splits and rifts as the production of more individuals, and thus more relationships, crossings, contexts. In "The Distance" there's always the split between past and future, thought and word, feeling and object, body and soul, visible and invisible. The voyage is in and across these distances, giving life to what waits on either side.

Lyn Hejinian gave an absolutely breathtaking reading at Woodland Pattern last Sunday.

I can't think of any other writing that's this generous, profuse, positive in the best sense. That very particular positivity, which bowls me over as a devotee of the negative, is something I hope to examine in a future post--but for now I'll just mention the free and light affirmation of thinking that rests on strata of critical awareness, an innocence that has earned its place by insisting on openness (and not on innocence, naivete) throughout Hejinian's writing career.

Generous, profuse: this close attention to such a wealth of particulars (I find it elsewhere only in Ron Silliman's writing and, in a different way, in Rae Armantrout's; in all cases arriving somewhere Proust only could have dreamt of): anything that comes into the day (animals, plants, talk, weather, objects of all kinds) and the ways a day takes shape; dreams; stories already told and newly invented; the language of other writers (poets, correspondents, novelists, philosophers, memoirists); instances of what would be "pure language" if anything in this writing were "pure;" jokes; philosophical propositions... anything may come in, and does.

And a profusion of styles and durations of abiding in one area of subject matter or another: the reading's large selection from The Book of a Thousand Eyes included a sequence of odd "faerie tales," tiny instances of speech, an extended description of the attitudes of mothers and children in a Blockbuster Video, a series of wildly varied tangents that ended in a catalog of facts about Malta, lyric poems and a portrait of a war zone.

And not just generous in the kinds of things the writing includes, but in what it gets those things to do. The Hejinianian (what a fine adjective to coin) poem can (at different times, and often at the same time) seem like a catalog of things, or of events (which, in this writing, are generally particular connections between things--or things and thoughts--making contexts for each other, producing a singular temporal form with its own shape and extension)--in which case one gets the sense of all this world laid out spatially. And/or the sense of a path through the world (the path of one's living), in which all these things and thoughts are encountered, their time and the time of one's experience intersecting and producing one another. All this has to do with what the language is about. There's also the status of all these particulars as specifically linguistic particulars; they are encountered in thought (by the poet and by readers/listeners) as words, phrases, lines, stanzas and sentences, and the shifting variety of the language is equally a part of the work. (Not-so-)finally, there's the relation of all this to a special set of particulars: the philosophical propositions that have been increasingly frequent in Hejinian's writing since Happily. These especially tend toward statements about the nature of temporal experience and phenomenological observations about appearance and event.

At the reception, I asked Hejinian about the status of this philosophical language in relation to everything else in the work: does it have a special status? If there's a general statement about temporality, are the descriptive particulars examples of that, objects to illustrate it or be illuminated by it? Is a proposition rather just another particular, a thought that comes into the poem with the other thoughts and observations? She told me that these propositions are in fact things she stands behind, but that they shouldn't be considered "pearls of wisdom." The function of the concrete particulars with relation to them is to show those committed philosophical positions as fundamentally context-dependent, their truth a matter of what there is and what happens (my paraphrase). To render the propositions less stable, less certain.

This is an area in which Hejinian's writing is particularly important to me: like no other poet, she's philosophizing in her work, not just quoting philosophy, referring to it or playing with it (I do, I should point out, like those latter approaches as well--and Hejinian is playful with philosophy). When I was finishing my BA in philosophy in San Diego, I repeatedly came to the conclusion that philosophy, in any form it's taken so far, can't really handle particulars--even in its most literary, empiricist or phenomenologically descriptive modes it subsumes them under general concepts and makes them illustrations of the latter. Some writers come closer than others (Adorno in Minima Moralia), and a number can provide revolutionary ways of thinking that, while they end up moored in generality within the work of a given writer, can be astonishingly illuminating and valuable in daily experience (Heidegger). It really does take the kind of paratactic approach native to art (for instance, to poetry, or to hybrid forms that poetry will accept and philosophy, even at its furthest margins, will not) to juxtapose the general and the particular in a mutually conditioning way, to let each have its independence as well as its dance with the other--and to embody, enact a way (shape, behavior, style, speed, rhythm) of thinking or a general concept, which in good philosophy is already a more important task than the direct statement or description of that way of thinking or concept. The last decade of Hejinian's writing is breaking absolutely new ground in this regard, opening up a whole new field of possibilities for poetry.

From work to work a philosophical focus tends to be foregrounded, in intimate relation to a particular linguistic issue. In Happily the adverb first comes into full prominence: the adverb says how something is going, and this "howness" of a "going" becomes the primary structure of experience. "Along comes something--launched in context." Things are always on their way, in transition, with a particular set of ways and speeds of moving--and, in fact, "things" and "states" are redefined as events, less "essential" than the becoming of which they are coagulations or glittering configurations. And these transitions aren't just in linear time (linear time is in question in this writing), but also between perspectives--of the things themselves, which include us and the poet. As Hejinian writes (somewhere in The Language of Inquiry) about the way she thinks of the lines in her poems, any place is the center; from any starting point the mutual contextualizations of things immediately will have already begun to crystallize into events, which vanish into others. This all ties back into the title of the work, the investigation of the connection between "happily" and "happens" and "happenstance," the question "is happiness the name for our (involuntary) complicity with chance?," ideas about time taking on particular shapes: stories make moments seem like additions to, rather than subtractions from, one's life; a move into context ("the chance that time takes") is a move outside ourselves, or into the outside we're included in, into the possibility of encounters ("The matter is here//Can we share its kind of existence?") in which temporal experience is primarily a relation to a future characterized by offering, the constant opening of beginnings. This leads to ethical investigations: to launch oneself in context is to affirm what there is, but the primacy of the future makes this into a commitment to attend to what's possible.* These joyous affirmations are risks. The fullest openness would also be the greatest vulnerability, because in that way of being there would be so many things that so crucially matter.

This is getting abstract, and would require another post to be brought back to coherence.

In A Border Comedy a focus is on story, narrative, forward motion and images, and the language that goes along with those. In The Fatalist a view of time from the point of view of "what will have happened" structures a way of writing that employs sentences, but takes the phrase as its basic unit, linking phrases with varying degrees of semantic continuity or cognitive distance from one another. Each sentence becomes a path defined by the way it's going in terms of how what has already happened will look in retrospect from the place toward which it seems, right now, to be headed. The ethical questions get more pronounced.

These investigations of temporal experience, with their shifting focus from work to work, are more or less consistent throughout Hejinian's last bunch of books--which makes me feel that her answer to my question is (not wrong, but) incomplete (not that I'd expect a complete answer at a reception). Though her many statements are certainly always "in context," and they successfully avoid the sense "oh, this is what this is all about," the commitment to them is strong and ongoing. The motivation behind my question is the further question, "how do you do it?." When I start trying to answer this for myself, I tend to get caught up in notes on the philosophical standpoint of the work (especially since the topics about which Hejinian is thinking are so often those with which I've been obsessed for some time--we do seem to be into the same philosophers, for example), and to temporarily forget about the experiential character of actually reading it, and this misses the answer to the question entirely. What's necessary is probably a patient description of what happens when I read the work, and a more detailed analysis of the linguistic particulars in it. In any case, this writing is generous even in the problems it offers me, the thrilling interest of its difficulties and the prospect of infinite reasons to read it again and again.

The Fatalist (no.2)

Here’s a stanza and part of another from The Fatalist that should help illustrate some of the points below, and those to come. If they don’t… get the book! A lot of what I’ll write won’t make sense anyway if you haven’t read it, and anyway I don’t want to get sued by Omindawn for overquoting here. I’m numbering the stanzas in my own copy, and will often refer to stanza numbers as well as page numbers.

[6]
Some days have gone by that were “good”
as blindly as the justice that a tightrope walker parodies
in her act. The gulf that usually separates one
from all else, the gulf that isolates one and keeps one conscious
of one’s self, disappeared. Not once did I say “I”
but I know that the only “inviolable” privacy lies in dreams
where things are experienced without thought to their having been
“permitted.” Constant change figures the waking time we sense
passing on its effect, surpassing things we’ve known
before making the case that memory of many things
is called experience, and that’s what we call nature
without pictures. Whether or not what we call life
is a valid criterion for these meditations
in time and narrations out of time in which we invent
and criticize too remains to be seen. “I feel right
with myself,” said Diderot, “only when I do what I ought to do.”
What about that for a nickname
nicknamed Annie pronounced Sam and Carl?
I too eagerly await news of gender. I’ll never keep up!
What is an anchor? An anchor is that which keeps one from drifting
     from the subject.
What is a battery? A single battery is seldom sufficient to produce
     energy. The more batteries there are (as in “batteries of
     observers” (unless the observers are critical)) the greater the
     energy produced.
What is cooking? The best cook knows ingredients rather than recipes.
     She also knows whom she is cooking for. The best cook with s
     can of anchovies and three children to feed will leave the
     anchovies on the shelf and go to the grocery store for
     macaroni, milk, and cheese.
What are darts? In an article of clothing, darts (created by gathering
     small portions of the fabric and stitching the folds together)
     provide shape. A game of darts takes place when a number of
     people are sewing.
And everyone? No credible comments can be made about everyone.
                              The Fatalist, pp. 20-21

[8]
Autobiography (the ghost (inadvertently
I first wrote goose) of modernity)
always involves social commentary, which is great
except that it puts pressure on me (to get things
right) and you (to be pleased even if, for some reason, things
disgust you) and becomes
either an emblem of love or a site for love’s contestation. What
will save the project? Why didn’t they call an electrician instead
of three cop cars and a fire truck? The detective
whose name incidentally is Askari Nate Martin
will make unexpected appearances the way clowns do in a real circus
and I suppose they do and maybe I should too.
[…]
[…] The numerous persons she has been
have each died until here is one listening
but I won’t bug you by playing them
while you are asleep. […]
[…]
[…] Their shouts go round
and round in virtual space and even if legitimate never get to where
they will do any good and also be good in relation to things
that come later and will appear in some index as traces
in an alphabetical structure, always a possibility, that we can talk about
at a moment which is merely rhetorical and indicative
only of frustration that we can’t simply reprint the whole wondrous thing.
I want also to be sure to wander around the city. Experience
doesn’t reveal one’s own reality but the reality of things
alien to one, the sea lost in the sky, the sky lost in a sequence of paragraphs
and the wind blows—do I have that
right? the only thing to offer posterity is life?

                              (pp. 22-23)  


Some things to consider in going through the poem (each of these probably deserves an independent post, and so they’re here presented as often fragmented notes):

1) PHRASE PARATAXIS: Where sentence-by-sentence parataxis refers us to a higher level of synthetic activity, making us conscious of combinatorial activity in a “trans-temporal” way, Hejinian’s sentences emphasize movement within the sentence. We reach a word like “them” (in the fourth sentence from #8 quoted above) that doesn’t clearly refer to anything in the previous clauses, and have to retrace our steps, to “go back in time,” rereading the past from the perspective of its future. The “them” is an event; until that point the sentence seems to work, at least in the sense that one can trace references, and though any given sentence may be structured on digression. This is a characteristic of Hejinian’s writing here: the sentences are almost right, and their “bumps” are carefully placed so that that “almost” becomes glaringly apparent—rejection of closure. The kind of thought here is concerned with motion, process—travel of various kinds as themes. Itinerary as “where I’ll go” or “where I’ve been,” an order of paths and pauses, locations and transitions, moments and their turning into one another, not quite fluidly.
     Also kind of motion: speed, way of circling back, how far one goes…
     The “them” of a sentence as a viewpoint from which where you’ve been can be seen differently?
     The fact that few sentences end where the line ends (there are actually more than the usual number in the examples above). The interaction of phrase, line and sentence… ways of keeping us in motion, in transit.

2) STANZAIC UNITY: Various kinds. Often they start & end with similar concerns, often as “different views” of them (as in #8). Within a stanza, clusters of concepts, in counterpoint to the sharing or repetition of concepts or syntactic forms or kinds of motion of thought between stanzas.
     Or there’s a formal unity: alternation of short sentences with long, complex ones (relation to point #3). Or, for example, the series of definitions in #6, which form occurs nowhere else so far in the poem, but which may refer to the definitional quality of the whole project (“what might it mean to be ‘a fatalist’?”.    

3) GENERAL AND PARTICULAR: Funny that there’s a concept of the particular.
     … we usually think of the general concept as providing the context for the particulars. Here the concrete detail, in a short sentences, contextualizes and specifies what’s more general. This happens in the transitions through the first four sentences in #8.
     Though it’s not that the concepts are exclusively generated by the details; she is investigating concepts, but they’re concepts that relate to particularized experience.
     Also see Hejinian’s statement, in the essay “The Rejection of Closure,” about the open text as one that can never be reduced to the arguments that get brought into it, but doesn’t abandon them either. This points toward an answer to one of my initial questions about poetry and philosophy.
     The “cooking” part of #6 as an example: the general definition of “cooking” becomes the definition of “a cook” (recall “fate” vs. “a fatalist”), and the good cook is one who takes into account the particulars: the ingredients, the given situation.

4) STATUS OF “I” AND OTHER PRONOUNS: “I” as nexus of experience and as interlocutor. Same with “we,” people represented by their initials, “you.” These are always present in Hejinian’s sentences, at least by implication.  Experience includes the experiencer and the experienced, which is ALIEN, strange. Encounters with things. Expand on the difference between this and the lyric “I.” And various narrative “I”s; this one is quite involved in what’s narrated.  

5) and more…

Digression on "fate" (2 of 2)

If the consequences of an “objective” view of fate lead to insignificance, then any meaningful consideration of the idea must be based somewhere else—for example, in experienced time. Not only does what we think of as objective time fail to match up with theories like that of spacetime; it’s also not something we truly experience. The common objective theory of time says, more or less, that only the present “exists,” and that time is a continuous replacement of one present by another; the past and future only “exist” in their relations to the present. What we experience, though, is never the present moment, but rather a movement in which the immediate future is always becoming the immediate past, with a threshold somewhere beyond which anticipation and memory undergo a qualitative change in relation to the more distant past and future. Continuities of various shapes, sizes and qualities structure our temporal experience.

That temporal experience is the relevant frame in The Fatalist is clear from its title; the book isn’t called Fate. I’d also suggest that the article in the title isn’t meant to specify a single character or person. As with her The Beginner, the point of Hejinian’s investigation is partly to ask, “what is it to be a fatalist? or what might that mean? what does the fatalist do?”—the way one might speak of “the habits of the midwestern chipmunk.”

(A brief tangential note: experience happens. This bugs some neurophilosophers who, having figured out to some extent the physical causes of experience, desperately want the phenomenal realm itself to vanish, to be resolved in practice into physics in the same way it is in theory. Too bad, folks. You don’t have to be a substance dualist—and I hope nobody is—to see experience as an effectively autonomous sphere, an ongoing occurrence whose world-forming activity is in some ways the whole point of those little electrical events in the brain, and which features its own kinds of events and relations).

Part of experience is not knowing what will happen. This is obvious. Even if one does think of the future as already, in a sense, existent, uncertainty and indeterminacy persist, since one never knows the future. (From here on out, I’d urge us to utterly drop the framework of the previous post, or the right sense of what’s said here, and in The Fatalist, will be lost). If fate is what will be the past, rather than what has been or what will be, then chance is built into fate; Hejinian explicitly equates them, in fact, just as she equates fate and indeterminacy. (Or chance is fate seen only in terms of the future). She’s making explicit a quite old connection between fate and chance that’s there at least as early as Sophocles; the absurdity of Oedipus’ fate, the fact that it doesn’t stem from an iron causal nexus but that it’s by pure chance that the man he kills is his father, etc., is essential to it being fate.

But being a fatalist is different from having ones life determined by the gods. It’s a chosen way of living in relation to time, one that’s structured by the future anterior tense, by the fact that fate is always beginning right now (see p.59). This temporal structure also makes choice and responsibility essential; the fatalist doesn’t resign herself by saying “whatever will be, will be.” If fate and chance are identical, then the fatalist is one who rejects closure in her life by opening it up to an ongoing dance with the unknown. Some angles on this:
1) To decide, “it’s going to be this way, no matter what happens” is a resolve based on the lust for closure—a final structure or meaning or role in one’s life. Since this dooms the inevitable to be a certain way (since what will become the unchangeable past will always do so in the same way, regardless of what might arise), the fatalist can’t accept it.
2) The only sense in which the past can be changed is by changing what it has turned out to lead up to. Openness to chance therefore means choice in interaction with chance, an ongoing composition with what comes into one’s purview. (This is kind of a Nietzschean idea, from the period of Zarathustra—the idea of “justifying” the entire past with one’s great new actions—though there are countless reasons not to simply map Nietzsche onto Hejinian).
3) Given point (2), one’s ongoing life is always becoming that with which posterity will have to deal (“leaving one’s life to posterity” is a theme of The Fatalist). What’s now becoming that-which-can’t-be-changed will be the basis on or against which future lives will have to develop. So one’s relation to the past, and to the becoming-past of the future, is one of enormous responsibility to whatever futures there will be.

The fatalist is in motion, on her toes, eyes open, in love with particulars, recontextualizing and being recontextualized by them. Concepts are changed by what comes under them. Not a composed person, not an improvisation but the center of activity of an ongoing composition whose material is what will always have been and what’s coming. A kind of cheer, a brand of serious lightness, is necessary. And an acceptance of risk, of danger, a sense of the absolute sufficiency of the undeniable fact that all this might not turn out well—that a positive relation to chance always means taking a chance.

In her Kelly Writer’s House talk, Hejinian says that the need for closure, trumping all else, is one of the great political disasters of our time. Given that the lust for revenge after 9/11/01 still utterly stultifies reason and ethical thought five years later, given that this desire for ultimate security, safety, “justice” and balance is not only utterly futile (e.g., literally impossible) but ravenous and globally destructive, I’d say she’s right. The ethics of her kind of “fatalism” are worth serious consideration, at the very least as an antidote to this terror. That careful thoughtfulness about one’s relation to time can lead to this says something about the persistent crucial nature of emphatic thinking.

Enough about fate for now. I’ll be back soon with more on the actual writing in Hejinian’s fantastic book.

P.S. For some other notes on fate, see Ian Keenan's blog.
P.P.S. I composed this post in MSWord. When I closed the document, it asked, "do you want to save changes to fate?"
P.P.S.S. Farewell to Syd Barrett.

Digression on "fate" (1 of 2)

I haven’t had much chance to delve into the intricacies of The Fatalist since my last post, so I’ll use this one to record more reflections in response to the idea of fate Hejinian’s book sketches out. This is partly a response to D.R. Israel, who doesn’t buy the idea that the poem (as I’ve described it so far) solves the problems arising from a consideration of “fate.”

Last time I mentioned some views of fate one might find ethically problematic; here I’ll begin by outlining one that is, I think, ultimately insignificant.

Fate is usually conceived in an “objective” way—as the “law of fate” that dictates all that will happen. Whether philosophical/religious or scientific, the idea here is that everything is set out in advance. Fate exists in this view, and it exists as something outside of us, outside time, as time’s ultimate organizing principle. It’s the book in which all events are written, or it’s the total chain of causation from the beginning of the universe to its end. Since I’ve thought about this more in the context of the modern problem of “freedom and determinism,” I’ll address it in that sense. The problem, which comes up especially in Anglo-American ethical philosophy dealing with human agency, runs something like this: Physical science suggests that all events in time and space are determined by the interactions of strict causal laws (and maybe some statistical ones, though many would claim that the causal laws are fundamental, and the statistical laws are based on these, or that the phenomena covered by the latter are “second-order;” there are thought to be statistical laws governing social phenomena—no-one’s been able to get anywhere near proving this—but humans are ultimately a bunch of atomic particles, and so it all boils down to physics). If one knew enough about the “initial conditions,” one could, in accordance with these laws, predict every event. This means that everything is set out in advance. There are no violations of the laws of physics, so there is no chance that anything could happen that isn’t already causally determined by what’s gone before. Therefore, though we may feel like free human agents who make choices that affect our lives and the world around us, this is an illusion. This is thought to be a serious problem for ethics and the philosophy of action for at least two reasons. First, it means that all our choices and our attempts at affecting reality are futile, and that a resigned going-along-with whatever happens is the only fully rational way to act. Second, it takes away the very substance of ethics, the idea that we are responsible for our actions. In this view, we can’t be responsible for anything, since everything results from some initial events and conditions in the distant past. Morality is empty, false.

But I don’t think it’s a serious problem at all. If absolutely everything is predestined, then the experience of choice, of freedom, of consequences following from our actions, of wishing that things had been different and thinking that they could have, is also fully determined. My thought and acceptance of the consequences of physical determinism would also be fated. If I decided to become resigned in the face of these consequences, that would be determined as well. This problem was basically solved ages ago in debates over the idea of predestination in Christianity:
“If the names of the elect are already written, why should I be virtuous, since it won’t determine whether I’m saved or punished eternally?” “If you’re among the elect, you will act virtuously; otherwise you wouldn’t be among the elect.” In a substantial sense, fate thought of this way has absolutely no consequences. Nothing changes. The problem that remains for a person who has these thoughts is the problem of the “falsehood” of experienced freedom. But even this doesn’t stand up when the matter is fully thought through. In an absolutely determined universe, “freedom” becomes the name for something that happens, is experienced, and is fully real. My choices have exactly the same relation to other events as they did when I “believed” in freedom. These relations can simply no longer be rationally described in terms of causality as it’s usually understood. I still make a choice, and it still has the character of “could have been different.”

It does take away some of the “magic” of fate, of course. If somebody says, “it was fated that we meet,” one can reply, “well, everything is fated, so what’s so special about that?” (I once had a love affair—a brief one—with somebody who said things like, “I was trying to decide whether to move to New York next year, when I passed New York Avenue, and knew it was a sign that I should go.” I replied that driving on any street with STOP signs must be lethal for her self-confidence).

Incidentally, the idea (in some theories of physics) of a “spacetime” in which all events already exist in some sense leads to the same conclusions as the “physical determinism” thesis.

Well, even this post—intended already as a tangent to the main job—will come in two parts; I want to get something up, so I’ll return shortly with the “positive” side of this: a description of a way of viewing fate that bases itself not on the “objective” view of time and fate examined above, but on analysis of temporal experience.

On Hejiniian's THE FATALIST (part 1)

Dear reader, please forgive the scattered nature of my initial notes on The Fatalist; it is indeed self-indulgent, since I’m studying this work largely for my own benefit as a writer. These little essays will, to be sure, feature more extended threads as I get farther into the work.

FIRST FORAYS INTO HEJINIAN’S THE FATALIST:

1) The work is in long stanzas (averaging somewhere around a page each), and one frequent mark of a stanza’s identity is the readdressing or recycling of motifs or kinds of sentence structure from an earlier stanza.

The book is written in sentences, but its basic unit is the phrase (it’s interesting that, in the avant-garde tradition, the sentence and the word are the objects of a lot of discourse while the phrase seems comparatively neglected). Hejinian often uses phrase-by-phrase parataxis, and discovering the various results of this is one of my goals. Here’s an example—the first two-thirds of the first stanza of the book:

Everything that works does so in time and testifies
to time’s inability to stop life. I can make the “pathetic leap” and go
from one moment to another that bears
no emotional relationship to it, obscured
by shadows cast by light one can lend oneself to
in the cozy enclosure provided by surroundings produced again
and again by the rain, the one
that you both very generously came to one
evening laughing and shouting “Whoa!” while I was writing
this letter. There were three women and a man, all markedly given
to eagerness, the three women admirably composed, gripping
the monitor. It didn’t last, at least not long ago. Now
in the pleasure of knowing that distracted restlessness
—their composition an arena for enthusiasms that remain
seemingly irrelevant to their apparent undertakings—
there are too many options, dithered and frittered
away buying groceries in which a lot (and I mean, really
a lot) of money gets spent on travel.

                    The Fatalist, p.15

The first sentence introduces time as the central concern of the poem, here time as a unity that contains all events. The second addresses time as “moments” and then illustrates this through its progression of phrases that all “work” in the syntactic contexts around them but don’t relate to each other in a way that adds up (what is the referent of “one” in the seventh line, for example)? Each of the next three sentences has its own way of deploying this technique: “gripping the monitor” doesn’t fit with “the three women admirably composed;” the next sentence starts in the past tense but then implies that “it” could now “have lasted;” “there are too many options” seems to refer to the increasing number of people in each sentence, to the cause of the “irrelevance” mentioned, and to the diverse possible referents of the word “their.”

This hints at one possible relation between the philosophical matter with which the book is concerned and the method of writing: different ways of thinking and experiencing time taken as parallel to ways of using and experiencing language.

(I do know how the book was written in a general sense: Hejinian saved all her correspondence with others for a year in a single text file, and then went through and “sculpted” the work from the block of text with nothing added (and, I believe, in order of composition)—though she also says (in a talk at the Kelly Writer’s House at UPenn archived here) that she would frequently insert a  phrase from one correspondence into the sentence she was working with from another). In any case, another characteristic: ADDRESS. The work is in dialogue, though we only get one participant’s side of it.

2) Most sentences start near the end of a line. Except at the beginning of a stanza (no sentence runs over from one stanza to the next), it’s unusual for a sentence to begin where a line does.

3) Here are some motifs in the first six stanzas of the book (pp.15-21):
     a) LIGHT AND SHADOW: Light shows things, which cast shadows, which themselves are shown and are a way of showing things (the things of which they’re shadows), and also, of course, hide things. At one point she writes, “the light that’s tale-telling/ flickers, slowing thrown shadows and the lives/ they carry” (p.17). This suggests a relation between “unrelated moments” and “shadows.”
     b) ARISING AND/FROM SUBMERGEDNESS: Waking up, remembering, and the flip side of these, what’s unconscious, dreamt, hidden—the great underwater force of seemingly delicate waves… a lot of these references are instances of
     c) BORDER-CROSSING or BEING IN THE BORDER ZONE, a great theme of Hejinian’s since before her A Border Comedy. The border is to be thought of as “between” rather than “at the margin,” as a place of exchanges, of currency, customs, language.
     d) TRAVEL and ADVENTURE: exploration, visitors arriving, going out for groceries, returning home. Relation to
     e) RISK: the promise and danger of what’s unknown, the future, in a life without closure.
     f) PICTURES: as instances of the past; more than once recurring pictures: “a frequently painted long-limbed muzzled white dog” (p.15) and “the frequently painted rowboat” (p.17).
     g) SCALE and COSMOS: in particular, considerations of the gigantic border space between the scale of one’s life and that of the cosmos—this is taken as an area to investigate in its own right.
     h) Repeating types of sentences: “I recite an epigraph” (p.16) and “I invent aphorisms” (p.17) is a very crisp type. “Type” might be too blurry a category to work with, though, since it runs over into the other kinds of motifs pretty easily (is “advice to a writer on their writing” a sentence type or a motif in the way (a)-(g) are?).

4) Ok, FATE is obviously the big one. Hejinian is pretty explicit about her concept of fate, though:
“One’s fate is/ what has happened to one, not what is going to happen. Think/ of the future anterior: think of what will have been. It begins/ (is beginning) right now.” (p.58)

“[…] fate/ which is not all that will happen/ except in retrospect, determined/ and determining “to produce this” as you put it.” (p. 63)
Or, as Hejinian puts it in her Writer’s House talk, “what happened will always have happened.”  There, she points to the double-edged nature of irreversibility: a deceased friend will always have lived, and this is a comfort; on the other hand, the event of a murder will always have been, and this is terrifying.

I know (from references in The Fatalist and A Border Comedy) that Hejinian has been reading Nietzsche for awhile now. In his late philosophy, Nietzsche repeatedly states his prime ethical imperative as “amor fati,” “love of fate.” I’ve always uncomfortable with this; the idea that whatever happens is fated and should be accepted can be one of the most horrifying notions of all. Read in a conventional biographical manner, it’s merely Nietzsche’s way of dealing with his drastic switching from elation, overwhelming energy and delight to deep depression and intense, thought-consuming physical agony, a bipolarity he credits, perhaps rightly, as being a source of many of his most unique philosophical insights. When juxtaposed with his contemptuous remarks about “the weak” in his last books, this attitude of acceptance is frightening. But it’s also important to remember that Nietzsche’s philosophy stages the dissolution of the substantial self, representing it as the phenomenal manifestation of interactions of forces, which can and “want” to be fluid. And the idea of “eternal recurrence” is usually treated in a simplistic fashion (“everything has already happened an infinite number of times and will do so again”), without consideration of the relation of Nietzsche’s notion to his repeated emphases on becoming, change, motion. This isn’t the place for an extended look at Nietzsche, though I have been thinking for years about these problems. And Nietzsche obviously isn’t the only source; Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist and His Master was a major source for Hejinian’s work, one that has more to do with the status of storytelling and that (in the ten pages of the novel I’ve read so far), has a considerably more comic stance than Nietzsche’s work (even Ecce Homo, which is as hilarious as it is frightening and sad).

In any case, I imagine that Hejinian found the notion of fate highly problematic and wanted to address the problem.

The Fatalist’s concept of fate isn’t quite as simple as the above quotations might imply, though. Here are some statements that problematize it:

We regard uncertainty (fate)/ as potentially a purveyor of pain […] (p.55)

To accept/ one’s fate one has to find each moment sufficient. Each awful thing/ is unique. (p.62)


There are many more. The idea that fate and uncertainty are somehow synonymous is obviously worthy of father consideration (it seems to have profound consequences for the role of time). However, it seems like Hejinian basically gives us what we need in order to think through her concept of fate. This makes me realize that, if I’m to learn from the book as poetry, I certainly can’t be satisfied to extract its main philosophical theses (though I do intend to keep thinking and writing about fate).  In terms of the initial questions of my previous post, The Fatalist is a work in which a main philosophical idea seems to predate the activity of the text. The challenge is eventually going to be to consider the aspects of the book that seem the least like philosophical statements or examples of concepts, as well as the specific ordering of the work (i.e., the fact that it’s not a series of philosophical propositions followed by a series of descriptions and so forth, but rather an interweaving of all kinds of more-or-less ordinary—though highly sophisticated and articulate—language through phrasal strategies and others yet to be discovered). Enough for tonight. Time to go sing folk music to the drunks on State Street.  


all citations are from Lyn Hejinian, The Fatalist (Omnidawn, 2003), except for quotations from Hejinian’s talk at the Kelly Writer’s House (see link above).



     
  


  

Poetry and Philosophy (no. 1)

I started this blog partly because I wanted a formal self-encouragement to write about poetry and philosophy. It was particularly reading Lyn Hejinian’s The Fatalist, being utterly floored by it, and feeling like it would be a real waste if I didn’t write about and study that book, that got me to begin posting in the first place, but that project has been deferred for a long time (for one thing, my copy of the book was on loan for the last six or seven months). This post will begin a (hopefully) regular series of investigations into poetry that I think of as genuinely philosophical, by which I mean poetry that does original philosophical work. The tautological aspect of that definition is fine as a starting point, though I’m sure it’ll be refined and particularized as this project goes on.

After some initial considerations here, I’ll start with The Fatalist, which should take some time—it’s an astoundingly rich book—and then hopefully examine the work of Rosmarie Waldrop, Leslie Scalapino, and others (Barrett Watten, Kit Robinson… a school essay on Heidegger and Silliman may get revised and posted as well).

Some general questions I’ll be thinking about during this project (these are just starting points; there will be countless others, many of them specific to the work under consideration):

1) What is the relation of expression (of some thought that can be considered as existing independently of what happens in the poem itself—discursivity is one kind of expression), example (where a particular piece of poetic language stands in for a more general concept or conceptual nexus), and enactment (where the philosophical work is first produced or performed by the writing—it need not be directly stated, but can come about through juxtapositions, etc.)? These three factors are, of course, always operating in any poem (what’s expressed, exemplified or enacted needn’t be philosophical—that’s just my focus here), and can slide into one another. In a given work, which, if any, is primary, and when?
This is a question about the function of language at any point in the work.

2) Given these relations, what do they do to each other?

3) What’s the relation of general & particular, concept & object, abstract & concrete in the writing? One reason “doing philosophy” in poetry is attractive to me is that poetic writing isn’t stuck with the discursive and abstract approach that even the best philosophy seems to end up with (on the other hand, I want a philosophical poetry that’s “philosophically rigorous,” not a watered-down or merely “poeticized” version of philosophical thinking, in which the matter of thought isn’t really thought through).

4) What is the philosophy of a given work of “philosophical poetry?”

5) Is the language/ style/ vocabulary/ logic of the work “philosophical,” in the sense of quoting or parodying a genre (or genuinely becoming a more-or-less discursive work), or does it do its philosophical work without “sounding like philosophy?” If both, then how does it negotiate between kinds of language?
Actually, that deserves its own point:

6) How does the work negotiate between different kinds of language?
A subquestion here bears on the status of the sentence.

It's also going to be important, in specifying what "philosophy" means in a given instance, to distinguish between fundamental philosophical approaches. One such distinction is that between a primarily "presentative" mode of philosophizing (where we're given the results of thinking) and an "investigative" mode that focuses on the "path" or process of thinking (Heidegger is the most prominent example of the latter--late Wittgenstein, too, to a great extent--but they're both usually operating in a given philosopher's work, at least when that philosophy is of any interest whatsoever).

Back soon with first stabs at The Fatalist.