Mallarmé is germane to this discussion in another way as well—the extensive mathematical calculations in his notes toward Le Livre, his conception of the ultimate book toward which all that exists is heading. The calculations have the same almost delirious freedom as Peirce’s pages and pages of numbers and lists. Le Livre is also full of diagrams, so that relationships among ideas and details are often presented spatially. In general, the notes are shaped like short free-verse poems of a particularly composition-by-field sort. The use of space in Le Livre is, in some ways, even more revolutionary; however, unlike Un Coup de dés, he did not intend them as “finished pieces.”
HOWE: Another point of comparison between them is that just as Mallarmé felt all poetry could be contained in a book, Peirce felt all logical truths could be expressed using one symbol.
Peirce was obsessed with capturing, as economically and precisely as possible, the complex relationships that make up reality. He differed from other mathematical logicians in believing that complex relationships could be more adequately represented in graphs than in algebraic notation. For most logicians, his graphs are unsuccessful, but as a poet, I find that they succeed in the manner of Yeats’ A Vision or Blake’s words and drawings or, most of all, Duchamp’s The Large Glass and the work that led up to it.
I’d like to have reproduced more of the graphs in Pierce-Arrow, but my contract limited me.
SWENSEN: The way you’ve used them, though, is striking. Because the Peirce pages face your own, we oscillate between reading and seeing, and are forced to recognize that we don’t see printed words. Viewing them both, we also become aware of the moment at which a mark becomes visual rather than referential, as well as the role that pleasure plays in that shift. With the Peirce, we’re aware of the beauty of handwriting, and the way that beauty deflects reading and encourages viewing.
HOWE: Recently I have been combining slides of the manuscripts with readings of the book, so there are two narratives—the one I read and the one consisting of the way I have combined the slides. I use two slide projectors, so you can see facing pages, and lists and diagrams mirroring or conversing with each other. And yes, it is the beauty of the diagrams, as Peirce himself drew them, and not only the graphs, but also pages of numbers, the doodles, the lists of words tumbling down sheets of paper—so many things I want people to see at the same time they hear the sound of a voice reading something else. So there are two different elements: slides in a darkened room and the sound of a voice reading.
And so, Pierce-Arrow is unfinished or constantly changing. There is one small manuscript notebook of Peirce’s graphs that I would love to see as a facsimile edition, similar to Ralph Franklin’s edition of Dickinson’s Three Master Letters. Then as an introduction you would supply a reading by a logician who understood Peirce’s system, then someone might try to put into words why they are also poetry.
SWENSEN: Multiple (and equally “legitimate,” though perhaps contradictory) readings of a text bring up the who-owns-what-language question. Peirce’s case seems to be one of misuse by the rightful heir—much more interesting.
Velimir Khlebnikov is a similar case—in fact, he has a lot in common with Peirce—particularly in his The Tables of Destiny. Their physical arrangement recalls Peirce’s existential graphs; both men shared the impulse to spatialize, as well as the faith that physical arrangement reveals metaphysical sense. The two bodies of works must have been created at about the same time, too.
In a sense, Khlebnikov was trying to turn time into, or map time onto, space—to resolve the two. All his charts and calculations were intent on proving universal links among peoples and a universal humanity.
He saw the arts as driven by intuition, and the sciences by intellection; the one based in images, the other on concepts. Their fusion would thus meld these two approaches to knowing the world. It’s another instance of that lovely suspension, as when an object tossed straight up stops a split second before starting back down. It opens a space through which the new can enter. It’s the hinge, or gap—they amount to the same thing.
Khlebnikov’s project was rooted in his horror at war. Acutely affected by the Russo-Japanese War, the first World War, and the Russian Revolution, his revulsion was in no way abstract. In The Tables of Destiny, he states: “I first resolved to search out the Laws of Time in 1905 on the day after the battle of Tsushima, when news of the battle reached the Yaroslavl district where I was then living … I wanted to discover the reason for all those deaths.” It’s an enormous horror, but also an enormous faith, that launched the project, and that remains its fuel.
HOWE: War is always present even if sometimes it is an offstage voice or a ghost. For Henry James 1905 was a crucial year. In 1904 he finished The Golden Bowl (to me the greatest of all his novels). And isn’t The Golden Bowl at some level a meditation on “tourist erudition?” In 1905 he returned to America after a twenty-year absence, this time as a tourist.
“Perhaps some day—say 1938. … they [Adams and Hay] might be allowed to return together for a holiday, to see the mistakes of their own lives made clear in the light of their successors; and perhaps then, for the first time since man began his education among the carnivores, they would find a world that sensitive and timid natures could regard without a shudder.” That’s the way Adams ends the last chapter of The Education titled “Nunc Age” (1905). Looking back now, and considering his book was published in 1918, the irony is chilling.
In 1905, Peirce began an unpublished manuscript notebook that I love. It’s called Analysis of Time. He starts to define time in sentences, then changes to numbers. Sometimes the numbers resemble musical notes. Eventually his analysis of the four-point problem trails off into, “I will not take up much of this book with the subject of discrete quantity—but I refer to a similar book labeled All Pure Quantity merely Ordinal.” At that point he was working in almost total isolation. You wonder who he was talking to other than himself.
SWENSEN: It’s important to see the manuscript—not only the words but also all the sheets of calculations. It’s in the physical strokes that you see conviction and compassion, rather than just “reading about it.” The graphic is presence; it’s the presence of the human hand (the “man-”). Thus you have both the abstract architecture of intellectual impulse and the concrete architecture of the hand, anchoring.
Like Peirce, Khlebnikov was fascinated by mathematical language—both as verbal language used so precisely that ambiguity is eliminated (leading him toward sound work and zaum), and as numbers used in meanings as intricate as those of verbal language—and, of course, numbers as an artistic medium in themselves.
HOWE: It’s reduction. There is something about marks on paper, graphics being involved in radical reduction; it’s reducing a thing to a diagram. It has to do with acoustics, with the fact that every mark on a page is on some level acoustic. Peirce was interested in a universal language but he was a mathematician and a philosopher, not a poet, and there is a difference. An article by Edward Moore and Arthur Burks on editing Peirce has a marvelous epigraph taken from the horse’s mouth: “I am a mere table of contents … a very snarl of twine.” Something said perfectly also has to work as sound. The word “snarl” there could be a pun—
SWENSEN: And puns always lead one back to Duchamp—such acrobatic skill. There’s a wonderful Duchamp series called “The Infrathin,” which made me think of you because it’s devoted to the “between.” It examines the between in its most reduced state.
Examples:
The warmth of a seat (that has just been vacated) is infrathin.
In holding one planed surface just above another planed surface, you pass through infrathin moments.
It’s another text full of numbers and diagrams. The infrathin, an endlessly protean hinge, is yet another approach to the verbal/visual issue and another approach to that point of suspension. The line between visual and verbal apprehension is in itself an instance of the infrathin, particularly when activated.<
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HOWE: It would take a book for me to go on about what The Large Glass means to me. The Bride’s Domain—the hinge between—the Bachelor apparatus. A note in The Green Box suggests Delay in Glass as a “kind of subtitle” to be thought of “as you would say ‘poem in prose’ or a ‘spittoon in silver.’” Erotic esoteric comic ironic passively aggressive actively passive. It’s the figure in the carpet. Aedh’s cloth of heaven under glass, or James’ golden bowl, fragile and hard at once. “Its hardness is certainly its safety. It splits—if there is a split.” It is two-sided. Synthesis, anthithesis, reflection and delay. It drags in my mother, along with Charlotte Stant, and the motley band of vagabond mystics, strolling players, renegade alchemists, itinerant ministers, founders of sects, all those purposive bachelors who arrive here repudiating and recovering something. Duchamp is familiar with séances, mediums, automatic writing, chemical experiments. This is the age of cinema not theater. Museums are the places we gather to worship. Museums are what churches and cathedrals once were.
Henry James and Marcel Duchamp are masters of parenthesis. Public and private. They are feminine and masculine. We will never know what the Bride’s messages are just as we never will know if the unnamed governess in The Turn of the Screw is crazy, or correct. Her story is littered with letters, mirrors, lakes, windows. Is she an Oculist Witness? Sometimes I have the uneasy feeling that Marcel Duchamp could be Peter Quint.
When The Large Glass got smashed in the region of the nine shots on its return from the Brooklyn Museum to the home of Katherine Dryer he said, “The more I look at it the more I like the cracks, because they are not like shattered glass, they have a shape … I see in it almost an intention, a curious intention that I am responsible for, in other words a readymade intention that I respect and love.” But he went on repairing it in secret. Just as James repaired his novels with prefaces.
A Vanity
Keith Waldrop
The notion of elsewhere was beyond her.
—Johanna Drucker, Otherspace
The world i see—there—here—is the world I remember. What is to come is behind me. As I look back …
lute, skull, globe, hour-
glass, and
[end of
year]
clutter
books, music, instruments of
war, astronomy, elements
of the liturgy
viol with a broken
[this century, as
past as any]
string, sextant, compasses, candle
the candle
forest
church in
ruins, the churchyard
extinguished
pillar of
fire
I have a terrible habit of remembering the death of people who are still alive, killing them off by an act of memory.
False memory, I suppose I should call it, but sometimes a person whose death I remember is in fact dead and my memorial in that case seems no different in character.
Until, by some chance or other, I discover that one I have killed still lives. Perhaps he phones me.
Or I run into her on my way somewhere.
Or I find an obituary:
someone I killed long ago is now dead.
pushed
particular
attached to
the body, a counter-
series
soul of the
skeleton, lower
brain, sea-horse and
almond
you who follow me are not
my children
Rain beats at the window, while from the other side precise daylight, gray under a comprehensive cloud but brighter than I would have expected for such a gray day, filters through.
But no, this I beheld with eyes closed and, I suspect, before waking had broken my sleep’s regular rhythm.
I saw it—think, or thought, I saw it—in a dream.
The day, awake, is not at all like that.
unhandled, cannot
be imagined, hypothetical
suicide
… can turn up at any moment
a place in the
lattice, noonday on
earth or
beneath earth
gloomy boundary, world
or not world
musk mingled
with orchids, countless
stars in ruin
battle to the
death, settling nothing but
place of burial
I see, so often, glanced in a mirror, the door just going shut.
(Negative.)
(North, vague image of Jealousy.)
Color reversal.
agility
clarity
subtlety
[dowries]
impassibility
had not occurred to her that he …
strange behavior, accomplished
this
dragonfly groups, force-
sensitive organs
exhibition
block and ax
pillar of
cloud
who said?: Thought will not go far in a negative direction, so things are always worse than we think.
up-and-down
scarcely able to
speak for weeping, heavy
grasp on my arm
machine, universal
gates of torment, mimic
[lost to this world]
mourned as dead, forgotten
dying
can scarcely weep, for
talking
down, up
a noise which I could call
shouting
pillar of
salt
… into
out of which …
strange beauty
trees
caught in the hearsay
Fishing as Impenetrable Stray
Will Alexander
Perhaps I fish by carnivorous scorpion
by integument as glutenous rash
breathing day after day formalistic dilation
& I argue to my dark phyletic
that these Hydrophidae that I hunt
exist like a fever of rural ophidians
I attempt no belletristic index
no formula which blandly contains the hideous
the corpse as biological malfunction
like a signal
or astrological corruption as vault
I cannot assume
any sabbatical of existence
any buried or revealed origination
which swims with a singular logic
in a bloodless lagoon
or a gallery of salt
of course signals emit from Globerigina
like the moon during every phase
as a fabulous cabana
as an occulted lightning domain
each anarchic wave
each voice from aboriginal voids
as an eclipse
as a solar alteration
with the precipitous intent
of a geometric sorcery
with the turbulence of diamonds
brought into view
by dialectical exertion
I fish by thievery
by subduction & germination
where during cerulean audibility
I am engulfed by dormition
where each nuanced gesture in dreaming
evaporates & cleanses
every molecule
every tense rhumatic oar
as regards bodily survival as mass
as a star above a brutish hamlet
full of jealousy
coldness
& fear
the sun
never a demonstrable enclave
or a stable which opens cataracts
to syllabic germination & verbs
at times
I fish by prejudgment
by a nautical disposition hostile to any form which divides me
which makes me parochial by means of standard spectral division
my wandering
an invincible isometric
like a powerful exclusivity
a fortitude
which surmounts the opaque patois of the elect
those secondary monarchs
listed upon scrolls as initiates sworn to the primeval
for me
a cold irrelevant posture
an illusionistic vectitude
which can no longer be part
of spontaneous living engagement
I cannot see myself
as he who exists
who carries ranges in his fingers
which erupts upon second seeing
into a dismal & unfructifying grace
perhaps a synapse
a bribery
a fall into the whispers stunned with the anti-oracular
if I voyaged on Uranus
if I gave to myself the powers of a runic musical pole
I would explore remnants which select from themselves secrecies
unconceived diameters
with language
which utterly de-exists
degree by electrical degree
subverting customs
which will never approach the magnetic realms of the haflon
I am gazing through myself
for non-local starlight
for riddles
for galaxies
alien
& supercessional with zodiacs
& so
I never dwell on options
on paralytic reprives
within a motion rendered by a mind enslaved to theoretical
connivance
I mean a science whose motions that says I cannot exist
which claims itself unshatterable
absolved of pure correction or motion
as to masters
I have none
I fish as a stray
as a survivor who constructs his sigil by superior perplexity
at the same time attempting a ghostly deliverance from matter
from normal convection as it spins through zones of extremis
pointless as to tabloid probings in Rome
American Poetry Page 27