get a line sufficiently unfamiliar, so began to work on all fifteen books of The Border Comedy (it is intended to be modeled on the fifteen books of Ovid’s Metamorphoses) at the same time, perhaps only returning to one spot in the work a couple of weeks after it was written and only looking at a few lines on the computer at once (in order not to ‘remember’ the background). “In order to keep writing fresh the memory of it has to fade. Unfamiliar, it is ‘of the moment.’”
In language horizontal and vertical time can occur at the same moment. Hejinian says that the unfamiliarity of the writing is a prompt; it prompts the future.
A lost mass (Paris gone) Shine red in young swallow’s mouth:
One of Philip Whalen’s poems might be written over a period of several years in a notebook, then typed and chopped into separate lines, which, arranged on the floor, are comparisons of different moments or periods of time and his mind at those times. Thoughts would have similarities and differences in two times, say. “It is not collage,” Whalen made the distinction speaking to me. Collage would be a completed woven or superimposed fabric (when read later); in his poems, the levels in the writing maintain their first imprint, the pattern of what the mind was doing at those different times. Is the distinction that a collage is more passive as a construction in the sense that the viewer sees it later, rather than active comparison on the part of the reader and writer in reading as real-time, an activity?
Whalen comments within Scenes of Life at the Capital that the process of copying from the manuscript to the typewriter suppresses the material: the copy is transmogrified throughout (with a sense of its original shape retained, its first imprint having been there); the physical original (written by hand in a notebook, before being translated into typeface) is also activity, it is physical imitation/which is fiction too. That is, it is fiction only; there’s no original.
In Whalen’s writing, comparable to Dōgen’s articulation of being as time (the poetry not being a description of anything outside, but a demonstration of one’s mind doing this—the syntax and structure duplicating the process that is the reader’s own mind-phenomena), the nature of the present is only disjunctive; the times occurring separately are at the same time.
Every place is the same
Because I felt the same, remembering everything
We boated for hours on the Lake of Constance …2
Remembering everything, all layers at the same time, writing is the mind’s operations per se and imitation of it at the same time.
Fits of psychic imperialism
there’s no point in returning until I find out
why did I have to come all the way back here
endless belt of punchcards travels through the neighbor’s loom
repetition of a pattern from a long time back
(P. 55)
Restatement adjusting perspective (also readjusting perception, which is pervasive, different from perspective) to an ordered sense is psychic imperialism; rather, Whalen is making overt imitation (in and) as being itself only the perspective’s moment:
There is a wonderful kind of writing
Which is never written NOW
About this moment. It’s always done later
And redone until it’s perfect
(P. 60–61)
“I just want to wreck your mind.” His moment redone is imitation rather than representation: he’s imitating speaking to himself rather than the writing dramatizing conflicting postures (in the sense of posturing which is to portray his own psychology or conflicts). In other words, he makes constructions overt as voices simultaneously as their being the ego of the speaker. So it displaces it by occurring at the same time (“wrecks the mind”).
Activity is everywhere not operated upon by only one. “No change of identity but a change of state” (p. 111). Activity is itself conditional.
That is, by placing passages of notation of events, seen to be similar and in the particular moment of text (construction of voices as shape/sound, their interrelation which is that moment—as being always outside the time when it occurred) there is a change in the shape and structure.
The poetry is ventriloquism that, by being sensitive scrutiny of himself, is actual conversation. The ‘imprint’ of someone only as their speaking has a shape that is the text.
Moment of change or connection is not coming from the individual (writer/reader) nor transformation from single crucial events, but is throughout the minute notations (isn’t any of them per se, at any one time).
The writing as the crystal does not act upon or change anything:
… In order to make this day great
Yesterday must be altered
(P. 69)
Making “this day great” is at the same time illusion and observing the nature of subtle pervasive change that is not caused anywhere.
Being free of himself is tonal (he makes fun of himself, imitates himself). Speed and vision are manifestations of each other, an activity, being outside.
Now currently appearing a persistent vision
When it happens at the correct speed
But if you get too close it is only
Patterns of light
Drop candy and try to follow it
Creates new place and time.
(P. 82)
Whalen cited The Art of the Fugue as an influence and described to me studying fugue structure, which is a pattern of major and minor melodies. The notebook method of composition of Scenes of Life at the Capital (capital cities of different times and locations are ‘occurring’ at the same time) is horizontal unfolding (procedure of the fugue) as note against note, and melodies moving over time as (if) ‘history.’
In The Kindness of Strangers, excluding horizontal range, the horizontal is implied (it is excluded by at the same time being there implied, ‘recalled’). Excluding this range by only ‘choosing’ the non sequitur (thought ‘connection’ omitted in close secession/succession) is disjunction in present time alone (that is, only the disjunction is there).
The implied ‘comparison’ (to shape/sound of horizontal fugue movement, as if ‘history’) is insisting on the process or act of that disjunction itself as being mind-phenomena.
Only the disjunction is there: occurring by the action (of the mind making leaps and remarks, and imitating its own sound and conversation, to itself or others); but there is the backlog at the same moment that is range itself. An implied vast space and terrain.
Whalen is saying we need not bear out the constructions that are in place. We are not ‘caused’ by ‘history;’ while it is being constructed.
Being
