T D Carroll

As with all of my posts, this one has been difficult to pin down, though the underlying subject of this post is pastiche and related matters. Looking over previous entries on this blog I see that much of what I publish is an assemblage of fragments, loosely strung together, with connections strengthened by a gradually emerging narrative arc. And as with all posts on this blog, the underlying factor, the urgrund, is very broadly the search for a subject within a given post, that would link with other posts to ultimately form an interrelated whole.

In this case, the originary spark was provided by my reading of a small portfolio of "emblem poems" published several decades ago. According to the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, emblem poems were popular in the early modern, or Renaissance period, though my exposure to them was much more recent, courtesy of Poetry Magazine, who published a selection by a Canadian poet called James Reaney. These poems are interesting because they combine writing with drawing, and in a general sense they correlate with a previous post that focused on poetry and collage.

One of Reaney's emblem poems is reproduced above, and is one of four such poems published in the December 1969 issue of Poetry Magazine. I especially like this poem for it's incorporation of singular or separate signs into a meaningful whole, and for its cosmic reference point. Interestingly, and perhaps appropriately given the subject matter of "The Tree", Reaney is described as a "mythopoet" in a recent issue of PN Review (#219, 2014) by the Canadian poet Amanda Jernigan, who writes:

There are critics for whom mythopoetry is, if anything, a was: a short-lived literary movement that grew up here in Canada under the influence of the mythopoetic criticism of Northrop Frye, and died out when its chief practitioners – Macpherson and James Reaney (1926–2008) are the two most often cited – went on to other things. In the May/June 2013 issue of PN Review, Evan Jones called me, only half-jokingly, the last of the mythopoets: 'the only heir to a tradition that was once central and has now died out'.

My feeling is that mythopoetry remains relevant, often appearing when poets seek greater depths of meaning. In fact, we needn't reach all the way back to Robert Duncan, or further back to Yeats, Eliot, or Auden, to locate this persistent relevance. As Susan Howe observed in a recent collection of essays (The Quarry, 2015):

Poetry is an incessant amorous search under the sign of love for a remembered time at the pitch-dark fringes of evening when we gathered together to bless and believe.

What does Howe suggest poetry is? Myth? Storytelling? I'll leave that question aside for now. But moving on I'd say that in my practice I tend to blur the categories. For example, to my mind the emblem poems may be akin in a very general way to the broadside ballads that emerged within the early print tradition in Europe. They tended to incorporate images or drawings of various kinds onto a broad sheet covered with printed text. For their part the emblem poem may pose difficulties for the anthologist; broadsides are simpler to reproduce and thus may appear more frequently in compilations of the period. The broadsides valorized text over image, whereas the opposite may be the case with the emblem poems (though Reaney does good work in giving equal status to each). Thinking further with the assistance of Reaney's poems, I realize that the extended word definitions culled from etymologies, such as by W.W. Skeat, might function in these blog posts as emblems — blocks of print assembled originally to form a definition, but capable of producing an image when displayed on the page in other contexts. See for example Skeat's definition of the word "emblem":

EMBLEM, a device. (F.,-L.,-Gk.) In Shak. All's Well, ii.
i . 44. O. F. embleme,' an embleme ;' Cot. Lat. emblema, a kind of
ornament. Gk. ξμβλημα, a kind of moveable ornament, a thing put
on. Gk. έμβαλλειν, to put in, lay on. - Gk. έμ = εν, in; and βάλλειν,
to cast, throw, put. See Belemnite. Der. emblemat-ic, from Gk.
stem έμβληυατ- ; emblemat-ic-al.

It's difficult to think of this entry as constituting just a text; it's a multilingual assemblage of abbreviations, punctuation marks, and signs that collectively compose an image, rather than a text per se. Compare this with Brewer's entry for this word in his Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, which is more precisely textual:

Emblem. A symbolical figure; a picture with
a hidden meaning which is "cast into" (Gr. em,
in, ballein, to cast) the visible device. Thus, a
balance is an emblem of justice, white of purity,
a sceptre of sovereignty.
Some of the most common and simple
emblems of the Christian Church are:
A chalice. The eucharist.
The circle inscribed in an equilateral triangle,
or the triangle in a circle. To denote the coequality
and co-eternity of the Trinity.
A cross. The Christian's life and conflict;
the death of Christ for man's redemption.
A crown. The reward of the perseverance of
the saints.
A dove. The Holy Ghost.
A handfrom the clouds. To denote God the
Father.
A lamb, fish, pelican, etc. The Lord Jesus
Christ.
A phoenix. The resurrection.

Having raised the issue of pastiche and imported a Renaissance era literary form into this discussion, I want to reach a little further for additional, possibly provocative parallels. In a recent book titled Inky Fingers, Anthony Grafton argues that early printing (15th-16th centuries) involved a hands-on interplay between scribes, printers, and scholars. In fact, he suggests that the postmodern sensibility and practices of contemporary scholarship may have been foreshadowed by close interactions between scholars and printers during the Renaissance. A reviewer of his book (Erin Maglaque, New Review of Books July 2021) notes that,

He had begun it by citing Macrobius: 'In this Book all is mine, & Nothing is mine. Omne meum, nihil meum.' Pastorius meant that by assembling bits of the old, he had created something new. It took considerable intellectual discernment – and long, cramped hours of reading and notetaking – to create a masterpiece that was at once his own and a compilation of others' writings. The Bee Hive exemplifies what is so puzzlingly postmodern about early modern textuality: it was both individual and collective, unique and pastiched.

"Pastiched" is the key word here, but I want to move on, for now. Erin Maglaque very conveniently (for my purposes) mentions Pastorius. "Pastorius" is Daniel Francis Pastorius, leader of the Germantown community, which was formed in the late 17th century just outside of Philadelphia. (I've written about this community in previous posts, focusing on Johannes Kelpius (the Latinized form of the person otherwise known as Johann Kelp), founder with other Pietists in 1694 of a small utopian community on the banks of Wissahickon Creek, in close proximity to Germantown). Thinking about the Wissahickon Creek area I'd add that the first paper mill in North America was established close by to the Kelpius site (a little further south on the Wissahickon) by the Rittenhouse family, who also were emigrés from Germany, and who settled near Philadelphia during this period. Kelpius was spiritual leader of his small group; he composed as number of hymns which are among the first written in North America. (Note that the issue of "firsts" is very much of dubious value, and is notoriously difficult to establish and pin down.)

I'll wrap this up with a puzzling quote from Bee-Hive (Pastorius hyphenated the title), which I believe remains a little-known classic of early American literature. (Parts of the book are excerpted in The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature, edited by Marc Shell and Werner Sollors). In their selection, Pastorius provides the following description of his work, situating that work, by the way, within the overarching domain of pastiche:

Whereas many prefer meer Rick-shaws beyond Solid meats, I had rather choose to set before them the dainties of other men, than the coarse food of mine own.

Bee-Hive has been dated to around 1696, so this brief description is fascinating; it's firstly a neat summary of Pastorius's intention in compiling his "Common-place" book, which was done principally for the edification and moral instruction of his sons. But note that Pastorius, writing at the close of the 17th century, uses the word "Rick-shaw"  — whereas the OED provides no examples for this word in English prior to the 19th century! The OED explains that the word is an abbreviated form of an earlier word, "Jinrickishaw", which means much the same thing — a conveyance on two wheels pulled by a person. The OED provides an etymology by way of translation: "Jin man + ricki strength, power + sha vehicle." The OED further notes that the word was "First used in Japan c. 1870 but now common in other parts of the world." It may be worthwhile exploring Pastorius's curious usage at some other time. Note, however, that he wrote in multiple languages -- German, Latin, English, and more. Was the word in use among German speakers much earlier than it was used by English speakers? (The word does not appear in my copy of the Langenscheidt Compact German Dictionary.) Was the rickshaw, as we understand the term, in use in Japan or elsewhere in Asia prior to the 19th century? Note that the OED associates the word Jinrichshaw with Japan, whence it spread elsewhere. What are the origins of the word "rickshaw?" What did this word mean to Pastorius? His usage appears to vary from the meaning we nowadays assign to that word.

One more thing — how is it possible that I've brought this post around to yet another discussion of word definitions and word origins?

More later…

Continuing a thread from the previous blog post, I want to continue to explore the concept of travel, if only briefly though I hope suggestively, along with related concepts and words. A partial listing… traveler, wanderer, pilgrim, stranger…

The Oxford English Dictionary conflates or interrelates two or more of these terms, indicating that the word "pilgrim" denotes "one that comes from foreign parts; a stranger", and later, "One who travels from place to place. A person on a journey; a wayfarer, a traveler; a wanderer, a sojourner" but then steers the definition more specifically towards, "One who journeys (usually a long distance) to some sacred place, as an act of religious devotion." Within this cluster of words, it appears that "stranger" may be the encompassing term. Interestingly, there is no separate entry for the word "stranger" in the American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, compiled by Calvin Watkins. But in his book on English etymology C.T. Onions forms "stranger" from the word "strange", and suggests a possible association with the word "extraneous". For some reason I like that connection; it says quite a bit about the social position of the pilgrim, the traveler, the wanderer, etc. — whether en route, or having arrived in whatever faraway or strange land. Interestingly, nor is the word "stranger" given a separate entry in An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language by Walter W. Skeat (a classic source on the subject)  — though he does provide an entry for "host":

HOST (i), one who entertains guests. (F..-L.) M.E. host, haste, Chaucer, C. T. 749, 753, &c.- O.F. haste, 'an hoste, inn-keeper;' Cot. Cf. Port, hospede, a host, a guest. Lat. hospitem, ace. of hospes, (i) a host, entertainer of guests, (2) a guest. p. The base hospit- is commonly taken to be short for hosti-pit- ; where hosti- is the crude form of tostis, a guest, an enemy; see Host (2). Again, the suffix -pit- is supposed to be from Lat. potis, powerful, the old sense of the word being 'a lord ;' cf. Skt. pali, a master, governor, lord ; see Possible. y- Thus hospes = hosti-pets = guest-master, guestlord, a master of a house who receives guests. Cf. Russ. gospode, the Lord, gospodare, governor, prince ; from goste, a guest, and -pode = Skt. pali, a lord. Der. host-ess, from O.F. hostesse, 'an hostesse, Cot. ; also host-el, q. v., host-ler, q. v., hotel, q. v. ; and from the same
source, hospital, q. v., hospice, q. v., hospitable, q.v.

Note, however, how this word morphs etymologically into a set of quite different connotations, where the sense of "guest" and "enemy" share meanings, and where the word "stranger" is at last introduced:

HOST (2), an army. (F., L.) The orig. sense is 'enemy' or foreigner.' M.E. host, Chaucer, C. T. 1028; frequently spelt ost, Will, of Palerne, 1127, 1197, 3767. O. F. host,' an host, or army, a troop ;' Cot. Lat. hostem, ace. of hoslis, a stranger, an enemy ;
hence, a hostile army, host. + Russ. goste, a guest, visitor, stranger, alien. + A. S. gecst ; see Guest. Der. host-He, Cor. iii. 3. 97, from F. hostile, which from Lat. hostilis ; host-ile-ly ; host-il-i-ly, K. John, iv. 2. 247, from F. hostilite, which from Lat. ace. hostilitatem. Doublet, guest. ^f Further remarks are made in Wedgwood.

This meaning is more explicit in the entry for "guest":

GUEST, a stranger who is entertained. (E.) The u is inserted to preserve the g as hard. M. E. gest, Hampole, Pricke of Conscience, 1 374 ; alsto ght, Ancren Riwle, p. 68. A. S. gast, gest, gast ; also gist, fiest; Grein, i. 373. + Icel. gestr. + Dan. giest. + Swed. gdst. + Du. gast. + Goth, gasts. + G. gast. + Lat. hostis, a stranger, guest, enemy. p. The orig. sense appears to be that of 'enemy, whence the senses of 'stranger' and 'guest' arose. The lit. sense is 'striker.'- VGHAS, GHANS, to strike ; an extension of^GHAN, to strike. Cf. Skt. Aims, to strike, injure, desiderative of Han, to strike, wound. Der. guest-chamber, Mark, xiv. 14. From the same root, gore, verb, garlic, goad, hostile.

Returning to the OED, there is an interesting tension in the various definitions offered there, even though in the end they indicate that a "pilgrim" is one who undertakes a "pilgrimage," in the sense that we understand that term nowadays. After retailing this cluster of meanings, whether related or disparate, the OED allows that the journey undertaken by the pilgrim to a sacred place is "the prevailing sense." My feeling, however, is that there is an embedded meaning in this word and among these definitions: the wanderer who sets forth on a long journey would be seeking something, irrespective of any religious or sacred duty. Or perhaps they are seeking poetry. If so, it follows that the two broader meanings as set forth by Cid Corman ('It was to be more a pilgrimage — and in the garb of pilgrims they went — than a case of wandering scholarship…') may come together to form a single reference — the wandering scholar is as much a seeker as the pilgrim.

The OED indicates that "wander" describes the activity of one who moves about with no fixed purpose; in one definition the word is applied to the movement of a river or a stream. This is interesting as well, since rivers, while subject to change or alteration, do regularly follow relatively fixed courses toward a given destination: the ocean, a sea, a lake, or a larger river — which then subsumes and perpetuates the journey begun by the tributary stream.

I'll note that "planet", which is to say the Greek word from which the English word "planet" derives, is defined by the OED as "wanderer": "A heavenly body distinguished from the fixed stars by having an apparent motion of its own among them." — the OED glosses this as deriving from "old astron." — in reference to the pre-Copernican, or Ptolemaic, system of the universe. This is food for thought. Within that older system as channeled or filtered through Christian ideology, humans occupy the center of an ordered universe — they look up at a set of celestial spheres which have been set in motion by God, onto which the planets, the moon, the sun and the stars are affixed. Humans are assigned their own, central position on Earth (under the direct gaze of God), while the planets "wander" in the sense that they're moving around earth, as seen from below, within a geocentric system, fastened to their own respective orbs or spheres. All of this in accord with the divine plan, set in motion by the Christian God. The world-shaking revolution, and subsequent theological upheaval initiated by Copernicus and later demonstrated by Galileo and his telescope, turned this orderly and divinely regulated world system upside down. That story is well known.

My interest just now however is to persist a little longer in exploring, if only briefly and superficially (and perhaps tendentiously), this word cluster— pilgrim, traveler, wanderer, stranger — and their interrelated meanings. John Clare has a poem called 'The Tramp' which captures the randomness of movement by the social outlier:

The Tramp

He talks to none but wends his silent way,
And finds a hovel at the close of day,
Or under any hedge his house is made.
He has no calling and he owns no trade.
An old smoaked blanket arches oer his head,
A whisp of straw or stubble makes his bed.
He knows a lawless law that claims no kin
But meet and plunder on and feel no sin—
No matter where they go or where they dwell
They dally with the winds and laugh at hell."
(Excerpt From: John Clare. "Poems Chiefly from Manuscript." Apple Books)

And another poem by Clare, portraying the respectable local who stays put:

The Cottager

True as the church clock hand the hour pursues
He plods about his toils and reads the news,
And at the blacksmith's shop his hour will stand
To talk of "Lunun" as a foreign land.
For from his cottage door in peace or strife
He neer went fifty miles in all his life.
His knowledge with old notions still combined
Is twenty years behind the march of mind.
He views new knowledge with suspicious eyes
And thinks it blasphemy to be so wise.
(Excerpt From: John Clare. "Poems Chiefly from Manuscript." Apple Books)

"Dally with the winds and laugh at hell," or "plods about his toils and reads the news." Pick your poison. There is a poem in VEII And Other Poems (Carcanet, 2021) the most recent book by the English poet Robert Wells, which I think captures the complementary tension between making toward a goal, or being at swim in the universal flux. The poem is called 'Loggerhead':

Type of a courage to which the heart, intent
On its own journey, answers:
                                          the sea-turtle,
Unwieldy, solitary, tilted aslant,
Ferrying itself along through the green swell.

Wells explains in a note that,

I was thinking of seventeenth-century emblem poems. But the turtle is a real one, seen off the island of Melos some forty years ago. A turtle also figures on the coins of Aegina, the earliest to be minted in Europe.

The heart 'intent on its own journey' may be purposeful, or may be obeying a primitive, migratory instinct. Or both. But the turtle is a wonderful emblem of travel, on account of its slowness and deliberateness, and in the poem, the turtle is the embodiment of contraries -- experiencing a purposeful enthrallment. William Blake: "without contraries, there is no progression." And so the loggerhead ferries itself along. I love the connection Wells makes to coins — which portend travel undertaken by merchants, and subsequent trading activity among strangers. So too with fieldwork — I understood that my position as outsider, someone who would soon move on, never returning, facilitated a more robust exchange of information, and disclosures.

With this I feel I'm moving toward concluding this one post, but not completion of the larger subject, however. During the years I was actively doing fieldwork, my intention in every case was to fulfill the contractual obligations I'd been party to. But I also sought ways to dissociate myself from any overt purpose with that travel; to give myself over to travel per se. Around that time I read an essay by Gary Snyder in a book I'd found, browsing the shelves of the Carnegie Library in the Oakland section of Pittsburgh. Snyder wrote about a Japanese poet who practiced a traditional form of poetry that involved walking, rather than writing. I right away understood that. In his introduction to For All My Walking, a book of translations of haiku and diary excerpts of Taneda Santōka, Burton Watson suggests that for Santōka,

The two activities of walking and composing haiku seemed to complement each other, and his many journeys, lonely and wearisome as they were, gave him a sense of fulfillment that he could gain in no other way.

The seamlessness between the two activities was well expressed by Santōka in a haiku:

I go on walking
higan lilies
Go on blooming

As a longtime walker, traveler, and sometime wanderer, this struck home. Rhythm, open sky, epiphany — pathways to poetry; words on the page superfluous? Loggerhead; with a shake of Blake.

My intention has been to publish on this blog every week or ten days. I haven't posted since 20 July, so I'm well past that self-imposed schedule. But this new post has been difficult to put together — I can't make the pieces fit. My hunch is that there's a connection between the material at the beginning — the references to Cezanne and to Michaux — and the material that follows, which takes up the theme of travel as tentatively explored in a previous post.

Thinking this through as I've struggled with this post, I know that my purpose is to engage in a process of discovery. This has two components — first, to establish connections among my various interests, and then hone them down to a single focus. I imagine that focus might consist of a rumination on the practice of fieldwork -- but that's undecided. Second, I want to do this in public, publishing on an open website just now. No doubt there are relatively few readers or visitors to this site; readers are important, but the public nature of the blog supplies a valuable psychological dimension; it's a communicative, not merely ruminative process  

As I say, this post is rather disjointed. But I want to move on with it, picking up threads from my previous post to begin probing the meanings of travel. The word travel hardly expresses all that I hope to convey just now, but I'll begin unpacking it here. Firstly, I want to note that the immediate inspiration for this post came from recent reading, with various stray pieces expressing a similar idea, but arising in divergent contexts. The first is from a review by Jed Perl of the recent Cezanne show at MOMA that appeared in the New York Review of Books. Perl is searching for a way to convey the jointure of faultless craft and visionary inspiration in Cezanne's work. He writes that,

 …the English critic Herbert Read quoted the German Romantic philosopher Friedrich Schelling, who said that 'the secret of true poetry' is 'to be drunk and sober not in different moments but at one and the same moment.'

And then:

Gustave Geffroy, the critic who was the subject of one of his most complex portraits, may have been echoing Schelling when he wrote that Cézanne "experiences an intoxication in the spectacle unfurled before him" and then transfers "this intoxication to the restricted space of his art." Cézanne is drunk on sensation but always sober enough to pin it down.

This is a common way to represent the complexity of authentic art, and the work of the inspired artist, and it turns up in a variety of writings, sometimes inserted more or less casually into seemingly unrelated discussions. For example, in a recent review in the Times Literary Supplement of a new translation of Johan Huizinga's masterwork, Autumntide of the Middle Ages (previously translated as The Waning of the Middle Ages), Alexander Murray notes of Huizinga that 'His prose unites precision with passion in areas that commonly pull them apart.' More pointedly, in the Introduction to Thousand Times Broken, a triptych of interrelated pieces by Henri Michaux, the translator Gillian Conoley offers the following regarding Michaux's experiments with mescaline:

Throughout each exploration, one becomes aware of a split in consciousness. While there is a mind at play, courting chaos, there is also a mind acutely observant and vigilant, taking note of every synapse, each glimmer of the unknown. As much as Michaux is desirous of vision, he is desirous to chart the course. While the work is strange, dark, and fantastic, his stance is often scientific, rational, that of one who is taking account, detached. Thus, Michaux, who once attended medical school, is both "poetic" and "scientific" at the same time, taking Rimbaud's statement: "contemporary poetry can no longer content itself with vague lyricism, but only with total self-knowledge," quite seriously.

The similarity between these passages appearing in entirely unrelated contexts is notable. But there's more.  As is widely known, Henri Michaux famously experimented with mescaline as a means of exploring (or accessing) the wellsprings of art. Having read the passage in Thousand Times Broken, I wanted to learn more about mescaline, especially any ritual or artistic implications associated with the substance. In Pharmako Gnosis, the third book of his Pharmako trilogy, Dale Pendell also identifies the jointure, but then suggests that the resulting equilibrium can paradoxically impose significant constraints on artistic practice and outcomes. Pendell writes of Michaux that,

For one, he can't stop the show — the dynamics of the mind. Michaux tries to find the inner laws of how one thought leads to the next, and uses his time in "altered states" totally to that end, a task for which his poetic training, the ability to maintain aesthetic judgment even in the midst of a maelstrom of images, serves him well. Still, one keeps wishing for the rationalist to let go, to fly through the medicine space to a more magical kind of art.  

But where's the connection to travel? I'll try to address that question by introducing yet another dichotomy, also prominent in contemporary writing and in accounts of writerly practice.  In a long and thoughtful review of a recent biography of Edward Said, writing in the New York Review of Books Adam Schatz notes that:

…as Said often pointed out, affiliation could degenerate into filiation, into a familial structure of obedience and conformity. Only in his final decade did he express himself freely on the movement's failures and the region's dictatorships. But, as Brennan shows, the Palestinian struggle enriched Said far more than it constrained him. The themes that echo through his writing – the preference for exilic over rooted writing, the idea of 'contrapuntal' criticism, the insistence on secular humanism, worldliness and universality – can all, indirectly, be traced to Palestine. Not to the land itself, or to the people, but to the metaphor, the region of the mind, that he fashioned out of them.

The interplay between affiliation and filiation, and between the exilic and the rooted, are of special interest. I am of course making free with Shatz's discussion of Said (in anticipation of further discussion later), but much as the artist manages altered states by leveraging poetic training (in Pendell's rendering ), so too must the traveler reconcile apparently conflicting tendencies — to remain rooted, or to venture forth — in other words, to accommodate risk in anticipation of reward. There are echoes here of the religious pilgrim, who for centuries has taken to the road in search of  enlightenment, or to fulfill a religious obligation, or to pay homage to sites or shrines invested with spiritual or historical significance.

As Cid Corman writes in his introduction to Basho's Back Roads to Far Towns, Basho and his friend Sora embarked on just such a journey, which they'd been looking forward to for some time:

The journey was one both had looked forward to and realized would be difficult and even dangerous. And, indeed, one might not return. It was to be more a pilgrimage — and in the garb of pilgrims they went — than a case of wandering scholarship: a sight not uncommon even in modern Japan, visiting from temple to temple, seeing old acquaintances, places famed in history or poetry or legend, touchstones for the life lived, the dying to come and what life continues.

Corman captures the tension between the anticipated rewards and the unexpected dangers associated with travel. Basho was a great traveler and a great world poet, who in fact fell ill and died on a subsequent journey, aged 51. His 'death poem', composed just four days before his death, suggests the deep intertwining of life and travel for Basho:

On journey, ill:

my dream goes wandering

over withered fields.

The 14th century traveler Ibn Battuta likewise left an important account of his journeys, making the pilgrimage to Mecca and other holy sites at age 22, later reporting on those as he did on the habits, customs, and experiences of peoples and places he encountered along the way — Cairo, Mecca and Medina, Andalusia, the Maghreb, Mogadishu and the Gulf of Aden, and so on. He begins his narrative thus:

I left Tangier, my birthplace, on Thursday, 2nd Rajab 725 [June 14, 1325], being at that time twenty-two years of age [22 lunar years; 21 and 4 months by solar reckoning], with the intention of making the Pilgrimage to the Holy House [at Mecca] and the Tomb of the Prophet [at Medina].

Unlike Basho, Ibn Battuta set forth alone, relying on family connections and on serendipitous encounters along the way. He too was well aware of the difficulties and potential dangers associated with traveling far from home, and which can be met and overcome, as he suggests in his account of a prophetic dream:

A dream of travels to come

That night, while I was sleeping on the roof of the cell, I dreamed that I was on the wing of a great bird which was flying with me towards Mecca, then to Yemen, then eastwards and thereafter going towards the south, then flying far eastwards and finally landing in a dark and green country, where it left me. I was astonished at this dream and said to myself "If the shaykh can interpret my dream for me, he is all that they say he is." Next morning, after all the other visitors had gone, he called me and when I had related my dream interpreted it to me saying: "You will make the pilgrimage [to Mecca] and visit [the Tomb of] the Prophet, and you will travel through Yemen, Iraq, the country of the Turks, and India. You will stay there for a long time and meet there my brother Dilshad the Indian, who will rescue you from a danger into which you will fall." Then he gave me a travelling-provision of small cakes and money, and I bade him farewell and departed. Never since parting from him have I met on my journeys aught but good fortune, and his blessings have stood me in good stead.

There are others who sought a middle ground of sorts — valorizing the idea of travel while not actually making the trip. I'm thinking here of the Moroccan poet Ibn Darradj al-Qastalli, who was active during the 10th century C.E. Pierre Joris and Habib Tengour print two of his poems in their Book of North African Literature (Volume 4 in the Poems for the Millennium series). Addressing his wife, the poet-traveler conveys the double nature of traveling thus:

Don't you know that to settle down means to die     

and that the homes of those who have no will become graves?

Didn't you try to read the early birds' omen?

Didn't they fly to the right to tell you the journey would be safe?

This long journey does scare me

though the hope of kissing al-Mansur's hand sustains me

Here again is the double or fraught nature of travel — the intertwining elements of risk and reward, to be experienced at home, and on the road. That said, although traveling formed the subject of Ibn Darradj's poetry, it was not part of his lived experience. In a note to their selection of these poems, Joris and Tengour quote translator Abdelfetah Chenni, who writes that,

Ibn Darradj is known as the poet of 'exile, separation, geographical nomadicity,' yet he's never been farther than Morocco, & each time he traveled, his family was with him: the man lived more in a nostalgic nomadic world of his own, though he did write excellent poems thanks to this virtual nomadic state of mind.

There's much more to be said here. But meanwhile, this post has wandered long and far, without arriving at any particular destination, or completion. I'll return to this subject in my next post.

*NOTE: Joris and Tengour provide a reference for an online version of Ibn Battuta's Travels, where I subsequently read the book and found the quotes which I've used in this post. Searching afterwards for a compelling image, I pulled a book from my shelf which I'd forgotten I owned -- an illustrated retelling of the Ibn Battuta narrative by James Rumford. I've used one of Rumford's images at the top of this post; his book was published in 2001 by Houghton Mifflin Company. The web version of Ibn Battuta's Travels can be accessed here, in the "Internet Medieval Sourcebook" on the Fordham University website.

I like to employ diverse technologies in composing poems and other texts (including blog posts), a writing practice that's loosely organized around the separate workspaces I've set up in my office — a sit-down writing table, a standup desk, and a shelf extension where I consult printed reference materials. These workspaces are interchangeable in practice, with the exception of an oakwood library chair, reserved for sitting and reading. All of these workstations are situated within a totalizing space of about a hundred square feet! — and where the majority of wall space is committed to shelving for books. Whenever possible, as I say, I diversify my writing qua writing practice, using either the computer, pencil on paper, or ink (fountain pen or quill), on paper. There's drawing paper on hand too, along with a variety of inks, pencils and pens, charcoal, and other tools such as compass, rulers, protractor.

At home in Philadelphia between field trips, I would routinely walk through the city neighborhoods, visiting especially the many small, independent galleries and bookshops. In Old City one day I walked into a small gallery and began looking at the paintings hung there. Very soon the owner — an artist — emerged from an adjacent room. We talked. At the time I was actively doing fieldwork, traveling wherever that took me, and when I mentioned my work, he became interested and made a leap, encouraging me to begin drawing to capture whatever insight -- esoteric, hermetic -- resulting from my relinquishing the familiar spaces/places, to approach the distant the unfamiliar the unknown (opposite/oppositional-spaces/places) — not mirrors — spaces/places closed or veiled — typically available to those on the inside, unavailable to those on the outside. Such was the nature of our conversation that day.

I wrote the following to a local artist in December 2009, relating to a project I was working on at the time:

Beyond all that, I also agree that we need to make more contact in the neighborhood itself, with new people. Remember the Lao monk that rainy Saturday when we visited Koune? [This was a recent visit to a Lao Buddhist temple in Philadelphia.] He was so expansive and expressive, but we really couldn't 'understand' much of what he was saying. But he talked, and we listened, and it worked. Fieldwork is like that in general. But more particularly, we need to explore that sort of communicative potential at large in the neighborhood and find social spaces where we really don't know what's going on or what people are saying, but we are anyway involved in some sort of deep engagement whether with English speakers or others that will produce something authentic, uncontrived. Interesting how that something could just as well be babble rather than words, or that it begins with babble, in any case, language notwithstanding.

And several years later, a note to myself:

"Discovery" on BBC this morning 9 September [2016] aired in the 3am hour sounded interesting -- about risk in scientific research and related issues in the context of the historical development of certain lines of inquiry and also I think and perhaps especially the idea of error as part of the shaping and production of knowledge and ultimately the political dimension of science and its applicability. At the moment I tuned in and began to absorb what I was hearing I'd been thinking about writing about fieldwork and all the indeterminacies associated with that. There was something on the program about "setting the meter" incorrectly, perhaps in an experimental process, with that error being carried through and shaping the outcome importantly, which dovetailed somehow with my own thought process at that moment, fieldwork such as it is being fraught with "error". For example, my idea of note taking and listening within a time rift that inhibits or restricts perception of the actual information being provided while simultaneously opening doors or windows of perception onto realms of intuitive -- or counterintuitive -- "meanings" not otherwise available in everyday discourse. So we do fieldwork not fundamentally in order to document and record information or manufacture data, but to set up conditions to achieve or gain access to these other realms.

Standing and talking in that storefront gallery space in Philadelphia, I realized that the artist had intuited something fundamental and important. I agreed that, yes, I've long felt that drawing could be a way to free my hand, which held a position at the threshold of those intimated worlds. The artist suggested I contact a friend who was (at that time) an instructor at the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia, suggested I explain that he was commending me to him, that I join the friend's drawing class at Slought. I did write to him, and was invited to join the class — but didn't follow through — probably because I had to leave town for the next fieldwork gig.

Cultivation of drawing skills aside, I do work with fountain pen, with inkwell and quill, with pencil and paper, which I believe are significant affordances of drawing. With this in mind, I looked through a book called Untitled Passages by Henri Michaux, having just re-read Michaux's essay on the Chinese written character, while awaiting arrival of a replacement copy of Fenollosa's essay, thinking to do some writing on the subject. Of course, the Fenollosa essay had been influential for Ezra Pound, and consequently for later generations of American poets.

So I picked up this other book by Michaux, which as it happens is the catalog for a museum exhibit of Michaux's drawings, and right away found a prefatory note titled "To Draw the Flow of Time" — where he writes that he had been drawing 'the consciousness of existing and the flow of time' but was producing 'scarcely more than one or two or three lines meeting up here and there with a few others…' Until a publisher wanting to reproduce some of the drawings said, 'All you have to do is make them bigger.' HM protested, seizing hold of a brush to demonstrate that "bigger" was impossible — but —

   As I drew the first lines I felt, to my extreme surprise, that something that had always been closed had opened up in me, and that this breach was to afford an outlet for a mass of movements.
   The fulness of the gesture necessitated by the characters that were supposed to come out bigger had changed the spirit of the drawing. Instead of characters, instead of notations of an undefinable 'something,' they became propulsion, participation, released torrent.

Michaux sometimes made drawings after ingesting mescaline or lysergic acid (mescalin especially). A selection of the mescaline drawings is included in the catalog, along with others of interest — there is a number of "alphabet" drawings — figures arrayed in a tabular format on the page. Interestingly, there are also several "movements" drawings, some also with figures arranged in more or less tabular format. These drawings open vistas too expansive for my purposes here, but I'll return to them in a future post.

In contrast to Michaux, the great Swiss writer Robert Walser spent the closing years of his life in a sanitarium — his everyday outer experience was one of confinement. And he too turned to writing "strange" — adopting what appeared to be an esoteric script, or code —producing a number of "microscripts." Susan Bernofsky, Walser's translator, describes them as "narrow strips of paper covered with tiny, antlike markings ranging in height from one to two millimeters," which were assumed to be indecipherable scribbles. But two scholars, looking more closely, identified them as writing per se, a "radically miniaturized" German script called Kurrent — "the form of handwriting favored in German-speaking countries until the mid-twentieth century, when it was replaced by a Latinate form similar to that used in English." As Bernofsky explains:

Kurrent is medieval in its origins, all up-and-down slanting angles. It is a form of script better suited to compression than modern handwriting, though its graphic simplicity — an e is represented by a simple pair of vertical ticks like a quotation mark, an s by a mere slash — means that shrinking it down results in a dramatic loss of detail and comprehensibility.

It seems that Kurrent may be likened to a "secret" code after all! Bernofsky's description is strikingly like Michaux's account of his drawings prior to being asked to "make them larger," which helped Michaux to free his hand. Walser too had issues with his hand. Bernofsky quotes from a letter Walser wrote to a publisher —

I can assure you (this all began in Berlin) I suffered a real breakdown in my hand on account of the pen, a sort of cramp from whose clutches I slowly, laboriously freed myself by means of the pencil… So I experienced a period of disruption that was mirrored, as it were, in my handwriting and its domination, and when I copied out the texts from this pencil assignment, I learned again, like a little boy, to write.

Bernofsky concludes: "By his own account, then, Walser began writing in a tiny pencil script to combat a sort of writer's cramp." There seem to be unmistakable parallels between the very diverse experience of Walser and Michaux -- both confronting limitations posed by the hand, both finding freedom by using the hand differently, eclipsing the writing/drawing they'd previously done to open new vistas of outlook and expression.

I'll close by citing an interesting little book by the Italian architect Paolo Belardi titled, Why Architects Still Draw. Having quoted Leonardo on "the rivalry between pen and pencil" Belardi offers a sort of rapprochement that may be apposite here:

Though if we look closely, there isn't any real competition or conflict between writing and drawing…I've always been charmed by the rhetorical finesse with which the great poet Marino Moretti attributes the fragility of the written word to the ephemeral nature of the pencil.

More later…

Alan Loney, one-time poet, longtime printer, and theorist of the book, participated in the Threads Talk Series, given between 2009 and 2012, and later co-published by Granary Books and Cuneiform Press in 2016 (I cited Loney's essay in an earlier post on the "undifferentiated poem"). In his essay Loney assesses his library, and reflects on his retirement from printing -- which leads to thoughts about reading. (I preserve Loney's orthography in these excerpts):

But I am about to cease making books, and my thought turns to the books about the house, most of which are unread in any normal sense, tho I have glanced at a page or two, here & there, in each of them. In some. I have looked only at their paratexts: titlepage, epigraph, endnotes, bibliography, index and so on.

Loney continues:

my library, for want of a better term, is not large. It has approximately one thousand volumes, and at my reading speed it would probably take me about forty years to read each volume once only, by which time I would be 110 years old. If I have actually twenty years left to me, you can see the problem.

Even so, he says,

liberated from printing books, maybe now I can learn to read them

Loney's essay had already been published in The books to come, a collection of his own writings  (Cuneiform Press, 2012), which collectively form a provocative meditation on "books" — objects that Loney understands expansively to include "other modes of textual transmission", such as bus tickets, magazines, and street signs.

Walter Benjamin has a brief essay on his personal library, or rather his "collection" — offered as a rumination on the occasion of "unpacking" his library, which, he writes, had languished in storage for the prevoius two years. In that essay, which is complex and which I adapt to my own purpose here, Benjamin sounds a similar theme to Loney's, suggesting that owning books but leaving them unread is routine among collectors. Benjamin develops his essay by outlining the several ways that individuals acquire books, such as borrowing, where he suggests that,

The book borrower of real stature whom we envisage here proves himself to be an inveterate collector of books not so much by the fervor with which he guards his borrowed treasures and by the deaf ear which he turns to all reminders from the everyday world of legality as by his failure to read these books. If my experience may serve as evidence, a man is more likely to return a borrowed book upon occasion than to read it. And the non-reading of books, you will object, should be characteristic of collectors? This is news to me, you may say. It is not news at all. Experts will bear me out when I say that it is the oldest thing in the world. Suffice it to quote the answer which Anatole France gave to a philistine who admired his library and then finished with the standard question, "And you have read all these books,. Monsieur France?" "Not one-tenth of them. I don't suppose you use your Sèvres china every day?"

The original impetus for this post was my reading a collection of letters that John Ashbery had written to Mark Ford, which the latter published in the English literary magazine PN Review after the poet's death. In one of these, Ashbery wrote:

I've been trying to supplement my usual reading of the Times, LRB and TLS with something more nourishing, and decided to crack open some of the hundreds of unread books I own. A friend just gave me P.G. Wodehouse's Damsel in Distress, which was made into a thirties musical starring Fred Astaire and someone other than Ginger Rogers, as well as harebrained Gracie Allen. There's a rather nice scene in an amusement park fun-house, but I can't seem to revive my 12-year-old passion for P.G., maybe because of all of those broadcasts during the as yet unthought-of war. So I decided to crack the work of George Meredith. I thought of trying Diana of the Crossways or The Tragic Comedians, but David said the type was too small and brought me instead Lord Ormont and His Aminta. I see that his most salient characteristic is oddness, which I, surely, have nothing against. Frank O used to like a poem of his called 'Jump for Glory Jane', it seems to me, and of course 'Modern Love' is peachy, don't you agree?
(5 June, 2015)

This reference to "the hundreds of unread books I own" likely rings true with many collectors. As a lifelong bibliophile, collector, (and reader) of books, I too have been confronted with the "standard question", as reported by Anatole France via Walter Benjamin. When I lived in Morristown, New Jersey in the late 1970s, our combined living-dining room had a long, high wall, where after moving in I right away built and installed a bookcase made of pine boards that were 1" thick and 12" deep. I cut them to size, stained them a dark brown, screwed the boards together, braced the corners, and set the whole thing against the wall, propping up the long shelves at evenly spaced intervals to minimize sagging.

I've forgotten the exact dimensions of that bookcase, but memory suggests it was roughly seven feet high and twelve feet long — with nearly all of that space taken up with books. Some months later, after we'd settled into that apartment, a dinner guest popped the big question — had I actually read them all? At that time, I could answer with a qualified yes, but that would change on relocating to Philadelphia to enroll in graduate school -- where I learned that graduate students have a special way of "reading" books.

I began purchasing books as a kid in my home town of Paterson, New Jersey, where I could walk down Mary Street to Main Street, towards the local pharmacy (which bore the name "Apteka", the Polish word for "pharmacy", on a sign set above the door), and where there was a small revolving book rack standing off to one side of the entrance. There were other neighborhood sources of books as well — there was the small lunch counter/ice cream parlor right across Barclay Street from the Apteka. St. Joseph's Hospital, where I was born, was directly across Main Street, while a small distance uphill on Barclay Street there was a small church, whose members were Syrian Christians from Aleppo (which last time I looked had transitioned to a Pentecostal church for Latinos).

Growing up, I felt that the Syrian church, along with the Polish Apteka, cast a special aura over the neighborhood. Indeed, there was an established and growing community of Arab peoples just a few blocks south along Main Street, with bakeries and small eateries offering breads and foods from the various home countries (Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Turkey) of residents and merchants of that neighborhood. There were also a number of bodegas nearby, owned by Puerto Ricans who had settled there in the post-war period. My old South Paterson neighborhood has changed quite a lot since then, with newcomers arriving from Turkey and nearby countries, gravitating toward that same area along South Main Street, the Puerto Rican community later giving way to Dominicans. I believe that they or some other Latino communitiy now worship at that erstwhile Syrian church on Barclay Street.

By the time I'd turned eight or nine years old, I was a steady consumer of books. Apart from an interest in their contents, I was probably attracted by the cover art or design, by simply picking up and holding the book, or by the descriptive blurb on the back cover. I visited the public library on Grand Street too, but even at that relatively young age I wanted to own books. The books filling the neighborhood racks back then cost as little as 25 or 35 cents, and I had "income" of my own, mainly from scavenging soda bottles and returning them to local stores for the deposit, or from "junking" — collecting discarded newspapers, or stripping parts from abandoned cars left on the street or in empty lots (starters, generators, alternators, etc.) and hauling them to the local junkyard for a payout. I was often on hand, too, to run errands for elderly people in the neighborhood, who would tip with a nickel, or have me keep the carefully calculated change from whatever purchases I'd made for them. And of course, in winter I shoveled snow for those same neighbors.

Looking back, some of those book titles are surprising, others not — I especially remember The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder, and Lost Horizon by James Hilton. But there was also Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, books by Robert Louis Stevenson (Treasure Island and The Black Arrow), or Rudyard Kipling (Kim and The Jungle Book), and books by Jules Verne. I began reading contemporary science fiction at that time too — Lester Del Rey, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Andre Norton. I recall liking Norton especially much (though I don't believe I read any of the books she wrote for young people). There were other writers and other books as well, too numerous to be named here.

I held onto those early purchases for many years, fetishizing them as mementos or, less prosaically, valuing them as starry messengers from my childhood. Whichever it was, they formed at first the embryonic and then the continually evolving substrate of my being — a bookish, though not scholarly individual, with a lifelong affinity for books and an abiding urge to acquire them. Those very early books gradually fell away, some left behind at my parents' house following the decisive breakaway from my birth family, some later misplaced or discarded while moving or relocating. There have been several iterations of culling, up to the most recent version — downsizing. I've given away many hundreds, amounting to thousands of books — to local libraries, to used booksellers, and most recently to a neighborhood typewriter repair shop, whose proprietor is setting books out for display around the storefront and sidewalks, in an effort at community building.

In his Threads Talk essay, Alan Loney discusses the many things I myself have wondered about – whether or not to continue adding to my existing library (at my age), the dual nature of books (book as codex vs. book as text), and so on. This gets at the argument Walter Benjamin was making, that books, in certain hands, can exceed or transcend their texts; they are indeed a magic conjuncture. Meanwhile, I expect that this post will engender a further post, where I plan to look more closely at Benjamin's essay, and explore Alan Loney's writings in more detail.