[Old paper, delivered at the World Picture conference in December 2016 (which took as its theme Property) and which never saw the light of day. The same Fuller poem was treated in more detail in a later essay on poetry and finance. I like this version better. Further treatment of the romantic erotetic and the poetically unanswerable can be found here.
William Fuller’s new book, Signal Flow, is forthcoming from Flood Editions; recent work can be found on Blackbox Manifold.]
“let us open our leaves like a flower”
1.
It seems fundamental to my continued derivation of pleasure from the experience of reading poetry that I do not quite know, finally, what kind of object a poem either is, should be, or wants to be. It seems important to start from the claim that poems are a particular kind of object, not to raise the poem above any other aesthetic experience in some arbitrary hierarchy, but rather to set some critical parameters for any investigation into the experience of poetic space. That poems have, or are, a space in which poetical things can happen, and from which we can derive certain laws of poetic motion, is as much an historical accident of form as any other space or dwelling, and is a shape of fact given to us with all the determinateness and contingency of the world in which we find and read them. I do not need to know, in any case, what kind of object I am experiencing in order to describe and analyse that experience; but it remains questionable to me whether or not the experience of reading poetry requires me not to know, and whether or not the experience of reading poetry entails a singular kind of ignorance, at least in part, of the object under scrutiny. I do not doubt that a thing of beauty is a joy for ever. What I do doubt is what exactly that thing is, and how exactly, or in what manner of association, it is a joy for ever.
How exactly, or in what manner of association, it is a joy for ever, should not, I think, be interred by chronology as an everlasting emblem of some immutable and ahistorical human spirit. That the first line of Keats’s Endymion, in popular parlance at least, has been so often taken to mean just this, is most likely the effect of the line having been scalped from the body of the poem which it begins:
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
This is not a description of immortality, but a description of the possible infinity (it is not a given; the thing has to be beautiful) of the speculative, and possibly specious, category of what I am calling “poetic space,” compared with which immortality is simply a bad dream. “Still” is an important word for Keats. He uses it when he wants a line to shimmer with the audacious and irrational expectation of its endlessness, and none more so when the pathos of an end is fully within the ambit of the poem’s apostrophic feint, as in the exponential twitch of To Autumn’s desperately distended syntax of proliferation over its eighth and ninth lines:
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Here, “still” seems barely to hold the very fabric of the poem on the page together, even as it arrests, in a moment of sheer emphatic relief, the encroaching and enveloping space either side of it, a chaotic profound that rushes in like a swarm between and either side of these lines, and which the phrase “still more” fends off in the rhythmic certitude of negation, of the poem’s space staked out against oblivion. By such means as these in Keats’s poem, as one critic comments on To Autumn’s final lines, “an imminent vanishing reflects the immeasurable economy of the gift,” of the generous, expansive interiority bequeathed against mere stillness. Negative capability is not, as it has so often been theorised, a state in which things can happen that would not otherwise, but a means of access to that dynamic space in which “loveliness increases,” in which “[b]eauty […] obliterates all consideration,” that is, a space in which to flourish and persist in a sensuous effervescence that overcomes the tyranny of “fact and reason.” The bound infinity of poetic space in Keats is not then known, but rather felt, and felt, I want to suggest, as the positive confirmation of what the young, Romantic Marx calls “human reality.”
What the young, Romantic Marx calls “human reality” is the space in which he imagines man having overcome the stupefaction and one-sidedness of private property, a stupefaction in which “an object is only ours when we have it[.]” What does it mean to possess something – for something to be ours – without “having” it?
Only through the objectively unfolded wealth of human nature can the wealth of subjective human sensitivity – a musical ear, an eye for the beauty of form, in short, senses capable of human gratification – be either cultivated or created. For not only the five senses, but also the so-called spiritual senses, the practical senses (will, love, etc.), in a word, the human sense, the humanity of the senses – all these come into being only through the existence of their objects, through humanized nature.
For Marx, to realize “human reality” historically, and not simply to slough off the husk of alienation, is to feel precisely the kind of object which Keats’s poetry wants to be, not only because “[t]he whole of history is a preparation, a development, for ‘man’ to become the object of sensuous consciousness and for the needs of ‘man as man’ to become [sensuous] needs,” but yet more because “[t]he element of thought itself, the element of the vital expression of thought – language – is sensuous nature.” Poetic space, romantically conceived, as much by the Marx who loved Shakespeare as by the Keats who loved him too, is the social expression of the feeling of possession without having. Perhaps poems might be thought of as the kind of object in which what Adorno refers to as the “infinitization” [Verunendlichung] of aesthetic experience is explicitly thematised and played out as the promise of the sensuous nature of language. The immeasurable gift of this promise is not the utopian fantasy that, one day, I will know my object and then resign: it is that the history of myself as an object for which the poem is a product of a truly “humanized nature” can begin only when my own objectivity ceases to be nothing more than quantifiable abstract human labour power.
2.
All the best contemporary poetry is Romantic poetry in the foregoing sense: that it conceives of itself as having a space in which its promise is reflected endlessly, as the feeling of something being ours without having it. Critics of Romantic poetry have opened up this space through reading its figurative and literal questions. Ross Wilson, for example, describes Romanticism’s “insistence on the essentially poetic nature of humanity,” an insistence that “does not simply dissipate the political in the vague diffusion of art but rather seeks to question whether life is essentially reducible to the facts currently obtaining about it.” Poets like Shelley, for Wilson, “persistently [address] a distinction […] between what is really life and what looks like it,” and they do so, like Shelley, by attempting “to address the question ‘What is life?’” in the face of “the apparent impossibility of answering it.” This impossibility, though certainly negative, is productive, not aporetic, because it demands “that an emphatic understanding of life – of ‘very life’ – cannot straightforwardly be gleaned from what has counted as ‘life’ so far.” Susan Wolfson, in the most thoroughgoing study of its kind, reads the Romantic interrogative mode out of the work of Keats and Wordsworth, arguing that:
For Wordsworth, a question is motivated by the desire for an answer, but it also releases energies that thwart the completion of meanings. For Keats a question is often voiced in knowing anticipation of its irresolvability, but he remains keenly aware of the difficulties of living in a world in which doubt is the only certainty.
“We come to value [Keats’s] artistry,” Wolfson suggests, “not so much by what [his poetics] yields to thought as by what it does to thought, provoking questions and refusing to confirm any sure points and resting places for our reasonings.” Wolfson captures one of the most compelling ways in which Keats “does” something to thought in her astonishing description of Ode on a Grecian Urn, in which
the speaker’s rhyme doubles back on itself to reflect his own perplexities: he barely asks his question before it branches into multiple ors – a ‘wild ecstasy’ of syntax that diagrams his ‘mad pursuit’ of his own ‘maiden loth,’ the unravished ‘what’ that would satisfy his questions.
That which Wolfson argues Keats “does” to thought, then, is specifically bound up in what she identifies as syntax in a “wild ecstasy” (itself part of the unanswered question from the last line of the Ode’s first stanza), a sensuous cultivation of ambiguity reminiscent of William Empson’s description of the “fluid unity” of Shakespeare’s sonnets in Seven Types of Ambiguity. In the erotetic – the questioning – logic of Romantic poetry can be found a touchstone for the erotetic logic of contemporary poems, in which unanswerable questions, whether posed directly as in Shelley, Keats and Wordsworth, or implied as a function of their address and urgency, are alike most fully apprehended through a study of their “‘wild ecstasy’ of syntax.”
Syntax in the American poet William Fuller’s recent book Playtime (2015) is quietly ecstatic. Fuller’s body of work, in print since the 1980s, has been crystallizing steadily into the style which finds its most fully articulated expression in Playtime’s collection of shimmering prose poems. Herein, the properties of thought, of things, and of ontological and phenomenological significance, are interweaved through a thoroughly ambiguous grammar of mental and physical investigation. The properties of things in Fuller’s poetry are continually at risk of becoming the properties of other things. I said Fuller’s poetry is quietly ecstatic: it does not burn itself out in a rageful conflagration, nor does it flaunt its own self-imposed impotence in a crash of style and polemic. Instead, the poems unfold through a syntactical pleating and proliferation, in which linguistic subjects and objects consistently wriggle free of each other and insert themselves into any number of hypothetical propositional matrices, the totality of which it is, in many cases, a difficult task to quantify exactly or to hold still. Here’s an example of what I mean:
Anoesis
There are within an ambit of circumstance certain principles
that attach themselves to the agents or actors for whom our
daily shifting scenes appear to have been arranged, and who,
while existing only within those scenes, are neither contained
by them nor detached from them, but hover among and between
while time unfolds in whatever sequence is elected, if by elected
one means the unalloyed application of indifferent forms revert-
ing to their more general, less numerous, prototypes, pacing
back and forth in the distance, and challenging all to carry out
acts consistent with the structure they maintain. Whether I
knew this then or know this now isn’t important. For words
drip like wax, and while there may be a need to extend them
over a rough surface, similar to the one immediately to my right,
I prefer what may happen in other regions, with other agents or
actors, who might overcome their own weaknesses in order to
insert themselves irrevocably into what they see and hear, and
enjoy a plausible form of life that cuts away everything, enticing
fresh sounds from above.
If we take the poem’s title, ‘Anoesis,’ which refers to a “hypothetical state of consciousness in which there is sensation but no thought,” to be a descriptor for what kind of space the poem contains, then that space is an incredibly rich, febrile and confusing one. The grammar is meticulous, bordering on a parody of bureaucratic disambiguation, but finally resistant to a reading that would see in it only a joke about process and stop there. The relationship between possibility and contingency in the poem is constantly breaking down and being resurrected, a relationship thematised by another poem in Playtime, in which “[t]he spirit of what can happen has changed into / the flesh of what has happened, and we make room for it.” Just as for Empson’s ambiguous Shakespeare and Wolfson’s erotetic Keats, my sense of Fuller’s poetry is guided more by what I cannot know at any given point in my reading than what I do know. I cannot know, in the sense of hold in my mind concurrently as fully fleshed-out possibilities, all of the poems which this poem is capable of being, but I feel very distinctly, as I read, those possibilities rising and falling from the page in front of me as I read. By the time I reach the end of the eighth line, for instance, I have the opportunity to decide, if I feel like it, to make the subject of “pacing” either its immediate neighbour, “prototypes”; or the “indifferent forms” of the seventh line; or to reach back all the way to the first and second lines for either “certain principles” or “agents or actors,” along with all the cognitive effort of straddling and recapitulating the intervening clausal networks this would involve. Each of these readings would exercise a subtle but decisive shift in the possible meanings of the poem, and any of them might be made more or less “plausible” as I keep reading – “time” is another possible subject of “pacing,” but only until I reach the third person plural in the tenth line, where it ceases to be a possible reading and hence stops. The poem distributes these possible readings as a function of its sense of what “form of life” it prefers to inhabit, and it does so whimsically and practically insouciantly, as if it were the offer of something less valuable than simply and abundantly necessary.
I do not really know where I am going with this, and it seems in any case a fairly commonplace experience of reading to end with. But it also seems, nevertheless, to say something about the feeling that I mentioned earlier, that of something being ours without having it, and in the context of Fuller’s Playtime, I might specify that feeling even further as the experience of play very gently, and for a split second at a time, lifted from its definition in subservience to its opposition to labour, and felt as something positively intrinsic to the sensuous shape and sound of human language.
