Some Rilke translation: its scope and limits

 

"E pero' sappia ciascuno che nulla cosa per legame musaico armonizzata si puo' de la sua loquela in altra transmutare sanza rompere tutta sua dolcezza e armonia" (Dante)


Curtis Faville has got me wondering lately about translation, too. In response to the opening passage from Rilke's "Seventh Elegy" (translated by Edward Snow) that I'd recently posted he'd referred to what he suspects is perhaps the inscrutability of every poem, it's "original grace". Does translation, even the very best, have a chance? To see for myself what had been lost in translation I thought I'd have a go at the first few sections of "The Seventh Elegy" (relying on a very elementary knowledge of German and my old Langenscheidt dictionary). First the German text, then Snow's translation, then mine. I'll end with a few brief comments not just on the quality of Snow's work but, more generally, on the nature of the change I've detected (or perhaps caused) in the transformation of Rilke's poem into a foreign medium.
________________________


Werbung nicht mehr, nicht Werbung, entwachsene Stimme,
sei deines Schreies Natur; zwar schrieest du rein wie der Vogel,
wenn ihn die Jahreszeit aufhebt, die steigende, beinah vergessend,
daß er ein kümmerndes Tier und nicht nur ein einzelnes Herz sei,
das sie ins Heitere wirft, in die innigen Himmel. Wie er, so
würbest du wohl, nicht minder , daß, noch unsichtbar,
dich die Freundin erführ, die stille, in der eine Antwort
langsam erwacht und über dem Hören sich anwärmt,
deinem erkühnten Gefühl die erglühte Gefühlin.

O und der Frühling begriffe , da ist keine Stelle,
die nicht trüge den Ton der Verkündigung. Erst jenen kleinen
fragenden Auflaut, den, mit steigernder Stille,
weithin umschweigt ein reiner bejahender Tag.
Dann die Stufen hinan, Ruf-Stufen hinan, zum geträumten
Tempel der Zukunft ; dann den Triller, Fontäne,
die zu dem drängenden Strahl schon das Fallen zuvornimmt
im versprechlichen Spiel .... Und vor sich, den Sommer.

Nicht nur die Morgen alle des Sommers , nicht nur
wie sie sich wandeln in Tag und strahlen vor Anfang.
Nicht nur die Tage, die zart sind um Blumen, und oben,
um die gestalteten Bäume, stark und gewaltig.
Nicht nur die Andacht dieser entfalteten Kräfte,
nicht nur die Wege, nicht nur die Wiesen im Abend,
nicht nur, nach spätem Gewitter, das atmende Klarsein,
nicht nur der nahende Schlaf und ein Ahnen, abends ...
sondern die Nächte! Sondern die hohen, des Sommers,
Nächte, sondern die Sterne, die Sterne der Erde.
O einst tot sein und sie wissen unendlich,
alle die Sterne: denn wie, wie, wie sie vergessen!
__________________

No longer, voice. No longer let wooing send forth your cry:
you're past that. Even though your cry would be clear as a bird's
when first Spring bears him aloft, almost forgetting
that he's a cautious creature and not an unsheathed heart
being flung into brightness, into passionate skies.
Like him, will all his art, you'd also woo--: invisibly,
so that some silent mate might learn of you, and,
as she listened, a reply would slowly wake and grow warm--
the kindled complement of your own ardent feeling.

O and Spring would understand--, annunciation
would echo everywhere. First those small
questioning notes, which a clear, confident day
would surround with heightening silence.
Then up the calls, up that long flight of steps to the dreamt-of
temple of the future--; then the trill, that fountain,
whose urgent jet is teased by its falling
where promise is foreplay...And on ahead, the summer.

Not only all of summer's dawns--, not only
how they change into day and gleam with genesis.
Not only the days, so tender around flowers, and above,
in the patterned treetops, so forceful and strong.
Not only the calm reverence in these outspread powers,
not only the paths, the meadows as evening deepens,
not only, after late thunderstorms, the pulsing clarity,
not only the onset of sleep and, near dusk, a premonition...
But the nights! Those towering summer
nights! And the stars, the stars of the earth!
O to be dead and to know them endlessly,
all the stars: for how, how, how to forget them!
                                                              (trans. Edward Snow)
_________________________________


Don't let wooing (never again wooing!) be the form of your cry,
nor ever its originating voice;
indeed, you'd cry pure as the bird
when the season carries him up, up, almost forgetting
that he's a grieving creature and not a solitary heart
cast into very serenity, into heaven's depths. Like him,
you would likewise woo--yes, invisible still,
a young girl would take to the silent you, a reply
slowly awakening and warming to your voice--
her bright feelings venturing your own.

And yes Spring knows it, too--there's no place
where its musical announcement could ever deceive. First
that small inquiring note which, with growing stillness,
a pure affirming day deeply embraces.
Then up ascending steps, the cry-steps, all the way to
the dreamer's temple of tomorrow--: then the trill,
the fountain whose hurrying flash the fall first foresees
in its promised play...And then promised summer.

Not just summer mornings--, not just
how they become day-transformed and emit beginnings.
Not just days sweet on flowers, and overhead,
round patterned tree-blossoms, thick and powerful.
Not only the devotion of these spreading powers,
nor even the paths or evening meadows,
nor the breathing clarity of a late thunderstorm,
nor the nearing dream and its foreboding,  in late evening...
but also nights! The height of summer nights,
and the stars, stars of earth.
Yes, to be dead and know them for ever, the stars:
and how, how would I ever forget them!
                                                     (trans. Conrad DiDiodato)
________________________________

Firstly, in Strophe 1 the translator of the original text (Edward Snow) has fractured a complete opening statement (expressed as a wish), leaving the reader with a succession of competing grammatical constructions where Rilke intended only one: as a result the integrity of "Werbung" (wooing), indicated by position and emphasis through repetition, has been broken. There's nothing in the opening lines to accommodate Snow's "you're past that". The reader is now bound to be distracted by imminent 'bird flight' when it's "Werbung" (speaker's anguished wooing) Rilke gives primacy to. Rilke's masterfully juxtaposed the song-bird's cry to a mate's uncertain reply. It is venturesome at best, a case of the invisible wanting badly to take physical shape in the anticipated other;

secondly, tampering too loosely with Rilke's own syntax--which Snow has done a second time (at "Even though your cry...") by substituting a 'fragment' for what is a complete thought in the original-- results in a perhaps too 'romanticized' view of the lyricist's anguished voice desperately trying for release from the bonds of his earthly misery. Precisely that troubling sense of arrested flight needs to be kept and can't be in translation that doesn't respect the form of the original. The bird of poetry simply rises too freely, too untroubled by the causes of the anguished voice;

thirdly, Snow's translation has left us (for the reasons above-stated) with a Rilke the Romantic rather than the more properly Modernist figure that he really is. Heidegger (in "What Are Poets For?")has aptly called Rilke the poet who's given us poetic song that hovers (like the bird's flight and song) over the world's true "destitute land." And that sense is precisely missing in Snow's translation;

fourthly, in Strophe 2 the promise of reply has properly been transmogrified into a uncertain "inquiring" sort of dream-state, and nothing more. "Fragenden" is Rilke's own term. The dream (more certainly the dreamer in bird-song) is called a "temple of tomorrow" (Tempel der Zukunft). The metaphor is inventive and instructive. The long winding steps to the temple opening is reminiscent of Kafka's The Castle; the poem (to this point) is every bit as subtly phantasmagorical, every bit as interminably expectant. Here Snow seems to be more at home in the fragment sentences and remains pretty faithful to Rilke's own language patterning, perhaps sensing like the poet just how "out of joint" is a solitary heart's springtime; and

fifthly, Strophe 3 almost stutters over any intended Romantic (Shelleyan) notion of unity in song. I believe Rilke has left the reader in the end with the sole consolation of sharp illuminations of star-light, "in late evening". Song seems to tire the ear in its repetitiveness just as starry nights bedazzle the eye. Rilke's "Elegy" passages end in twilight where stars (those unforgettable stars) serve as one more distraction from the state of every "grieving creature" and are literally something to die for. One is also reminded of that other sorrowful lover of stars, van Gogh. Snow fails precisely because he gives the poetic heart the most brilliantly imaginative language possible: because he's really never properly registered the troubled nature of all spring "wooing" and failed to take Rilke's poem to its final resting-place, somewhere over the world's true "destitute land".

My favourite Canadian poet, or a reply to Curtis Faville

Alden Nowlan

I've lately joined in a chorus of boos for contemporary mainstream Canadian poetry that, on the whole, I also happen to find "vanilla and inert and obtuse". But though, like Swift, I'm a hater of mankind, I happen to be also, like Swift, a lover of individuals. There are a few instances of Canadian writing that's in my opinion world-class. I've always lamented that Timothy Findley, for example, never received the Nobel for his exemplary fiction and that Bliss Carman, whose Songs from Vagabondia even got Pound's attention, was never seen as anything but a Confederation Poet. Knowing my own country as well as I do, I can see why.

There's the case of Alden Nowlan, hardly discussed anymore and yet is (in my humble estimation) Canada's greatest lyrical poet. His is the poetic voice I still revere after almost three decades. And he's the individual I love through the strength & beauty of verses alone. Of the many poems he's written perhaps none is more memorable than "The Bull Moose" (and more characteristically Easterner as well: I also happen to think the best writers are Easterners) . Here's the poem and some reasons why it's Canada's best offering to date. I may surprise some, though, with the discovery of dark corners in a place that's supposed to be cheerily lighted.

The Bull Moose

Down from the purple mist of trees on the mountain,
lurching through forests of white spruce and cedar,
stumbling through tamarack swamps,
came the bull moose
to be stopped at last by a pole-fenced pasture.

Too tired to turn or, perhaps, aware
there was no place left to go, he stood with the cattle.
They, scenting the musk of death, seeing his great head
like the ritual mask of a blood god, moved to the other end
of the field, and waited.

The neighbours heard of it, and by afternoon
cars lined the road. The children teased him
with alder switches and he gazed at them
like an old, tolerant collie. The woman asked
if he could have escaped from a Fair.

The oldest man in the parish remembered seeing
a gelded moose yoked with an ox for plowing.
The young men snickered and tried to pour beer
down his throat, while their girl friends took their pictures.

And the bull moose let them stroke his tick-ravaged flanks,
let them pry open his jaws with bottles, let a giggling girl
plant a little purple cap
of thistles on his head.

When the wardens came, everyone agreed it was a shame
to shoot anything so shaggy and cuddlesome.
He looked like the kind of pet
women put to bed with their sons.

So they held their fire. But just as the sun dropped in the river
the bull moose gathered his strength
like a scaffolded king, straightened and lifted his horns
so that even the wardens backed away as they raised their rifles.

When he roared, people ran to their cars. All the young men
leaned on their automobile horns as he toppled.


The effect is of the palpable shock to lethargic seeing that the dying animal always creates. Nowlan knew his people and reactions well enough to write it. Of its kind the poem is unsurpassable. Tragically (or perhaps unsurprisingly) the Canadian psyche will find nothing to distinguish this "blood god" massacre from that of anything or anyone else. One only has to look at the always phantasmagorical blood-letting in the writings of another Easterner, David Adams Richards, and particularly in his For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down, to see the same archetypal bull moose at work. In fact, I'd be disprizing Nowlan's great poem if I tried to do the toppled moose one better by calling it a kind of christ-figure, with its "purple cap of thistles" and passion among the jeering crowds. (The eerie sightings of Elvis in Matt Cohen's Last Seen might be, by way of contrast, a glimpse into the urban hero after it's been bled out: and it isn't Elvis we're talking about either)

It's characteristically Canadian to pour beer down the throat of our dying symbols: to mock our greatest fears. Even our critics seem to have an inkling of this. Atwood, and this most rightly ridiculed of Canadian symbols is always at her best in criticism, says of the poem in Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, that the "sacrificed-god" didn't really redeem anyone (77). Certainly not. Perhaps she saw that the most terrifying image in the poem is that of the young men honking their horns: a sort of parallel "bellowing" more premonitory of human savagery than raised rifles alone.  Of course, Northrop Frye who didn't have the stomach for real "irony" might have described this (if he'd been asked) as an image of the fallen world that afflicts humans and non-humans alike (Anatomy of Criticism: 285). True but hardly insightful.

But can its claim to being lyrically supreme accommodate the horror of bloodied nature rituals in general? Is Canada, as I'm suggesting, really the place for this cruelly irreverent myth mockery?Atwood and Frye look too pitifully shallow to see through to real causes & conditions. It's perhaps time to give the origin of this penchant for malicious culture sport: namely, the usually bludgeoned psyche of a part of Canada where living conditions have always been historically the most depressed and Mt. Cashel sex scandals have lately called religious consolation back to the dark waters whence they came. Our best literatures are too stony and too strongly regional for anything but this.

Ernest Buckler, author of perhaps Canada's greatest novel The Mountain and the Valley, and also an Easterner, had a similar penchant for turning events in his fiction into troubling dream landscapes, mostly intactile, mostly gloomy. The Annapolis Valley, like Nowlan's slaughter-field, is a place "jealous of our breath" and where the vaunted Canadian indigenous is only a "shaly amalgam of replica". Which is to suggest that our greatest native traditions can't seem to find anything but dimming copies of themselves. The Totem's no longer the quintessentially native kinship symbol: carved now into images of children flailing the bull moose with alder switches. Note the unbearable friability of all things literary in the Canadian landscape: where we want literary referents to hang our hats on, we get loose slimy shale, the drama of children mocking a mock-christ.

Buckler's is no Dantean mountain in the southern hemisphere just as Alden's sacrificial moose is anything but sacrificial, nothing to write books about. There are no intervening desert slopes for archetypal heroes to anguish over either. What dying icons do in Canada is send people running to their cars howling with delight. And as there are no dangerous woods anymore, and with nothing better to imitate than the wailing moose, the horn's the only option. How well Alden knew his people and their Canadian myth-busting ways.

Alden's our best poet and my favourite because he understood as I wish more would understand. I wish our writers & critics would also admit that any literary output dissociated from the warnings & admonitions of our own wiser spirits ends in deplorableness (The plural 'spirits' is intentional here). He foresaw, or certainly wrote as if it were a truth, that  national smallness set mostly in stifling colonial (Susanna Moodie-type) narrative and never offset by anything grander than a field or valley amounts only to national smallness. It's hardly surprising that visitors at our shores see only the "vanilla" spectacles of cultural production comically dwarfed (most of the time) by its own stinking "tamarack swamps". It's best they never witness (as they will in one story, at least) the character of the cuckolded husband found frozen to death in a prairie storm, standing just meters away from his bedroom window.

Let's admit we've led only by accident many of our best literary kings to the scaffold, bull moose included: and nothing as grandiose as death by prophecy will ever appear here as a result. Canada's very best (who I happen to think hail from the East) have always served up that humiliating spectacle to us. I've at least admitted it to myself.

The year in review: what I'm not going to say & do, and people I'd like to mention

I won't bother to tell people how much I've read or watched or done (as if that matters); nor bore anyone with any end of year de profundis reflections on my life because, frankly, I happen to be a pretty happy & grateful guy who's never considered writing a form of self-imposed misery and thankless drudgery (as all too many surprisingly still do), as if somebody's always holding a gun to my head. As if there really is such a thing as the 'starving artist' in affluent North America. Writing and blogging are their own uniquely enjoyable rewards.

And unlike Geof Huth I won't be sending, as a sort of symbolic purge, all my scribblings to any academic institution around here: though my wife's been urging me to remove all my teaching- and-poetry-related folders piling up high in the closet. I measure progress, not in numbered boxes but by the amount of heart-satisfaction every form of self-expression gives. And I'm certainly not going to make any silly prognostications about the future of poetry in 2011 and thereafter. I think poets ought not to take themselves too seriously.

In 2010 and really throughout most of my adult life I wrote what I liked and liked what I wrote. But that's not to deny that really no more than about 20% of what I've done is really publishable. The books, though falling randomly into my lap, always seemed to fill a need for knowledge & inspiration, and there is no shortage of first-rate poets, critics and exceptionally talented people out there with something significant to say about art, life and the cosmos. The authors, poets, & critics I read are really a sort of privilege I don't share with many, except, of course, Amazon.com. The name-dropper, in any sort of company, is really the most pernicious killjoy there is.

I'd like to say as well that I'm a Canadian, first and foremost, a product of a distinctively modernist (Anglo-Saxon) tradition of which I'm proud, and to our language, landscape and mannerisms I've always headed my own poetical fires. My blog was intended for an exclusively Canadian audience, the hope being that a type of Canadian poetry network could arise through interactions & sharing of resources but my interests took me to generally more receptive and sympathetic groups elsewhere. With some exceptions, I've found the Canadian mainstream crowd to be a particularly arrogant & cliquish bunch. I know what I like but am also a pretty assiduous student of different  styles, methodologies & traditions. I hope anyone who's visited my site has seen that: if not, I've got some work to do.

Finally, I would  like to begin a tradition, at every year's end, of showing my gratitude to the few out there in the blogosphere who've helped make blogging for me a particularly enriching experience. To the following people I say thank you for a year of sharing, critiquing and respectful bickering: Ed Baker, Curtis Faville, Joseph Hutchison, William Michaelian, Vassilis Zambaras, & Irina Moga.

"Thankyouthankyouthankyou"

"Close writing': or some transcendental properties of the poetry blog

"La poésie est science, déconstruction des évidences mortes...celle du coeur, de l'âme de la patrie et de l'homme." ("Les Dix Propositions", La Presse 4 April 1970, cited in Caroline Bayard's The New Poetics in Canada and Quebec: From Concretism to Post-Modernism )

But communication would be impossible if it should have to begin in the ego, a free subject, to whom every other would be only a limitation that invites war, domination, precaution and information. To communicate is indeed to open oneself, but the openness is not complete if it is on the watch for recognition. It is complete not in opening to the spectacle of or the recognition of the other, but in becoming a responsibility for him (sic). (Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being: Or Beyond Essence )

One of the most urgent tasks for contemporary thought is, without doubt, to redefine the concept of the transcendental in terms of its relation with language...[H]ere "transcendental" must instead indicate an experience which is undergone within language. (Giorgio Agamben, cited in The Fire: Collected Essays of Robin Blaser)

Blogs? If it's neo-Formalist discourse you want, marked by very well-informed and astute commentary, there's Curtis Faville's Compass Rose, or if you'd like to see perhaps Canada's most prolific avant-gardist at work, Clifford Duffy, visit his radio deleuze, a singularly dadaist site with spectacular graphics & audio- and visual- montages for the works of a single author.

 Or if a more openly (& brazenly) non- or counter-or anti-syntactic visual poetry is your thing, see dbqp: visualizing poetics, both cutting-edge & multi-composite to the teeth, or if you subscribe rather to the grand ol' narratives of current LANGUAGE poetics, Ron Silliman's Blog and Charles Bernstein's WEB LOG are for you. A style for just about everyone. Serialist, collage or 'old school' representationalist; minimal, concretist or 'New Sentence'. But what have genres and poetic manifesto really amounted to these days? What have they really to do with the blog? And where's the room for development and responsible critique in the Internet's crowded synchrony?

 As if the bewildering array of styles weren't enough, there's the very important question of writing that goes on in (and for) them. I don't mean writing in the technical sense that servers, website and design & editing features act as its primary means of production. Search technology is not the same as academic research. And nor is it writing in the traditional chirographic sense for it's impossible to write for the blog; a deep abiding sense of whatever it is literacy means has been usurped by that grotesquerie of indelible Internet ink and e-readership, always radically mixed-mode, ethereal and impolitic. I'm looking at writing as the most critical project imaginable.

 It's sort of Lacan's point about the text writing the reader except that there's no real writing going on at all. With nothing to experiment on anymore, we're not the tabula rasa of old. Texts without borders cannot be useful analogues anymore for Lacanian or Kristevian subconscious undercurrents since 'digital only' takes up virtually no space or soul at all. Writing for the blog is as counter-intuitive a notion as driving for the road. So what exactly is it? 

The phonetic alphabet gives sounds a shape and textual 'look' on the page that are instantly transmissible: messages codified, stored and easy to be registered made writing about look unconfoundingly natural. Books, headings, table of contents, citations, etc are the traditional paraphernalia of intelligibility and loci for discussion. In phonetic writing the Word has a mind of its own, wound tight and ready to mean anything under the right conditions. But those typographical spaces (even in the best avant-garde work), the domain or extract of the roving "thinking eye" (as Silliman puts it) have been transgressed for good. Read good visual/concrete poetry today, such as you see in Geof Huth's dbqp: visualizing poetics, and try telling the artifact from the separate visual-syntactic& hypergraphical elements from which it arises. The poem is the "writing eye" that stares back at you, authorial intention and design reduced to subsets of its own easily reproducible technics.


The weblog's become the deconstructed site everyone's been hankering after for the past three decades: the Internet's delivered the goods, handily removing all the typographical, semantic, and authorial barriers that ever stood in the way between you and the signifiant. Not pre- or anti- but perhaps simulverbal communication; a simultaneity of act and product desperate enough for attention to pierce through the babble of multiple sites.The life-world, 'old school' aesthetics, and real author-reader symbiosis have been sacrificed to an impersonal but ubiquitous binary beast. As requested. It's not, in Iser's way of speaking, "an aesthetic object that will reveal the thought system of the social world" (The Act of Reading, 101): the Internet's too asocial, too voluptuously self-absorbed for that.

The problem is that to step beyond some threshold of minimal reading competency is to sense not a text (the d'hors text paradigm permanently displaced by a stiff-necked regimen of 'on/off' coding) but an ominous graphomania. The reader doesn't, in radio deleuze, for example, read poststructuralist deleuze at all; s/he wades rather into the intercellular deep of Clifford Duffy's dream, waging the same anti-Language war. It's interesting that in two of the blogs listed above (Duffy's and Bernstein's) reader comments are not allowed, perhaps as a way of averting the visitor to the very real danger of being trapped not in cyberspace but headspace where there's only room for one. Writing is the only enter- and exit- strategy we have and yet here it cannot really be about anything nor intended for any particular audience nor even designed to give a point of view. Cannot be a writing at all that's unconfoundingly tied (as it once hoped to be) to signs, referents or whatnot.

And so what's all the fuss about close 'reading', close 'listening' then? After a while Bernstein's Pennsound becomes a bore, poets droning on about reading; Silliman's "Alphabet", just downright self-mystifying. If Walter J. Ong's thesis about orality irretrievably assimilated to technical literacy (in Orality and Literacy) has any merit, it's because we sense that after writing there's no going back to a privileged preverbal place. Orality isn't an option (for all of the resemblances of e-reading to preliterate ages). Poetries that have been wound this tight can do nothing but put on displays of themselves, glaringly technical and scenographic: they are a sadly atrophied version of an old school artes virorum. 

 And by writing I don't mean écriture (or what Canadian theorist Caroline Bayard calls écouture in the case of radical performance): it's old hat by now and we've gone beyond that. I mean with all this promiscuous heterogeneity in the blogosphere, who needs to bother about codes and hidden discourses anymore? They're all around you. Most internet sites are pretty up-front about those sorts of things: ironic and playful, allegorical and irreverent to the teeth. So how useful will it be for writing to do duty for anything that's pretty much unraveled itself to this extent, bare textual presences audited, texted and 'tweeted' ad nauseum?

 I mean if poetry can be envisaged (as in Christian Bök's Xenotext Experiment ) literally "subsist[ing], like a harmless parasite, inside the cell of another life-form", what's the point of it all?  I fear that poetry sites whose signature layouts, content and textual panache are signs of a blogging self really have nothing to say. With authorial comes scriptural death. But we write !And if authors & their sites become morose or stupidly overconfident (and surprisingly most of them do at times, as I've discovered), how can a reader be expected to fill in those empty "ciphers" robbed of aesthetic content, and avoid the fall at the same time into kitschy discourse? The blog is testimony, if ever there was one, to the hegelian "dark night in which all cows are black", the deadpan face of the Internet's empty Absolute. To communicate through the blog seems to me about as absurd as Bök's hope to encode poetry for posterity. Gone is the notion of an "implied reader"who as part of textual structure (Iser) engages in ongoing discussion about literary meaning,

Death of the author: no kidding!Everything's dead except the will to admit it's finally died & like concerned artists perhaps prevent cases of this kind of self-immolation from recurring. Adorno's point about the death of poetry post-Auschwitz is well taken. It's perhaps in that sense that Canada's bp Nichol and bill bissett talked about the logotherapy of poetry. Perhaps writing is essentially therapy but I think they got it the other way around: poetry causes the therapy. Its healing properties have evaporated; and if we allow the Word into our souls it won't hover above vocables like Spirit (as bill bissett & Ron Silliman hope it will) but just stare back at us (like an unblinking Masonic eye), incapable of changing anything, empty pre-emptive bluster at best. The concretists, dadaists, surrealists, etc wanted to smash language & scatter the bits over the white screen: well, they've got it now. "La désintegration du langage est accomplie." (Raoul Duguay)

The result is weblogs have also grown a curiously thick skin to compensate for this spirit deficit. How? When spelling changes into graphics, representation into hypertext, and linear thinking into 'clouds' ("ephemeral electromagnetic traces"), the type of traditional literacy the blog tried to rely on, scoping out the world for meaning, turns into a pod that's hard to penetrate. Far from the playful & ironic creatures we thought the Internet would make us, we've actually turned out to be ornery monads (not nomads)who live under retractable roofs, looking out at the world through a single glazed Eye. We prefer depth but like sea otters sleep tied to seaweed,  bobbing near the shoreline.Spending too much time in any one blog gives the living sensorium a distinctly oneiric rather than fleshy feel for the world, the other, self. Reader-response is what blogs do but only unintentionally, and only if the tides sway them close enough to dry land.

 Consequently I've never really encountered anything as 'unwriterly' as the poet's weblog: in fact, I've never encountered anything as 'unwriterly' as e-writing itself or the blogger. But the urge to write persists despite the poststructuralist gutting of language, with opinions stubbornly locked into place, countless counter-discourses on the ready. I can think of only one way out of this impasse (or  'aporia'), however. And that's through what I call 'close' writing, one modeled on the Levinasian conception of "responsibility for the other" ( in Otherwise Than Being ) but I will have to be content with only a general outline for now. There's a lot at stake.

I define 'close writing' as a type of  'close watching' (not reading) to avoid the fatal deflection off text (dévier de text) in which the glaring You switches place with content and observer and observed invariably collapse into each other's arms. Reflection is neither participatory nor autonomous enough a description for the type of essential role-reversal that must take place for e-communication to thrive. I suggest we use "transcendence" instead of reflection or authorial intention or referentiality. Preferring to drop the baggage of poststructuralist experimentation altogether & begin to view writing as rather an ontological leap into text, since without the linguistic innards to keep it going  it can be nothing but that. Communication with the other (that the weblog primarily showcases)  is transcendent and as such always inherently dangerous, risky (Levinas). We're ultimately responsible for the blog "spectacle" we've created.

Denuded poststructuralist language cannot read the labile, processual world fully without also unwittingly becoming the carrier of every type of intolerable dogmatism. Perhaps bissett and Silliman have been inching in their works, maybe without meaning to be, towards just this sense of the 'transcendental' to keep the reader from being swallowed whole. I think, for example, of Silliman's description of the prose poem in The New Sentence as a"discontinuous-but-eternal presentness" (180-81), a language of teleology in-laying phrases like "upward falling", "integrate up"into a discussion of contemporary literary theory . The blog as the site of the encapsulation of thought and creativity may have to come in for a virtual ethics, e-writers having to become linguistics watchdogs at the same time. In a future blog article I'd like to show how this innate self-regulating impulse of writers to become responsible for each other's writings actually works, using the weblogs cited at the beginning.