Bergsonian time and free will, and the poem that ensues

Henri Bergson

toward

the end --

just so

      (John Martone)

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I've recently revisited Henri Bergson's Time and Free Will, a work that though possessing remarkable insights into the nature of time and human perception, and the celebrated defense of free will, also makes (to my mind) the even more remarkable claim that the elements of artistic activity are almost always antithetical to language itself, leaving Bergson with the inescapable fact that "there is no common measure between mind and language." What type of poetry can come of this?

In his view (and mine) the data ("states of consciousness") from which the artist (the poet) draws reveal a source that's deeply temporal, deeply personal and whose greatest legacy to art will be its ability to disclose how the "fusion" and "interpenetration" of its objects--a sort of melting of qualities into each other so that objects can never be easily distinguishable from each other, leaving in their wake a spectral residue-- always give this hauntingly penumbral state for the poet who assimilates them to literary production. It's when the mind forms a "space" (as of the page or canvas) for these intuitive states and devises a decidedly more "impersonal" form by juxtaposing the primary data of artistic consciousness in linear fashion and employing the symbolism of language to represent the "feelings and ideas", or the true "living and original individuality", of artistic consciousness--it's when the poet, in short, looks for a more overarching medium of artistic "space" that "the thousand emotions that stir the soul" in "time" become the deadpan expression of mere language. The 'thing' appears always as a certain "shade" or "quality" of itself as it was once perceived: the poem that ensues is a veritable Eurydice who is tragically torn from our affections the moment she's glimpsed.

Bergson's example of the rose is illuminating:

I smell a rose and immediately confused recollections of childhood come back to my memory. In truth, these recollections have not been called up by the perfume of the rose: I breathe them in with the very scent; it means all that to me. To others it will smell differently.--It is always the same scent, you will say, but associated with different ideas.--I am quite willing that you should express yourself in this way; but do not forget that you have first removed the personal element from the different impressions which the rose makes on each one of us; you have retained only the objective aspect, that part of the scent of the rose which is public property and thereby belongs to space. Only thus was it possible to give a name to the rose and its perfume...And you now say that our different impressions, our personal impressions, result from the fact that we associate different recollections with rose-scent (162)

To give expression to the "inner" without resorting to the conventions of the "outer" conditions of artistic sensibility is the poet's fate. S/he faces the unenviable task of relating only the more hauntingly beautiful nuances of deeply interrelated human perceptions: the conventions and symbolism of language itself must, on the other hand, always militate against the ineffable and sublime qualities of a poetic mind. The world will reveal, and the poet is always fated to try to write, that which cannot be easily written, if at all. The 'maker' works with very recalcitrant materials that jealously hoard their interior riches.The "self", as Bergson says, "comes into contact with the external world at its surface." The poem's rose-scent and the feelings it elicits will be lost in the act of transmission. The chronicler of feelings can only provide a single one of what were successive states in the perception of the single object or event: the rose-scent in its final form as the poem. The only way a reader can intuit the poet's own inner experience is by impossibly recreating or reimagining, somehow, the exact "shading" or "colouring" or "intensity" of the experience that gave rise to the object that gave rise to the poem itself.

I've always believed this but not as some sort of conscious artistic manifesto of my own: it has always been intuitively obvious to me that the poet must look deep below the conventions of spatial configurations of reality (of which language and all conceptual thinking are primary exemplars) and record the exuberantly errant colourings of human perception at its most elemental. Bergson's true heir is Gilles Deleuze who I believe used precisely this Bergsonian sense of the "primary psychic phenomena" of human perception in his discussion of "the principle of the emission of singularities" to elucidate the source of every type of concrete expression (The Logic of Sense). To intuit the outlines of a mood or feeling or insight without the aid of the "word" is what I've always attempted to do, albeit at times clumsily and imprecisely. Language can do nothing (if it is to be poetic, above all) but try recording the essential evanescent and heterogeneous qualities of the world. It's a way of writing about things that by nature flee from where they've been necessarily accessed. And yet, at the same time, nothing has always appeared to me to be more liberatory.

I offer the following as another poem-offering to Bergonsian time and free will: a wildly exuberant way, that is, to voice a feeling and the only image of it available to me at that time. I can do no more without solidifying the form into a real prayer. Its aim is to show how agitated is the suppliant and how moody and changeable at the same time. That prayers go unanswered only attest to their living dynamism and liquidity. And since 'prayer' is at best a "symbolical representation" and a thing there's no way to predict a reader's response to it for, after all, one can really read the poem in its present state only. And the poem in that state will necessarily be imprecise and spontaneous like the perceptions that birthed it. There's no help for it.
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"Prayer"

You say, 'Blot out the leaves first, & pray', and so I do
creeping along as I have for some fifty odd years been
just this insanely cold, tired & rhapsodical
In the annals of heart, it was the eeriest light-greyish
                                                                            type by far

 

So by praying I can hope the ground to harden— but You,
up there with nowhere to go, star-fetish at best, a sky god
in the same wintery way a sparrow-bill can poke

into me anytime & tear like a bad tooth, wheresoever

And I hear myself say everyday, to you alone in my car
'With eyes like clouds, son-eager,& wise, see me through'.
The reply's the same, tho: all leaves turn each into a crow
and not just one but a whole tetchy gang of them, today

I'd even go for a more blanketing swarm to drop stone-fruit

down on me, and santana winds to turn or carry me like snow,
the road swept ahead like a lovely, pure sacrifice--ha!
even that'd be a little like prayer to a star-fetish, on the road

Karen Houle's "during": oughtn't the poet-philosopher to have known better?

                              Out isn't where she thinks she went in (during)

I take it almost as a certainty that the academic ought not to write poetry. It's probably truer to say that subservience to theory is the  primary cause of the disastrous poetry being written at campuses everywhere, and there others—such as tenure, publication pressures, collegial self-esteem, etc.—contributing their small share. As an inductive proposition, of course, I anxiously await the one disconfirming case of the theorist who writes exemplary verses or would eagerly consider to what extent the exception isn't just an interesting coincidence. I've tended to cite only confirming instances because there are, after all, so many of them. Well, to be fair, they may not prove the conclusion but they certainly establish it as very likely.

Karen Houle's book of poetry titled during is very probably another case of disastrous academic poetry. Are the cards stacked that pitilessly against her? The Canadian associate Professor with an interest in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, author here of a book of poetry heavily staked in a key "plane of immanence" view of knowledge (such as its divisions into 'During', 'Duration', 'Endure" and 'Durable' strongly imply), will have to prove (to me) that contemporary 'process'-metaphysics can be wed to her lyric.Yes, lyric. If Houle must serve as the 'I'-observer of Deleuzian transformations & give voice to the interplay of language and the perceiving body,as in "Someone, or the thought of someone, plops itself down—/in my corolla region; in the rising sun's brief, seasonal/ struggle I can hear" ("Second, During", 11), the 'lyrical' property is one she will be obligated to keep. To lose the "I" to theory (as I fear she does) is tantamount to failure.

 In fact, the success of academic poetry, here in Houle's work & anywhere else, hinges on whether experimentation and the "I"-subject can appear together without having to endure too much permeability or a bad case of what Houédard calls "borderblur". To write, & make tropes conform to, a wilfully transgressive language—as per poetry exercise—isn't a processual aesthetics worthy of the name. For a poetry that properly incarnates the "sensations" of daily existence one must turn to Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane. Just how hard she tries to make lyricism a function of a predominantly inhuman, almost grotesque realm of "becomings" is evident in places like

Life boils.

Watercycles char
sideways, lateral-driven cyclone spumes.

Resin flees from one ring to the next
through the trick-hatch ("Fourth, During" 15)

or,

Like a borning calf sliding in fuck-ooze,
he imagines, homunculated feminine
capacity for endless more; a liar-shimmer
highway of rubber insides, bat-black
verminy thick: sickens. ("Discretion" 41)

or,

Getting to say how you need it said
is what we have been saying

all along and when we see it

no doubts frame it cheap as black-out,
no unsubstantiated charges hanging bitch
teat in the downward air,

no weapons-grade anger
spruce sting bat swoop above his and her heads
swarming between us ("Modesty Lesson No. 3" 49-50)

where the "life-boil" images try clumsily to become real "lines of flight". Deleuze & Guattari, champions of "a material power of language", do urge us, in very elegant & passional terms, to "witness a transformation of substances and a dissolution of forms, a passage to the limit or flight from contours in favor of fluid forces, flows, air, light, and matter, such that a body or a word does not end at a precise point."(A Thousand Plateaus, 109). And what better food for metaphor, what better gateway to the radical open-endedness of poetry in general, than "flows, air, light, and matter"? Bachelard certainly knew the poetic value of earth's elementals.

It's regrettable, however, that Houle can work her way only through predictable groupings or that she resorts to them at all. "During" & "Duration", for example, make an interesting pair. Presumably "During" is process to "Duration"'s fleeting solidity. In "During", poetry's "moving matter" is reduced to a woodcutter figure "[who] instructs me/on the legal centre of wood"("Fourth, During"15)—a too predictable carpentry tool analogy!—with plenty of ash & poplar images to go around;  representations of"air" appear, among other things, in watery and silky things ("Fifth, During"16) like fish & nylon; and Houle's "fluid forces" are recast as the "pre-vibrational undodgeable" ("Seventh, During"18) motion of a train or a rickety bridge. It strikes the reader more as fanciful automatic writing than the radical deterritorialization of objects, bodies & sensations. "Each day I tilt like zinc/tarp all day one way" ("It Was Summer We Decided to Marry"25) could have easily been read in Schwitters.

In "Duration", on the other hand, "fluid forces" have cooled—for the duration only—into a narrative in perpetual flux, presumably the poet's own. While we are too busy doing philosophy, Houle seems to say, life momentarily congeals and then escapes through one of many apertures, leaving the "holey" space of paper after confetti's been punched out ("Guilt or Dread What An Amazing Instrument You Are" 28) or dreams issuing out of a husband's mouth ("Modesty: Lesson One" 32) or, of all things, a sea draining from a stem glass ("Forgiveness" 34). And where holes don't only appear there's also a kind of supporting "meat", "skin" and "flesh" armature for something that looks very much like a "Body without Organs (BwO)", the symbol perhaps of the many indeterminate thresholds existing between bodies & sensations or a sense of their varying intensities. The poem "Because We Were Prepared To Make Use Of Each Other" (29), among others like it, is a perfect summing up of all the Deleuzian categories to be found in during, "matter", "fluid forces" and a BwO-type Figure arrayed predictably & faithfully down the page:

Two by two in a harness of blended capability—
our handmade house with its hundred movable parts:

Parts to organize the light for sleeping,
parts for being all alone and
parts for being alone with you.

Your voice soon bent to fit my keyhole
was the opening in you to the outside world.

One thing safe inside another,
the high talk began

brutalizing one's mouth by the questions coming out of it.

Feet melt on rungs of deadly daylight.
Skin bangs on its hinges all night.

My breasts still warm dead doves—
picture window, mistaken for open sky. (29)

"Endure" and "Durable" fare no better as opposable poetic principles: no lovable odd-balls these to engage the reader. There are the usual openings, endless transformations (of God into river, cotton candy into silly girls, to name a couple from "On The Paper Anniversary Of The High-Wire Act" 55) and fluid forces of change (such as "mangling pretty phrases out of/loamy inert matter" in "By This Method The Mother Tongue Becomes" 69). There are the interminable exchanges between language and a prevalent "process"-philosophy, such as "shit snow", "obscene float", "yellow ringlets dangling like giant sperm", "Sinuses' private lessons", "Tube-tanged air" (from "My Various Daughters" 71) multiplying beyond necessity. The concluding "Durable" section, with its exploration of other bodies, ideas & states of affairs, reads like an angry anti-logocentric (anti-socratic) feminist tract—very reminiscent of Atwood—with daughters ("Durable No. 4" 90), Buddhist misogyny ("More Women Advice From The East" 92) and even some environmentalist rant ("Durable No. 6" 94). Now Deleuzian "becomings" become social causes:  the "I"-observer the "I"-activist. Houle's clearly violated a key non figuratif non objectif principle of Deleuzian aesthetics:  almost every line on Houle's page signifies or illustrates or narrates.

Perhaps the object here is just to endure & trudge on, through Houle's tetralogy, into the interminable talkativeness to which the poet-philosopher's reduced language & the lyrical journey (after Beckett). If this is the game-plan, then poetry's been turned into self-critique (a parody?) of poet & her materials, and how differently during would seem to me. But I don't think Houle's self-reflexive enough for this: the one thing that would've saved her, the potential in lines like "Each year is nothing more than a rolling over to relieve the/stiffness" and "Today the sad riffling lean of March on the pack-ice at the pilings/tired like our believing it" ("Endure No. 7" 79), seems to have eluded her. Here the narrative can have turned into nonnarrative, the academic-poet narrator into what Deleuze (in Francis Bacon: the logic of sensation) calls the "Figure" (71), with rythmical variations on the "becomings" of things like "the sad riffling lean of March".

Houle's are always misspent energies, however: well-intentioned to be sure, eagerly availing herself of the theory but just not up to the job. For transformation an equally transformative language is required. The effect is decidedly that of the postmodern enthusiast given to writing spurts inspired by her reading of a single philosophical source, and in her hurry to make theory fit, she's stilled the "infinite movement of thought" (from Deleuze's What is Philosophy?). I ought to be able to say of her poetry (but can't) what Deleuze said rightfully of Francis Bacon's paintings, a body of work to which he himself went for self-validation:

In place of formal correspondences, what Bacon's painting constitutes is a zone of indiscernibility or undecidability between man and animal. Man becomes animal, but not without the animal becoming spirit at the same time, the spirit of man, the physical spirit of man presented in the mirror as Eumenides or Fate. (Francis Bacon 21)

That wonderful blending of spirit and artistic subject in a pure animality (materiality) of work is nowhere to be seen in Houle. Saying in repetitive, almost formulaic verse—as the academic-poet does—that poetry such as hers moves by real affections, & even more devastatingly real "chaosmic" & deterritorializing forces doesn't make it so: the work rather refers to poet herself & turns poetry into a bland narrative of ideas. The dynamism she's striving for must draw deep from the well of 'hidden' fires & leave the reader with real poetical "matters" irreducible to her books, and for that talent is required. She really ought to have known better. And she ought to have seen above all the effigy of the lyrical "I" that always results from a misappropriated reading of a favourite author.

Faces: Gilles Deleuze

A schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on the analyst's couch (Deleuze & Guattari)

Schizophrenia is disaster in life and success in poetry (Harold Bloom)

I can say without exaggeration that were it not for Gilles Deleuze I wouldn't be writing this now. Not that he's meant a life or death difference to me personally: or perhaps it's the case that (to realign indebtedness more clearly to the man & some uniquely collaborative origins) the writing vocation would've been lost entirely on me. The crease in the picture is a little telling: perhaps even emblematic. It's probably why I've kept it.

Actually, 'liberatory' is the word I ought to use to show the pure (& thrilling) aleatoriness of my first dove flight after reading Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Nothing seemed beyond reproach afterwards and everything that was to me erstwhile literarily dull, by which I mean weighted down with spotty academicisms, was subject to exciting new laws of intensities, new refractions & the vital regroupings that go with them. Poetries and genres seemed to dissolve into slipstreams. The language of poetry came— after the fall (so to speak)— soaring to the lyrically accessible spheres where composition developed by "lawns of excluded middles" (Waldrop) & singularities, averse to 'molar' crowds, that could be skimmed off the poet's perceptual field almost with Alice-in-Wonderland ease. In the words of Deleuze commentator Constantin V. Boundas (in "Gilles deleuze and the Problem of Freedom"), it's "the excess of the virtual over the actual" that releases free creativity. It's what I needed.

Yes, I said 'lyrical'! It's why my favourite modern work (or the one to which I believe a true lyricism is beholden the most these days) is John Berryman's The Dream Songs, and my favourite sonneteer, Ted Berrigan. And because they happen to be deleuzian spirits, they're also both American and not Canadian, coincidentally, and not Canadian because my country's still a place where, again, "skirting the surface" (The Logic of Sense) is seen as unpatriotic. Moralizing tendencies in Art abound everywhere here. After Deleuze, the poem didn't become the fashionable (Language) slyboots but rather an egregiously manifold 'body without organs' (bwo), a living index to any one of life's most intense schizzes: a living palette, installation visible only to the artist, a dream poetry worth dying for. None of which is to say, at the same time, that poetry turns into the unnatural and artificial medium for grotesqueries deleuzians worldwide had originally hoped for.

A world & a heart can, after all, be willed into being as easily as pastiche & readymades: being without organs invites deep tampering. Berryman, again, is not to lyricism what Duchamp is to the avant-garde: for one thing Deleuze & Berryman were jumpers whereas the middle class eagerly ate up Duchamp's artistic creations. I can envisage in them both a suicide pact and make that the lyrical heart. Logically and materially the work's (or the bwo's) still a creature of impetus coralled easily into a 'holey' space of competing forms & materials. It's the handling that matters. In short, Deleuze defines that uniquely defining arrest quality of a work, a quality which only the transplanted heart can give, as the immanent lyric (or avant-garde or Sadean or Mallarméan) in us all. Again and again, Canada's still a landscape for emotional & aesthetic cripples because it's forgotten how to walk like a true poetry body: beset with the tendency to think that Art's never immanent but interchangeable & so can be easily replaced by its francophone neighbour.

The crease in the Deleuze pic is emblematic, after all: & I've saved it since a crease pleases more than a skull fracture, and the figure in it looks like a framed portrait. One for Francis Bacon. A somehow even soft and reassuring granfatherly rest competes with a death mask image, the impish with the ghoulish, as if the man were saying anything, like Art, can be as freely transgressible as this receptacle for spontaneity named a bwo, & all that's needed is a constant infusion of fresh heart before the hardening sets in: something to lure aging spirits into creativity, even long after their prime. Cracked spirits like me.

Some reflections on a Bachelard quotation:


"If meanings become too profuse, it can fall into word play. If it restricts itself to a single meaning, it can fall into didacticism. The true poet avoids both dangers. He plays and he teaches. In him, the word reflects and reflows; in him time begins to wait. The true poem awakens an unconquerable desire to be reread."

Avoiding profuseness and a too clean, too neatly compressed language use is a poet's mandate. True. The danger is in not allowing language to skirt middle options since the middle is always the poem's true origin (in medias res)...But I'd like to make distinctions—though none exist really— preferring to see the poem as a "body without organs (BwO)" (after Deleuze) and the desires a poem awakens as flights and intensities skimming lightly over its smooth planar surface. Intentions and works always intersect transversely. Even if thoughts cause unseemly striations, the effect is too free us from stultifying "totalizing" designs and delight in the almost infinite multiplicities the text can now reveal to us.


Wherever you begin in a poem both a beginning and potential for infinite flows and "reflows" can be assured. In Deleuzian theory (as in my acceptation of that term) the BwO is not a metaphor: it's rather an 'abstract' machine universally applicable to any concrete writing project or, more properly speaking, a radical text-becoming that unleashes creative vectors (after Charles Olson) or can, if necessary, disclose the turning or twisting force of prosodic language (after Ron Silliman). I believe Bachelard may have anticipated this postructuralist rethinking of the primacy of "flows" in poetrywriting, pointing the way to a true radical heterogeneity of meaning.