Poeticity is present when the word is felt as a word and not a mere representation ofthe object being named or an outburst of emotion, when words and their composition, their meaning, their external and inner form, acquire a weight and value of their own instead o f
referring
indifferently to reality.
Brett Bourbon - 1996 - Constructing a Replacement for the Soul
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He [Wordsworth] was to treat man as man--a subject of eye, ear, touch, and taste, in contact with external nature, and informing the senses from the mind, and not compounding a mind out of the senses" (188).
1 What has changed between Coleridge's Wordworth and Eliot when he writes in "Gerontion"?
:
To lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition.
I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it Since what is kept must be adulterated?
I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch: How should I use them for your closer contact?
Such poetry is not simply an expression o f personality. Age and terror and revulsion and the failure of our knowing and knowledge, the realization that not only can the mind and the world be confused with each other, but that a failure of courage or of sense or of meaning can tempt us to deny our mind. What kind o f questions are these? : "Do I dare disturb the universe? "2or "After such knowledge, what forgiveness? " or "I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch: How should I use them for your closer contact? "3 or "Shall I set my lands in order? " or '"What! areyou here? "'. 4 We can say at least that questions about the limits of knowledge can be understood as questions about redemption (ofour knowing, ofour language(s), ofourselves). The possibility ofredemption in The Waste Land underwrites a theory of animation (a set of embedded assumptions) that
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? displaces the site of our mind or soul (the between in Finnegans Wake) into the subjunctive. How does one animate possibility? This sounds like a nonsense question. I think, however, that one should understand it to mean that Eliot's use o f possibility highlights the failure o f knowledge, such that the demand to reanimate mind and world is not a rejection o f this failure (skepticism), as in pantheism, but a demand to reanimate
mind and world from within or as this uncertainty.
"What The Thunder Said" in The Waste Land does not promise the sound of
thunder, but the meaning o f a particular burst o f thunder-talk. Joyce gives the thunder a voice as well, but Wakean thunder is not yet caught up into fragmented allegories: it structures the world o f "broken heaventalk" (261. 28) as a semantic/ syntactic/ phonetic limit between the body o f the dreamer, whose turning in the night is signaled by these thunderous peals, and the mind or language he finds himselfbeing or in, which we call the book Finnegans Wake:
The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarr hounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthumuk! ) o f a wallstrait oldparr is retale early in bed and later on life down through all Christian minstrelsy. (3. 15-16)
Thunder phonemes repeat and therefore constitute a rhythmic order: mm, nn, onn, t . . . t, h. . . h,bababada,gh. . . gh,etc. Thisrepetition,likethe"Da/Damata. . . "ofEliot's thunder, grows, barnacle-like, through accretion into parodic forms o f human sense: "konnbronntonner" or "toohoohoord": to be able to bum and thunder [G. konnen, brenn, tonner] and 'also who heard? '. Does this make the sense of the thunder a question of training (maybe even scientific training) or of listening or of failing to hear or failing to be
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? a person who can hear, who can recognize 'me' and 'who' in 'toohoohoord'? Joyce has included at least 13 words for thunder in this sound: "thunntro" and "tonnerr" pun the English thunder, German, Donner, Japanese, kaminair, Hindi, karak, Greek, brontao; French lonnerre\ Italian, tuono, Swedish, aska\ Portaguese, trovao\ Irish, tomach, Old Rumanian, tun , Danish, tordenen. Does the inclusion o f these multi-lingual puns in the soundofthethundermakethissoundself-reflexive? Whatthethunderspeaksisitsname, as if in some comedy, 'thunder thunder thunder. ' But this is not God's 'I am that I am. '
The sounds and the name are for us Thunder. They are for us a semantics discovered in the self-replication o f names in a series o f phonemes. Language o f this sort is a dreaming into the world, not into ourselves. Eliot wrote in his essay on Dante,
We have nothing but dreams, and we have forgotten that seeing visions--a practice now relegated to the aberrant and uneducated--was once a more significant,interesting,anddisciplinedkindofdreaming. Wetakeitforgranted that our dreams spring from below: possibly the quality of our dreams suffers as a consequence. {SelectedEssays, 204)
What is the ontological status (is it real? ) or the intentional claim (what is it about? ) of a dream exposing the world and not our psychology? Finnegans Wake is such a dream, that is, the world dreaming a mind; so would the world be if constructed by a demon, or if our brain was wired into its vat; or ifwe found ourselves in a world which was made in the way that we were made; culture would be such a dream; so would psychology be a dream intotheworldandnotintous. "IBshearingisindoubtingjustasmyseeingisonbelieving" (FW468. 15-16). Tothinkaboutbelievingthreatensunbelieving. Forthemoment
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? philosophy and poetry will seem "the world, mind, is, was and will be writing its own wrunes for ever, man, on all matters that fall under the ban o f our infrarational senses" (FW19. 35-20. 01).
A certain awe attends the world and its adequacy for us. This adequacy can at least be explained as an effect ofnatural selection. But thejustification ofthe worlds adequacy, its existence as a world for us, can mutate into a further confusion about how a world is constituted for us as our own. Or we might ask how we might lose the world not only to skeptical doubt, but in not knowing how to find ourselves in the world, lost "[tjill human voices wake us, and we drown". 5 In his notes on a philosophy seminar given by Josiah Royce, Eliot criticized philosophical theories o f knowledge as limited by their failure to "treat illusion as real" (Costello, 119). 6 I f I posit the causes o f my dream-vision as bio-chemical interactions in my brain or as a function of some psychological allegory,71 have not explained how the irreality ofmy vision alters what is a world; how can we survive fantasy? "What we should consider is not so much the meaning o f the images, but
the reverse process, that which led a man having an idea to express it in images"(204). Eliot ties this process to the clarity of visual images in allegorical thinking and poetry. Allegory generates meaning even without our being aware o f the particular meaning o f an image. This might be our response to systemic coherence, where the image manifests an order that constitutes the kind of order determining of a world or an organism or a mind.
Eliot's poetry constructs meaning at the edge o f these allegories (or worlds or organisms or minds), where we must always ask what is this poetry in relation to what the worlds are it points to and abuts. This poetry cannot itself function as a form of
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? consciousness as might Romantic poetry. Instead, Eliot's poetry describes limits to both howandwhyweinhabitourformsofmind(s)andworld(s). Thepoetryofallusionand fragmentation in The Waste Land' therefore, functions as grammatical categories written as ifthey were ontological categories describing the limits ofbeing human within the world. Fragments act as interlocking domains, pointing elsewhere, or switching point-of- view, failing to designate some other something (even the allusions do not mean as a
function o f their originary texts). The Waste Land poetic world, enacts subjunctive possibilities (word meanings, other texts, other worlds and persons, other minds that might read nonsense as sense) as the ontological description o f our stance toward each other and the world. In other words, both the conventional pictures o f the world and poetic fantasies and nonsense do not describe possible worlds, but rather pick us out as the limits o f all such possible worlds. 8
The claims that both the world and what counts as the subject or self are determined and limited, and made problematic or only possible by our being betrayed withinandthroughthispoetryasnothingmorethanthelimitofthesepossibilities. Lifeis counterfactual. Claims about what is real are all limit claims; the borders of sense and nonsensesketchedinTheWasteLanddescribethesesamelimits: theconflationofthe semantic and the ontologic draws our psychology into conflicting language games used to capture the interplay between husband and wife and friends, and living and dead, animate andinanimate,symbolicandordinary,etc. Theeffectofthepoetryistorequirea
justification for how we inhabit or project or commit ourselves to different and fluid grammatical (or what we often call psychological) limits: subject, object, self, other, 'I',
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? 'you', 'we', 'they', etc. The patterns of our involvement describe a meta-temporal order that can count as either a mind (ours or someone else's or the worlds) or a world (ours or someone else's or a presupposed given).
How do we confuse minds for world(s)? Thoreau can give us a hint about what it means to be confused enough to ask another version o f this question. In Walden's "Brute Neighbors", he fits the world to the mind, where this fitting is, itself, our awe:
Whydopreciselytheseobjectswhichwebeholdmakeaworld? Whyhasmanjust these species of animals for his neighbors; as if nothing but a mouse could have filled this crevice? I suspect that Pilpay & Co. have put animals to their best use, for they are all beasts of burden, in a sense, made to carry some portion of our thoughts. (151)
Do the objects we see make a world? "Make" can almost be read as a semantic pun. Interposing the clause 'which we behold' between the objects and 'making the world' not only pictures our seeing or an 'I' between objects and world, it attaches our beholding to world-making. Thus the question 'why do we make a world with these objects? requires us to answer with another question, 'how do we make a world? , placing these objects and the world on top o f the poetic and engineering modeling power o f our mind, [transcendental aesthetic]; But our seeing is a beholding, or a being held by the objects which might then make a world. These objects make a world, and our seeing is not a Kantian apperception but a perception ofwhat Heidegger calls the 'throwness of being". This would translate Thoreau's question into 'how do objects constitute a world? "; this is one way o f understanding Hiedegger's question "What is a thing? " in "Das Ding".
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? Thoreau, however, nests what makes a world in the questions 'Why these objects? ', 'Why this beholding? ', 'Why a world? '. These questions ask for the criteria (a
justification) that determines what counts as a world: why do these objects make a world? What objects? Look around. Pilpay, falsely believed to have written the Sanskrit fables collectedastheHitopadesa(telleroffables),makesfictionalworldsoftheworld. Already in the pressure Thoreau places on 'beasts ofburden' and 'made to carry some portion of our thoughts', our language functions as our thought. Animals become animals in our stories. But if they are not reduced into fetishes, they manifest "a portion o f our thoughts" (what portion? ) to ourselves as the world. We may think, in other words only what the world offers or the world may only be what we think. We are returned to Parmenides, even inthe difficulty oftranslation that attends his Greek: to yap auto voeiv ecmv xe
Kaisivai. Wecantranslatethisas'becausethesamethingisthoughtasexists'(57). 9 Does this mean that only what is thought exists? Or that to be thought about and to exist are the same? Or even as Sparshott suggested, "'Only what can think can exist? ' Or even 'Thinking and being are the same? "' (110). 10
The adequacy o f the world is understood here as the expression o f meaning, or possibly a theory of meaning, if what counts as a theory is understood to be a problem about how the world means. The adequacy o f the world, therefore, can be determined by how one answers (or if one asks) the question: 'how does the world mean or manifest our thinking (about it) in what it is? '; or 'how do we use the world to manifest our mind to ourselves or to express the world as the world? '
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? The awe attending the adequacy o f the world can seem to be a description o f the mind. The psycho-physiologist Warren McCulloch asks Thoreau's question o f the mind under the aspect o f logical coherence: "What Is a Number that a Man May Know It, and a Man that He May Know a Number? "11 Although his answer returns us to the question, it formulates a model o f time as a probabilistic logic expressed through "all-or-none impulsesoftheneurons"(9). Hesayshisobject,"asapsychologist,"
was to invent a kind of least psychic even, or "psychon," that would have the following properties: First, it was to be so simple an event that it either happened orelseitdidnothappen. Second,itwastohappenonlyifitsboundcausehad happened--shades o f Duns Scotus! --that is, it was to imply its temporal antecedent. Third, it was to propose this to subsequent psychons. Fourth, these were to be compounded to produce the equivalents of more complicated propositions concerning their antecedents. " (8)
The ambiguity in Thoreau's use of "make a world" is mirrored here in McCulloch's attempt "to invent a kind o f psychic event. " Logic is meant to provide a temporal invariant that in essence functions as the identity structure constituting both number and consciousness. Thismodelcanbeunderstoodasatranslationmachine(ofinputsinto outputs) structuring time through causal implication ("imply its temporal antecedent") in a hierarchical system whose final output, grasping an identity (number), mimics its own deep structure o f simple events as a succession o f organized identities (psychons).
Thoreau and McCulloch both describe the world from within, that is, not as a whole, and thus as built out of fragments. They describe, however, different kinds of
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? fragments. Thoreau,torqueingtheKantianlimitbetweenthemindandtheworldinthe stalling circular aesthetic logic of his sentences, marks out his neighbors, the particulars that fit within the world. These particulars present themselves to him in/ within/ as his awe and questioning. This may not seem a fragmentation; it is a peculiar kind. He finds himselfaskinghowtheobjectsfitsowellintoaworld,asifsuchafittingsurprisesus. He
finds himselfin the midst of a quantity of objects, and asks about what qualities (why these? ) fits these particulars within the qualitative whole of our experience and the world. McCulloch understands what exists as countable, and therefore wants to translate the qualitativeexperienceofconsciousnessintocountableunits. Hestructuresthetransitive relation between mind and brain as the instantiation o f identity as the determining atomic units o f mind-existence. Both we and the world inhabit this awe and these numbers.
One way o f reducing ourselves to quantity is to call ourselves clocks timing the world and actions and thoughts, speaking, remembering, returning, and hoping into being someone anyone might see again, surviving either humiliation or infinite diminishment. In such a clock, what someone might imagine the mind to be as the limit o f the world, the first moment must fix all other moments. Such an assumption underlies what was called in the Fifteenth century the problem o f the Absolute Clock. The Dominican philosopher Graziadei of Ascoli writes in his Quaestiones litterales:
Even though time is the measure ofall movement, and there is, at the same time, a multitude o f movements, there is, however, only one numerically single time, and not multiple times; that is so because the first movement is unique, and time concerns this movement and properly. '12
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? Duhem explains: "Time is an abstract concept formed by the intellect form every concrete movement; it remains always the same, whatever the concrete movements are from which it was formed" (362). This is time abstracted from the world, the creation of a still point or uniform series o f changes in relation to which time emerges as an idealized concept beyond the confusion of change and identity in the world. Heidegger in "Das Ding" and Eliot in The Waste Land twist this abstract series back into the world of things. These orderings oftime within the world constitute a semantics ofthings, an animation ofthe inanimate through the hypostatization o f existing (in various modes and forms) for Heidegger and of identity for Eliot.
Eliot's and Heidegger's investigation ofthe semantics o f'to be' revolve, I think, aroundthedistinctionbetweenredemptionandjustification. Youcanseethisrevolution in Eliot's Four Quartets: "There is only the fight to recover what has been lost and found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions that seem unpropitious"(EC)13; "Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future, and time future contained in timepast. Ifalltimeiseternallypresentalltimeisunredeemable"(BN). Thisisonewayof saying we do not know even what redemption might mean. Redemption might require perspicuous description of ourselves and/or the world. 14 But "Words strain, crack and sometimes break, under the burden, under the tension, slip, slide, perish, decay with
imprecision, will not stay in place, will not stay still. "(BN) 'Tor us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business. "(EC) "Also pray for those who were in ships, and ended their voyage on the sand, in the sea's lips or in the dark throat which will not reject them or wherever cannot reach them the sound o f the sea bell's perpetual angelus. "(DS)
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? "And every phrase and sentence that is right (where every word is at home, taking its place to support the others, the word neither diffident nor ostentatious, an easy commerce of the old and the new, the common word precise but not pedantic, the complete consort dancing together) every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning, every poem an epitaph. " (LG) How does one write an epitaph? Here lies nothing and above it these words. "The voice of the hidden waterfall and the children in the apple-tree not known,
because not looked for but heard, half-heard, in the stillness between two waves of the sea. " Suchanepitaphissenseless.
What can justify committing ourselves or attaching ourselves to pronouns, to nonsense, to poetry or logic? Jakobson gives one answer in "What is Poetiy? ":
But how does poeticity manifest itself?
Poeticity is present when the word is felt as a word and not a mere representation ofthe object being named or an outburst of emotion, when words and their composition, their meaning, their external and inner form, acquire a weight and value of their own instead o f referring indifferently to reality. (378)
Poetry is a mode of linguistic self-reflection, and in this is an animation and personification of language into self-consciousness (as if a mind). In ordinary language, words function under the aspect of grammar. Through poetry, in Jakobson's picture, this relation is inverted such that words gain possession oftheirgrammar and thus ofthemselves in a kind o f Lockean self-ownership. The personification o f language proceeds through equating self-reflection as self-possession ('acquire'). Self-reflection and self-possession function through the concepts o f 'weight' and 'value', not through reference or
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? expression. Thisconstitutesaredefinition(maybeareconceptualization)of'value'. Meaning does not function through reference; in this value is no longer ontologically determined, that is, the value expressed in self-reflection, in its creation o f our individualisticwords,isnotdeterminedbythecriteriaofthereal. Thesewordsdonot lose their ontological force, what Jakobson calls here their "weight". Value so considered becomes incoherent without the construction of a domain incommensurable with but able to replace that which was lost (the 'real' world picked out by reference). Words do not function independently o f ordinary referential language; self-reflection does not deny the sociality of words (our common usage) in their functional independence in poetry except inthedeterminationoftheirvalue. Referenceisembeddedincommonusage,value,for Jakobson, is (somehow) not. The primacy of sense is replaced with a concept of self- determined value (whatever that means). In this picture, words are tools only to and in their own ends, but they have no ends o f their own. In Jakobson's picture words, phrases, sentences are not valuable because they have a sense, but they have a sense because they are valuable (the poem as a political fantasy ofwords functioning as ifanimate minds).
Jakobson's definition of poetry, in essence as a mode of textual self-reflection constructing inherent value as the identity or meaning of words, places language in an ontological crisis, where the value o f language, as reflected in its poetic claim on us, is disjunct from the ontological conditions and criteria describing reality. Is the value of poetry real? All conceptual work remains legitimate only to the degree that the categories that are articulated (between intentionality and substance for example) exist. The terms of existence vary, matter does not exist in the same way that intentionality might, but matter
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? and intentionality must both fall under the rubric o f a reality (ours) as defined by an ontology that includes both domains or categories. It is not clear in Jakobson's definition what common ontology describes the world and this strange poetic value. The incommensurability o f poetry and the world forgets that it is human beings in the world and made by the world that make poetry. Jakobson's picture o f poetry generates a dualism.
Jakobson tries to stitch the world back together by an appeal to a kind o f logical necessity meant to describe an aspect ofthe world:
Why is all this necessary? Why is it necessary to make a special point o f the fact that sign does not fall together with object? Because, besides the direct awareness o f the identity between sign and object (A is Ai), there is a necessity for the direct awareness ofthe inadequacy ofthat identity (A is not A). The reason this antinomy is essential is that without contradiction there is no mobility of concepts, no mobility of signs, and the relationship between concept and sign becomes automatized. Activitycomestoahalt,andtheawarenessofrealitydiesout. (378)
Jakobson believes that poetry allows us to see a double aspect o f language, its contradictory functioning through identity and through inequality. Thus he reduces the referential functioning o f language, rather absurdly, to "the identity between sign and object (A is A)". We can read this identity in two ways. The first is obviously false: the sign "Lilac" is not equivalent to the lilac flowers planted in my garden. Words do not look like their objects, nor do prepositions look like their ostensible relations, or verbs like their actions, or the determiner 'the' like anything. Jakobson's use of identity must mean
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? instead that words function as if they were the objects picked out by these words (if one can even talk about objects here). But if "is" means here "as if where is the contradiction? How a particular sign string picks out something is at best not exclusively determined by a synonymy between sign and referent. The awareness ofthe non-identity between sign and object arises when 'lilacs' ceases to function as a name and is quoted
(explicitly or otherwise). 15 Thus, 'A is Ai', as the subscript should indicate (but does not to Jakobson), is a formula o f identity like x=y and not x=x. But even in saying this I do not mean to suggest that reference or naming can be explained through the use o f identity. There was never a real identity between A and Ai, thus the fact that A is not Ai should come as no surprise. Jakobson thinks that the formal non-identity o f A and Ai is a problem becasue he assumes that A means Ai through formal identity. Not only does this ignore the different forms o f 'identity', but why and how should reference be secured through identity? Consequently, this is not a real antinomy at all16
Even if this is not a real logical antinomy the force o f the double awareness o f the relation between word and object (or let's say world) and the fact that the word has no such intrinsic relation remains (at least as a claim). This claim, however, has ceased to be about language, where there exists no contradiction because reference cannot be reduced to identity. Jakobson's picture of double awareness describes, therefore, not our language but an aspect of our conscious experience (an aspect Joyce calls a "world, mind"). I think we can see a trace of this shift from language to consciousness in Jakobson's reasoning. This is registered as an anxiety that compels him to try an answer why reference might find itself akin, at least in appearance to identity. Jakobson must resolve this antinomy by
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? describing this double awareness as a function o f what is ontologically real: that is he must reconnect language with the world, but not through reference or identity.
Jakobson does this by embedding contradiction as an engine for movement between concepts and signs within a world which he believes cannot be automatized. Although change as contradiction should be perfectly describable as a logical transform, one assumes that Jakobson appeals to some gap that must be jumped creatively that allows for the alteration o f concepts and signs that allows for awareness. Because this is opposed to automazation, this awareness must be an awareness of difference built out of not a transformation between two states, which could be automatized, but a triangulation between these changes and our perception as a stable substrate describing an identity. There is a difference here. Automaztion describes a law like description o f reality, whereas 'mobility', not only in its appeal to animation, reduces the world to our temporal experience o f it. That is, without poetry, without our own double vision o f language as referential and self-reflexive, consciousness is reduced to objects described under the aspect of mechanical laws. Without this double vision activity ceases, and death results. With another rhetorical slip, Jakobson equates life with consciousness, such that this stasis loses us the phenomenal world. Are animals who do not use language incapable o f being aware of reality? A lot rests on how one construes "aware". Not simply for us, however.
The ontological status of these claims requires that they not be subjective. The conflation o f consciousness with life is thus a value judgment: without movement or contradiction poetry and life are really deadness, not anything at all. It is also an ontological claim, in which the prime criterion for being alive is movement. Such an ontology built out o f a
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? false antinomy and an unwarranted equation o f value and ontology (failing according to its ownstandardofdoubleawareness)begsthequestionitwasputforwardtosolve. It leaves us not with ajustification ofart but with a need to justify art that articulates the relation between poetic value, whatever that is, with ontological force and in relation to ontological criteria.
Thejustification ofa string ofwords through some version ofidentity, because it pretends to proceed through identity (tautology), should resolve itself into some kind o f truth claim. Jakobson's version seems to argue that the "logical antinomy" determining reference and sense (a kind o f theory o f naming) in its contradictions describes (isomorphically) the movement of our thoughts, either described or made possible by (the etiology o f this is confused and incomplete here) which is itself the means, because presumably it mirrors, the ontological contradictions that is "reality. " These contradictions in our language function at the service of a three-tiered chain of metaphysical identities fromsignstothinkingandthoughts(concepts)toreality. Thejustificationofpoetry,its necessity, describes the relation between our minds and the world according to an axiom ofidentity that yields a description oftime and mental movement, the loss ofwhich seeminglyisthedeathofrealityandourthinking. Thepictureunderlyingthismodelisthe equation o f a picture o f time with both the real and the animate. Time becomes the engine o f mind. Such an equation has an intuitive force; but it is not a consequence o f this model, but rather a picture undergirding it. The description of reference, thinking, time, and reality, however, all function as mythological names. They are unsupported by an ontology, let alone a logic.
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? But as an anthropological finding this model can at least make an odd question seem more reasonable. How canjustification invoke identity and not lead toward logical truth, but toward animation instead? This means asking what is the aesthetic force of identity, if this force cannot be reduced to logical analycity? Both questions, in order to remain sensible, ask for the missing ontology that Jakobson's model masks (by his playing
with dialectic and an incomplete picturing o f language as a certain kind o f naming).
A poetry constructed in such a way as to offer its "justification in every line", or
let's say any kind of self-reflection that loses the referential or expressive force of language (its dependent attachment to the world), requires that its senses function as ontologicalcriteria. Whatontologicalcommitmentisentailedinthesenseof'aroseisa rose is a rose is a rose'? This is asking what kind of sense is there in nonsense? One of Joyce's answers was what he called "singsigns to soundsense" (FW13807), "soundscript" (FW219. 17),"sinscript"(FW421. 18)or"sinse"(FW83. 12). Amusicoftransgression, however, cannot explain its meaning simply as an opposition to referential or spatial sense. The condition o f 'soundsense' must speak towards itself and towards the world, where the worldbecomestheconditionsdescribingcertainkindsoftransgressions. Onedoesnot imaginethatnonsenseescapestheworldofsenseorofmatterorofanythingelse. Our speaking o f both sense and nonsense must mark this speaking, and thus ourselves, as real.
If a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose, what am I? I might be tempted to answer with a Popeye-like parody of God: I am that I am that I am that I am. This does not lose its sense in the same way that Stein's repetition does. I am invested differently in my statements about roses than I am in those about myself. By analogy then poetry is
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? committed differently to its statements about the world than those about itself. What is this difference? When sense has ontological force as a structural function, we can call that theological language.
Is poetry linguistic self-reflection ofthis sort? or ofany sort? How is the temptation to appeals to identity, underpinning the truth possibilities o f self-reflection, implicatedintheconstructionofnotionsofvalueandjustification? Whatleadsfromthe
justification ofpoetry to a theory ofmind? What use or value or sense can a theory of mind constructed as part of such a justification have? All ofthese questions ask about how we use the verb of 'to be' as the limit between our conception of mind and world. The first question asks for either a definition of poetry, which would require further
justification, or for examples of poetry in relation to each other as they describe themselves. Any generalization about poetry remains so tied to changing expectations, personal responsiveness, prejudice, and so on that only poems can themselves make such claimsandgivethemselvesasevidence. Poemsthenatleastofferanopportunityto ventriloquizeouropinionsasaneffectofreading. Butclaimsaboutpoetryareinteresting in the ways they justify themselves and less in the substance o f their description and claims.
How can a poem become its own justification? Because we do not know what it means for a collection ofwords or phrases or lines or sentences to reflect upon themselves, not understanding any form of self-reflection besides our own, any claim about poetry's self-reflection allegorizes our reading of a poem as simultaneously an object which produces meanings, as a mechanism o f some sort, and as a phenomenological
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? self-reflection on our own reading, described, we imagine, as the interaction between the semanticsandsyntaxofapoem. Poetryis(orcanbe)anautonomousmechanismdirected towards us and an expression o f our reading towards the poem.
Asking "what does 'is' mean? " (a question o f semantics and syntax) and "what 'is' is? " (in what way does it exist? ) are not questions but riddles. The riddle o f 'to be', even in Eliot's fragmented symbolism o f subjunctive identities and Heidegger's ontological myth of revealing existing, asks, as Ammons does in his anti-symbolist poetry, how "this measure moves/ to attract attention. . . not to persuade you, enlighten you, not necessarily to delight you, but to hold you" (Sphere, 30). How the world holds us, how things hold us, and how we behold it and them, in containment or continuity or context or conflict, as genitive, dative, or ablative relations, requires justification, such as beauty, goodness,
truth, correspondence, coherence, desire, identity, fear, dread, despair. We inhabit an 'is' through our justification o f our kind of inhabiting. We can construct this how in art or in a description of our mind or in moral judgment; or we can express this holding in our questioning o f why this world holds us? why these things?
Russell describes the grammatical distinctions in our use o f "to be" :
The word is is terribly ambiguous, and great care is necessary in order not to confound its various meanings. We have (1) the sense in which it asserts Being, as in "A is"; (2) the sense o f identity; (3) the sense o f predication, in "A is human"; (4)thesenseof"Aisa-man". . whichisverylikeidentity. Inadditiontothese there are less common uses, as "to be good is to be happy"; where a relation of assertions is meant, that relation, in fact, which, where it exists, gives rise to formal
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? implication, Doubtless there are further meanings which have not occurred to
me. (64n)
These four classifications can be further described as (1) assertions o f existence (as in the quantifiers Vx and 3y; or, the Scholastic existentia, that something is); (2) x=x; and more questionably x=y; (3) Quine writes "Predication joins a general term and a singular term to form a sentence that is true or false according as the general term is true or false o f the object, if any, to which the singular term refers" (Wordand Object, 96), in this case the use o f the copula is restricted to claims about objects; (4) a definition and in this sense
both an identification and the inclusion of something within a class or set or category. As in category 4, these distinctions often function as aspects of each other, or presuppose each other, collapse into each other. 17
Prepositional and predicate logic analyzes the way in which the words 'or', 'and', 'not', 'if. . . then', 'every', 'some', 'necessary' and so on function in and structure statements or propositions as either True or False. Lyric poetry, and I am tempted to say most o f what counts as literature, let's say its narrative force and world-making force,
functions through instantiating the pronominal and the adverbial limits (primarily the demonstratives 'this', 'that', 'here', 'now') constituting the domain within which referential language functions. The limits of our language are non-referential. They constitute the world as temporal. Pronouns constitute our relation to the structures of our grammar and to the world determined by our perception and biology as a discursive event. Both pronouns and the adverbs 'now' and 'here' set up an indeterminate set of referential andmeaningpossibilities. Theycansubstituteforeachotheraswaysofmarkinga
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? sentence as a sentence in a language, an utterance as an utterance. Are they existential markers or temporal markers, guarantors, implicit or not, that in speaking this sentence I am alive? T points, therefore, in two directions: toward my inhabitation o f the world and my inhabitation o f language, where my utterance functions as a reflection o f this act o f uttering. Such self-reflection can then be used as an allegory onto which statements o f 'I am'candescribeme. Thisisawayofputtingtheobjectfirst,mythirdpersonstatusasa 'me', which is animated becomes an 'I am' through self-reflection.
Lyric enacts an exemplary expression o f language (exemplary o f what? ) as a referential system constituting the T . A poem is not strictly speaking about or picturing an 'I ', but causes an 'I ' to become instantiated as meaningful, marking language as ours by exposing how we speak this possession and thus offering itself as justification for this ownership. Justification means making visible the rules (the translation o f the pronouns and adverbs into 'to be' into 'to have'). Art in this sense exemplifies the psychological
and the grammatical, as the limits constituting the negative space of'I' and 'me', as objective, as an expression o f a body, and thus as 'mine'. Lyric as the poetry o f being-a-
moment and narrative as the poetry o f succession, o f being-in-the-world are ontological arguments through which we enter the world as real (but not only through good art, but through songs, phrases, perceptions, objects, lyric effects or attention, narrative logics, the failure o f which would be catatonia).
How to enter the world and language is tied to how we exit them. This relation between entering and exiting is the problem of the Sibyl in The Waste Land. The complicated metaphysics ofthe last section ofthe poem, "What The Thunder Said", are
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? built from the riddling thematic strands and ontological implications radiating from Eliot's initial introductory quotation:
"Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampula pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: SiPuXXa tt QeXiq; respondebat ilia; a7to0aveiv 0eXa>. "
For I saw with my own eyes the Sibyl hanging in ajar at Cumae, and when the
acolytes said, 'Sybil, what do you wish? ' she replied, 'I wish to die. '"
Apollo has granted the Sibyl eternal life, but because she failed to request eternal youth, she continues to age and shrink in size. Her small withered body is kept in a suspended
jar. Thus, we can recognize two temporal patterns: continuity and decay. The Sibyl's immortality consists o f her continued existence and identity as who she is. Although her form changes, the animating essence within it remains identical in every moment. The Sibyl's soul and body describe identity and loss. Her personal identity supersedes dynamic change, and thus separates her from the mortal metaphysical universe in which time, as Aristotle claims, can best be understood as loss. The Sibyl's containment in a bottle symbolizes this separation.
Change is marked by her shrinking, her continual decay and loss of physical substance,becominglessandless. Sheexistswithinaninfiniteregressionconstitutingnot onlyherworldbutherselfaswell. FortheSibylherimmortalityonlyservestocontinue her suffering as an old and aging woman. Immortality is an extension through time of an animatingessence,containedwithinthephysicalformofbeing. Thisessenceisnot separate from the form o f being, for it is the body itself which is immortal. Her physical
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? form, however, is endlessly disintegrating.
To lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition.
I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it Since what is kept must be adulterated?
I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch: How should I use them for your closer contact?
Such poetry is not simply an expression o f personality. Age and terror and revulsion and the failure of our knowing and knowledge, the realization that not only can the mind and the world be confused with each other, but that a failure of courage or of sense or of meaning can tempt us to deny our mind. What kind o f questions are these? : "Do I dare disturb the universe? "2or "After such knowledge, what forgiveness? " or "I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch: How should I use them for your closer contact? "3 or "Shall I set my lands in order? " or '"What! areyou here? "'. 4 We can say at least that questions about the limits of knowledge can be understood as questions about redemption (ofour knowing, ofour language(s), ofourselves). The possibility ofredemption in The Waste Land underwrites a theory of animation (a set of embedded assumptions) that
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? displaces the site of our mind or soul (the between in Finnegans Wake) into the subjunctive. How does one animate possibility? This sounds like a nonsense question. I think, however, that one should understand it to mean that Eliot's use o f possibility highlights the failure o f knowledge, such that the demand to reanimate mind and world is not a rejection o f this failure (skepticism), as in pantheism, but a demand to reanimate
mind and world from within or as this uncertainty.
"What The Thunder Said" in The Waste Land does not promise the sound of
thunder, but the meaning o f a particular burst o f thunder-talk. Joyce gives the thunder a voice as well, but Wakean thunder is not yet caught up into fragmented allegories: it structures the world o f "broken heaventalk" (261. 28) as a semantic/ syntactic/ phonetic limit between the body o f the dreamer, whose turning in the night is signaled by these thunderous peals, and the mind or language he finds himselfbeing or in, which we call the book Finnegans Wake:
The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarr hounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthumuk! ) o f a wallstrait oldparr is retale early in bed and later on life down through all Christian minstrelsy. (3. 15-16)
Thunder phonemes repeat and therefore constitute a rhythmic order: mm, nn, onn, t . . . t, h. . . h,bababada,gh. . . gh,etc. Thisrepetition,likethe"Da/Damata. . . "ofEliot's thunder, grows, barnacle-like, through accretion into parodic forms o f human sense: "konnbronntonner" or "toohoohoord": to be able to bum and thunder [G. konnen, brenn, tonner] and 'also who heard? '. Does this make the sense of the thunder a question of training (maybe even scientific training) or of listening or of failing to hear or failing to be
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? a person who can hear, who can recognize 'me' and 'who' in 'toohoohoord'? Joyce has included at least 13 words for thunder in this sound: "thunntro" and "tonnerr" pun the English thunder, German, Donner, Japanese, kaminair, Hindi, karak, Greek, brontao; French lonnerre\ Italian, tuono, Swedish, aska\ Portaguese, trovao\ Irish, tomach, Old Rumanian, tun , Danish, tordenen. Does the inclusion o f these multi-lingual puns in the soundofthethundermakethissoundself-reflexive? Whatthethunderspeaksisitsname, as if in some comedy, 'thunder thunder thunder. ' But this is not God's 'I am that I am. '
The sounds and the name are for us Thunder. They are for us a semantics discovered in the self-replication o f names in a series o f phonemes. Language o f this sort is a dreaming into the world, not into ourselves. Eliot wrote in his essay on Dante,
We have nothing but dreams, and we have forgotten that seeing visions--a practice now relegated to the aberrant and uneducated--was once a more significant,interesting,anddisciplinedkindofdreaming. Wetakeitforgranted that our dreams spring from below: possibly the quality of our dreams suffers as a consequence. {SelectedEssays, 204)
What is the ontological status (is it real? ) or the intentional claim (what is it about? ) of a dream exposing the world and not our psychology? Finnegans Wake is such a dream, that is, the world dreaming a mind; so would the world be if constructed by a demon, or if our brain was wired into its vat; or ifwe found ourselves in a world which was made in the way that we were made; culture would be such a dream; so would psychology be a dream intotheworldandnotintous. "IBshearingisindoubtingjustasmyseeingisonbelieving" (FW468. 15-16). Tothinkaboutbelievingthreatensunbelieving. Forthemoment
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? philosophy and poetry will seem "the world, mind, is, was and will be writing its own wrunes for ever, man, on all matters that fall under the ban o f our infrarational senses" (FW19. 35-20. 01).
A certain awe attends the world and its adequacy for us. This adequacy can at least be explained as an effect ofnatural selection. But thejustification ofthe worlds adequacy, its existence as a world for us, can mutate into a further confusion about how a world is constituted for us as our own. Or we might ask how we might lose the world not only to skeptical doubt, but in not knowing how to find ourselves in the world, lost "[tjill human voices wake us, and we drown". 5 In his notes on a philosophy seminar given by Josiah Royce, Eliot criticized philosophical theories o f knowledge as limited by their failure to "treat illusion as real" (Costello, 119). 6 I f I posit the causes o f my dream-vision as bio-chemical interactions in my brain or as a function of some psychological allegory,71 have not explained how the irreality ofmy vision alters what is a world; how can we survive fantasy? "What we should consider is not so much the meaning o f the images, but
the reverse process, that which led a man having an idea to express it in images"(204). Eliot ties this process to the clarity of visual images in allegorical thinking and poetry. Allegory generates meaning even without our being aware o f the particular meaning o f an image. This might be our response to systemic coherence, where the image manifests an order that constitutes the kind of order determining of a world or an organism or a mind.
Eliot's poetry constructs meaning at the edge o f these allegories (or worlds or organisms or minds), where we must always ask what is this poetry in relation to what the worlds are it points to and abuts. This poetry cannot itself function as a form of
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? consciousness as might Romantic poetry. Instead, Eliot's poetry describes limits to both howandwhyweinhabitourformsofmind(s)andworld(s). Thepoetryofallusionand fragmentation in The Waste Land' therefore, functions as grammatical categories written as ifthey were ontological categories describing the limits ofbeing human within the world. Fragments act as interlocking domains, pointing elsewhere, or switching point-of- view, failing to designate some other something (even the allusions do not mean as a
function o f their originary texts). The Waste Land poetic world, enacts subjunctive possibilities (word meanings, other texts, other worlds and persons, other minds that might read nonsense as sense) as the ontological description o f our stance toward each other and the world. In other words, both the conventional pictures o f the world and poetic fantasies and nonsense do not describe possible worlds, but rather pick us out as the limits o f all such possible worlds. 8
The claims that both the world and what counts as the subject or self are determined and limited, and made problematic or only possible by our being betrayed withinandthroughthispoetryasnothingmorethanthelimitofthesepossibilities. Lifeis counterfactual. Claims about what is real are all limit claims; the borders of sense and nonsensesketchedinTheWasteLanddescribethesesamelimits: theconflationofthe semantic and the ontologic draws our psychology into conflicting language games used to capture the interplay between husband and wife and friends, and living and dead, animate andinanimate,symbolicandordinary,etc. Theeffectofthepoetryistorequirea
justification for how we inhabit or project or commit ourselves to different and fluid grammatical (or what we often call psychological) limits: subject, object, self, other, 'I',
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? 'you', 'we', 'they', etc. The patterns of our involvement describe a meta-temporal order that can count as either a mind (ours or someone else's or the worlds) or a world (ours or someone else's or a presupposed given).
How do we confuse minds for world(s)? Thoreau can give us a hint about what it means to be confused enough to ask another version o f this question. In Walden's "Brute Neighbors", he fits the world to the mind, where this fitting is, itself, our awe:
Whydopreciselytheseobjectswhichwebeholdmakeaworld? Whyhasmanjust these species of animals for his neighbors; as if nothing but a mouse could have filled this crevice? I suspect that Pilpay & Co. have put animals to their best use, for they are all beasts of burden, in a sense, made to carry some portion of our thoughts. (151)
Do the objects we see make a world? "Make" can almost be read as a semantic pun. Interposing the clause 'which we behold' between the objects and 'making the world' not only pictures our seeing or an 'I' between objects and world, it attaches our beholding to world-making. Thus the question 'why do we make a world with these objects? requires us to answer with another question, 'how do we make a world? , placing these objects and the world on top o f the poetic and engineering modeling power o f our mind, [transcendental aesthetic]; But our seeing is a beholding, or a being held by the objects which might then make a world. These objects make a world, and our seeing is not a Kantian apperception but a perception ofwhat Heidegger calls the 'throwness of being". This would translate Thoreau's question into 'how do objects constitute a world? "; this is one way o f understanding Hiedegger's question "What is a thing? " in "Das Ding".
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? Thoreau, however, nests what makes a world in the questions 'Why these objects? ', 'Why this beholding? ', 'Why a world? '. These questions ask for the criteria (a
justification) that determines what counts as a world: why do these objects make a world? What objects? Look around. Pilpay, falsely believed to have written the Sanskrit fables collectedastheHitopadesa(telleroffables),makesfictionalworldsoftheworld. Already in the pressure Thoreau places on 'beasts ofburden' and 'made to carry some portion of our thoughts', our language functions as our thought. Animals become animals in our stories. But if they are not reduced into fetishes, they manifest "a portion o f our thoughts" (what portion? ) to ourselves as the world. We may think, in other words only what the world offers or the world may only be what we think. We are returned to Parmenides, even inthe difficulty oftranslation that attends his Greek: to yap auto voeiv ecmv xe
Kaisivai. Wecantranslatethisas'becausethesamethingisthoughtasexists'(57). 9 Does this mean that only what is thought exists? Or that to be thought about and to exist are the same? Or even as Sparshott suggested, "'Only what can think can exist? ' Or even 'Thinking and being are the same? "' (110). 10
The adequacy o f the world is understood here as the expression o f meaning, or possibly a theory of meaning, if what counts as a theory is understood to be a problem about how the world means. The adequacy o f the world, therefore, can be determined by how one answers (or if one asks) the question: 'how does the world mean or manifest our thinking (about it) in what it is? '; or 'how do we use the world to manifest our mind to ourselves or to express the world as the world? '
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? The awe attending the adequacy o f the world can seem to be a description o f the mind. The psycho-physiologist Warren McCulloch asks Thoreau's question o f the mind under the aspect o f logical coherence: "What Is a Number that a Man May Know It, and a Man that He May Know a Number? "11 Although his answer returns us to the question, it formulates a model o f time as a probabilistic logic expressed through "all-or-none impulsesoftheneurons"(9). Hesayshisobject,"asapsychologist,"
was to invent a kind of least psychic even, or "psychon," that would have the following properties: First, it was to be so simple an event that it either happened orelseitdidnothappen. Second,itwastohappenonlyifitsboundcausehad happened--shades o f Duns Scotus! --that is, it was to imply its temporal antecedent. Third, it was to propose this to subsequent psychons. Fourth, these were to be compounded to produce the equivalents of more complicated propositions concerning their antecedents. " (8)
The ambiguity in Thoreau's use of "make a world" is mirrored here in McCulloch's attempt "to invent a kind o f psychic event. " Logic is meant to provide a temporal invariant that in essence functions as the identity structure constituting both number and consciousness. Thismodelcanbeunderstoodasatranslationmachine(ofinputsinto outputs) structuring time through causal implication ("imply its temporal antecedent") in a hierarchical system whose final output, grasping an identity (number), mimics its own deep structure o f simple events as a succession o f organized identities (psychons).
Thoreau and McCulloch both describe the world from within, that is, not as a whole, and thus as built out of fragments. They describe, however, different kinds of
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? fragments. Thoreau,torqueingtheKantianlimitbetweenthemindandtheworldinthe stalling circular aesthetic logic of his sentences, marks out his neighbors, the particulars that fit within the world. These particulars present themselves to him in/ within/ as his awe and questioning. This may not seem a fragmentation; it is a peculiar kind. He finds himselfaskinghowtheobjectsfitsowellintoaworld,asifsuchafittingsurprisesus. He
finds himselfin the midst of a quantity of objects, and asks about what qualities (why these? ) fits these particulars within the qualitative whole of our experience and the world. McCulloch understands what exists as countable, and therefore wants to translate the qualitativeexperienceofconsciousnessintocountableunits. Hestructuresthetransitive relation between mind and brain as the instantiation o f identity as the determining atomic units o f mind-existence. Both we and the world inhabit this awe and these numbers.
One way o f reducing ourselves to quantity is to call ourselves clocks timing the world and actions and thoughts, speaking, remembering, returning, and hoping into being someone anyone might see again, surviving either humiliation or infinite diminishment. In such a clock, what someone might imagine the mind to be as the limit o f the world, the first moment must fix all other moments. Such an assumption underlies what was called in the Fifteenth century the problem o f the Absolute Clock. The Dominican philosopher Graziadei of Ascoli writes in his Quaestiones litterales:
Even though time is the measure ofall movement, and there is, at the same time, a multitude o f movements, there is, however, only one numerically single time, and not multiple times; that is so because the first movement is unique, and time concerns this movement and properly. '12
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? Duhem explains: "Time is an abstract concept formed by the intellect form every concrete movement; it remains always the same, whatever the concrete movements are from which it was formed" (362). This is time abstracted from the world, the creation of a still point or uniform series o f changes in relation to which time emerges as an idealized concept beyond the confusion of change and identity in the world. Heidegger in "Das Ding" and Eliot in The Waste Land twist this abstract series back into the world of things. These orderings oftime within the world constitute a semantics ofthings, an animation ofthe inanimate through the hypostatization o f existing (in various modes and forms) for Heidegger and of identity for Eliot.
Eliot's and Heidegger's investigation ofthe semantics o f'to be' revolve, I think, aroundthedistinctionbetweenredemptionandjustification. Youcanseethisrevolution in Eliot's Four Quartets: "There is only the fight to recover what has been lost and found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions that seem unpropitious"(EC)13; "Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future, and time future contained in timepast. Ifalltimeiseternallypresentalltimeisunredeemable"(BN). Thisisonewayof saying we do not know even what redemption might mean. Redemption might require perspicuous description of ourselves and/or the world. 14 But "Words strain, crack and sometimes break, under the burden, under the tension, slip, slide, perish, decay with
imprecision, will not stay in place, will not stay still. "(BN) 'Tor us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business. "(EC) "Also pray for those who were in ships, and ended their voyage on the sand, in the sea's lips or in the dark throat which will not reject them or wherever cannot reach them the sound o f the sea bell's perpetual angelus. "(DS)
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? "And every phrase and sentence that is right (where every word is at home, taking its place to support the others, the word neither diffident nor ostentatious, an easy commerce of the old and the new, the common word precise but not pedantic, the complete consort dancing together) every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning, every poem an epitaph. " (LG) How does one write an epitaph? Here lies nothing and above it these words. "The voice of the hidden waterfall and the children in the apple-tree not known,
because not looked for but heard, half-heard, in the stillness between two waves of the sea. " Suchanepitaphissenseless.
What can justify committing ourselves or attaching ourselves to pronouns, to nonsense, to poetry or logic? Jakobson gives one answer in "What is Poetiy? ":
But how does poeticity manifest itself?
Poeticity is present when the word is felt as a word and not a mere representation ofthe object being named or an outburst of emotion, when words and their composition, their meaning, their external and inner form, acquire a weight and value of their own instead o f referring indifferently to reality. (378)
Poetry is a mode of linguistic self-reflection, and in this is an animation and personification of language into self-consciousness (as if a mind). In ordinary language, words function under the aspect of grammar. Through poetry, in Jakobson's picture, this relation is inverted such that words gain possession oftheirgrammar and thus ofthemselves in a kind o f Lockean self-ownership. The personification o f language proceeds through equating self-reflection as self-possession ('acquire'). Self-reflection and self-possession function through the concepts o f 'weight' and 'value', not through reference or
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? expression. Thisconstitutesaredefinition(maybeareconceptualization)of'value'. Meaning does not function through reference; in this value is no longer ontologically determined, that is, the value expressed in self-reflection, in its creation o f our individualisticwords,isnotdeterminedbythecriteriaofthereal. Thesewordsdonot lose their ontological force, what Jakobson calls here their "weight". Value so considered becomes incoherent without the construction of a domain incommensurable with but able to replace that which was lost (the 'real' world picked out by reference). Words do not function independently o f ordinary referential language; self-reflection does not deny the sociality of words (our common usage) in their functional independence in poetry except inthedeterminationoftheirvalue. Referenceisembeddedincommonusage,value,for Jakobson, is (somehow) not. The primacy of sense is replaced with a concept of self- determined value (whatever that means). In this picture, words are tools only to and in their own ends, but they have no ends o f their own. In Jakobson's picture words, phrases, sentences are not valuable because they have a sense, but they have a sense because they are valuable (the poem as a political fantasy ofwords functioning as ifanimate minds).
Jakobson's definition of poetry, in essence as a mode of textual self-reflection constructing inherent value as the identity or meaning of words, places language in an ontological crisis, where the value o f language, as reflected in its poetic claim on us, is disjunct from the ontological conditions and criteria describing reality. Is the value of poetry real? All conceptual work remains legitimate only to the degree that the categories that are articulated (between intentionality and substance for example) exist. The terms of existence vary, matter does not exist in the same way that intentionality might, but matter
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? and intentionality must both fall under the rubric o f a reality (ours) as defined by an ontology that includes both domains or categories. It is not clear in Jakobson's definition what common ontology describes the world and this strange poetic value. The incommensurability o f poetry and the world forgets that it is human beings in the world and made by the world that make poetry. Jakobson's picture o f poetry generates a dualism.
Jakobson tries to stitch the world back together by an appeal to a kind o f logical necessity meant to describe an aspect ofthe world:
Why is all this necessary? Why is it necessary to make a special point o f the fact that sign does not fall together with object? Because, besides the direct awareness o f the identity between sign and object (A is Ai), there is a necessity for the direct awareness ofthe inadequacy ofthat identity (A is not A). The reason this antinomy is essential is that without contradiction there is no mobility of concepts, no mobility of signs, and the relationship between concept and sign becomes automatized. Activitycomestoahalt,andtheawarenessofrealitydiesout. (378)
Jakobson believes that poetry allows us to see a double aspect o f language, its contradictory functioning through identity and through inequality. Thus he reduces the referential functioning o f language, rather absurdly, to "the identity between sign and object (A is A)". We can read this identity in two ways. The first is obviously false: the sign "Lilac" is not equivalent to the lilac flowers planted in my garden. Words do not look like their objects, nor do prepositions look like their ostensible relations, or verbs like their actions, or the determiner 'the' like anything. Jakobson's use of identity must mean
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? instead that words function as if they were the objects picked out by these words (if one can even talk about objects here). But if "is" means here "as if where is the contradiction? How a particular sign string picks out something is at best not exclusively determined by a synonymy between sign and referent. The awareness ofthe non-identity between sign and object arises when 'lilacs' ceases to function as a name and is quoted
(explicitly or otherwise). 15 Thus, 'A is Ai', as the subscript should indicate (but does not to Jakobson), is a formula o f identity like x=y and not x=x. But even in saying this I do not mean to suggest that reference or naming can be explained through the use o f identity. There was never a real identity between A and Ai, thus the fact that A is not Ai should come as no surprise. Jakobson thinks that the formal non-identity o f A and Ai is a problem becasue he assumes that A means Ai through formal identity. Not only does this ignore the different forms o f 'identity', but why and how should reference be secured through identity? Consequently, this is not a real antinomy at all16
Even if this is not a real logical antinomy the force o f the double awareness o f the relation between word and object (or let's say world) and the fact that the word has no such intrinsic relation remains (at least as a claim). This claim, however, has ceased to be about language, where there exists no contradiction because reference cannot be reduced to identity. Jakobson's picture of double awareness describes, therefore, not our language but an aspect of our conscious experience (an aspect Joyce calls a "world, mind"). I think we can see a trace of this shift from language to consciousness in Jakobson's reasoning. This is registered as an anxiety that compels him to try an answer why reference might find itself akin, at least in appearance to identity. Jakobson must resolve this antinomy by
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? describing this double awareness as a function o f what is ontologically real: that is he must reconnect language with the world, but not through reference or identity.
Jakobson does this by embedding contradiction as an engine for movement between concepts and signs within a world which he believes cannot be automatized. Although change as contradiction should be perfectly describable as a logical transform, one assumes that Jakobson appeals to some gap that must be jumped creatively that allows for the alteration o f concepts and signs that allows for awareness. Because this is opposed to automazation, this awareness must be an awareness of difference built out of not a transformation between two states, which could be automatized, but a triangulation between these changes and our perception as a stable substrate describing an identity. There is a difference here. Automaztion describes a law like description o f reality, whereas 'mobility', not only in its appeal to animation, reduces the world to our temporal experience o f it. That is, without poetry, without our own double vision o f language as referential and self-reflexive, consciousness is reduced to objects described under the aspect of mechanical laws. Without this double vision activity ceases, and death results. With another rhetorical slip, Jakobson equates life with consciousness, such that this stasis loses us the phenomenal world. Are animals who do not use language incapable o f being aware of reality? A lot rests on how one construes "aware". Not simply for us, however.
The ontological status of these claims requires that they not be subjective. The conflation o f consciousness with life is thus a value judgment: without movement or contradiction poetry and life are really deadness, not anything at all. It is also an ontological claim, in which the prime criterion for being alive is movement. Such an ontology built out o f a
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? false antinomy and an unwarranted equation o f value and ontology (failing according to its ownstandardofdoubleawareness)begsthequestionitwasputforwardtosolve. It leaves us not with ajustification ofart but with a need to justify art that articulates the relation between poetic value, whatever that is, with ontological force and in relation to ontological criteria.
Thejustification ofa string ofwords through some version ofidentity, because it pretends to proceed through identity (tautology), should resolve itself into some kind o f truth claim. Jakobson's version seems to argue that the "logical antinomy" determining reference and sense (a kind o f theory o f naming) in its contradictions describes (isomorphically) the movement of our thoughts, either described or made possible by (the etiology o f this is confused and incomplete here) which is itself the means, because presumably it mirrors, the ontological contradictions that is "reality. " These contradictions in our language function at the service of a three-tiered chain of metaphysical identities fromsignstothinkingandthoughts(concepts)toreality. Thejustificationofpoetry,its necessity, describes the relation between our minds and the world according to an axiom ofidentity that yields a description oftime and mental movement, the loss ofwhich seeminglyisthedeathofrealityandourthinking. Thepictureunderlyingthismodelisthe equation o f a picture o f time with both the real and the animate. Time becomes the engine o f mind. Such an equation has an intuitive force; but it is not a consequence o f this model, but rather a picture undergirding it. The description of reference, thinking, time, and reality, however, all function as mythological names. They are unsupported by an ontology, let alone a logic.
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? But as an anthropological finding this model can at least make an odd question seem more reasonable. How canjustification invoke identity and not lead toward logical truth, but toward animation instead? This means asking what is the aesthetic force of identity, if this force cannot be reduced to logical analycity? Both questions, in order to remain sensible, ask for the missing ontology that Jakobson's model masks (by his playing
with dialectic and an incomplete picturing o f language as a certain kind o f naming).
A poetry constructed in such a way as to offer its "justification in every line", or
let's say any kind of self-reflection that loses the referential or expressive force of language (its dependent attachment to the world), requires that its senses function as ontologicalcriteria. Whatontologicalcommitmentisentailedinthesenseof'aroseisa rose is a rose is a rose'? This is asking what kind of sense is there in nonsense? One of Joyce's answers was what he called "singsigns to soundsense" (FW13807), "soundscript" (FW219. 17),"sinscript"(FW421. 18)or"sinse"(FW83. 12). Amusicoftransgression, however, cannot explain its meaning simply as an opposition to referential or spatial sense. The condition o f 'soundsense' must speak towards itself and towards the world, where the worldbecomestheconditionsdescribingcertainkindsoftransgressions. Onedoesnot imaginethatnonsenseescapestheworldofsenseorofmatterorofanythingelse. Our speaking o f both sense and nonsense must mark this speaking, and thus ourselves, as real.
If a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose, what am I? I might be tempted to answer with a Popeye-like parody of God: I am that I am that I am that I am. This does not lose its sense in the same way that Stein's repetition does. I am invested differently in my statements about roses than I am in those about myself. By analogy then poetry is
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? committed differently to its statements about the world than those about itself. What is this difference? When sense has ontological force as a structural function, we can call that theological language.
Is poetry linguistic self-reflection ofthis sort? or ofany sort? How is the temptation to appeals to identity, underpinning the truth possibilities o f self-reflection, implicatedintheconstructionofnotionsofvalueandjustification? Whatleadsfromthe
justification ofpoetry to a theory ofmind? What use or value or sense can a theory of mind constructed as part of such a justification have? All ofthese questions ask about how we use the verb of 'to be' as the limit between our conception of mind and world. The first question asks for either a definition of poetry, which would require further
justification, or for examples of poetry in relation to each other as they describe themselves. Any generalization about poetry remains so tied to changing expectations, personal responsiveness, prejudice, and so on that only poems can themselves make such claimsandgivethemselvesasevidence. Poemsthenatleastofferanopportunityto ventriloquizeouropinionsasaneffectofreading. Butclaimsaboutpoetryareinteresting in the ways they justify themselves and less in the substance o f their description and claims.
How can a poem become its own justification? Because we do not know what it means for a collection ofwords or phrases or lines or sentences to reflect upon themselves, not understanding any form of self-reflection besides our own, any claim about poetry's self-reflection allegorizes our reading of a poem as simultaneously an object which produces meanings, as a mechanism o f some sort, and as a phenomenological
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? self-reflection on our own reading, described, we imagine, as the interaction between the semanticsandsyntaxofapoem. Poetryis(orcanbe)anautonomousmechanismdirected towards us and an expression o f our reading towards the poem.
Asking "what does 'is' mean? " (a question o f semantics and syntax) and "what 'is' is? " (in what way does it exist? ) are not questions but riddles. The riddle o f 'to be', even in Eliot's fragmented symbolism o f subjunctive identities and Heidegger's ontological myth of revealing existing, asks, as Ammons does in his anti-symbolist poetry, how "this measure moves/ to attract attention. . . not to persuade you, enlighten you, not necessarily to delight you, but to hold you" (Sphere, 30). How the world holds us, how things hold us, and how we behold it and them, in containment or continuity or context or conflict, as genitive, dative, or ablative relations, requires justification, such as beauty, goodness,
truth, correspondence, coherence, desire, identity, fear, dread, despair. We inhabit an 'is' through our justification o f our kind of inhabiting. We can construct this how in art or in a description of our mind or in moral judgment; or we can express this holding in our questioning o f why this world holds us? why these things?
Russell describes the grammatical distinctions in our use o f "to be" :
The word is is terribly ambiguous, and great care is necessary in order not to confound its various meanings. We have (1) the sense in which it asserts Being, as in "A is"; (2) the sense o f identity; (3) the sense o f predication, in "A is human"; (4)thesenseof"Aisa-man". . whichisverylikeidentity. Inadditiontothese there are less common uses, as "to be good is to be happy"; where a relation of assertions is meant, that relation, in fact, which, where it exists, gives rise to formal
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? implication, Doubtless there are further meanings which have not occurred to
me. (64n)
These four classifications can be further described as (1) assertions o f existence (as in the quantifiers Vx and 3y; or, the Scholastic existentia, that something is); (2) x=x; and more questionably x=y; (3) Quine writes "Predication joins a general term and a singular term to form a sentence that is true or false according as the general term is true or false o f the object, if any, to which the singular term refers" (Wordand Object, 96), in this case the use o f the copula is restricted to claims about objects; (4) a definition and in this sense
both an identification and the inclusion of something within a class or set or category. As in category 4, these distinctions often function as aspects of each other, or presuppose each other, collapse into each other. 17
Prepositional and predicate logic analyzes the way in which the words 'or', 'and', 'not', 'if. . . then', 'every', 'some', 'necessary' and so on function in and structure statements or propositions as either True or False. Lyric poetry, and I am tempted to say most o f what counts as literature, let's say its narrative force and world-making force,
functions through instantiating the pronominal and the adverbial limits (primarily the demonstratives 'this', 'that', 'here', 'now') constituting the domain within which referential language functions. The limits of our language are non-referential. They constitute the world as temporal. Pronouns constitute our relation to the structures of our grammar and to the world determined by our perception and biology as a discursive event. Both pronouns and the adverbs 'now' and 'here' set up an indeterminate set of referential andmeaningpossibilities. Theycansubstituteforeachotheraswaysofmarkinga
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? sentence as a sentence in a language, an utterance as an utterance. Are they existential markers or temporal markers, guarantors, implicit or not, that in speaking this sentence I am alive? T points, therefore, in two directions: toward my inhabitation o f the world and my inhabitation o f language, where my utterance functions as a reflection o f this act o f uttering. Such self-reflection can then be used as an allegory onto which statements o f 'I am'candescribeme. Thisisawayofputtingtheobjectfirst,mythirdpersonstatusasa 'me', which is animated becomes an 'I am' through self-reflection.
Lyric enacts an exemplary expression o f language (exemplary o f what? ) as a referential system constituting the T . A poem is not strictly speaking about or picturing an 'I ', but causes an 'I ' to become instantiated as meaningful, marking language as ours by exposing how we speak this possession and thus offering itself as justification for this ownership. Justification means making visible the rules (the translation o f the pronouns and adverbs into 'to be' into 'to have'). Art in this sense exemplifies the psychological
and the grammatical, as the limits constituting the negative space of'I' and 'me', as objective, as an expression o f a body, and thus as 'mine'. Lyric as the poetry o f being-a-
moment and narrative as the poetry o f succession, o f being-in-the-world are ontological arguments through which we enter the world as real (but not only through good art, but through songs, phrases, perceptions, objects, lyric effects or attention, narrative logics, the failure o f which would be catatonia).
How to enter the world and language is tied to how we exit them. This relation between entering and exiting is the problem of the Sibyl in The Waste Land. The complicated metaphysics ofthe last section ofthe poem, "What The Thunder Said", are
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? built from the riddling thematic strands and ontological implications radiating from Eliot's initial introductory quotation:
"Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampula pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: SiPuXXa tt QeXiq; respondebat ilia; a7to0aveiv 0eXa>. "
For I saw with my own eyes the Sibyl hanging in ajar at Cumae, and when the
acolytes said, 'Sybil, what do you wish? ' she replied, 'I wish to die. '"
Apollo has granted the Sibyl eternal life, but because she failed to request eternal youth, she continues to age and shrink in size. Her small withered body is kept in a suspended
jar. Thus, we can recognize two temporal patterns: continuity and decay. The Sibyl's immortality consists o f her continued existence and identity as who she is. Although her form changes, the animating essence within it remains identical in every moment. The Sibyl's soul and body describe identity and loss. Her personal identity supersedes dynamic change, and thus separates her from the mortal metaphysical universe in which time, as Aristotle claims, can best be understood as loss. The Sibyl's containment in a bottle symbolizes this separation.
Change is marked by her shrinking, her continual decay and loss of physical substance,becominglessandless. Sheexistswithinaninfiniteregressionconstitutingnot onlyherworldbutherselfaswell. FortheSibylherimmortalityonlyservestocontinue her suffering as an old and aging woman. Immortality is an extension through time of an animatingessence,containedwithinthephysicalformofbeing. Thisessenceisnot separate from the form o f being, for it is the body itself which is immortal. Her physical
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? form, however, is endlessly disintegrating.
