Hyperion (No. 16 or Vol. VIII, No. 1-4),
(c) 1980 by The Carolina Wren Press, Inc.
This essay opened Judy Hogan's Focus: South issue.
The Mystery of Place
by Gene Fowler
a poet generates place
If Warren Woessner hadn't quoted my "a poet generates place" as epigraph to a poem, I might have forgotten saying this during a panel discussion at the Austin COSMEP conference a few years ago and not have been jogged into thinking, again, about place as such. Judy Hogan opened her anthology Eat Your Natchos – which came out of the conference readings – with Warren's poem. And perhaps that is why it came to rest in her thoughts so that, in the fall of 1979, she asked me for my "thoughts on place."
In the sixties and on into the seventies, successive crops of poets worried about place.
A good many of the young people who walked into poetry scenes during the sixties attached themselves to the hierarchy and formulae of Charles Olson, for instance. And he put great importance on the use of place in poems. He thought a poet should locate in a definite place and use that place to build a ground in poems. He used Gloucester, Massachusetts. He'd devote entire passages to locating a boundary stone, giving bounds and meters measurements, township descriptions, and surveyor's considerations. His fairly numerous disciples took up variants of his practices – sometimes with such intensity of focus that the result seemed parody.
There were also resurgences of traditional regional poetries and of travelogisme which thought of itself as regionalism. In both of these, the poet is very conscious of place in the sense of a defined region of the country with its types of locale and atmospheres.
And many poets identified with the folk-rock and folk-pop song writers, no doubt envying the public attention those ladies and gents drew, and borrowed a kind of narrative out of a merger of the old ballad and the Hollywood film – so mis-en-scene enters the work.
All in all, anybody walking into a space full of poems found her or himself surrounded by places in abundance.
The common belief is, I think, that place is something out there, something established before the poet appears. And the belief is that by using the place come upon, the poet attaches his poem to it or, in the jargon, gets in touch with reality.
The usual non-poet is convinced that poets are crazy and lost in bizarre spaces within their own skulls. I suspect a great many poets worry about this. What better way, then, to seem to be out among the folk than to securely anchor the poem into some locatable spot out there where the folk walk around in it. By seeming to be where they are, the poet reasons, he and his poem might be taken for "one of them."
Since the reader can presumably travel to Gloucester and parallel Olson's walk from library to boundary stone to some specific old shed full of lobster pots that was built in a particular year of wood from a named shipwreck by some old character everybody knew and whose birth was recorded in the overleaf of a family Bible still residing in a particular house, maybe Olson's poem will be thought to reflect reality or be genuinely "where it's at." To the extent Olson can believe this, he may find some comfort.
Maybe the regional poets figure they're involved in what's going on in the region, or what went on, the opening up of the territory, if they seem to recreate that territory before your very eyes. Thus, they try to "tell it like it is."
The underlying faith is that the place is out there, that it exists before the poet comes to it and independently of the people experiencing it, and that this place, taken into the poem, as through the senses like windows, brings reality with it.
#
THIS FAITH EXISTS because most poets, like most of the general population, are primitives. I don't mean, by primitive, some sort of noble savage or somebody closer to the world of feeling or more spontaneous than his descendants in genuine response. And I'm not talking about our tendency to run around the planet trying to club each other to death either. The test that divides the primitive from whatever follows it in our evolution of behavior is very simple. The primitive can't tell his perception of out there from the out there. In fact, it wouldn't occur to him to try. There are other failures of discrimination, too. But this is the Great Base of that tune.
We don't know much about the out there, since we can get it only through inference. We find that some things we infer about out there won't fit well with other things we infer about it. It takes heroic twisting and squirming, for instance, to get our wave model and our particle model into the same universe and the fit remains uncomfortable.
One thing is sure, however. And that is that the subtle complex of qualities that constitute place is not an aspect of out there but of our perception of out there. We read place into the world we've read into the out there. We don't know who or what, if anybody or anything, made the out there; but we do know who made the perception of out there. The perceiver did. This isn't much thought about, however. Even those who suspect perception is something "in the head" still think it an exact reflection of "what's out there" evoked by the out there through senses that are windows. These people are still primitives in their living, however sophisticated their chatter. They see perception of out there not as the out there itself, but as a reflection of it. Usually, they keep the two even this separate only while theorizing and forget instantly when they look up into the reflection. They are a long way from the difficult realization that perception of out there is a construction, a thing made. And the idea of God, the Maker, at each of our centers? – as the integrity of each of our wholes? Well, that thought is still blasphemy in most parts of the world and an incomprehensible rumor in the remaining few.
So we walk about, all of us, not just the poets, and we make the places, with their atmospheres, that we walk into and out of – though, to be sure, we're constantly cued, guided in our constructive endeavors. While some deep organ of perception, functionally like a brain within a brain, goes about this God-like task, we live in some surface brain and behave like fools, convinced we're not very bright and not at all creative. Our construction of a perceived world isn't arbitrary. It doesn't represent some solipsist super-freedom. The stuff we work in our mental fingers, call it stimuli, comes from interactions between a real nerve-system, itself an element of the out there, and the whole of the out there, including itself. That organ or organizer is the result of the hardware that is its basis and the programming done by experience. Some of that programming experience has been thrown up by universe and some has been carefully set up by other people or even by the learner himself. You might say we're programmed by experience and by experiment. We perceive in acquired terms. Some of those terms are person, thing, event, and, then, place ... and atmosphere.
#
WE'VE NOT ONLY GOT AN OUT THERE and a perception of out there, but an imagination of out there.
The primitive not only confuses the first two, but often he confuses the third with the already merged two. When the quality of the third is different from that of the second, he complicates the first to hold both – and we get ghosts added to persons, astral places added to physical places, and so forth.
The poet leads the making of an imagined out there. If he bypasses that and leads the making of a perceived out there, we no longer call him poet but hypnotist or magus. We watch a stage hypnotist get a volunteer drunk on a glass of tap water in an area we know contains no strange alkaloids in the soil. We laugh nervously – because we are forced to consider the split between perception and what is supposedly perceived.
But whether he works with the imagined out there or the perceived out there, the poet generates ... place. Within place he generates events. And out of events, he distills things and persons, maybe even ghosts and such, the mysterious substratum quality we call presence.
The poet generates place even if no specific place seems relevant to the poem and nothing is said about a place. What is evoked from the reader and shaped within the reader is an experience – and an experience defines a space as an aspect of itself, however vague that's left in the explicit matter of the poem.
When a place is evoked by the poet's guiding voice, the person experiencing the poem is constructing it, but the poet is generating it. The poet does this guiding out of his whole attitudinal and felt being, not out of some distant and sharp-eyed deliberation. Here we see, in fact, first glimpses of true (21st century?) communication. When we communicate, we do not entertain or inform each other: we transform each other.
Trying to write a flat description of what's presumed to come in through the "window" sense yields up a flat, dry poetry. But if the mirage hovers into sight at all, life comes with it. A kind of aural wealth. What reality comes into the poem is not from the exactitude of description, but from the rising into activity of the constructive powers of perception evoked, the making of place that breaks through the intended describing of a previously made place.
The organ of perception and the organ of language are intergrown, made of the same tissues, and the central or whole being knows itself making perception. So even the language of "dry description" evokes the forces of creation. At heart we know we generate or create place, that even in describing, we create what we describe.
#
THIS BRINGS US TO THE SCIENCE OF MIRACLES. Keep in mind the perceived out there (including the imagined out there) is made from the out there and the in here by the perceiver. A poet or maker evokes and guides this process. Qualities such as place, thing, person, and situation belong to the product.
From the time men began to sense events as familiar, maybe even a bit expected, there's been the unexpected, the unfamiliar – and miracles. At first unexpected, unfamiliar, and seemingly impossible events were regarded as tricks. Witnesses looked around for the trickster; if they didn't find one, they looked fearfully toward the thicket, and later into the sky, and imagined horrifying tricksters best not uncovered in their lairs. Or they assumed the trickster was camouflaged. Maybe he's in the form of that coyote up on the ridge obviously laughing at us. Or in an ectoplasmic gleam caught only at the edge of somebody's eye and gone before focal vision could swing toward it. Later, the trickster was thought to be wholly abstract and occupying the sky overhead – only once to have gotten into a flesh and blood member of the tribe at all.
Our seeing was quite blurred by time we took up a term like miracle. When we called an event a miracle, we didn't look around for anybody engineering it – though we spoke of somebody calling it forth. Often we thought of somebody doing the miraculous thing, but simply as participant, not as engineer. Thus, a miracle-worker might walk on water or make a rope stand up out of a basket like a serpent. But the apparent happens; it is not engineered. In fact, the miraculous is always an occurrence of the impossible. A mechanism, a reduction to the possible after all, is, by definition, not there.
Thus, all miracles carry the same message, contain the same meaning: the possible, call it reality, with its terrifying limits, isn't binding after all. If this fellow walks on water, forcing only water's surface tension to support his weight, a thing impossible in familiar and expected reality, then I can walk not only through the valley of the shadow of death but through death itself – if my faith will just hold. Oh, what good news that is, eh?
The gname-maker in humans who births words is very sharp-eyed and seldom fooled. This is why I've claimed often in print, without evoking much interest, that you can, if you'll expend a little concentrated thought, dig out from any $4.95 dictionary all the "occulted" wisdom so many chase gurus seeking. We've codified everything we know but don't know we know.
Let's look at three words: miracle, oracle, and mirage. We'll see what news we've left for ourselves to discover later.
I understand we've no exact etymological findings about the -acle ending. But, beside oracle and miracle, we have debacle, obstacle, things like that. A sensitive ear suggests it means something like apparency. The concretizing t
of act (and ac- is "out, outward") yields to the inward pulling l. Act becomes the reflective (feedback) -acle; words like ankle, angle, and angel are in the air. The act/acle relation shows up elsewhere, say in the seam/seem pair. Anyway, we end up with -acle meaning out there (projection). We can forget, for this discussion, the rounded up words, deb-acle and obst-acle.
Let's consider mir-acle and or-acle together. Reports of miracles present accounts of what happened. We can believe the impossible occurred or we can believe a trick was perpetrated or we can believe the report is a lie. By making our choice, we receive the message that familiar, expected reality is or isn't binding. Our attention isn't directed to the content of the miracle after it's served as entertaining or awing hook to grab our interest.
Reports of oracles don't seem to be the same sort of report of an event. People are much involved. The oracle was verbal – implying human construction right at the core. It was delivered by somebody, though the person is supposed to be only a medium for delivery, not the constructive verbalizer. And a human being received the saying, interpreted it, and acted on it.
The accounts are stories. They direct our attention to somebody's understanding or difficulties with understanding of the oracle. The notion that a lesson was being taught is very present in these reports or stories. There's the sense that something was said to somebody in order to set up an experience the somebody could "learn a lesson" from.
Sometimes the oracular saying appears to be nonsense, with sense hovering beyond it to be somehow drawn out. Or the saying is in figurative or symbolic speech which must be translated. The best stories tell of an apparently straightforward and direct meaning being, in fact, a misunderstanding. The disaster that follows teaches that meaning comes from the hearer – and there's a trickster within manifest as hope and fear. A king with a covetous eye on the neighboring realm heard, "If you cross the border now, a kingdom will fall." He extended that to read "before you!" He crossed the border ... and lost his ass. A less enthralled king might have asked the clarifying second question, "Yeah ... whose?"
The literature on the oracle clearly instructs us to always find what is told within what is heard.
As the or- has to do with "hearing speech," so has the mir- to do with "seeing...." Seeing ... what? A kind of ... speech? Something akin to a verbal construct, a non-verbal construct?
If we're conscious of the miracle-worker delivering what is seen, as we're conscious of the medium delivering what is heard, we might think of digging out what's shown from what's seen.
Through the oracle, we're told something important – if we can learn to find what we're told. Through the miracle, we're shown something important – if we can learn to find what we're shown.
We've a third word to look at: mirage. Here, we've the mir- and that marvelous old ending, -age. It means "belonging to, related to, of the essence of," etc. It's been a great builder of words close to us. It's a human word, or ending, really, with "ability" touched on. Take a man's ability, for instance, to "hold to his course." He has course-age. He can tack across the tao, as it were. Then, as the nozzling out of the s is "dropped" to leave the orbit-holding power of the r at the turn-point in the word, we get courage. So courage is course-age, the ability to hold to a choreography or course through fears, distractions, and other urgings, currents pulling away from the course and into drift or sinking.
So mirage is see-age, having the perception of out there when the out there is apparently absent.
You might call this the imagination of out there.
The oracle-maker is what I've called a gname-maker, wrighting a verbal artifact, a wrought whole made of language. The miracle-maker is what I call an experience-maker. He works on the stuff of perception. The mirage-maker parallels the miracle-maker, but works on the stuff of imagination. The stage hypnotist, with his intoxicating water, is a mirage-maker; the stage magus, with his appearing and disappearing coins, is a miracle-maker; the stage poet, today, is content to rouse faded experiences in the imagination of out there and often experiences so abstracted they're really only conception of out there. The poet more or less dissociates from his powers.
#
A POET GENERATES PLACE.
Beyond that, a poet generates reality and life. So the poet is not only gname-maker (making a verbal artifact), but experience-maker. And the poet makes highly resolved experiences, so what is told and shown may be extracted from what is heard and seen, and from what is felt, and he becomes, finally, mind-maker. Since culture is what's common to a number of minds, the poet is culture-bringer. And because the objective is distilled from the subjective, the poet is inventor of civilization. The generation of place is a beginning in the invention of civilization.
A poet "cuts shapes in time" – and is one with choreography. We find this in our words, if we look into them. Consider the word place. In my study of the phonemic instrument, I've found that r and l are "deep vowels" equivalent to the "surface vowels" o and e. We employ the r, behind the head of a word, to carry the word's gesture, the kinesthetic feedback from making the sound pattern with our speech apparatus, into human orbit or arc, an act of "wrighting" the choreography of the sound; we use the l to bring something "into" orbit around the self as axis. In this way, we take terms we find in the realm of sentience, that is cause and phase, and make them, in the realm of sentence, into clause and phrase.
How, then, in this making, did we get place? Well, we begin with a man's outward pace. Other beasts can get up on their hind feet and move while staying on them. Apes have built this standing into their evolution, but still rest on knuckles. And bears can get up there and charge with a precarious kind of grace. Only a human being, however, walks – just as only a human being talks.
Thus, pace is a primary human act, a defining or enclosing – along a direction. It makes segments. It generates the unit of measure. We symbolize it with 1. We call it one or an ... or won or own. Seal it, and it becomes and, hand, or owned.
Now, suppose we don't just pace outward along a direction, but bring it back, in orbit, around ourselves (religare)?
Pace becomes p(l)ace becomes place.
When we think of pace as defining, beyond just the unit or interval, we're into multiple directions and complex figures, a figuring out instead of a pacing off. And this is the choreographed dance of human movement. Thus, place is not a simple circle, but a complex conSTELlation or conSIDERation. Or situation (situs). Or sight. Or city.
The listener, or reader, who is also a listener, really, walks into a place, a clearing in the woods, a room, a city square, whatever, a place – but that place is not there before the listener walks it into being. And just behind the listener's left shoulder, quite unobtrusive, walks the miracle-maker. The gentlest nudges to order the dance of attention; the quietest suggestion to steer the co-gnitive organizings, the extensions, the implicatings.
And in the end, who has generated this ...
#
THE EXPERIENCE MAKER
Walking brings me out
sooner or later
into your place.
Camp you set up by the stream
to get away
from it all?
Florescent bleached office
or musk dark cafe?
Bus bench? Or road shoulder?
The porch.
Lean close, out of
traffic and blood pressures
or people in other rooms
or crickets and mosquitoes -
Just passing through. Going
some place of my own
but a job along the road to do.
What is it? Well, I sing
the song
at the right ear
it'll build the
new City.
Before
history was sung, before
the places were
I sailed on a dark Earth.
The old sea people you call us
and make us ghosts
with your disbelief.
And I was the singer
the world maker
who gave shape and cry
to the winds
that crossed our eye.
The seer
the old sea people called me
and you'd call it
the "experience maker,"
though you'd shudder
a shaken ship
storm ridden
to see
the void I'd made
into sea and lands, winds and
fire-winds
and pull back
forgetting even the thought
man made the whole of it.
I've been around -
following prevailing winds
and sailing into those winds,
using an oar, when the winds lay slack,
coiled in the sea,
running with the tide over islands
and walking through valleys
and walking around
the sea basins.
I came up out of the Indian sea
and across the bone
to work in the dry as navigator
casting my charts
by the winds of season
for men to walk with or into.
I stood under stars, and read the winds
in men, and cast my vision
into the dark soils of men.
The Wessex folk brought me up to
build their sun dial, the Veekings had me sing back
and build a ship
The Hopi, too, noted my coming -
portrait scratched
in stone -
Up from those belly-currents in the south
my whistle with its warm breath-winds
my pack full of dreams, of
insightings and incitings, seeds
to plant in gray soil
in skull-pots, the pack
under my coat
drawn as a devious spine
as I humped over the thing I drew
in the ground mists or dust devils
of vision for those
who'd look past the hump
- the ghostly laws sung
into walls, then
the sites.
And everywhere, every place, planted dreams
and grew things and thinks
to leave behind as agriculture and culture,
as city and situation,
I hunted only that magic lady
never quite laid or seen
whose gusted tits
whip-brushed my cheeks, those earlier
sailings,
whose current thigh
hooked my hip
and threw me to love.
And I sang her those songs of number, and set sail
to the gnamer, took it to sea, before
I grew numb, stilled the live, birthed
numb-er, de-
entrailed, the gnamer, dropping
its game, leaving
the half fired
oil slick
name.
And wherever I waked, to sing
my charts
and birthe a "waking" place -
I hunted only that magic lady.
An oral art?
The painter's art, the sculptor's, the
film-maker's, yet
an oral art:
Walk beside your ear,
plant
my phrases and words,
help you make
SENSE
in the void, led
by song.
Hunt for my lady
of wind gust and current, dark
in sky cathedrals,
awash
in sea,
grottos of drowned pasts,
long sea trails and land trails
and wastes and folds of the globe,
pause where you are
and looking off to the road
I'll travel, stop
to make a song, one
for the road,
leave
the song
tucked lightly in your soil
full of things, not
words
it'll grow all right.
It'll all hang together.
Archive links:
So, place is derived from a walking man's pace. I'll
link to a few of my "walking" poems. Three of these appeared in
Fires. They were "in order" but in no obvious way connected.
They were much like towering bridge supports. The fourth is from
Return of the Shaman.
San Francisoc Poem
Obsidian
Cosmic Language
All the Walks Sitting
For more on the phonemic instrument and the sensemic
instrument and revelemic instrument, browse in
Waking the Poet:
Waking the Poet – Table of Contents
|
|