![4 / Introduction
guage is no longer enfeebled by an impossibly deep and distant reality,”
Har
man writes. “Instead, language is overloaded by a gluttonous excess of
surfaces and aspects of the thing” (25). Harman’s take on a certain famous
passage in which a sailor is “swallowed up by an angle of masonry which
shouldn’t have been there; an angle which was acute, but behaved as if it
were obtuse” (76) merges mathesis, or the expression of mathematical prop-
erties in physical reality, with journalistic subjectivity or what Frege might
call “psychologism”: “Lovecraft introduces a problem. Not only is Cthulhu
something over and above the three creatures he partially resembles [. . .]
we now find that even acute and obtuse angles must be something over and
above their qualities. There seems to be a ‘spirit’ of acute angles, a ‘general
outline of the whole’ which allows them to remain acute angles even in cases
where they behave as if they were obtuse. Not since Pythagoras have geo-
metrical entities been granted this sort of psychic potency, to the point that
they have a deeper being over and above their measurable and experience-
able traits” (76–77). There is pleasure in learning that there is, after Pythag-
oras (and before Kandinsky!), a tradition of attributing “psychic potency”
to squares and circles. “[I]t is unclear how the mere fact of ‘behaving as ob-
tuse’ would allow an angle to ‘swallow up’ an unwary sailor,” Harman con-
tinues: “Sketch the diagram of an obtuse angle for yourself, and you will see
the difficulty in intuitively grasping what has happened. If the phrase ‘she
looked daggers at him’ is an example of catachresis in language, a misap-
plication of a word to gain metaphorical effects, then the acute angle ob-
tusely swallowing a sailor is a fine example of catachresis in geometry. We
might as well say: ‘It was the number 21, but it behaved as though it were
the number 6’” (77).
A sec
ond stylistic technique that Harman describes is the “vertical” or
“allusive” style, typified in this passage from the “Call of Cthulhu”: “If I say
that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures
of an octopus, a dragon and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to
the spirit of the thing [. . .] but it was the general outline of the whole which
made it most shockingly frightful.” For Harman, such a passage draws us
away from trying to recreate the creature in the terms of our loathsome,
mundane world of Euclidean time and space. Lovecraft situates the crea-
ture partly in the diseased imagination of a narrator who claims that the de-
scription is “not unfaithful” but hardly correct, and also “asks us to ignore
the surface properties of dragon and octopus [. . .] and to focus instead on
the fearsome ‘general outline of the whole.’” In this way, Lovecraft opens up
a “gap”: things are moving along swimmingly in the story, with the narra-
tor sane and physical reality recognizably accessible and ordered; just at the](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25877107-250522034021-a874b697/85/Word-Toys-Poetry-And-Technics-1st-Edition-Brian-Kim-Stefans-19-320.jpg)
![Beyond Estrangement / 5
moment when the narrator experiences something truly astounding—the
color out of space, the shadow out of time—language breaks down, and all
you are left with is the “general outline of the whole” (24). Harman, to this
degree, examines Lovecraft’s texts spatially, not temporally; he doesn’t pro-
vide a subjective account of a reading of the text burdened with the diffi-
culties of generations of literary theory so much as focus on specific loca-
tions—words, sentences, paragraphs—where the text, imagined as a sort of
tool, breaks and we are granted access to the noumenon.
Likewise, Meillassoux surrenders to a naive mimesis: he recounts, or at-
tempts to recount, Un coup de dés as a story with characters, a setting, and
something of suspense. Mallarmé’s text doesn’t grant such easy access, of
course, and argues by its syntax, graphic design, and the indeterminacies
of its narrative for a mathematical reading—again, topographic, but not in
the manner of a map so much as a formula or “picture” as we understand it
from Wittgenstein’s definition in the Tractatus Philosophicus. Meillassoux at-
tempts to establish a relationship to the text that is as impossible—but pos-
sibly necessary—as the drowning sailor’s grasping of a severed mast in the
whirlpool. We are given something of an allegory to the “strong correlation-
ist” description of the mind→object relationship, but are also teased with at-
tempting to grab the mast itself in an effort to situate and steady ourselves
in space and time.
Meillassoux believes the poet was meticulously crafting a singularity: a
poem that is the ultimate, and unrepeatable, response to the “crisis in verse”
because it created a new poetic form premised on an unrevealed Number,
a new form of measure, with its attendant metaphysical properties, but also
the ultimate response to the secularization of Europe and the need, expressed
in countless ways in nineteenth-
century culture, to raise art to the status of
religion. Meillassoux makes an interesting critique of Wagner and his par-
ticular response to secularization: “[T]he weakness of Wagnerian ‘total art’
resides in its will to reconnect with the Greek articulation of theatre and
politics. To fig
ure upon a scene the relation of humans and their gods, to
render visible to the masses the principle of their communion with the aid of
a narrative embellished with song—in short, to represent to a people its own
mystery: such is for Mallarmé the Greek heritage upon which art, including
Wagnerian art, continues to feed. But, according to the poet, it is precisely the
representation that art must break with if it would claim to go beyond Chris-
tianity” (108). While Mallarmé referred to Christianity as the “black agony,”
he nonetheless saw the roots of European culture lying not in the Greeks but
in the Latin Middle Ages. “Christianity has handed down to us a ritual su-
perior in power to those of paganism,” Meillessoux writes, “namely the real](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25877107-250522034021-a874b697/85/Word-Toys-Poetry-And-Technics-1st-Edition-Brian-Kim-Stefans-20-320.jpg)
![6 / Introduction
convocation of a real drama.” Thus, the Master favored the mysteries of the
Eucharist over the catharsis of theater or allegorical pageantry:
The Eucharist is thus a paradoxical mode of ‘presence in absence’:
The divine is there, among the elect, in the very host—but is not yet
returned. . . . It is a presence that is not in the present, but in the past
and in the future. To take up Mallarmé’s vocabulary—and his evoca-
tion of ‘God [. . .] there, diffuse’—we should speak, to signify the Eu-
charistic mode of presence, whether or not it is transcendent, of a dif
fusion of the divine, as opposed to its representation, or its presentation.
The ultimate singularity of Mallarmé’s poetics—the idea that oriented
his last writings—thus consisted in the quest for a ‘diffusion of the ab-
solute’ emancipated from representation (even if, evidently, the latter
is not annulled in the labor of the work) and dismissing all eschato-
logical parousia. (112)
For Mallarmé, art doesn’t conjure the divine for humans by overpowering
them with presence—narrative, technology, song, even perhaps the “soul”—
but imitates rather the act of Christ, whom Mallarmé sees as the “anony-
mous official, effaced before transcendence, and whose sole movement of
retreating, back into the throng, attests to the presence of divinity.” Though
Mallarmé’s poem, with all of what the Brazilian concrete poets would term
“verbi-
voco-
visual” elements, does indeed have all the trappings of a Ge
samtkunstwerk, it is not theater so much as an event, the “diffusion of the
divine,” in all modesty an attempt to replace religion with poetry.
There is a sort of Decadent trinity, the character of the Master in the poem
hesitating before a throw of the dice, Chance itself, and finally, the poet and
historical figure Mallarmé:
[T]his ‘Master’ who would be both thrower and non-
thrower would
be only a representation of the Master. He would be nothing more than
a fiction engendered by the Poem—and it is precisely his fictional sta-
tus that would permit him to be virtually all things, at the behest of
the reader’s imagination. Now, according to our hypothesis, at stake
in the Coup de dés is the ‘diffusion of the divine’ and therefore the real
presence of a real drama, a drama supporting an effective infinitiza-
tion—not an empty fiction. Thus, it is indeed the gesture of Mallarmé
himself—his throwing of the Number, his wager engendered by the
performative purport of the encrypted Poem—that must be infinitized
if we would extract the Coup de des from the sole reign of represen-
tation. (132)](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25877107-250522034021-a874b697/85/Word-Toys-Poetry-And-Technics-1st-Edition-Brian-Kim-Stefans-21-320.jpg)
![Beyond Estrangement / 7
Un coup de dés is not merely a narrative poem, a fiction or objective cor-
relative (to borrow T. S. Eliot’s term), telling the story of the Master hesi-
tating before Chance. Rather, the poem itself becomes this very act, a hesi-
tance in which the throwing and not throwing are coexistent, like life and
death in the allegory of Schrödinger’s Cat. The Number tossed, of course, is
one I can’t reveal, but which Meillessoux writes can only have been, itself,
discovered by chance; hence, the wager that Mallarmé himself took that his
poem would never be “deciphered” and Meillassoux’s palpable excitement
at having done it.
In Word Toys, I try (with far less elegance and far too many words) to ne-
gotiate some of the terms Meillassoux employs: treating poems as singulari
ties (even if clear “influences” and other historical determinants are visible),
as objects (instances of graphic design, numerically-based diagrams, as func
tioning actants), and as evental (a “truth condition” in Badiou’s term, pro-
ducing new possibility from the void). Badiou’s most accessible deployment
of the term appears in his po
liti
cal writings, such as Rebirth of History, The
Communist Hypothesis, and elsewhere where he seeks to link the recent wave
of “riots and uprisings” (his phrase) to something like the revaluation of his-
tory. “What is important here,” Badiou writes in the Communist Hypothesis,
“is not the realization of a possibility that resides within the situation or is
dependent on the transcendental laws of the world. An event is the crea-
tion of new possibilities. [W]ith respect to the situation or a world, an event
paves the way for the possibility of what—from the limited perspective of
the make-up of this situation or the legality of this world—is strictly impos-
sible.” In other words, revolution is an attempt to try the hand of chance: to
create historical singularities that are transformative, truly novel, and that
leave in their wake nothing unchanged. This is also his description of what
happens in a poem.
A Quick Graph
Word Toys is “non-
linear” to the degree that, on occasion, words or phrases
are used in earlier chapters that are not substantially defined or investi-
gated until later. Additionally, many terms and concepts are derived from
my read
ing in Continental (and related) philosophy and might be unusual
in the context of “literary criticism,” though some (especially those derived
from Wittgenstein and Deleuze) have been pretty regularly employed. An-
other strand that appears frequently derives from vari
ous theories of the
visual: new media, print design, “picture” and information theory. The most
familiar element, at least to readers of this series from the University of
Ala
bama Press, is that of “postmodern” or experimental poetics, though I](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25877107-250522034021-a874b697/85/Word-Toys-Poetry-And-Technics-1st-Edition-Brian-Kim-Stefans-22-320.jpg)
![14 / Chapter 1
like space, and explanatory of why things appear to change. Keith Robert
son writes (in the context of a comparison with Deleuze’s “plane of imma-
nence”): “Prehension is a noncognitive ‘feeling’ guiding how the occasion
shapes itself from the data of the past and the potentialities of the future.
Prehension is an ‘intermediary,’ a purely immanent potential power, a rela-
tion of difference with itself, or pure ‘affection’ before any division into form
and matter” (219). The central issue in Robertson’s essay, and much writ-
ing about Whitehead, is whether or not Whitehead’s “process” philosophy
is a philosophy of “flux” in the Bergsonian sense; the theory of “prehension”
seems to argue for a sort of pulse, a “rhythm of life,” a sort of temporal atom-
ism, that would argue against it. “[E]very element in an open poem,” Olson
wrote in “Projective Verse,” “must be taken up as participants in the kinet-
ics of the poem just as solidly as we are accustomed to take what we call the
objects of reality”—“accustomed” being the key term, as in the Whitehead
worldview, “objects” are really events, their static stability a mere illusion.
Refiguring the classic clash of the “raw” and the “cooked,” of Whitman
against the traditional poetries of the Old World, Olson dubbed formal po-
etry the “verse which print bred,” in which form seemed to be imposed from
outside, like the form of the brick on the matter of clay, maintaining the hylo-
morphic dualism of “matter” and “form” characteristic of Aristotle and later
Medieval scholastics. Olson argued instead that poems were “direct transfers
of energy” between the writer (not the subject but “some several forces”) and
reader, and in fact a physical inscription of the bodily (breathing) act of the
poet. To this degree, poems for Olson were in constant states of becoming,
both in the writing (the cybernetic loop that requires the typewriter to pro-
vide precise feedback to the poet engaged in the process) and for the reader
who adjusts his/her reading according to the marks on the page, and not
final states of being following some predetermined pattern such as a son-
net. The page could, to this degree, be described as merely the place where
these transfers were stopped, burning their energies into a hindering me-
dium, like the canvas upon which Pollack captured his arcs of paint or the
plane that checked the three pieces of thread, dropped from the height of
one meter, in the Three Standard Stoppages of Duchamp.
Olson’s poetics in particular seemed to suggest that the page simply ex-
isted as a place where a series of seemingly random, and largely disordered,
processes were “recorded” if only because they were halted in their mo-
tions through space. Syllables, that most granular element of language below
which exists only the sound or the stroke, were the building blocks of this
form of poetics, even as Olson never experimented with the types of deter-
ritorialized (in Deleuze and Guatarri’s sense) or “ideolectic” (some would
say merely nonsense) poetries that Charles Bernstein among other Language](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25877107-250522034021-a874b697/85/Word-Toys-Poetry-And-Technics-1st-Edition-Brian-Kim-Stefans-29-320.jpg)
![Figures toward a Speculative Prosody / 19
has been preserved, even as the apparatus of Projective Verse—the compo-
sition by breath, the liberation from the left margin, the inclusion of un
digested bits of documentary matter—has become unfashionable? (Bern
stein’s understanding that Maximus “fares best when it is released of the
demands of information, its cargo load jettisoned: when its content is not
like vitamins added to bread which has had its bran removed” [Content’s
Dream 336] is probably commonplace.) Has a paradigm shift occurred,
and are we no longer able to understand the page as intensely private, an
enactment of specific energies between writer and reader, because of the
ubiquity of the present tense from all quarters of society—the techno
logi
cal
milieu—today? Finally, is the new emphasis on the ludic nature of commu-
nications systems—the database logic that underlies all instances of digital
communication and that Lev Manovich identifies as constituting a new “sym
bolic form” (Language of New Media)—forcing us to rethink the divide be-
tween “formal” and “experimental” verse? Can the use of fixed (even if in-
vented) forms be understood as aspiring to be evental—as pulling from the
invisible—
rather than merely the rehearsal of a “tradition”?
A Note on Prosody
Prosody has traditionally denoted the study of rhythmical patterns in poetry,
a search for a universal set of terms with which to describe its pre-
semantic
underpinnings through sound and pattern. Some poets, like Thomas Gray,
Adelaide Crapsey, and John Hollander, have written detailed treatises on
poetic meter, but for the most part studies of prosody are associated with
non-
poets, with a particular swelling of the practice in the late nineteenth
century culminating in George Saintsbury’s His
tori
cal Manual of English
Prosody (1908), which was over fifteen hundred pages long. Joost Daalder,
in a recent study of the tome, echoes what is probably the view of most po-
ets and scholars today when he notes that Saintsbury’s “remarkable theory
of the English language, and of versification . . . in its very unsoundness [is]
a provocative challenge to those of us who would like to describe the facts
of English prosody” (1), concluding: “The ‘feet’ which lie at the heart of
Saints
bury’s sys
tem . . . provide an inadequate concept in the analy
sis of al-
most any kind of English verse. The chief merit of his monumental book is
that its very erroneousness forces us to think more clearly than he did” (19).
Contemporary treatments of prosody in the Saintsbury tradition are no-
table for their chapters on “free verse” and Ameri
can variations on somatic
metrics ranging roughly from Whitman to Williams and Olson, suggesting
that some serious attention to the “variable foot” and the “line by breath”](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25877107-250522034021-a874b697/85/Word-Toys-Poetry-And-Technics-1st-Edition-Brian-Kim-Stefans-34-320.jpg)
![20 / Chapter 1
is warranted but ultimately cannot be reduced to system. This continued
reference to notions of form and pattern in verse suggests that something
of the technicity of a poem lies in the discernible mechanics and patterns
lying beneath the level of affect and proposition, even if it’s not describable
in the language of stress and “feet.” By technicity, I mean the properties that
a poem shares with those machines that Gilbert Simondon and Bernard
Stiegler describe as constituting a “third order of being” between those or-
ders of the inanimate (stones, wind, sunlight) and the living. The prosodists
are, to this degree, correct in believing that there is an invisible (or insen
sible) element grounding poems, but wrong in thinking that the only way
we gain access to this grounding is through examining stress patterns, pho-
netics, metrics, and so forth.
Richard Cureton writes in Rhythmic Phrasing in English Verse (1–75)
that there are currently fifteen major schools of prosody, among them: foot-
substitution prosodists (“The oldest and still most dominant approach to En-
glish verse . . . derive[d] from classical scansion”); temporalists who replace
the foot with “measures”; phrasalists and prose rhymists who likewise see a
frame beyond the foot; and free verse prosodists who, notably, have failed “to
describe the complex non-
visual rhythms of free verse” but have succeeded
“in describing the effects of visual form.” Intonationalists base their find
ings on phonology and morphology, often using very creative visual systems
for denoting the way poems sound, while generative metrists, influenced
by generative grammar, “assume that verse meter/rhythm is essentially lin-
guistic or algebraic rather than psychological. Barbara Heirnstein Smith’s
theories are notable for her focus on poetic closure (a central theme of Lyn
He
jinian’s poetic theory), while Donald Wesling coined the term “gram-
metrics,” favoring “weak questions” over the “strong explanations” that lead
prosodists to create absurdly over-
determined systems. “Prosodic reading
in
Wesling’s approach centres on the reader’s sequential experience of the
‘fig
ures of grammar’ in the text—subordination, apposition, modification,
tense, mood, sentence types (e.g., questions, statements, etc.), anaphora, etc.—
and all of the various figures caused by the linear positioning and processing
of syntactic units—deletions, transpositions, inversions, parentheses and so
forth—as these ‘fig
ures’ play within and across the other prosodic ‘struc-
tures’ in the reader’s acts of attention” (65). Wesling calls this bifurcation of
focus between grammar and metrics “scissoring.” This suggests, to me, that
what the poet is doing when writing is, in fact, binding, a term taken from
cognitive science to describe the sense of a unity in a perception despite the
activation of discrete parts of the brain. This is akin to an act of synesthesia:
“When I look at a red square, the color and the shape may be represented](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25877107-250522034021-a874b697/85/Word-Toys-Poetry-And-Technics-1st-Edition-Brian-Kim-Stefans-35-320.jpg)
![Figures toward a Speculative Prosody / 21
in different parts of my visual system. But somehow these separate pieces
of information are brought together so that I experience a single red square,
so that I can identify and report a red square, and so on. This phenomenon
is often referred to as binding, and the question of how it is achieved is of
ten referred to as the binding problem” (Bayne and Chalmers 3). To this de-
gree, the act of the prosodist is to unbind—to segregate the merged elements
of literary reception into discrete parts with the hope that the unassembled
puzzle offers insight into poetics.
While some of these new theories of prosody have focused on the visual
element of poems, they don’t generally, to my mind, respond to poems as ob
jects apart from the human observer or “reader,” but rather still as the repre-
sentation of something that could be speech, or a species of rhetoric. Reuven
Tsur’s Toward a Theory of Cognitive Poetics offers a different approach, nicely
summarized by Cureton:
Tsur’s central claims are: (1) that cognitive processing proceeds by suc-
cessive “recodings” of information at several levels of representation;
(2) that these “recodings” are motivated by informational economy
and simplicity, and that “simplicity” is defined, (3) differently on dif-
ferent levels of coding, and (4) (predominantly) from “higher” levels to
“lower” levels within cognitive processing as a whole. As in
[Rudolph]
Arnheim’s theory of visual art or [Leonard] Meyer’s theory of music,
the controlling notion in these claims is “simplicity,” what the gestalt
psychologists called prägnanz, or “strong shape.” A structure is “strong”
if it presents “clear-
cut contrasts, distinct outlines,” with these con-
trasts and outlines deriving from innate principles of perceptual/cog-
nitive “symmetry, similarity, regularity, and balance.” All things being
equal, it seems well established that we “prefer” to perceive shapes that
are “strong” in this sense. (40–41)
Tsur’s “cognitive” poetics recognizes the activity of a poem on a reader as
akin to that of a painting or musical composition; the reader “recodes” com-
plex arrangements into simpler “shapes” even as elements within the work
will resist this reduction. Tsur describes the effects of poetry as largely one
of tensions—convergent/conclusive (tending toward certainty and control)
and divergent/suspensive (tending toward uncertainty and emotional reso-
nance). Tsur draws directly from Arnheim’s notion of “perceptual forces.”
[A]rnheim demonstrates the “the hidden structure of a square” by plac
ing a black cardboard disk in various positions on a white square. Thus](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25877107-250522034021-a874b697/85/Word-Toys-Poetry-And-Technics-1st-Edition-Brian-Kim-Stefans-36-320.jpg)
![22 / Chapter 1
he “maps out” regions of tension and of balance. In [this drawing (see
fig. 1.2)], the disk lies slightly off the centre. “In looking at the disk we
may find that it does not merely occupy a certain place but exhibits
restlessness. This restlessness may be experienced as a tendency of the
disk to get away from where it is placed or, more specifically, as a pull
in a particular direction—for example, toward the center.” Although
perceptual forces are not physical in the sense that gravity is, “there is
no point in calling these forces ‘illusions.’ They are no more illusory
than colors, which are attributed to the objects themselves, although
they are actually nothing but the reactions of the nervous sys
tem to
light of particular wave lengths.” (132)
Not surprisingly, Tsur’s central example of how these “perceptual forces” ex-
ist in poetry centers around an examination of the caesura, and to that de-
gree lies comfortably in the field of prosody. But the ontological claim at the
end of this passage is interesting: visual tensions are as “real” as colors and
prosodic tensions are as “real” as, say, the asymmetries of one of
Gehry’s
Bilbao-
style crushed can buildings or a wonky eyeball. A type of a literary
synesthesia is described (Tsur devotes a chapter to the subject) that is not
merely analogical—as if words had colors—but actual: poems have tensions
that exist crossing the visual, verbal, and syntactical, regardless of the hu-
man subject. Though much of Tsur’s theory of “cognitive poetics” centers on
higher level semantics, such as the perception of allegories, symbols, and ar-
chetypes, his abstraction of poetic effects into moments of control and sus-
pension, linked to physiological responses to language and syntax, suggests a
way to begin to discuss poems not only as pictures or diagrams but as even
tal in Badiou’s term—as containing within them invisible elements that are
nonetheless central to, or constitutive of, their effects.
Figure 1.2. Reuven Tsur, “Arnheim.”](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25877107-250522034021-a874b697/85/Word-Toys-Poetry-And-Technics-1st-Edition-Brian-Kim-Stefans-37-320.jpg)
![24 / Chapter 1
if not harsh’—poetry is a promise that should not be kept” (68). Badiou de-
scribes several features he associates with interruption:
It splits the poem in two. Its operators are the “nothing,” the “enough,”
the “but,” and the “no.”
In the Drunken Boat, there is a flood of Parnassian rheto
ric that
verges on radiant promise—“Million golden bird, o future Vigour”—
and then there is this: “But, in truth, I’ve wept too much! Dawns are
heartbreaking. Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter,” which
is like the abolition, or the revenge, of a zero degree of desire. (68)
These “nos” and “buts” are a “non-
dialectical negation,” a “no that does not
sublate anything, with which Rimbaud turns poetry from its own opening”
(69). No third term surrenders itself from this negation, only a new world,
a new poetry, created which opposes the old in the same poem. But what I
am calling “new poetry” is in fact “a prose as dry as a notary report”: “For
interruption effectively aims to disappoint; it attests to the radical doubt that
besets the epiphany. And this ‘prose waiting in ambush’ is . . . the latent fig
ure of this doubt” (72). In more conventional literary terms, one could ex-
press this “figure of doubt” with the drop of bathos, or even, in Daniel Tiffa-
ny’s estimation, with the intervention of kitsch, which Tiffany notes “traces a
Luciferian arc from cosmos to cosmetics, from canonical to degraded verse:
a delusional program of bad taste and aesthetic failure” (“On Poetry and
Kitsch”). The interruption produces what Badiou calls the undecidable—a
central feature of his philosophy of the event: “The undecidable division of
being itself, of being qua being, is distributed by the poem between its legal
situation and the disappearing of the pure event. In Rimbaud’s poetics, the
undecidable comes with our being proposed, literally, and in all senses, two
universes, and not only one. This composition is that of someone who stands
before a sudden decision for which there is no norm” (74). Badiou contin-
ues with an analysis of a figure that appears in two of these universes, that of
women, who are (referring to two titles of Rimbaud’s poems) “as much crows
as they are genies” for “she co-
belongs to both universes” (76). Reader’s of
Badiou will recognize elements of his argument for “multiplicities” against
the figure of the “count-as-one,” derived from his understanding of set theory
as the foundation of ontology (and which I don’t hope to describe here).
Rimbaud is the poet of disappointment because he is “dream[ing] of a
truth that would be coextensive to the entirety of a situation,” unlike the
Master, Mallarmé. “Poetry has always propped itself up on exactly this un
decidability, because for our education and joy it separates out the poets
of incitement and the poets of composition, the tropes of interruption and](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25877107-250522034021-a874b697/85/Word-Toys-Poetry-And-Technics-1st-Edition-Brian-Kim-Stefans-39-320.jpg)
![Figures toward a Speculative Prosody / 27
that the postmodern cult of indeterminacy is founded in a mode
starting
with the French Symbolists, but she uses the terms “indeterminacy” and “un-
decidability” interchangeably (Poetics vii). I’d like to see suspension, how
ever, as more than merely linguistic, but rather as the non-
evental form of
ontological undecidability, that is, not the blurring of meanings but the flip
ping back and forth or between several discrete meanings that never merge,
one of which must be chosen to make a poem work. Suspension fig
ures
words as elements in sets that constrict or even endow them with meaning,
not as units possessing their meanings in the form of some elusive essence.
The poem can be seen, therefore, as a sort of function delimiting sets by their
very suitability. The analogy would be in the attempt of Russell and White-
head (following Frege) to replace the subject / predicate binary of traditional
logic systems with a function / variable structure in the Principles of Mathe
matics. Poems can then be considered Venn diagrams in which possible re-
lations can be discerned between words; given that poems generally have
more than a handful of words, these overlaps can be exponentially increased.
Suspension moves beyond a mere uncertainty about the meanings—
authorial intentions, cultural determinants, formalist understanding of pat-
terns in sound and grammar—into something more speculative: a considera
tion of words as particles or objects in a field. Words are, in fact, suspended
by their very undecidability—it is why we become aware of them as words.
Badiou suggests in his writing about Rimbaud a form of interruption not
only across the parts of a poem but within the word or phrase itself: “[I]nter-
ruption consists in the brusque rise to the poem’s surface of the ever pos-
sible prose it confines” (71). Suspension suggests that the words are in tran-
sit between two (or more) points; the reader, in turn, is moved from a single
point to a sort of “infinite” in the contemplation of the undecided word.
With suspension, we are still in the universe of pure presence, of “breath
and movement”—that which the interruption interrupts—but are far from
attaining surety of situation or place, what Heidegger might call “dwelling”
in his writing on Hölderlin: “[T]he phrase ‘poetically man dwells’ says: po-
etry first causes dwelling to be dwelling. Poetry is what really lets us dwell.
But through what do we attain to a dwelling place? Through building. Po-
etic creation, which lets us dwell, is a kind of building” (391). This “build-
ing” is, however, really a suspension between the earth and heaven: “Poetry
does not fly above and surmount the earth in order to escape it and hover
over it. Poetry is what first brings man onto the earth, making him belong
to it, and thus brings him into dwelling” (Jackson 392).
Only in the realm of sheer toil does man toil for “merits.” There he
obtains them for himself in abundance. But at the same time, in this](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25877107-250522034021-a874b697/85/Word-Toys-Poetry-And-Technics-1st-Edition-Brian-Kim-Stefans-42-320.jpg)
![30 / Chapter 1
and, unlike the poet of indeterminacy, does not want to deny an eventual
completion of the task.
c. Recursion
In computer science, recursion is the phenomenon of an algorithmic function
referring to itself within its execution. For example, if I were writing an algo-
rithm that was to continue running until the value of x, initially defined as equal
to 10, attained the value of 0 and named this function
subtract1UntilZero,
I would call subtract1UntilZero—which subtracts one from x—from within
the function itself until x equaled 0. For example:
variable x = 10;
function subtract1UntilZero { x = x -1;
if (x == 0) {
print “done!”;
exit;
} else {
subtract1UntilZero;
}
}
Recursion can occur in nature, for example in the shape of a seashell in
which the same pattern or process is repeated from the smaller, interior
parts of the spiral to the outer levels. The once ubiquitous visualizations of
the Mandelbrot, or any set of fractals, might be the most iconic images of
the process.
While he doesn’t use the term “recursion,” Roman Jakobson suggests in
“Poetry of Grammar and the Grammar of Poetry” that these types of gen-
eration out of self-
referentiality or identification are common even in folk
poetry. Recursion’s primary avenue is through grammatical parallelism,
which when present threatens to override anything we might call seman-
tic meaning. Jakobson writes, “[T]he juxtaposition of such sequences as the
farmer kills the duckling and the man takes the chick makes us ‘feel instinc-
tively, without the slightest attempt at conscious analy
sis, that the two sen-
tences fit precisely the same pattern, that they are really the same fundamen-
tal sentence, differing only in their material trappings. In other words, they
express identical relational concepts in an identical manner.’ Conversely, we
may modify the sentence or its single words ‘in some purely relational, non](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25877107-250522034021-a874b697/85/Word-Toys-Poetry-And-Technics-1st-Edition-Brian-Kim-Stefans-45-320.jpg)
![Figures toward a Speculative Prosody / 31
material regard’ without altering any of the material concepts expressed”
(86). Jakobson argues for a “clear-
cut discrimination” between “material”
and “relational” (or “lexical” and “grammatical”) elements in a language,
suggesting a nearly Cartesian dualism between body and soul; sentences can
be fundamentally the same even if the material elements change. He also pos-
its that a “poetry without images” is possible, conveyed entirely through the
permutations of its morphology and parallelisms: “[I]n imageless poems, it
is the ‘figure of grammar’ which dominates and which supplants the tropes”
(93). Grammar might, indeed, represent the pictorial in poetry by its rela-
tionship to the diagrammatical (and, it must be said, to the mathematical
proof) to which painting also bears a relationship. Jakobson cites Benjamin
Lee Worf: “[Worf] discusses the abstract ‘designs of sentence structure’ as
opposed to ‘in
di
vidual sentences’ and to the vocabulary, which is a ‘some-
what rudimentary and not self-
sufficient part’ of the linguistic order, and
envisages ‘a “geometry” of form principles characteristic of each language’”
(133). Quoting, of all people, Stalin, Jakobson writes: “‘[G]eometry, when
giving its laws, abstracts itself from concrete objects, treats objects as bod-
ies deprived of concreteness and defines their mutual relations not as con-
crete relations of certain concrete objects but as relations of bodies in gen-
eral, namely, relations deprived of any concreteness.’ The abstractive power
of human thought underlying [. . .] both geometrical relations and grammar,
superimposes simple geometrical and grammatical fig
ures up on the picto-
rial world of particular objects and upon the concrete lexical ‘wherewithal’
of verbal art” (95). While Worf’s and Stalin’s understanding of the abstract-
ing powers of grammar have long been supplanted by generative linguistics
(Chomsky made his reputation through a damning critique of behaviorist
linguistics such as Worf’s), this understanding of the pure abstractive pow-
ers of grammatical parallelism hint at the non-
dialectical powers of nega-
tion that a recursive poetics suggests.
My key exhibit of a totally recursive poem is Vito Acconci’s work “Mar-
gins on this paper are set” (see fig. 1.3) whose only positive quality is that it
offers an exhaustive description of itself. Like all of Acconci’s text works
of this period, “The letters” was typewritten on a letter sized page; the fixed
width of the typewritten text (as opposed to the variable width of a computer
font like Times New Roman) is exploited as a sort of measure by Acconci,
an imposition of a mathematical formality on printed text. After the stan-
dard paragraph indentation, the poem starts: “Margins on this paper are set,
on the left, one inch from the,” then, following the carriage return, “edge, at
e, t, l, , o, i, n, a, v, , , -
, a, o, b, a, e, , , g, ,” followed by a carriage return. The
reader can, naturally, continue reading, but most would want to verify the
statement since, unlike Wittgenstein’s hippopotamus, the object being de-](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25877107-250522034021-a874b697/85/Word-Toys-Poetry-And-Technics-1st-Edition-Brian-Kim-Stefans-46-320.jpg)
![Figures toward a Speculative Prosody / 35
investigation of the quatrain form since Ezra Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauber
ley, written expressly to revive interest in fixed forms in the fate of the suc-
cess of vers libre while never displaying the regularity of, for example, T. S.
Eliot’s quatrain poetry of the same period.
The real note of suspension in the sequence, however, is in Mullen’s self-
styled “visionary heteroglossia,” a sort of field in which seemingly irrecon-
cilable words and syntax can coexist. Responding in a 1997 interview to the
question of whether she writes for an ideal reader who has “access” to all of
the vocabulary that she utilizes in her work, Mullen replies:
No [laughter]. Because I don’t really have access to all of them. I can
put Spanish words in there because I did take Spanish classes and
I grew up around people speaking Spanish but I am not a Spanish
speaker by any means. So I don’t really have access to Spanish in the
way that a Spanish speaker does and I have even less of the other lan-
guages. I think I threw a Portuguese word in there and a French word
or two, some Af
ri
can terms, mostly Yoruba. It’s just a gesture toward
multiplicity, my small gesture toward a visionary heteroglossia, which
seems appropriate to the diaspora of languages and cultures that the
black world encompasses. There’s always the possibility of the unimag-
ined reader, someone not necessarily aimed at, but one who can read
the text as I’d never imagine. I do want to leave space for that possi-
bility. Also, the poem was a process for me, you know. I was throwing
in black vernacular from Clarence Major’s dictionary Juba to Jive. I
would find something really juicy and say, “Oh, I’ve got to put this in.”
I have something that I got from you Farah [laughter], “washing her
nubia.” I knew I had to use it somehow. I was picking up all of these
threads like the magpie that I am and weaving them into this poem.
(Griffin, Magee, and Gallagher)
Notable is Mullen’s suggestion that, in some possible future, an “unimagined
reader,” perhaps the same one that can read the Cantos unassisted, will be
able to take in Muse Drudge as naturally as one reads, say, The Prelude. In
this case, suspension can be further described as how the various bits of lan-
guage that the “magpie” poet has collected remain in a tense relationship to
the ghost-figure of the ballad and normative English syntax, not to mention
the “unimagined” reader for whom this poem is close to natural language.
Muse Drudge exploits the relation that signs are asked to maintain,
through the middle area of the signifier, to the referent; that is, if words are
being divorced from their respective linguistic systems, whether it be dis-
tinct languages such as Spanish, French, and Portuguese or the class, race, or](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25877107-250522034021-a874b697/85/Word-Toys-Poetry-And-Technics-1st-Edition-Brian-Kim-Stefans-50-320.jpg)
![38 / Chapter 1
like to attempt a diagrammatical representation of this poem. In the alter-
nate rendering of the poem below, I’ve highlighted standard prosodic ele-
ments such as meter and rhyme (bold faced for stressed syllables) to high-
light how the syncopated sound play, the technicity of off-
rhyme, internal
rhyme, and uneven if confident metrics, amplifies this quality of suspension:
[if you’ve been in Virginia (a)
where the green grass grows (b) (“green” resonates with “been”
and “-gin-“)
did you send your insignia (a) [strong rhyme]
up a greased flagpole]? (b) [off rhyme] (greased flagpole
elevated to molossus)
[you used to hock your hambone (a) (“hambone” elevated to spondee)
at a cock and bull pawnshop]; (-
a, x) (“bull pawnshop” elevated to
molossus)
[internal rhyme around “-
ock”
and “-
op,” “pawn” picks up
“bone”]
[got your start as a sideman], (a) (“sideman” elevated to spondee)
[now you’re big on your own]. (a) [series of slant end rhymes
around “-
one” sound]
[what makes tough muffins (a) [possible double spondee]
put Juba on the back]. (b)
[Miz Mary takes a mack truck in (b, a) [feminine rhyme imitated by “in”]
trade for her slick black cadillac]. (b) [mixed strong end rhymes,
internal rhymes around “ck”
consonant]
[la muerte dropped her token (a) [Texan/American pronunciation
of Spanish?]
in the subway slot machine]. (a)
[nobody told the green man (a) [three slant-rhymes]
the fortune cookie lied] (x) [“-
une” links to previous lines
while “lied” brings the poem
back to prose—a sort of entropy]
The brackets in the above suggest sentence or clause clusters while punc-
tuation marks after a closed bracket suggest what type of sentence or clause
it is. All in all, what this exercise in a rather old-
fashioned form of textual](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25877107-250522034021-a874b697/85/Word-Toys-Poetry-And-Technics-1st-Edition-Brian-Kim-Stefans-53-320.jpg)
![Figures toward a Speculative Prosody / 39
analy
sis suggests is a very lively, variable surface for the poem that points
to its direct relation to an invisible fig
ure as well as to its relationship to the
vari
ous fields of language—Af
ri
can Ameri
can slang, British slang, hand-
clapping songs, Spanish, etc.—from which it draws.
The 27th Letter
A fourth element that can be added to our notions of a speculative
prosody
must appeal to computation for its explanation. Fifteen years before the
launch of ASCII, Claude Shannon elaborated upon his notion of informa-
tion entropy in his 1948 paper “A Mathematical Theory of Communica-
tion,” and began the path to the mathematization of writing by codifying a
27-
symbol ‘alphabet,’ the 26 letters and a space. Lydia H. Liu writes of this
momentous event:
When Claude Shannon added a twenty-
seventh letter to the English
alphabet in 1948, no one had remotely suspected that the phonetic al-
phabet was less than perfect. Shannon’s introduction of the new letter,
which codes “space” as an equivalent but non-phonetically produced
positive sign, laid the first stone in the mathematical foundation of in-
formation theory in the early postwar years; it was as revolutionary
as Newton’s apple. [ . . . ] Whereas many of us recognize the impact
that information theory has exerted on computer science, linguistics,
cryptology, military technology, molecular biology, neuro
physiology,
and other disciplines over the past half century, we have not been
forthcoming in posing the following question: Does Shannon’s twenty-
seven-
letter English alphabet pose a challenge to our conception of
alphabetical writing? (45)
Two years later, Shannon published “Prediction and Entropy in Printed En-
glish,” in which he established a connection between his mathematized lan-
guage and normal usage by, in a sense, inserting a computer into the reader:
“The new method of estimating entropy exploits the fact that anyone speak-
ing a language possesses, implicitly, an enormous knowledge of the statis-
tics of the language. Familiarity with the words, idioms, clichés and gram-
mar enables him to fill in missing or incorrect letters in proof-
reading or to
complete an unfinished phrase in conversation” (54). Despite the presence of
numbers and formulas, this inner statistician is bound by several finitudes:
the “finite number of possible sequences of N letters,” (55) the extant English
vocabulary, and the particularities of grammar and syntax.
Shannon then embarked on an interesting mental experiment in which](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25877107-250522034021-a874b697/85/Word-Toys-Poetry-And-Technics-1st-Edition-Brian-Kim-Stefans-54-320.jpg)
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- 6. WORD TOYS
- 7. MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY POETICS Series Editors Charles Bernstein Hank Lazer Series Advisory Board Maria Damon Rachel Blau DuPlessis Alan Golding Susan Howe Nathaniel Mackey Jerome McGann Harryette Mullen Aldon Nielsen Marjorie Perloff Joan Retallack Ron Silliman Jerry Ward
- 8. WORD POETRY AND TECHNICS TOYS BRIAN KIM STEFANS THE UNIVERSITY OF ALA BAMA PRESS Tuscaloosa
- 9. The University of Ala bama Press Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380 uapress.ua.edu Copyright © 2017 by the University of Ala bama Press All rights reserved. Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Ala bama Press. Typeface: Minion and Futura Manufactured in the United States of America Cover design: David Nees Cataloging- in- Publication data is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: 978-0-8173-5895-2 E-ISBN: 978-0-8173-9122-5
- 10. Contents List of Figures vii Introduction: Beyond Estrangement 1 1. Playing the Field: Figures toward a Speculative Prosody 13 2. The New Commodity: Technicity and Poetic Form 49 3. Pilots of the Pharmakon: Bodies, Precarity, and the Milieu 83 4. Fictions of Immanence: Undigests and Outsider Writing 119 5. Terrible Engines: Toward a Literature of Sets 158 6. Miscegenated Scripts: The Gramme and Transpacific Hybridity 191 7. Discompositions: Troubling Ground in Graphic Design 228 8. Just Ask Lattice: A Poetics of Grids, Numbers, and Diagrams 260 Appendix: “Objects” in Programming and Philosophy 299 Notes 309 Works Cited 321 Index 333
- 12. Figures Figure 1.1. Charles Olson, “History” 15 Figure 1.2. Reuven Tsur, “Arnheim” 22 Figure 1.3. Vito Acconci, “The Margins on this paper are set” 32 Figure 1.4. Harryette Mullen, page from Muse and Drudge 37 Figure 2.1. Rube Goldberg, “Simple Way to Light a Cigar” 62 Figure 2.2. “Audions and early triodes developed from them, 1918” 65 Figure 2.3. “Fleming valve schematic from US Patent 803,684” 66 Figure 3.1. Kevin Davies, page from Comp 103 Figure 4.1. John Wieners, page from Behind the State Capitol or Cincinnati Pike 132 Figure 4.2. Toadex Hobogrammathon, “Dagmar Chili” 141 Figure 4.3. Tan Lin, page from HEATH Course Pak 149 Figure 5.1. Mark Z. Danielewski, pages from Only Revolutions 176 Figure 5.2. Jonathan Safran Foer, page from Tree of Codes 181 Figure 6.1. Henri Michaux, “Alphabet” (1927) 195 Figure 6.2. Ho Hon Leung, “A Symphony Poem ‘Unfinished’ for Rose Li Kin Hong” 207
- 13. Figure 6.3. Young- Hae Chang Heavy Industries, excerpts from “Cunnilingus in North Korea” in four languages 212 Figure 6.4. Paul Chan, “Black Panther” font from Alternumerics 215 Figure 6.5. «when you are old» (Square Word Calligraphy) 2007 218 Figure 6.6. John Cage, selection from “62 Mesostics re Merce Cunningham” 220 Figure 7.1. Arakawa and Madeline Gins, selection from The Mechanism of Meaning 236 Figure 7.2. Illustration from Denise Schmandt- Besserat, When Writing Met Art, depicting token system 239 Figure 7.3. Ezra Pound, page from The ABC of Reading 244 Figure 7.4. Caroline Bergvall, page from Éclat 253 Figure 7.5. Wittgenstein’s Rod (origi nal) 257 Figure 7.6. Wittgenstein’s Rod (corrected) 259 Figure 8.1. Gottlob Frege, from Begriffsschrift 271 Figure 8.2. Feynman diagram 272 Figure 8.3. Nomogram, “The Day of the Week for Any Date of History Back to the Birth of Christ” 274 Figure 8.4. “Nomogram for Determining the Lead Angle of a Cycloidal Cam” 275 Figure 8.5. Nomogram, “Solution of Lamé- Maxwell Equation of Equilibrium” 276 Figure 8.6. William Poundstone, selection from New Digital Emblems 283 Figure 8.7. Christian Bök, page from Crystallography 289 Figure 8.8. Dom Sylvestre, “great cultural medical pekinese / protect steve” 297
- 14. WORD TOYS
- 16. Introduction Beyond Estrangement On the Autonomy of the Poem “He watched for the repetition of certain ideas; he sprinkled them with numbers.” —Paul Valéry, “The Evening with Monsieur Teste” A Dissociation Alain Badiou names the central purveyors of a certain type of “postmodern” thinking—that which concedes, generally, that there is nothing “out side of language”—vari ously “sophists” and “anti- philosophers,” arguing that hav- ing Wittgenstein considered the central philosopher of the early twentieth century would be like having Gorgias and Protagoras, and not Plato and Aristotle, as the founders of Western philosophy. If the “language game,” de- construction and various “poststructural” offshoots, wanted to signal the end of Western metaphysics, Badiou instead sets aside the question of language— brackets it just as Husserl did the extra- cognitive or “thing- in- itself” in the construction of his phenomenology—in favor of a renewed engagement with “truth.” Quentin Meillassoux, Badiou’s former student, is the best known of those post linguistic- turn philosophers identified, for better or worse, as “specu- lative realists.” Meillassoux’s relatively short work After Finitude proposes the term “correlationism” to describe those methods of philosophy that make the experiencing mind—objects as they exist in consciousness, the object of consciousness itself—the sole subject of philosophy rather than the things- in- themselves and the natural “laws” that govern them apart from consciousness. In these philosophies that Meillassoux wishes to supplant, only the correlation of the mind and object is what matters—neither can be understood without the other. Vilém Flusser articulates the correlation-
- 17. 2 / Introduction ist view succinctly in his highly entertaining pataphysical tract, co- written by Louis Bec, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis: A Treatise, on the vampire squid: “Reality is neither the organism nor the environment, neither the subject nor the object, neither the ego nor the nonego, but rather the concurrence of both. It is absurd to envisage an objectless subject or a subjectless object, a world without me and a me without the world. ‘Da- Sein’ means ‘being in the world.’ If things were to change, it would not be because I have changed myself or because the world has changed itself but quite the contrary: the concrete ‘ego- world’ relationship has changed, and this change has revealed itself phenomenally as changes both within myself and in the world outside” (36). While the details of Meillassoux’s argument are too complex to relate here, one finds in After Finitude a suggestive way to recover from Descartes’s famous split of the mind from matter and view consciousness as at one with the real without merely relegating consciousness as an emanation or epi- phenomenon of the real (which Steven Shaviro argues is central to White- head’s philosophy in Without Criteria). Consciousness becomes an element of the universe to which in di vidual human minds have access, like a com- puter terminal to a mainframe, just as the laws of physics or of “nature” are an element of the universe to which in di vidual physical objects have access. I’d like to take advantage of this rapidly unfolding reengagement of phi- losophy with what used to be called metaphysics to speculate on poems as non- textual and even non- cultural objects—that is, as things in the world divorced from the human agents that created them and outside of the hu- man agents that experience them. I’d like to attempt something that, to my mind, has been largely unfashionable in criticism of the latter twentieth century, which is to describe poetry—categories of poetry, poems as in di vidual actors—in terms that derive from the metaphysical tradition. I’m not looking for eternal or absolute “truths” about poetry so much as to lib- erate poems from their depiction as merely symptoms of social, material, or his tori cal forces, products of when different human interests collide, co- here, or otherwise conspire to cough up things called “poems.” I don’t wish to discount these terms entirely, of course, as language is naturally tied to ethics and communal life and poetry to other genres such as the novel or even film. But I’d like to imagine poems as autonomous entities that, like machines and living organisms, enact their own interactions with their mi- lieus, perhaps each with its own “will to power” and desire to reproduce, obtain sustenance, and evolve. Poems are, to this degree, “objects” in the sense of Graham Harman’s ex- panded definition, with essences that, in his theory of “vicarious causation,” retreat from other objects, hence their continued “allure” (the key concept in Harman’s aesthetics, which I won’t describe here). To Harman, objects
- 18. Beyond Estrangement / 3 only ever present “caricatures” of themselves to other objects: “The tribes- man who dwells with the godlike leopard, or the prisoner who writes secret messages in lemon juice, are no closer to the dark reality of these objects than the scientist who gazes at them. If perception and theory both objectify entities, reducing them to one-sided caricatures of their thundering depths, the same is true of practical manipulation. We distort when we see, and dis- tort when we use. Nor is the sin of caricature a merely human vice. Dogs do not make contact with the full reality of bones, and neither do locusts with cornstalks, viruses with cells, rocks with windows, nor planets with moons. It is not human consciousness that distorts the reality of things, but rela- tionality per se” (“Vicarious Causation” 193). To the degree that poems are objects, they can be understood, in Harman’s terms, as always already de familiarized in the Russian Formalist sense. The Number and the Siren I have written elsewhere of Harman’s and Meillassoux’s major forays into literary aesthetics, the former in a book- length work on H. P. Lovecraft en- titled Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy, the latter in a short book about Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard titled The Number and the Siren. In my view, both Harman and Meillassoux could be said to trust their texts in fashions that have grown alien to academic critics during the period of high “theory.” While not offering any sort of “surface” reading of the type that has become influential in the academy since the publication of “Surface Reading: An Introduction” by Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus (2009)—readings that eschew the concerns of poststructural, Marxist, femi- nist, and psychoanalytic traditions view texts as dissimulating or otherwise concealing ideology, a form of interpretative loosely termed “symptom- atic”—the “speculative realist” take on literary texts trusts, first of all, that they exist, and, sec ond, like any object in the world, they are marked by ap- pearances and essences. The result is texts are liberated from the network of relations that had threatened to turn texts into mere relations themselves, a network constructed largely by those invested with the duty to interpret texts in an era that sought to undermine the very paradigm of hermeneutics itself. Harman adheres, in his writing on Lovecraft, to a sort of naive mime- sis, one that views language as largely “transparent” in a fashion long dis- couraged by avant- garde writers in the tradition of, say, Stein, Ashbery, and the Language poets. The apparatus of a typical Lovecraft story is simple and reliable—a monologue, a series of letters, a third person account—only tak- ing on “horizontal” or “cubist” elements in those moments when the narra- tor himself fails to offer the open window on the view. “The power of lan-
- 19. 4 / Introduction guage is no longer enfeebled by an impossibly deep and distant reality,” Har man writes. “Instead, language is overloaded by a gluttonous excess of surfaces and aspects of the thing” (25). Harman’s take on a certain famous passage in which a sailor is “swallowed up by an angle of masonry which shouldn’t have been there; an angle which was acute, but behaved as if it were obtuse” (76) merges mathesis, or the expression of mathematical prop- erties in physical reality, with journalistic subjectivity or what Frege might call “psychologism”: “Lovecraft introduces a problem. Not only is Cthulhu something over and above the three creatures he partially resembles [. . .] we now find that even acute and obtuse angles must be something over and above their qualities. There seems to be a ‘spirit’ of acute angles, a ‘general outline of the whole’ which allows them to remain acute angles even in cases where they behave as if they were obtuse. Not since Pythagoras have geo- metrical entities been granted this sort of psychic potency, to the point that they have a deeper being over and above their measurable and experience- able traits” (76–77). There is pleasure in learning that there is, after Pythag- oras (and before Kandinsky!), a tradition of attributing “psychic potency” to squares and circles. “[I]t is unclear how the mere fact of ‘behaving as ob- tuse’ would allow an angle to ‘swallow up’ an unwary sailor,” Harman con- tinues: “Sketch the diagram of an obtuse angle for yourself, and you will see the difficulty in intuitively grasping what has happened. If the phrase ‘she looked daggers at him’ is an example of catachresis in language, a misap- plication of a word to gain metaphorical effects, then the acute angle ob- tusely swallowing a sailor is a fine example of catachresis in geometry. We might as well say: ‘It was the number 21, but it behaved as though it were the number 6’” (77). A sec ond stylistic technique that Harman describes is the “vertical” or “allusive” style, typified in this passage from the “Call of Cthulhu”: “If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing [. . .] but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful.” For Harman, such a passage draws us away from trying to recreate the creature in the terms of our loathsome, mundane world of Euclidean time and space. Lovecraft situates the crea- ture partly in the diseased imagination of a narrator who claims that the de- scription is “not unfaithful” but hardly correct, and also “asks us to ignore the surface properties of dragon and octopus [. . .] and to focus instead on the fearsome ‘general outline of the whole.’” In this way, Lovecraft opens up a “gap”: things are moving along swimmingly in the story, with the narra- tor sane and physical reality recognizably accessible and ordered; just at the
- 20. Beyond Estrangement / 5 moment when the narrator experiences something truly astounding—the color out of space, the shadow out of time—language breaks down, and all you are left with is the “general outline of the whole” (24). Harman, to this degree, examines Lovecraft’s texts spatially, not temporally; he doesn’t pro- vide a subjective account of a reading of the text burdened with the diffi- culties of generations of literary theory so much as focus on specific loca- tions—words, sentences, paragraphs—where the text, imagined as a sort of tool, breaks and we are granted access to the noumenon. Likewise, Meillassoux surrenders to a naive mimesis: he recounts, or at- tempts to recount, Un coup de dés as a story with characters, a setting, and something of suspense. Mallarmé’s text doesn’t grant such easy access, of course, and argues by its syntax, graphic design, and the indeterminacies of its narrative for a mathematical reading—again, topographic, but not in the manner of a map so much as a formula or “picture” as we understand it from Wittgenstein’s definition in the Tractatus Philosophicus. Meillassoux at- tempts to establish a relationship to the text that is as impossible—but pos- sibly necessary—as the drowning sailor’s grasping of a severed mast in the whirlpool. We are given something of an allegory to the “strong correlation- ist” description of the mind→object relationship, but are also teased with at- tempting to grab the mast itself in an effort to situate and steady ourselves in space and time. Meillassoux believes the poet was meticulously crafting a singularity: a poem that is the ultimate, and unrepeatable, response to the “crisis in verse” because it created a new poetic form premised on an unrevealed Number, a new form of measure, with its attendant metaphysical properties, but also the ultimate response to the secularization of Europe and the need, expressed in countless ways in nineteenth- century culture, to raise art to the status of religion. Meillassoux makes an interesting critique of Wagner and his par- ticular response to secularization: “[T]he weakness of Wagnerian ‘total art’ resides in its will to reconnect with the Greek articulation of theatre and politics. To fig ure upon a scene the relation of humans and their gods, to render visible to the masses the principle of their communion with the aid of a narrative embellished with song—in short, to represent to a people its own mystery: such is for Mallarmé the Greek heritage upon which art, including Wagnerian art, continues to feed. But, according to the poet, it is precisely the representation that art must break with if it would claim to go beyond Chris- tianity” (108). While Mallarmé referred to Christianity as the “black agony,” he nonetheless saw the roots of European culture lying not in the Greeks but in the Latin Middle Ages. “Christianity has handed down to us a ritual su- perior in power to those of paganism,” Meillessoux writes, “namely the real
- 21. 6 / Introduction convocation of a real drama.” Thus, the Master favored the mysteries of the Eucharist over the catharsis of theater or allegorical pageantry: The Eucharist is thus a paradoxical mode of ‘presence in absence’: The divine is there, among the elect, in the very host—but is not yet returned. . . . It is a presence that is not in the present, but in the past and in the future. To take up Mallarmé’s vocabulary—and his evoca- tion of ‘God [. . .] there, diffuse’—we should speak, to signify the Eu- charistic mode of presence, whether or not it is transcendent, of a dif fusion of the divine, as opposed to its representation, or its presentation. The ultimate singularity of Mallarmé’s poetics—the idea that oriented his last writings—thus consisted in the quest for a ‘diffusion of the ab- solute’ emancipated from representation (even if, evidently, the latter is not annulled in the labor of the work) and dismissing all eschato- logical parousia. (112) For Mallarmé, art doesn’t conjure the divine for humans by overpowering them with presence—narrative, technology, song, even perhaps the “soul”— but imitates rather the act of Christ, whom Mallarmé sees as the “anony- mous official, effaced before transcendence, and whose sole movement of retreating, back into the throng, attests to the presence of divinity.” Though Mallarmé’s poem, with all of what the Brazilian concrete poets would term “verbi- voco- visual” elements, does indeed have all the trappings of a Ge samtkunstwerk, it is not theater so much as an event, the “diffusion of the divine,” in all modesty an attempt to replace religion with poetry. There is a sort of Decadent trinity, the character of the Master in the poem hesitating before a throw of the dice, Chance itself, and finally, the poet and historical figure Mallarmé: [T]his ‘Master’ who would be both thrower and non- thrower would be only a representation of the Master. He would be nothing more than a fiction engendered by the Poem—and it is precisely his fictional sta- tus that would permit him to be virtually all things, at the behest of the reader’s imagination. Now, according to our hypothesis, at stake in the Coup de dés is the ‘diffusion of the divine’ and therefore the real presence of a real drama, a drama supporting an effective infinitiza- tion—not an empty fiction. Thus, it is indeed the gesture of Mallarmé himself—his throwing of the Number, his wager engendered by the performative purport of the encrypted Poem—that must be infinitized if we would extract the Coup de des from the sole reign of represen- tation. (132)
- 22. Beyond Estrangement / 7 Un coup de dés is not merely a narrative poem, a fiction or objective cor- relative (to borrow T. S. Eliot’s term), telling the story of the Master hesi- tating before Chance. Rather, the poem itself becomes this very act, a hesi- tance in which the throwing and not throwing are coexistent, like life and death in the allegory of Schrödinger’s Cat. The Number tossed, of course, is one I can’t reveal, but which Meillessoux writes can only have been, itself, discovered by chance; hence, the wager that Mallarmé himself took that his poem would never be “deciphered” and Meillassoux’s palpable excitement at having done it. In Word Toys, I try (with far less elegance and far too many words) to ne- gotiate some of the terms Meillassoux employs: treating poems as singulari ties (even if clear “influences” and other historical determinants are visible), as objects (instances of graphic design, numerically-based diagrams, as func tioning actants), and as evental (a “truth condition” in Badiou’s term, pro- ducing new possibility from the void). Badiou’s most accessible deployment of the term appears in his po liti cal writings, such as Rebirth of History, The Communist Hypothesis, and elsewhere where he seeks to link the recent wave of “riots and uprisings” (his phrase) to something like the revaluation of his- tory. “What is important here,” Badiou writes in the Communist Hypothesis, “is not the realization of a possibility that resides within the situation or is dependent on the transcendental laws of the world. An event is the crea- tion of new possibilities. [W]ith respect to the situation or a world, an event paves the way for the possibility of what—from the limited perspective of the make-up of this situation or the legality of this world—is strictly impos- sible.” In other words, revolution is an attempt to try the hand of chance: to create historical singularities that are transformative, truly novel, and that leave in their wake nothing unchanged. This is also his description of what happens in a poem. A Quick Graph Word Toys is “non- linear” to the degree that, on occasion, words or phrases are used in earlier chapters that are not substantially defined or investi- gated until later. Additionally, many terms and concepts are derived from my read ing in Continental (and related) philosophy and might be unusual in the context of “literary criticism,” though some (especially those derived from Wittgenstein and Deleuze) have been pretty regularly employed. An- other strand that appears frequently derives from vari ous theories of the visual: new media, print design, “picture” and information theory. The most familiar element, at least to readers of this series from the University of Ala bama Press, is that of “postmodern” or experimental poetics, though I
- 23. 8 / Introduction choose not to use those terms and, for the most part, do not chart chains of influence, social or his tori cal contexts, or link readings of works to pre- decessor texts. In “Playing the Field,” three “fig ures” are introduced: interruption, sus- pension, and recursion. I call these “prosodic” to the degree that they are re- lated to the material foundation of a poem—the words on the page, arrange- ment, punctuation, etc.—but don’t play a direct role in determining their “meaning,” much as metrical, phonological, and even syntactical elements of a poem (the subject of traditional prosody) don’t determine its meaning. The three terms are derived, respectively, from the writings of Badiou on Arthur Rimbaud, of Heidegger on Friedrich Hölderlin, and from my own understanding of “recursion” from object-oriented computer programming. The test, as regards the concepts derived from philosophy, is whether these terms can be liberated from their initial application to (or derivation from) the poetry of Rimbaud and Hölderlin and be applied elsewhere. Later in the book, the criti cal writing of poet/critics Veronica Forrest- Thomson and Charles Bernstein are examined to round out the notion of the contribution of “non- meaningful” elements to a poem. The “27th Letter,” another concept from the first chapter, is derived from a reading of the founder of information theory, Claude Shannon, and in- troduces a theme that occurs in vari ous guises through out this book, which is that of the “mathematical” reader. A note on the link of logic and psy- chology (derived from the writing of Jean Piaget), a meditation on Wittgen- stein’s Remarks on Mathematics, reflections on Meillassoux’s (and his men- tor Badiou’s) employment of set theory in his philosophy of the “transfinite,” Sherry Turkle’s writing on video games and, finally, a linkage between the attempts in the early twentieth century by Frege, Russell, Whitehead, and Wittgenstein to create formal languages that merged mathematics and phi- losophy as a manner of grounding these discourses all contribute to this no- tion that there is some way to “perceive” a mathematical layer to what are, on the surface, linguistic structures. Occasionally, I make some asides con- cerning “digital humanities” and the problems of the mathematization of text and their subsequent visualizations in this academic practice (Franco Moretti, Johanna Drucker, and Alex Galloway are touchstones here). The final chapter’s long digression on a “Theory of Diagrams” and remarks on the work of William Poundstone and Christian Bök are intended as the cul- mination of this thematic strand. “The New Commodity” introduces the notion of “technicity,” which I base on the writing of Gilbert Simondon and, to a smaller degree, Bernard Stiegler. Starting with a reflection on the Language poets’ employment of Marx’s critique of the “commodity,” this chapter attempts to concretize, or
- 24. Beyond Estrangement / 9 render literal (and not merely metaphorical), the notion of the poem as a “machine” as both Pound and Williams suggested in different ways. Two avenues linking textual objects to functioning material objects are through computer programming—an essentially textual practice that makes things happen—and through W. J. T. Mitchell’s concept of the “metapicture,” an im- age that is “undecided” between a closed set of possible (and absolute) un- derstandings rather than merely “indeterminate.” Like the first chapter, this chapter is overloaded with concepts and spends little time doing literary criticism. The first chapter “close reads” Harryette Mullen’s Muse & Drudge (to illustrate “suspension” and the notion of an underlying poetic “diagram”) and this one Ben Lerner’s Lichtenberg Figures (to illustrate the linked con- cepts of the metapicture, undecidability, and recursion). “Pilots of the Pharmakon” introduces concepts that are much more “so- cial” than the above, namely the notion of the pharmakon—the ensemble of technical elements that comprise the non- in di vidual “tertiary” memory of a culture—as derived from the writing of Bernard Stiegler who, in turn, adapted it from Derrida’s reading of Plato in “Plato’s Pharmacy.” Much as my first chapter started with a brief revisit with an acknowledged twentieth- century fig ure, Charles Olson, this one starts with a review of some of the “method” of Ezra Pound’s Cantos and traces it through the writing of Alice Notley, Kevin Davies, and Wanda Coleman. These works best illustrate a decidedly Anglo- Ameri can version of Badiou’s poetics of “interruption,” and while I don’t make any sociological claims, it is notable that all three were published in within a few years of the last turn of the century. The sec- tion on Coleman concludes with a review of Kristin Ross’s notion of “the Swarm” in her book The Emergence of Social Space, and introduces another important strand for my book—the concept derived from Simondon of the “pre- individual.” The chapter ends with a brief meditation on the “poetics of care,” which eschews interruption (seeing it as “fragmentation”) and ar- gues instead for a poetics of “connectivity.” “Fictions of Immanence” attempts to describe an “outsider writing” and examines a new literary form that I have dubbed the “undigest.” Unlike the above chapters (and much like the two that follow), this chapter operates more as a catalogue of works—in this case Peter Manson’s Adjunct: An Un digest, Toadex Hobogrammathon’s “Name: A Novel” and the blog “Dagmar Chili,” and a set of works by Tan Lin—situating them within, on the one hand, an undercurrent of Modernist and mid- century experimental writ- ing and, on the other, a “techno- anarchist” moment that occurred in the early days of internet art and literature. This chapter dips briefly, however, into a review of Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the “plane of immanence,” characterized as pre-conceptual, transindividual, and as aspiring to “infinite
- 25. 10 / Introduction speed” (in contrast to the “slow beings that we are”). The “plane of imma- nence” is related to the notion of the a-field (my own coinage) to denote a sort of physical, information- rich field to which we have no direct access— Eugene Thacker might call this “the world without us”—but which can be seen as an empirical (even if not observable) proof of Deleuze and Guat- tari’s highly speculative concept. A section in the final chapter, “Just Ask Lattice,” on nomograms is also concerned with the process of deriving “de- cided” meanings from mathematized “planes.” “Terrible Engines” and “Miscegenated Scripts”‘ also function largely as catalogues. “Terrible Engines” attempts a “speculative realist” reading of a range of works from conceptual writing to mainstream (if highly experi- mental) novels by Mark Danielewski and Jonathan Safran Foer. These works can be situated in a triad that includes, in one corner, the “lyric” poem (de- scribed in my first two chapters) and the “undigest” (a sort of poem- as- source- text), as they are works that make a show of their structure and yet are (in the manner of Oulipian writing) attempting to strangle “inspiration.” “Miscegenated Scripts” likewise investigates works that, in some way, target a specifically transpacific linguistic, cultural, and geographical divide. Many of these works lack “content” in the traditional sense—they are often works that are in the form of procedures and instructions (Xu Bing’s calligra- phy, Paul Chan’s fonts, John Cage’s mesostics), or that chart some zone be- tween “east ern” and “west ern” writing systems (Yunte Huang’s translation practices, Ho Hon Leung’s “matrices,” John Cayley’s “transliteral morphs)— though in other cases (Prema Murthy’s pseudo- erotic website, Young- Hae Chang Heavy Industry’s word movies, Theresa Cha’s performance and visual poetics) they directly target cultural and po liti cal representation. A section on granularity and the gramme (derived from Derrida through Steve McCaf fery) offers yet another take on the “plane of immanence.” “Discompositions” is a speculative reading of the basis of “meaning” in graphic design, and “Just Ask Lattice” is something of a Symbolist and art criti cal take on decidedly non- artistic practices such as the title states: the visualization of numbers. “Discompositions” examines how three types of grounding—formal, phenomenological, and legislative/symbolic—can be dis- cerned in graphic design, and uses archeologist Denise Schmandt-Besserat’s theories of the origins of writing systems to link the three. What follows is an eclectic set of case studies—Ezra Pound’s ABC of Reading, poems by Cummings and Clark Coolidge, and Caroline Bergvall’s Éclat—ending with an account of Wittgenstein’s “visual proof” in Remarks. “Just Ask Lattice” starts with an account of Paul Valéry’s speculative Instrumentalists (who used “tables of correspondences”), Rosalind Kraus’s writing on the “grid,” and a
- 26. Beyond Estrangement / 11 series of reflections on the depictions of numbers in images (charts, dia- grams, formal languages, nomograms) concluding with a reading of William Poundstone’s New Digital Emblems and Christian Bök’s Crystallography. This chapter ends with a quick array of linkages between purely formal struc- tures—metapictures, paragrams, crystals—and something like the origins of the “subject,” again revisiting the notion of the “preindividual.” As this “quick graph” should make clear, Word Toys makes contentions that are, on the one hand, simply not provable and, on the other, of little use in helping to interpret poems. Yes, there are “close readings,” but they are done (or are intended to be done) in symbiotic relationship with some purely speculative, and vaguely outlandish, notion such as the “plane of im- manence,” the “a- field,” the “infinite,” the “undecidable” and so forth. I’m not a philosopher, and yet I wanted to be able to employ a set of terms from my reading while granting them more significant stage time (espe- cially when derived from less well- known writers like Simondon, Meillas- soux, and Stiegler that I’ve grown particularly fond of) than usually occurs in literary criticism. As for stylistic infelicities, I’ve tried to delete or revise out as many em- dashes, crazed contentions, dropped names, and impos- sible associations as possible, but I’m afraid that, like Frank O’Hara (or was it Rachmaninoff?), I will never be mentally sober. Acknowledgements Some chapters in this book were initially written for a variety of occasions and were all extensively revised and expanded. A shortened version of “Fic- tions of Immanence” will appear in the volume Contemporary Fiction After Literature, edited by Daniel O’Hara, to be published by Northwest ern Uni- versity Press in 2017. Sections of “Miscegenated Scripts” appeared as the “new media” entry in the The Routledge Companion to Asian Ameri can and Pacific Islander Literature (2015) edited by Rachel Lee. The sections con- cerning distant reading were written for a talk I gave at Richard Stockton University titled “Questions of Scale: Notes on ‘Distant’ and ‘Close’ Read- ing” in February 2015. A first draft of “The New Commodity” was written for the PAMLA Conference in Riverside, CA, in 2014. “Discompositions” was origi nally conceived as the keynote address at the conference “Compo- sition: Making Meaning Through Design” at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in May 2014. The bulk of “Terrible Engines” first appeared in Comparative Literature Studies in 2014. The section on William Poundstone in “Just Ask Lattice” derives from a presentation at the Electronic Literature
- 27. 12 / Introduction Organization’s arts festival of 2010, Archive & Innovate. Parts of the sections concerning Alice Notley’s Disobedience, Kevin Davies’s Comp., and Tan Lin’s BlipSoak01 first appeared in the Boston Review in the years 2001–2004. A proper list of personal acknowledgements would take up several pages. I haven’t adopted the good habit that many academics have of sharing drafts of their work with peers—any mistakes, bad judgments, and malformed thoughts herein are entirely mine—and so thanks for feedback and so forth are absent. I don’t know how many great conversations about poetry I have had with Walter K. Lew, Tim Davis, Jennifer Moxley, Jeff Derksen, Darren Wershler, Miles Champion, Sianne Ngai, Kevin Davies, Bruce Andrews, Robert Fitterman, Kim Rosenfield, Nathan Brown, Michael Scharf, Stacy Doris, Michael O'Brien, and Michael Gizzi—I’m just quite sure I had them. Writing by poet/scholars such as Charles Bernstein, Steven McCaffery, Daniel Tiffany, and Craig Dworkin, who I’m happy to count as friends, are clearly evident in this book—I hope my contribution to this library is wor- thy. Among my great poet- teachers in college and graduate school I count Robert Kelly, John Ashbery, Wayne Koestenbaum, and Ann Lauterbach, but I’ll refrain from noting any other great “teachers” I’ve only known through books (thank you, The Pound Era). My poet posse here in Los Angeles—Joseph Mosconi, Andrew Maxell, Kate Durbin, Ara Shirinyan, Will Alexander, Aaron Kunin, Molly Bendall, and others—are necessary air, but most important is Román Luján, who has taught me much about the genuinely Corinthian nature of Los Angeles and the intricacies of Mexican and South Ameri can poetry and also just how friendship works. I’ve learned much from my students, especially Jeremy Schmidt, Jacquelyn Ardam, Jay Jin, Sarah Nance, Craig Messner, and the fabulous Lysette Simmons. Friends who don’t fit into the categories above but who I have to mention include Sarah Gardam and Nathan Long. Of course, I want to thank family: my father, John, for his creativity— he wrote many songs!—and also his useful impatience with the state of the world, and his wife and my great friend Karin for her intelligence and spirit; my mother Mi Yong to whom this book is secretly dedicated, who probably got the whole poet thing going just in the richness of her “Oriental” wisdom mixed with the no- bullshit, passionate attitude she takes into everything, along with her husband, Dean Daly, who is a quiet treasure and maybe the only sane person in my family; and my siblings Lindsay, Cindy, Alexandra, and Erik, with whom I’ve shared many misadventures but who also continue to amaze me by all they’ve learned and have been willing to share. Anna Le Roy, I love you for your patience, support, and your beautiful heart.
- 28. 1 Playing the Field Figures toward a Speculative Prosody The Field For readers of Anglophone poetry of the twentieth century, the concept of the “field” as the true ground of poetic composition, in contrast to a false ground of meter, rhyme, and formal patterns such as the sonnet, will have some resonance. Charles Olson advocated the “composition by field” predi- cated on his understanding of Alfred North Whitehead, whose philosophy transformed the concept of “field” in particle physics to an entire metaphysi cal system, while The Opening of the Field was the title of a major book by Robert Duncan, the first of a trilogy he published with New Directions in the 1960s, foregrounding his particular blend of the techniques of Pound and Olson, his deep reading in a variety of literatures, occult philosophies, and emancipatory politics. The argument by these and other practitioners of “New Ameri can” poetics was that the page could operate like a plane of appearances, as a foundational bed or ground in which objects, namely clusters of words, could be situated and in which experiments in spatial or- ganization, reading temporality and semantic indeterminacy—the page as “score”—could be enacted. Olson, inspired by his reading in Whitehead, would understand the page as a field of processes, of “actual events” or “ac- tual occasions,” terms Whitehead employed to collapse the binary between objects and events (or subject and predicate), favoring instead a metaphysics that rendered events or occasions as in a state of constant destruction and re- newal—which he called “prehension”—and to a degree undecided until ob- served (like the particle/wave distinction in physics). This concept is central to Whitehead’s notions of time, which he understood as having extension
- 29. 14 / Chapter 1 like space, and explanatory of why things appear to change. Keith Robert son writes (in the context of a comparison with Deleuze’s “plane of imma- nence”): “Prehension is a noncognitive ‘feeling’ guiding how the occasion shapes itself from the data of the past and the potentialities of the future. Prehension is an ‘intermediary,’ a purely immanent potential power, a rela- tion of difference with itself, or pure ‘affection’ before any division into form and matter” (219). The central issue in Robertson’s essay, and much writ- ing about Whitehead, is whether or not Whitehead’s “process” philosophy is a philosophy of “flux” in the Bergsonian sense; the theory of “prehension” seems to argue for a sort of pulse, a “rhythm of life,” a sort of temporal atom- ism, that would argue against it. “[E]very element in an open poem,” Olson wrote in “Projective Verse,” “must be taken up as participants in the kinet- ics of the poem just as solidly as we are accustomed to take what we call the objects of reality”—“accustomed” being the key term, as in the Whitehead worldview, “objects” are really events, their static stability a mere illusion. Refiguring the classic clash of the “raw” and the “cooked,” of Whitman against the traditional poetries of the Old World, Olson dubbed formal po- etry the “verse which print bred,” in which form seemed to be imposed from outside, like the form of the brick on the matter of clay, maintaining the hylo- morphic dualism of “matter” and “form” characteristic of Aristotle and later Medieval scholastics. Olson argued instead that poems were “direct transfers of energy” between the writer (not the subject but “some several forces”) and reader, and in fact a physical inscription of the bodily (breathing) act of the poet. To this degree, poems for Olson were in constant states of becoming, both in the writing (the cybernetic loop that requires the typewriter to pro- vide precise feedback to the poet engaged in the process) and for the reader who adjusts his/her reading according to the marks on the page, and not final states of being following some predetermined pattern such as a son- net. The page could, to this degree, be described as merely the place where these transfers were stopped, burning their energies into a hindering me- dium, like the canvas upon which Pollack captured his arcs of paint or the plane that checked the three pieces of thread, dropped from the height of one meter, in the Three Standard Stoppages of Duchamp. Olson’s poetics in particular seemed to suggest that the page simply ex- isted as a place where a series of seemingly random, and largely disordered, processes were “recorded” if only because they were halted in their mo- tions through space. Syllables, that most granular element of language below which exists only the sound or the stroke, were the building blocks of this form of poetics, even as Olson never experimented with the types of deter- ritorialized (in Deleuze and Guatarri’s sense) or “ideolectic” (some would say merely nonsense) poetries that Charles Bernstein among other Language
- 30. Figures toward a Speculative Prosody / 15 poets have advocated (Bernstein 1996). There are, however, significant mo- ments in Olson’s writing in which he did, indeed, turn to formal patterns, notably in the charts and diagrams that he drew up to clarify his under- standing of the transformations that he was requesting be made in general thinking about the relationship of, for example, history to the present, or the Cartesian “self” to the Whiteheadian “actual occasion.” A diagram known as “History” (“me fecit” on Janu ary 7, 1955) is one of the more intriguing of these occasional charts (see fig. 1.1). The chart describes the convergence of Figure 1.1. Charles Olson, “History.”
- 31. 16 / Chapter 1 several vectors onto a single rectangular plane, perhaps that of the page, but equally like that of the person Ed Dorn, whose name stands at the center of it. The vectors are, roughly: • that of “history” seen previously as “static” travelling across “millennia, 12,000 BC to 1955 AD” to form (once inside the plane) the “field”; • that of the “individual,” formerly understood as a “soul” and now given, contra Descartes, extension (“as round as is long, as wide as is down”), being the “result” inside the plane; • that of the “soul” or “spiritual” life which, like above, is depicted as somehow acquiring extension (“a measurable quantum”) but this time as a “process” and not as the round, wide object of before, understood inside the plane as the “act”; and • that of the “environment” or “society”—perhaps the milieu of Bernard Stiegler’s pharmakon, as we shall see later—that, through the growth of population and the expansion of technology, is depicted as having merged into something he calls “quantity,” later as era or “time” (in square quotes with a trailing question mark, as if Olson himself didn’t know), on the interior of the plane. His note on the bottom of the chart outlines some of the less apparent sym- metries—that “time” is quantity and “field” is millennia, “process” is soul and “person” is the science of soul—none of which I hope to unpack here. My concern is simply with Olson’s use of a diagram, a formal and symmet- rical structure, to describe a poetics that is predicated on a multiplicity of processes that could never be reduced to the sorts of abstractions he con- tends draw us away from our particularity. There are many points in the diagram that seem classically Olsononian—the eccentric rhetoric (“how— how—how”), the etymological insertions (“meta + hodoes = TAO”); and the resistance to a total symmetry (the writing is simply too indeterminate and idiosyncratic for that)—and for this reason one must ask: is this dia- gram actually a poem. My guess is that most readers of Olson would simply say, yes, of course, but to do so would beg the question: is it then no longer a diagram? If it’s so easy to think of a diagram as a poem, can we then think of poems, even or especially lyric poems, as a species of diagram? Olson’s direct influence on Ameri can poetry is a bit hard to discern to- day, but his poetics offer a way to rethink what is often thought of as a con- vergence of “avant-garde” or “Language” poetries with those poetries known as “lyric,” serving as an anticipatory unifier of literary “fields” in this way. Though it has hardly become a common term, the “new lyric” was mostly
- 32. Figures toward a Speculative Prosody / 17 related to the poetry of Jennifer Moxley and her journal The Impercipient (1992–1995), and others who had some affiliation with the Brown Univer- sity creative writing program in the 1990s, and was understood at the time as a lyric “after” Language poetry—the return of the subjective “I,” passion- ate affect, and the rapprochement with a sort of Romantic tradition (though not the Tradition as known through Eliot). Influenced perhaps by Berna- dette Mayer’s engagements with classical literature, Moxley was particularly bold in affecting a Romantic posture and exiling the difficulties and “ironies” one associated with postmodernism, even as she flirted with the campy ex- cesses, the “moral exhibitionism” (as Benjamin wrote of the Surrealists) of Frank O’Hara. She writes in “Æolian Harp”: Ribboning dreams unspool in a discarded heap of oppressive gravity, remember when life was still compelling, your talents in truck for fealty, the luxurious future at hand, pastoral lack of capital in the vernal fervor couched; “make something of yourself,” for example a man or a picture of archaic pride atop an old armoire, “pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” as did those bargained away first sons whose whims were nursed by sins far worse than sacrifice . . . (56) The run- on syntax and heightened verbiage, not to mention declamatory pose, of O’Hara’s “Odes” is readily apparent, but so is a strong pentamet- rical base, with lines like “bargained away first sons whose whims were nursed” only straying slightly from a string of clear iambs. Other journals with slightly different emphases, such as Apex of the M (1994–1997) and The Germ (1997–2005), were also seen as emblematic of this turn from construc- tivist poetics. However, it was not until the turn of the twenty- first century that lyric poetry, in guises far from traditional, made a resurgence, not just as a reaction against the excesses of Language poetry but also against the ascendance of “digital culture”—the textuality of blogs, spam, algorithms, all sorts of machinic creativity characteristic of the Internet. A plethora of presses have formed around the interests of these poets, such as Wave Books, Flood Editions, and most importantly Ugly Duckling Press, which has worked against the trend of digitally- created and internet- distributed books by crafting each volume like a fetish- object. If one end of the poetry- publishing spectrum takes McLuhan as their guide, pouring out e- books and PDFs on the web (ubu.com’s “slash ubu” series, Gauss PDF, and Troll
- 33. 18 / Chapter 1 Thread are three examples), these presses look back to the artisanal prac- tices of William Morris, the Russian avant- garde of the twenties, and the small presses of the seventies.1 One could generalize and say that this merging of the “lyric” and the more indeterminate forms of “Language- centered” writing brings us back to what Olson proposed: the composition of deeply novel poems, point by point rather than as a way to fill a prescribed form, using the entire ener- gies of the poet’s mind/body to make “high energy constructs.” However, I’d like to suggest that a different set of poets are reviving some of the poetics of “field,” even as the page is not being understood as a medium that makes visible (or captures photographically) the activities of the field, but rather points to a field that remains invisible. Among these poets engaged in a re- vival of the “lyric,” many, even if they are instinctually allergic to traditional meters and forms, are nonetheless investigating the very object- nature of poems, their autonomy as things in the world (and not as constellations of fragments), as identifiable patterns and not congeries of traces. While still eschewing composition by “field,” these poets opt vari ously for highly rhe tori cal (as opposed to Romantic), procedural (as opposed to “organic”), de- cidedly unnatural modes, characterized by the uses of arbitrary constraints, word lists, syllabics and exhaustive reworkings of precedent texts. Books consisting of shorter lyrical works (some authors include Matthea Harvey, Harryette Mullen, Susan Wheeler, Christian Bök, K. Silem Mohammad, Ben Lerner, and Aaron Kunin) and “novels” such Mark Z. Danielewski’s Only Revolutions (his follow- up to the widely acclaimed House of Leaves) and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes, both of which strike me as narra- tive poems, exhibit these tendencies. My sense is that, though the term “open form” was often used as a syn- onym of “composition by field,” one could argue that the page- as- field is where poems in both “open” and “closed” form could exist—a sonnet, for example, would run there in the way a train engine could run on tracks and yet be an object in opposition to another object on the same page— and, indeed, in Olson’s Maximus poems, several elements of “closed” po- etry appear (“Aloofe, aloofe; and come no neare, / the dangers doe appeare,” a transcription of “The Sea Marke” by John Smith), not to mention archi val documents that couldn’t possibly represent a “direct transfer” of energy (an aspect Susan Howe would fruitfully exploit). What would have to be asked, then, is whether it is ever truly possible to escape the “field” upon which literature is based—the plane of appearances that we call “poems”— and if there could be a composition by a- field, a field beyond literature (or consciousness-of-literature). Is there a way that a theory of the page- as-field
- 34. Figures toward a Speculative Prosody / 19 has been preserved, even as the apparatus of Projective Verse—the compo- sition by breath, the liberation from the left margin, the inclusion of un digested bits of documentary matter—has become unfashionable? (Bern stein’s understanding that Maximus “fares best when it is released of the demands of information, its cargo load jettisoned: when its content is not like vitamins added to bread which has had its bran removed” [Content’s Dream 336] is probably commonplace.) Has a paradigm shift occurred, and are we no longer able to understand the page as intensely private, an enactment of specific energies between writer and reader, because of the ubiquity of the present tense from all quarters of society—the techno logi cal milieu—today? Finally, is the new emphasis on the ludic nature of commu- nications systems—the database logic that underlies all instances of digital communication and that Lev Manovich identifies as constituting a new “sym bolic form” (Language of New Media)—forcing us to rethink the divide be- tween “formal” and “experimental” verse? Can the use of fixed (even if in- vented) forms be understood as aspiring to be evental—as pulling from the invisible— rather than merely the rehearsal of a “tradition”? A Note on Prosody Prosody has traditionally denoted the study of rhythmical patterns in poetry, a search for a universal set of terms with which to describe its pre- semantic underpinnings through sound and pattern. Some poets, like Thomas Gray, Adelaide Crapsey, and John Hollander, have written detailed treatises on poetic meter, but for the most part studies of prosody are associated with non- poets, with a particular swelling of the practice in the late nineteenth century culminating in George Saintsbury’s His tori cal Manual of English Prosody (1908), which was over fifteen hundred pages long. Joost Daalder, in a recent study of the tome, echoes what is probably the view of most po- ets and scholars today when he notes that Saintsbury’s “remarkable theory of the English language, and of versification . . . in its very unsoundness [is] a provocative challenge to those of us who would like to describe the facts of English prosody” (1), concluding: “The ‘feet’ which lie at the heart of Saints bury’s sys tem . . . provide an inadequate concept in the analy sis of al- most any kind of English verse. The chief merit of his monumental book is that its very erroneousness forces us to think more clearly than he did” (19). Contemporary treatments of prosody in the Saintsbury tradition are no- table for their chapters on “free verse” and Ameri can variations on somatic metrics ranging roughly from Whitman to Williams and Olson, suggesting that some serious attention to the “variable foot” and the “line by breath”
- 35. 20 / Chapter 1 is warranted but ultimately cannot be reduced to system. This continued reference to notions of form and pattern in verse suggests that something of the technicity of a poem lies in the discernible mechanics and patterns lying beneath the level of affect and proposition, even if it’s not describable in the language of stress and “feet.” By technicity, I mean the properties that a poem shares with those machines that Gilbert Simondon and Bernard Stiegler describe as constituting a “third order of being” between those or- ders of the inanimate (stones, wind, sunlight) and the living. The prosodists are, to this degree, correct in believing that there is an invisible (or insen sible) element grounding poems, but wrong in thinking that the only way we gain access to this grounding is through examining stress patterns, pho- netics, metrics, and so forth. Richard Cureton writes in Rhythmic Phrasing in English Verse (1–75) that there are currently fifteen major schools of prosody, among them: foot- substitution prosodists (“The oldest and still most dominant approach to En- glish verse . . . derive[d] from classical scansion”); temporalists who replace the foot with “measures”; phrasalists and prose rhymists who likewise see a frame beyond the foot; and free verse prosodists who, notably, have failed “to describe the complex non- visual rhythms of free verse” but have succeeded “in describing the effects of visual form.” Intonationalists base their find ings on phonology and morphology, often using very creative visual systems for denoting the way poems sound, while generative metrists, influenced by generative grammar, “assume that verse meter/rhythm is essentially lin- guistic or algebraic rather than psychological. Barbara Heirnstein Smith’s theories are notable for her focus on poetic closure (a central theme of Lyn He jinian’s poetic theory), while Donald Wesling coined the term “gram- metrics,” favoring “weak questions” over the “strong explanations” that lead prosodists to create absurdly over- determined systems. “Prosodic reading in Wesling’s approach centres on the reader’s sequential experience of the ‘fig ures of grammar’ in the text—subordination, apposition, modification, tense, mood, sentence types (e.g., questions, statements, etc.), anaphora, etc.— and all of the various figures caused by the linear positioning and processing of syntactic units—deletions, transpositions, inversions, parentheses and so forth—as these ‘fig ures’ play within and across the other prosodic ‘struc- tures’ in the reader’s acts of attention” (65). Wesling calls this bifurcation of focus between grammar and metrics “scissoring.” This suggests, to me, that what the poet is doing when writing is, in fact, binding, a term taken from cognitive science to describe the sense of a unity in a perception despite the activation of discrete parts of the brain. This is akin to an act of synesthesia: “When I look at a red square, the color and the shape may be represented
- 36. Figures toward a Speculative Prosody / 21 in different parts of my visual system. But somehow these separate pieces of information are brought together so that I experience a single red square, so that I can identify and report a red square, and so on. This phenomenon is often referred to as binding, and the question of how it is achieved is of ten referred to as the binding problem” (Bayne and Chalmers 3). To this de- gree, the act of the prosodist is to unbind—to segregate the merged elements of literary reception into discrete parts with the hope that the unassembled puzzle offers insight into poetics. While some of these new theories of prosody have focused on the visual element of poems, they don’t generally, to my mind, respond to poems as ob jects apart from the human observer or “reader,” but rather still as the repre- sentation of something that could be speech, or a species of rhetoric. Reuven Tsur’s Toward a Theory of Cognitive Poetics offers a different approach, nicely summarized by Cureton: Tsur’s central claims are: (1) that cognitive processing proceeds by suc- cessive “recodings” of information at several levels of representation; (2) that these “recodings” are motivated by informational economy and simplicity, and that “simplicity” is defined, (3) differently on dif- ferent levels of coding, and (4) (predominantly) from “higher” levels to “lower” levels within cognitive processing as a whole. As in [Rudolph] Arnheim’s theory of visual art or [Leonard] Meyer’s theory of music, the controlling notion in these claims is “simplicity,” what the gestalt psychologists called prägnanz, or “strong shape.” A structure is “strong” if it presents “clear- cut contrasts, distinct outlines,” with these con- trasts and outlines deriving from innate principles of perceptual/cog- nitive “symmetry, similarity, regularity, and balance.” All things being equal, it seems well established that we “prefer” to perceive shapes that are “strong” in this sense. (40–41) Tsur’s “cognitive” poetics recognizes the activity of a poem on a reader as akin to that of a painting or musical composition; the reader “recodes” com- plex arrangements into simpler “shapes” even as elements within the work will resist this reduction. Tsur describes the effects of poetry as largely one of tensions—convergent/conclusive (tending toward certainty and control) and divergent/suspensive (tending toward uncertainty and emotional reso- nance). Tsur draws directly from Arnheim’s notion of “perceptual forces.” [A]rnheim demonstrates the “the hidden structure of a square” by plac ing a black cardboard disk in various positions on a white square. Thus
- 37. 22 / Chapter 1 he “maps out” regions of tension and of balance. In [this drawing (see fig. 1.2)], the disk lies slightly off the centre. “In looking at the disk we may find that it does not merely occupy a certain place but exhibits restlessness. This restlessness may be experienced as a tendency of the disk to get away from where it is placed or, more specifically, as a pull in a particular direction—for example, toward the center.” Although perceptual forces are not physical in the sense that gravity is, “there is no point in calling these forces ‘illusions.’ They are no more illusory than colors, which are attributed to the objects themselves, although they are actually nothing but the reactions of the nervous sys tem to light of particular wave lengths.” (132) Not surprisingly, Tsur’s central example of how these “perceptual forces” ex- ist in poetry centers around an examination of the caesura, and to that de- gree lies comfortably in the field of prosody. But the ontological claim at the end of this passage is interesting: visual tensions are as “real” as colors and prosodic tensions are as “real” as, say, the asymmetries of one of Gehry’s Bilbao- style crushed can buildings or a wonky eyeball. A type of a literary synesthesia is described (Tsur devotes a chapter to the subject) that is not merely analogical—as if words had colors—but actual: poems have tensions that exist crossing the visual, verbal, and syntactical, regardless of the hu- man subject. Though much of Tsur’s theory of “cognitive poetics” centers on higher level semantics, such as the perception of allegories, symbols, and ar- chetypes, his abstraction of poetic effects into moments of control and sus- pension, linked to physiological responses to language and syntax, suggests a way to begin to discuss poems not only as pictures or diagrams but as even tal in Badiou’s term—as containing within them invisible elements that are nonetheless central to, or constitutive of, their effects. Figure 1.2. Reuven Tsur, “Arnheim.”
- 38. Figures toward a Speculative Prosody / 23 Interruption, Suspension, Recursion I’d like to posit three categories of poetic operation that exist outside of, even as they intersect with (as a circle with a line in Flatland), the tradition of schematizing the production of meaning through analyses of the lexical, grammatical, and phonological activities of in di vidual poems. This tradi- tion includes the classical studies of rhetoric—often called “poetics” as in Geoffrey de Vinsauf’s Poetria nova (1210)—through the countless treatises on prosody of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, through the Rus- sian Formalists and those they influenced (the New Critics, reader response theory) and, after a “poststructural” turn that eschewed any sort of vulgar epistemology, recent developments in both prosody and “cognitive poet- ics.” My categories are not intended to be of any benefit in a hermeneutic enterprise, for while they move toward explaining some aspects of a poem’s power—its reality effects—most likely the absence or presence of these fea- tures does not intersect with any element of the poem’s “meaning.” These elements create the possibility of meaning to the degree that they ground the concrete aspects of a poem much as syntax and grammar ground the words of a prose sentence, but the nature of this poetic grounding is largely only discernible in the space of the event of poetry. Being essentially sin gular and therefore non- normative, it has no relationship to convention and only a modest relation to method. Poems can be poems even when lacking these events—I’m not the gatekeeper of a genre—and I don’t intend the outline of these features to form the foundations for an evaluative para- digm for poems. But my sense is that the containing of these events within a poem are what elevates poems above rhe tori cal eccentricities, what truly separates them from prose essays, fiction, speeches, or comedy routines, all of which can at any time exhibit many of the qualities of poetry (posited by, for example, Jakobson). a. Interruption The first fig ure I’d like to introduce stems from Alain Badiou’s discussion of Rimbaud’s method in his collection Conditions, and is called “interruption.” While it is debatable whether any of the methods Badiou identifies in poetry are portable enough to transfer to poets outside of his personal canon (or “poetry” in general) without corruption—I’m avoiding his analy sis of “sub- traction” in Mallarmé for this very reason—Badiou’s chapter suggests ways to discuss both rhetorical and aporetic features in poetry without submitting to something like a vulgar epistemology (and hence supporting practices of “reading”). Interruption is “brutal, unequivocal”: “More harshly still, in the sense that Rimbaud welcomed all harshness—‘True, the new hour is nothing
- 39. 24 / Chapter 1 if not harsh’—poetry is a promise that should not be kept” (68). Badiou de- scribes several features he associates with interruption: It splits the poem in two. Its operators are the “nothing,” the “enough,” the “but,” and the “no.” In the Drunken Boat, there is a flood of Parnassian rheto ric that verges on radiant promise—“Million golden bird, o future Vigour”— and then there is this: “But, in truth, I’ve wept too much! Dawns are heartbreaking. Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter,” which is like the abolition, or the revenge, of a zero degree of desire. (68) These “nos” and “buts” are a “non- dialectical negation,” a “no that does not sublate anything, with which Rimbaud turns poetry from its own opening” (69). No third term surrenders itself from this negation, only a new world, a new poetry, created which opposes the old in the same poem. But what I am calling “new poetry” is in fact “a prose as dry as a notary report”: “For interruption effectively aims to disappoint; it attests to the radical doubt that besets the epiphany. And this ‘prose waiting in ambush’ is . . . the latent fig ure of this doubt” (72). In more conventional literary terms, one could ex- press this “figure of doubt” with the drop of bathos, or even, in Daniel Tiffa- ny’s estimation, with the intervention of kitsch, which Tiffany notes “traces a Luciferian arc from cosmos to cosmetics, from canonical to degraded verse: a delusional program of bad taste and aesthetic failure” (“On Poetry and Kitsch”). The interruption produces what Badiou calls the undecidable—a central feature of his philosophy of the event: “The undecidable division of being itself, of being qua being, is distributed by the poem between its legal situation and the disappearing of the pure event. In Rimbaud’s poetics, the undecidable comes with our being proposed, literally, and in all senses, two universes, and not only one. This composition is that of someone who stands before a sudden decision for which there is no norm” (74). Badiou contin- ues with an analysis of a figure that appears in two of these universes, that of women, who are (referring to two titles of Rimbaud’s poems) “as much crows as they are genies” for “she co- belongs to both universes” (76). Reader’s of Badiou will recognize elements of his argument for “multiplicities” against the figure of the “count-as-one,” derived from his understanding of set theory as the foundation of ontology (and which I don’t hope to describe here). Rimbaud is the poet of disappointment because he is “dream[ing] of a truth that would be coextensive to the entirety of a situation,” unlike the Master, Mallarmé. “Poetry has always propped itself up on exactly this un decidability, because for our education and joy it separates out the poets of incitement and the poets of composition, the tropes of interruption and
- 40. Figures toward a Speculative Prosody / 25 those of the exception. On the one hand, there is the ‘enough!’ of impatience, the abrupt ‘nos’ and ‘buts’ of de- liaison. On the other, there are the ‘excepts,’ the ‘otherwises’ and the ‘thoughs,’ which rescue thought from being engulfed in the nullity of the site through a patient exposition of the void” (Badiou 88). Naturally, one can describe this difference between poetic methods as between that of the “poet of youth”—for whom the world is a totality, is mul- tiple, but is not infused with justice—and the “poet of science”— under no illusions about the spontaneous arrival of justice, systematically investigat- ing through the painstaking creation of tools what is now a “void.” But no such tropes corrupt Badiou’s meditation. Mallarmé is the poet of “excep- tion,” to that degree the ‘pataphysician, the patient creator of the singular, while Rimbaud—who wanted to “strangle rhetoric” in Conrad Aiken’s poem “Preludes For Memnon”—interrupts with a flurry of over- packed qualifica- tions, the logician in flux. Perhaps the first Ameri can poet to leap to mind as exploring this fig ure of interruption is William Carlos Williams. Williams shares with Rimbaud a love for visceral imagery (notably in the “anti- poetic” Spring and All), the use of the exclamation point to denote ironies or merely to expel excessive energy, and not least the tendency to destroy a pretty picture, his Parnassian- ism, with interjections that place what has preceded into the world of the undecidable. “A Portrait of a Lady” dramatizes Williams’s need to interrupt, enacting an inner battle that only cripples any simple mimetic metaphor: Your thighs are appletrees whose blossoms touch the sky. Which sky? The sky where Watteau hung a lady’s slipper. Your knees are a south ern breeze—or a gust of snow. Agh! what sort of man was Fragonard? —As if that answered anything. (129) A more famous, if less cleanly cut, example of Williams’s interruption occurs in “To Elsie,” which runs as a single run- on imagist sentence decrying the loss of “peasant traditions” and describing a world from which all enchant- ment has been banished, before growing reflective—“Somehow / it seems to destroy us “—concluding with perhaps Williams’s most philosophically resonant lines: “No one / to witness / and adjust, no one to drive the car.” This dramatic turn to reflection in stanza 20 sets up quickly what becomes,
- 41. 26 / Chapter 1 in stanza 22, an ascent into metaphysics (who is this “no one”) and even cy- bernetics (what does it mean to “witness” and “adjust”?), a departure that puts all of the previous stanzas (which roughly argued along the lines that the “Pure products of America / go crazy”) into question. We become, in some way that seems like an impasse (even as it describes one), unsure of what we have just been reading. I’m increasingly convinced that Ashbery is the most Rimbaudian of Ameri can poets even as the two poets’ temperaments couldn’t be more different. A parody of a Rimbaudian interruption occurs ten lines into “And Ut Pictora Poesis Is Her Name,” creating a bend in the poem and leading it from a de- cidedly urbane form of the Parnassian to practical, prosaic matters: You can’t say it that way any more. Bothered about beauty you have to Come out into the open, into a clearing, And rest. Certainly whatever funny happens to you Is OK. To demand more than this would be strange Of you, you who have so many lovers, People who look up to you and are willing To do things for you, but you think It’s not right, that if they really knew you . . . So much for self- analy sis. (Selected Poems 235) The effect here is, of course, one of bathos; the mental pastoral mode that readers of Ashbery are well acquainted with drops, with a rakish wave of the hand, into the matter-of-fact reality of someone—certainly not Ashbery, perhaps simply the empowered reader—trying to write a poem. Of course, by the end of this poem a synthesis does occur: “The extreme austerity of an almost empty mind / Colliding with the lush, Rousseau- like foliage of its desire to communicate / Something between breaths, if only for the sake / Of others and their desire to understand you and desert you . . . “ (House boat Days 45). In Badiou’s terms, such a synthesis never arrives in Rimbaud. b. Suspension A fig ure alluded to but never named in Badiou’s essay on Rimbaud is that of “suspension,” which might, in general, be considered the normative state of language in a poem, the base level of the “poetic.” Suspension is the most traditionally linguistic of the three fig ures I’m introducing here as it can be characterized, if only partially, by the well- known term indeterminacy, the slippage of meanings that corrodes the indexical identity of the sign→ signified→ referent equation of traditional semantics. Marjorie Perloff argues
- 42. Figures toward a Speculative Prosody / 27 that the postmodern cult of indeterminacy is founded in a mode starting with the French Symbolists, but she uses the terms “indeterminacy” and “un- decidability” interchangeably (Poetics vii). I’d like to see suspension, how ever, as more than merely linguistic, but rather as the non- evental form of ontological undecidability, that is, not the blurring of meanings but the flip ping back and forth or between several discrete meanings that never merge, one of which must be chosen to make a poem work. Suspension fig ures words as elements in sets that constrict or even endow them with meaning, not as units possessing their meanings in the form of some elusive essence. The poem can be seen, therefore, as a sort of function delimiting sets by their very suitability. The analogy would be in the attempt of Russell and White- head (following Frege) to replace the subject / predicate binary of traditional logic systems with a function / variable structure in the Principles of Mathe matics. Poems can then be considered Venn diagrams in which possible re- lations can be discerned between words; given that poems generally have more than a handful of words, these overlaps can be exponentially increased. Suspension moves beyond a mere uncertainty about the meanings— authorial intentions, cultural determinants, formalist understanding of pat- terns in sound and grammar—into something more speculative: a considera tion of words as particles or objects in a field. Words are, in fact, suspended by their very undecidability—it is why we become aware of them as words. Badiou suggests in his writing about Rimbaud a form of interruption not only across the parts of a poem but within the word or phrase itself: “[I]nter- ruption consists in the brusque rise to the poem’s surface of the ever pos- sible prose it confines” (71). Suspension suggests that the words are in tran- sit between two (or more) points; the reader, in turn, is moved from a single point to a sort of “infinite” in the contemplation of the undecided word. With suspension, we are still in the universe of pure presence, of “breath and movement”—that which the interruption interrupts—but are far from attaining surety of situation or place, what Heidegger might call “dwelling” in his writing on Hölderlin: “[T]he phrase ‘poetically man dwells’ says: po- etry first causes dwelling to be dwelling. Poetry is what really lets us dwell. But through what do we attain to a dwelling place? Through building. Po- etic creation, which lets us dwell, is a kind of building” (391). This “build- ing” is, however, really a suspension between the earth and heaven: “Poetry does not fly above and surmount the earth in order to escape it and hover over it. Poetry is what first brings man onto the earth, making him belong to it, and thus brings him into dwelling” (Jackson 392). Only in the realm of sheer toil does man toil for “merits.” There he obtains them for himself in abundance. But at the same time, in this
- 43. 28 / Chapter 1 realm, man is allowed to look up, out of it, through it, toward the di- vinities. The upward glance passes aloft toward the sky, and yet it re- mains below on the earth. The upward glance spans the between of sky and earth. This between is measured out for the dwelling of man. We now call the span thus meted out the dimension. This dimension does not arise from the fact that sky and earth are turned toward one another. Rather, their facing each other itself depends on the dimen- sion. Nor is the dimension a stretch of space as ordinarily understood; for everything spatial, as something for which space is made, is already in need of the dimension, that is, that into which it is admitted. (392) Poetry provides the “measure” by which man can conceive a relationship to the heavens; it is the dimension upon which the “facing” of “sky” and “earth” depends. “The taking of measure is what is poetic in dwelling. Poetry is a measuring.” Again: “To write poetry is measure- taking, understood in the strict sense of the word, by which man first receives the measure for the breadth of his being” (394). But by what can we replace Heidegger’s language of the “sky” and “earth”—that is, can one generalize this notion of suspen- sion beyond Hölderlin’s poetry? Heidegger’s language is, of course, very particular to his system, and his style is notoriously difficult, setting the stage for many duels among his aco lytes. Heideggerian phenomenology, especially in his later essays, makes for an uneasy fit with the decidedly anti- mystical array of philosophers I’ve de- cided to employ for this present book. However, this notion of a poem as both the possibility of a dwelling—what brings us to dwell—and the dimen- sion that conjoins the sky and earth, that makes them face each other, is ap- posite for an understanding of how a poem could both form the possibility for a cognitive (spiritual, psychological, etc.) grounding—a central term in chapter 7—while offering, seemingly in opposition, a relationship to the “in- finite” that philosophers such as Deleueze, Badiou, and Stiegler describe, in their own ways, as the locus or essence of thought. I can think of several poets who engage in “suspension” as I understand it here; not surprisingly, many of them can bear a useful relationship with the tradition of phenomenology. But of poets for whom phenomenology would not prove a suitable method for explication, I think it is Hart Crane who, at his best, typifies a poet of suspension. This is partly due to an arsenal of techniques that are familiar to a reader of Crane: a baroque syntax, per- haps based in some misprision of either Latin or Shakespeare but not tied to anything like conventional American speech; a vocabulary that can seem at once random and precise; modes of address to fig ures, either the reader or a fictive other, often wanderers of some nature; and a deeply formal ele-
- 44. Figures toward a Speculative Prosody / 29 ment that suggests blank verse but which rarely settles into regularity. Note how the suspended absence of the sentence’s subject animates its qualifiers in the opening stanza of “Voyages”: Meticulous, past midnight in clear rime, Infrangible and lonely, smooth as though cast Together in one merciless white blade— The bay estuaries fleck the hard sky limits. There is something slightly absurd, though certainly bold, in starting a verse with the single adjective, “meticulous,” which opens a very narrow range of meanings—only the conscious and careful are meticulous—and then quali- fying its extensional locus (“in clear rime”) temporally (“past midnight”), before adding two more adjectives with very different connotations to which the preceding descriptors do not directly relate, “infrangible” (not breakable, inviolable) and “lonely”—perhaps due to its atomic nature? A more conven- tional image follows, that of a “smooth . . . white blade,” though the unusual adjective “merciless” is added to the pool of suspended words. Finally, one learns that it is “bay estuaries” that are meticulous, infrangible, lonely, and merciless, though of these adjectives it seems that “lonely” would have to be ascribed to the effect the vision has on the viewer rather than as intrin- sic or essential to the object itself. But this last line contains a heretofore not witnessed form of suspension: the verb “flecked” is used to describe the activity of the bay estuaries on the sky in a decidedly nonsensical way. “Fleck” usually takes some sort of ob- ject—moles fleck the arm, whitecaps fleck the sea—with an asymmetry be- tween those several objects that fleck and the larger body that is flecked (or flecked with). One can only assume, in this final line of the poem, that the bay estuaries are flecking the limits with bits of sea spray or bits of white- ness; the very absence of these words is what permits the sky to survive as a “limit” toward which these suspended meanings aspire. The brief passage from “Voyages” suggests that it is the very job of words to draw false cer- tainties from the void, but even in the most straightforward statement of this fact—“What words / Can strangle this deaf moonlight?”—we are faced with a void, or a series of undecidables: a moonlight possessing the properties of being “deaf” and of being able to be “strangled” by “words,” but also “words” that possess the ability to “strangle” the electromagnetic phenomenon of “light.” Which of these several discursive fields, that of language, of neu- rology (“deaf”), or of radiation is to be privileged? This type of irresolvable metaphor is characteristic of much of Crane’s work; my contention is that Crane is aware of the reader’s drive toward what Tsur calls “strong shapes”
- 45. 30 / Chapter 1 and, unlike the poet of indeterminacy, does not want to deny an eventual completion of the task. c. Recursion In computer science, recursion is the phenomenon of an algorithmic function referring to itself within its execution. For example, if I were writing an algo- rithm that was to continue running until the value of x, initially defined as equal to 10, attained the value of 0 and named this function subtract1UntilZero, I would call subtract1UntilZero—which subtracts one from x—from within the function itself until x equaled 0. For example: variable x = 10; function subtract1UntilZero { x = x -1; if (x == 0) { print “done!”; exit; } else { subtract1UntilZero; } } Recursion can occur in nature, for example in the shape of a seashell in which the same pattern or process is repeated from the smaller, interior parts of the spiral to the outer levels. The once ubiquitous visualizations of the Mandelbrot, or any set of fractals, might be the most iconic images of the process. While he doesn’t use the term “recursion,” Roman Jakobson suggests in “Poetry of Grammar and the Grammar of Poetry” that these types of gen- eration out of self- referentiality or identification are common even in folk poetry. Recursion’s primary avenue is through grammatical parallelism, which when present threatens to override anything we might call seman- tic meaning. Jakobson writes, “[T]he juxtaposition of such sequences as the farmer kills the duckling and the man takes the chick makes us ‘feel instinc- tively, without the slightest attempt at conscious analy sis, that the two sen- tences fit precisely the same pattern, that they are really the same fundamen- tal sentence, differing only in their material trappings. In other words, they express identical relational concepts in an identical manner.’ Conversely, we may modify the sentence or its single words ‘in some purely relational, non
- 46. Figures toward a Speculative Prosody / 31 material regard’ without altering any of the material concepts expressed” (86). Jakobson argues for a “clear- cut discrimination” between “material” and “relational” (or “lexical” and “grammatical”) elements in a language, suggesting a nearly Cartesian dualism between body and soul; sentences can be fundamentally the same even if the material elements change. He also pos- its that a “poetry without images” is possible, conveyed entirely through the permutations of its morphology and parallelisms: “[I]n imageless poems, it is the ‘figure of grammar’ which dominates and which supplants the tropes” (93). Grammar might, indeed, represent the pictorial in poetry by its rela- tionship to the diagrammatical (and, it must be said, to the mathematical proof) to which painting also bears a relationship. Jakobson cites Benjamin Lee Worf: “[Worf] discusses the abstract ‘designs of sentence structure’ as opposed to ‘in di vidual sentences’ and to the vocabulary, which is a ‘some- what rudimentary and not self- sufficient part’ of the linguistic order, and envisages ‘a “geometry” of form principles characteristic of each language’” (133). Quoting, of all people, Stalin, Jakobson writes: “‘[G]eometry, when giving its laws, abstracts itself from concrete objects, treats objects as bod- ies deprived of concreteness and defines their mutual relations not as con- crete relations of certain concrete objects but as relations of bodies in gen- eral, namely, relations deprived of any concreteness.’ The abstractive power of human thought underlying [. . .] both geometrical relations and grammar, superimposes simple geometrical and grammatical fig ures up on the picto- rial world of particular objects and upon the concrete lexical ‘wherewithal’ of verbal art” (95). While Worf’s and Stalin’s understanding of the abstract- ing powers of grammar have long been supplanted by generative linguistics (Chomsky made his reputation through a damning critique of behaviorist linguistics such as Worf’s), this understanding of the pure abstractive pow- ers of grammatical parallelism hint at the non- dialectical powers of nega- tion that a recursive poetics suggests. My key exhibit of a totally recursive poem is Vito Acconci’s work “Mar- gins on this paper are set” (see fig. 1.3) whose only positive quality is that it offers an exhaustive description of itself. Like all of Acconci’s text works of this period, “The letters” was typewritten on a letter sized page; the fixed width of the typewritten text (as opposed to the variable width of a computer font like Times New Roman) is exploited as a sort of measure by Acconci, an imposition of a mathematical formality on printed text. After the stan- dard paragraph indentation, the poem starts: “Margins on this paper are set, on the left, one inch from the,” then, following the carriage return, “edge, at e, t, l, , o, i, n, a, v, , , - , a, o, b, a, e, , , g, ,” followed by a carriage return. The reader can, naturally, continue reading, but most would want to verify the statement since, unlike Wittgenstein’s hippopotamus, the object being de-
- 47. Figure 1.3. Vito Acconci, “Margins on this paper are set.” Courtesy of Vito Acconci, Acconci Studio.
- 48. Figures toward a Speculative Prosody / 33 scribed is in the room. Indeed, reading vertically down the left margin, one sees the sequence of letters and glyphs exactly as Acconci describes: edge t, ly, , on i, and so forth (commas show up as empty entries in the array). He proceeds to tell you about the letters on the right hand and top margins (“M, a, r, g, i, n, s . . .”), noting a few times that the “spaces” on the page are peculiar to his typewriter, an Olivetti Underwood Lettera 31. He lists the letters above which indentations appear (there are three paragraphs, so three lists of let- ters), then proceeds to describe the spaces between each line of text, starting with the space between the first line, “Margins on this page . . .” and the next line “edge, at e, t, . . . ,” a task that could never be finished as it takes six and a half lines of typing to describe the spaces between two lines of text. An- ticipatory of much of the work of “conceptual writing” that would appear in the early twenty-first century, notably Craig Dworkin’s Parse, which replaces all of the words of an English grammar with the terms used to describe their grammatical function (particular nouns, for example, become “subject,” “ob- ject,” “indirect object,” and so forth), Acconci’s work, via the act of recursion, is both purely solipsistic as it seems to run, or want to run, without any in- tervention from an “outside” while, at the same time, it creates propositions that are entirely true by the terms of analytic philosophy. To this degree, it satisfies the requirements that Wittgenstein sets out in the Tractatus for an “atomic” fact: it is both tautological and yet foundational. Recursion, then, can be seen as a species of interruption: it provides a break in the “breathing” of true poetry (here described as suspension), but rather than splitting the poem into two “universes,” it collapses, or provides an intersection between, these universes or, conversely, closes off access to either universe. Consequently, it is also the most obvious site of the pres- ence of the matheme in poetry, as it privileges geometrical tropes over se- mantic (affective, factual, metaphorical, etc.) elements. Harryette Mullen’s Muse Drudge As I suggested above, interruption is a rare quality in poetry, though, as my section on Alice Notley’s Disobedience will show, certain poetic efforts make
- 49. 34 / Chapter 1 recourse to interruption as a matter of form. Suspension, however, seems to be at the core of what most people think of when discussing poetry, particu- larly the lyric: scattered points of undecidability, a hovering about a never- reached essence, a poignancy about some topic but diluted within a penum- bra of meanings that seem to both focus and disperse the singular “prose” meaning. An excellent example of a poetic sequence that seems at once to court these qualities of the lyric while gesturing toward what I will describe later as an “undigest”—a text that keeps its powers in reserve, that acts as a sort of “source text” to a virtual lyric—is Harryette Mullen’s celebrated 1995 sequence Muse Drudge. Muse Drudge was one of many works that signaled a turn away from some of the so- called free doms granted by avant- garde poetics, notably composition by field, as it instead foregrounded a relatively conventional formality, hovering around the mutating fig ure of the ballad form and the plain tive voice of the blues. Each page of the sequence consists of four qua- trains comprised of lines of variably two or three stresses, though Mullen occasionally breaks from this pattern with lines that are much longer—“now it’s knownthatweusemumornumbourstresses”(145)—and,arguably,shorter, as in this quatrain: “didn’t call / you ugly—said / you was ruined / that’s all” (140). Veering as close to prose as the quatrains get in Muse Drudge, the final line, “that’s all,” could, nonetheless, be read as double- stressed given the preponderance of spondaic rhythms elsewhere in the book, such as in the lines “butch knife / cuts cut” (110). In addition to a regularity of rhythm is the presence of a rhyme scheme that shifts from the standard abab schema of a ballad (“curly waves away blues navy / saved from salvation / army grits and gravy / tries no lie relaxa- tion”) to a set of rhyming couplets (“devils dancing on a dime / cut a rug in ragtime / jitterbug squat diddly bow / stark strangled banjo”) (116). How- ever, as any reader of Muse Drudge knows, no single set of quatrains ad- heres completely to any of these formalisms. None of the poems contain four quatrains of abab or aabb rhyme scheme (and, indeed, most of the rhymes are off, eye or slant) or regularly patterned 2-or 3- stress lines. None of the poems adhere to normative syntax for longer than a line or two, the quatrain noted above starting “didn’t call” being a singular exception. Part of the plea- sure of reading Muse Drudge relies, in fact, on the very display of Mullen’s attention to the ghost- like formalism of the fixed rhyme and stress pattern of the ballad along with the approaches toward, and divorces from, stan- dard grammaticality. The poems suspend this fig ure of the ballad form and normative syntax in the poem while never bringing it clearly into view; in turn, this never revealed ideal form suspends the words of the poem them- selves. Muse Drudge is, to my mind, one of the most virtuosic and various
- 50. Figures toward a Speculative Prosody / 35 investigation of the quatrain form since Ezra Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauber ley, written expressly to revive interest in fixed forms in the fate of the suc- cess of vers libre while never displaying the regularity of, for example, T. S. Eliot’s quatrain poetry of the same period. The real note of suspension in the sequence, however, is in Mullen’s self- styled “visionary heteroglossia,” a sort of field in which seemingly irrecon- cilable words and syntax can coexist. Responding in a 1997 interview to the question of whether she writes for an ideal reader who has “access” to all of the vocabulary that she utilizes in her work, Mullen replies: No [laughter]. Because I don’t really have access to all of them. I can put Spanish words in there because I did take Spanish classes and I grew up around people speaking Spanish but I am not a Spanish speaker by any means. So I don’t really have access to Spanish in the way that a Spanish speaker does and I have even less of the other lan- guages. I think I threw a Portuguese word in there and a French word or two, some Af ri can terms, mostly Yoruba. It’s just a gesture toward multiplicity, my small gesture toward a visionary heteroglossia, which seems appropriate to the diaspora of languages and cultures that the black world encompasses. There’s always the possibility of the unimag- ined reader, someone not necessarily aimed at, but one who can read the text as I’d never imagine. I do want to leave space for that possi- bility. Also, the poem was a process for me, you know. I was throwing in black vernacular from Clarence Major’s dictionary Juba to Jive. I would find something really juicy and say, “Oh, I’ve got to put this in.” I have something that I got from you Farah [laughter], “washing her nubia.” I knew I had to use it somehow. I was picking up all of these threads like the magpie that I am and weaving them into this poem. (Griffin, Magee, and Gallagher) Notable is Mullen’s suggestion that, in some possible future, an “unimagined reader,” perhaps the same one that can read the Cantos unassisted, will be able to take in Muse Drudge as naturally as one reads, say, The Prelude. In this case, suspension can be further described as how the various bits of lan- guage that the “magpie” poet has collected remain in a tense relationship to the ghost-figure of the ballad and normative English syntax, not to mention the “unimagined” reader for whom this poem is close to natural language. Muse Drudge exploits the relation that signs are asked to maintain, through the middle area of the signifier, to the referent; that is, if words are being divorced from their respective linguistic systems, whether it be dis- tinct languages such as Spanish, French, and Portuguese or the class, race, or
- 51. 36 / Chapter 1 age- specific codes or slangs that Mullen later names, then the transport be- tween sign and referent is required to cross an exponentially more unstable field, one which we can associate with the transfinite world of radical con- tingency (in Meillassoux’s understanding) rather than the merely infinite world of possible meanings (in the sense of Chomsky’s understanding of an “infinite number of sentences” conceivable based on a finite set of gram- matical rules). “You know, the young people will get some things,” Mul- len says in the interview, “the older people will get other things, the white people are getting one joke and the black people are getting another joke, and people who speak Spanish are getting some other joke, and the laughter ripples around the room. I really enjoy that” (Griffin, Magee, and Gallagher). Mullen’s sequence represents a turn away from the radical indeterminacies of Language Poetry (or John Ashbery’s Tennis Court Oath) toward a reen- gagement with the referent, since the work maintains strong ties to the real of black culture, “appropriate to the diaspora of languages and cultures that the black world encompasses.” The poem is metonymic to the degree that it bears some indexical relationship to what one might call, after Timothy Morton, the hyperobject of the Af ri can diaspora. While this might seem far- fetched, the Af ri can diaspora (in clud ing nonhuman, cultural elements like music and language) maintains many of the properties Morton lists: it is “viscous” to the degree that it alters whatever has been touched by it; it is “nonlocal” to the degree that no in di vidual object associated with it is di- rectly the “diaspora” itself; it is “interobjective” in that it can be “detected in a space that consists of interrelationships between aesthetic properties and objects”; and it is “transdimensional” in that it couldn’t be perceived in all of its present dimensions without access to a point beyond (1, 73). Hyper- objects, though they extend beyond human scales and temporalities, “don’t inhabit some conceptual beyond in our heads or out there. They are real ob- jects that affect other objects” (73). To this degree, Muse Drudge stands in direct relationship to the Af ri can diaspora, just as it does to “what was Af ri can Ameri can literature” in Kenneth Warren’s controversial estimation.2 Figure 1.4 shows a poem from Muse Drudge as it appears in its 2006 re- print from Graywolf Press (I’ve offered this image, rather than retyping it, to put it into some relationship to the rest of the diagrams in the present book). The “greased flagpole” appears to refer to the practice of greasing flagpoles to prevent the erection of an Ameri can flag during pre- Revolutionary days, though in this case it might refer to the battle of the Union and Confederate flags. “Hambone” seems to refer to the bone in a ham—an absurd thing to hock—though equally to the nickname “Hambone” in Bessie Jones’s collec- tion of plantation songs, Step it Down, suggesting perhaps that one “hocks” Af ri can Ameri can identity or language in favor of something less or more
- 52. Figures toward a Speculative Prosody / 37 “authentic” (Mullen’s sequence doesn’t permit such obvious binaries). Inter- estingly, the dance called juba was origi nally not able to be performed with percussion instruments due to the possible inclusion of secret codes; this suggests a bridge between what Mullen is doing by repressing the strict for- malism of the steady ballad rhythm in favor of meandering around it and Amiri Baraka’s contention in Blues People that the “nonsense” lyrics of work songs concealed coded messages, some of which directly concerned eco- nomics (Baraka 25). “Cock and bull” is, of course, British slang for a tall tale, while “tough muffins” is slang for “tough luck.” “Miz Mary” and her “mack truck” are a play on the hand- clapping game “Miss Mary Mack,” in which the titular heroine is “dressed in black” and, consequently, asks her mother for 50 cents to see the “elephants, elephants, elephants.” A “Cadillac” is nearly ubiquitous in pop songs as representing the peak of promiscuous wealth, though, curiously, “slick black cadillac” seems to have been coined by Quiet Riot for a 1978 single. “La muerte,” a personification of death—deemed fe- male rather arbitrarily due to the gender of the article—could also be seen as some representation of Charon as (s)he ferries the “green” (naive) man over to his death on the subway. In an effort to make these properties of Muse Drudge more visible, I’d Figure 1.4. Harryette Mullen, page from Muse and Drudge as it appears in Recyclopedia.
- 53. 38 / Chapter 1 like to attempt a diagrammatical representation of this poem. In the alter- nate rendering of the poem below, I’ve highlighted standard prosodic ele- ments such as meter and rhyme (bold faced for stressed syllables) to high- light how the syncopated sound play, the technicity of off- rhyme, internal rhyme, and uneven if confident metrics, amplifies this quality of suspension: [if you’ve been in Virginia (a) where the green grass grows (b) (“green” resonates with “been” and “-gin-“) did you send your insignia (a) [strong rhyme] up a greased flagpole]? (b) [off rhyme] (greased flagpole elevated to molossus) [you used to hock your hambone (a) (“hambone” elevated to spondee) at a cock and bull pawnshop]; (- a, x) (“bull pawnshop” elevated to molossus) [internal rhyme around “- ock” and “- op,” “pawn” picks up “bone”] [got your start as a sideman], (a) (“sideman” elevated to spondee) [now you’re big on your own]. (a) [series of slant end rhymes around “- one” sound] [what makes tough muffins (a) [possible double spondee] put Juba on the back]. (b) [Miz Mary takes a mack truck in (b, a) [feminine rhyme imitated by “in”] trade for her slick black cadillac]. (b) [mixed strong end rhymes, internal rhymes around “ck” consonant] [la muerte dropped her token (a) [Texan/American pronunciation of Spanish?] in the subway slot machine]. (a) [nobody told the green man (a) [three slant-rhymes] the fortune cookie lied] (x) [“- une” links to previous lines while “lied” brings the poem back to prose—a sort of entropy] The brackets in the above suggest sentence or clause clusters while punc- tuation marks after a closed bracket suggest what type of sentence or clause it is. All in all, what this exercise in a rather old- fashioned form of textual
- 54. Figures toward a Speculative Prosody / 39 analy sis suggests is a very lively, variable surface for the poem that points to its direct relation to an invisible fig ure as well as to its relationship to the vari ous fields of language—Af ri can Ameri can slang, British slang, hand- clapping songs, Spanish, etc.—from which it draws. The 27th Letter A fourth element that can be added to our notions of a speculative prosody must appeal to computation for its explanation. Fifteen years before the launch of ASCII, Claude Shannon elaborated upon his notion of informa- tion entropy in his 1948 paper “A Mathematical Theory of Communica- tion,” and began the path to the mathematization of writing by codifying a 27- symbol ‘alphabet,’ the 26 letters and a space. Lydia H. Liu writes of this momentous event: When Claude Shannon added a twenty- seventh letter to the English alphabet in 1948, no one had remotely suspected that the phonetic al- phabet was less than perfect. Shannon’s introduction of the new letter, which codes “space” as an equivalent but non-phonetically produced positive sign, laid the first stone in the mathematical foundation of in- formation theory in the early postwar years; it was as revolutionary as Newton’s apple. [ . . . ] Whereas many of us recognize the impact that information theory has exerted on computer science, linguistics, cryptology, military technology, molecular biology, neuro physiology, and other disciplines over the past half century, we have not been forthcoming in posing the following question: Does Shannon’s twenty- seven- letter English alphabet pose a challenge to our conception of alphabetical writing? (45) Two years later, Shannon published “Prediction and Entropy in Printed En- glish,” in which he established a connection between his mathematized lan- guage and normal usage by, in a sense, inserting a computer into the reader: “The new method of estimating entropy exploits the fact that anyone speak- ing a language possesses, implicitly, an enormous knowledge of the statis- tics of the language. Familiarity with the words, idioms, clichés and gram- mar enables him to fill in missing or incorrect letters in proof- reading or to complete an unfinished phrase in conversation” (54). Despite the presence of numbers and formulas, this inner statistician is bound by several finitudes: the “finite number of possible sequences of N letters,” (55) the extant English vocabulary, and the particularities of grammar and syntax. Shannon then embarked on an interesting mental experiment in which
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- 56. tropical lilies and Cape jessamine and heliotrope and late-flowering roses, stole in rejoicingly. Then came sounds of awakening in the palace. The chowkedars, or night-watchmen, cried out to one another, and gave up their posts to the bearers and chuprassies. The royal peacock, perched on the garden wall, shook out his jewelled fan to the sun and screamed in discordant tones his welcome to the morning. Innumerable doves, of old time pensioners of the palace, swept past the marble lattices, with a whirr and flutter of soft grey wings, to take toll from the heaps of yellow grain piled up in the outer court. The stir of the city, the lowing of kine, the rumble of wheels, the cries of those who bought and sold, the ring of metal, wrought painfully into forms of use and beauty, the monotonous beat of hammers—these, with the thousand indistinguishable sounds of a multitude in busy movement, fell, softened by distance, on the young rajah's ears. His heart swelled as he listened, and his eyes were dim with a sudden rush of tears. All the strangeness, all the wonder, all the curious tangle of conflicting passions and fates had brought him hither—he, in his weakness and inexperience—to be the ruler of this people. Yes; and the strangest part of it was that he felt in himself a fitness for the work he was called upon to do. He remembered his boyish choice of a profession. If he could not be amongst those who, by their thought and genius, build up the destinies of men and nations, he would, he said, build houses for them to dwell in, and temples where they could worship. He had entered upon the lower task; suddenly and unexpectedly he had been called to the higher. What did it mean? Had he really the constructive power, of which, in his boyish ignorance, he had boasted? And if so—ah! if so—how was he to use it? As these thoughts succeeded one another through his mind, they took gradually a wider range. Beyond his own narrow individuality, beyond the little city and the busy crowd, they wandered, till, as in a vision, he seemed to see the truth at which as yet he had but dimly guessed. He did not stand alone. He was one in a chain. Purposes, strongly linked together, had been passed on from hand to hand, each in turn strengthening them with its own formative will, till at
- 57. last in their cumulative force they should be powerful enough to move the world. He saw now that it was not for her own sake, nor even for the sakes of those who dwelt within her walls, that Gumilcund had grown up from the desert and taken a place amongst the cities of the world. She was to be an example—a living type of what might be, on a large scale and everywhere, when wealth and science and the white heat of enthusiasm—that heat in which self perishes—are brought together and allowed unchecked to exercise their influence upon the life and destiny of nations. They—his predecessors—had been able to do no more than give the sign. The prejudices of their friends of the West, and the circumstances of their own lives, narrowed down to the small issues of an Asiatic society, had tied their hands. To him—a child of the West in a truer sense than they could ever have been—belonged the larger life. Had he the strength and wisdom to use it as he should? He would at least try. And then his thoughts flew to Grace—his white dove—his darling. She had the wisdom that he lacked. She had more than wisdom. She had heroism, and the passion of self-renunciation and deep spiritual insight, which, however we may imagine of ourselves, are better understood and more widely appreciated in the East than in the West. Grace! But would she—could she—help him? His mind strayed back over the past few days, blissful for all their suffering, and his lips parted in a smile of hope. She had said she loved him. The sweet confession, true, he knew, as she was true, was still ringing in his ears. Would she, then, do what his mother could not? Would she give up country and race and come to him? Would she live here in Gumilcund, letting the beautiful radiance of her woman's life shine through and overcome the mists of custom, and the harsh and cruel caste-prejudices, which have separated Hinduism from the rest of the world and made of its votaries a people apart? That was the question which the next few days must decide. There rose a vision before him, as he thought. He seemed to see in imagination how his hand, in passing on the sacred trust, might impress a new form upon it. His predecessors had founded a State and built a city. He might mould a society. His thoughts, having
- 58. reached this stage, were becoming incoherent and wild, when Hoosanee, who had heard him stirring, came in with his morning meal. Hoosanee looked superb. He was dressed in snowy white, while a turban of pale gold, in the front of which glittered a small diamond star, given to him long ago by Byrajee Pirtha Raj, surrounded his dusky brows and fell in voluminous folds to his waist. 'Why, Hoosanee,' said Tom, raising himself on his elbow, 'how gorgeous you are this morning! You look much more of a prince than I do.' 'My master must remember that he is not in the jungle,' said Hoosanee, his dark face flushing with pleasure. 'And the gay dress is the sign of the joyful heart,' said Tom. 'Well! I think you are right. Have you any news for me?' 'Yes, Excellency. I have seen my sister, Sumbaten, and the little baba, Aglaia. Grace Sahib slept well last night, and she is sleeping still.' 'Thank heaven!' said Tom fervently. 'I hope they will not awake her. And the other ladies, Hoosanee——' 'There is one who would have speech of your Excellency. I met her in the house in the garden, where the mem sahibs take choto hasari. She asked me many questions. The last time we saw her, Sahib,' said Hoosanee, a smile overspreading his face, 'it was the work of the rajah's servant to put questions to her.' 'Ah! poor Mrs. Lyster! And admirably you did it!' said Tom, laughing. 'I wonder, by the bye, if she thinks you artful still.' 'She spoke to me with kindness, Sahib.' 'They have told her what a hero you are, Hoosanee. Well! get my bath ready, and give me my things! No one from outside will come in yet. I will meet the ladies in the summer-house.' All of them but Grace were there—Lucy, looking a little pale after the excitement of the night before, and Mrs. Durant, with Kit pressed
- 59. close by her side, and Mrs. Lyster, who wore her Indian dress with a strange shyness, and Aglaia, all smiles and gladness, and little Dick and his mother. When they saw the rajah, who was dressed as an Indian of rank, coming along the path that led to their retreat, they rose from the table and went out to meet him. Aglaia and little Dick were first. They ran into his arms, and he caught them both up joyfully, glad, perhaps, to hide his slight embarrassment in the warmth of the children's boisterous welcome. 'Oh! how lovely everything is!' said Aglaia rapturously. 'You won't go away again, Daddy Tom?' 'Not till I take you back to England with me, Aglaia.' And then he turned to the other ladies, a boyish flush on his face, which exercise and exposure to the sun had bronzed almost to the native hue. 'It is too bad of you to disturb yourselves,' he said. 'I should not have come so early, only I thought that, as you were taking breakfast out-of-doors, you would give me a corner at the table.' 'Of course we will,' cried Lucy. 'It's such a rapture to see any one. Mrs. Lyster was just wishing——' 'Never mind what I wished. Let me speak for myself, Lucy,' said Mrs. Lyster, advancing and looking at the rajah shyly. 'Mr. Gregory——' Tom smiled. 'So you have found me out at last, my dear old friend,' he said, shaking her cordially by the hand. 'I am cleverer than you. Dark as it was the other night, I found you out at once—— 'And yet you said nothing?' 'Ah! I was burning to speak, but I dared not. Our safety and yours depended on the fidelity with which I was able to play my part. I had to be the Indian rajah, and nothing else. A word in English might have lost us. But my happiness in knowing that it was you whom we had helped was none the less, I can assure you. And your companions—how are they?' 'So well, poor boys, that they are burning to be on the move! The Resident can scarcely keep them quiet. It was a happy Providence
- 60. that brought you our way.' 'Happy for me,' said Tom feelingly. 'Do you know that you gave us the clue we wanted? My artful servant,' he smiled—— 'Now,' broke in Mrs. Lyster, with Irish impetuosity, 'that is really too bad of you. You heard what I said.' 'I said to myself then that I would make you laugh about it later,' said Tom. 'But come into the summer-house. Oh!' as she continued to look at him questioningly, 'I will tell you all about it presently. I am not so much of an imposition as you imagine.' He turned to the others, and gave them a cheerful good-morning. It was such a meal as he had often shared in the verandahs of English bungalows. A silver urn, over which Mrs. Durant presided, steamed at one end of the table, where tea and coffee were being made in the most approved English fashion, and white bread, cakes hot from the oven, platters of snowy rice, scrambled eggs and curried fowl were being laid out daintily by the well-trained attendants. 'How delightful this is!' said Tom. 'It seems like coming home. No, no, Mrs. Durant,' as she handed him a cup of tea. 'I am not so much of a prince as all that. Help the others first! It is too much happiness to have my friends here to wait upon. What!' looking back at the face of one of the attendants. The man grinned from ear to ear, showing a row of perfect teeth. 'Excellency, the little Sahib would have it so!' he said in broken Hindoostani. 'So you and Bâl Narîn are inseparables, are you?' said Tom to Kit. 'What will you do when he goes back to Nepaul?' 'He mustn't go,' said Kit stoutly. 'You want a shikari here.' 'To hunt the jackal. We have no other wild animals in Gumilcund, Kit.' 'Then we must import some,' said the child gravely. 'Two or three elephants, and a tiger or so, and a few head of sambre. That would
- 61. be enough. In a few years there'd be a lot, and we'd have no end of fun.' Tom laughed, and turned to Mrs. Durant. 'What do you say to your son?' he said. 'Haven't his travels made quite a man of him?' 'I don't know about that,' said Mrs. Durant, who was watching her little boy with fascinated eyes. 'But I know he is more of a darling than ever.' Here Kit, not wishing to be seized and kissed in the presence of Bâl Narîn, edged away from his mother and made a remark in a low voice to Aglaia about the general jolliness of things. He wanted to know furthermore what she generally did after breakfast, and proposed a little turn in the town, offering to take the greatest care of her. Lucy overheard him, and burst into a fit of laughter. Then she sprang up and said she would see whether Grace was awake, and might she take any message from his Excellency the rajah? His Excellency's colour rose after a very boyish fashion, which made the ladies feel friendly towards him, when Lucy asked him this question. 'No, no,' he blurted out—'that is, I daresay I shall see her myself presently. But if I may, I will wait to hear your report.' Lucy went off, smiling to herself over the pretty little romance, which gave life a fillip that had been sadly lacking to it of late. After a few moments, during which Tom, who was extraordinarily agitated, had left the little company at the breakfast-table and strolled to meet her, she came tripping back. He watched her face, which was a very mobile one. It was serious, not sad; and this, he thought, augured well. 'How is your cousin?' he said, as quietly as he could.
- 62. 'I can't quite tell yet,' answered Lucy. 'But she knows where she is, and she knows me, which I don't think she did last night.' 'You will keep her quiet?' said Tom wistfully. He was half regretting the days of travel, when she depended upon him for everything. 'Yes; I think so. Sumbaten will take in her breakfast. She asked if we had seen you,' said Lucy, with an enchanting smile. 'And you told her I was here?' 'Oh, yes! I told her, and she just smiled, as if she was glad to hear we were so much honoured, and said that she hoped she would see you a little later. She was very eager about news from Meerut.' 'You have heard lately?' 'Yes; I had a long letter from Trixy—do you know Trixy, by the bye?' 'Do I know Trixy?' said Tom, his face lighting up. 'I should rather think so! She is one of my best friends and dearest enemies, if you can understand the anomaly. Would it be indiscreet to ask what she wrote to you?' 'Not in the least, Sir Paladin,' said Lucy, laughing, while, for the third time that morning, Tom felt the dark flush mounting to his face. 'She writes that Meerut is waking up. But I dare say you will have heard that already. The private news is that General Elton—my uncle, you know—is in his element, helping to restore order in the district, and that my poor dear aunt is distracted with anxiety to come on here at once.' 'I wish she could come,' said Tom. 'I have written to ask if it could be managed.' 'Oh, have you?' cried Lucy, the slightly artificial tone that had been apparent in her manner giving place to the most genuine eagerness. 'And do you think she will be able to come?' 'It will depend very much upon herself and General Elton. Personally, I don't think there would be any risk if she was properly attended. You would be glad to see her?'
- 63. 'Glad!' cried Lucy, clasping her hands. 'I should be simply wild! And Grace—dearest Grace!—I believe it would do her more good than anything else. I sat beside her bed half the night, poor darling! Not that I was afraid of anything, you know; but that it was so delightful —such a rest and happiness—just to feast my eyes upon her. She spoke in her sleep once, and I bent over her to catch her words. Take it away, mother, she said, take it away! I can't bear it! I moved her pillow and she half-opened her eyes and smiled. But a little later she cried out again, and there was fear in her voice—fear and horror—Mother is dead! she said. Mother is dead, or she would come. I whispered to her that she was not dead—that she was coming; and then my poor darling smiled again, and lay quite still, looking as beautiful as an angel.' Lucy's eyes were full of tears, and her voice was husky long before she came to the end of her little story. As for Tom, he could not so much as answer her. And so they stood silent for a few moments, he looking down absently into the basin of water, by whose marble brim they had stopped to have their little talk. It was embarrassing to Lucy, and she began again presently, moving as she spoke towards the door of the pavilion in the garden. 'We get such longings out here for the home faces,' she said, with a plaintive little smile. 'And in England we don't care. Sometimes we are stupid enough to think we would as soon be without them. At Nowgong, you know, I was getting perfectly ill with my longing to see some of them. And mother and father, who are at Lucknow, heard of it, and Grace was staying with them, having a first-rate time of it too! and she left everything and came to me. She is an angel! an angel!' said little Lucy tremulously. 'If anything happened to her it would break my heart. But it will be all right as soon as Aunt Grace comes.' 'Yes, yes, all right! Thank you for saying so,' said Tom hoarsely. He held out his hand. 'You will take care of her meanwhile, Lucy?' She pressed it warmly. 'Take care of her! Of course I will, as much as I can.'
- 64. 'And if there is anything she wants—anything you think would be better changed, you will let me know. You see'—blushing and fidgeting—'I am a novice about all these things. I don't really know what ladies want.' 'Then your imagination is better than most people's knowledge,' said Lucy, laughing. 'I have never seen anything like the arrangements of this place——' But here Tom was called away. It was the hour when he had arranged to meet the chief men of the city in his private hall of audience, and Hoosanee had come, at his request, to remind him of the promise. The rajah went away with his heart vibrating sorrowfully; but in the business of the day, which claimed his full attention, he regained the serenity and even, in some degree, the exaltation of the morning. There was much to be done. From the hour of the forenoon, when he left the ladies in the garden-pavilion, until the sun was sinking behind the low hills that shut in the city to the west, he had not an hour to spare. He carried out literally the programme which he had laid down for himself when he received his mother's letter. In the inner council and in the open court he proclaimed to the people that his instincts and theirs had not deceived them. He was the true son of Byrajee Pirtha Raj, and their ruler by right of succession. The elders received the intelligence quietly. They were glad to hear him acknowledge that he belonged to them, and his explanation of the reasons that had led him to leave the city, with his well-balanced relation of the measures he had taken in his absence to strengthen the hands of the English and to secure peace to Gumilcund, gave them perfect satisfaction. But they showed no surprise and very little emotion.
- 65. Outside it was different. Here the people—the craftsmen and mechanics—the small merchants and aged householders—were gathered together; and it may be that an electric current of pent-up feeling streamed outward from them to the comely youth who stood above them with his nerves and brain on fire. Certain it is that he told his tale after a different fashion to them. In the pose of the fine figure, drawn to its full height—in the flashing eyes and dilated nostrils—above all, in the noble words, wherein he expressed his reverence for those who had gone before him, and his desire to follow in their footsteps—pride of his lineage could be plainly read. He was proud to be the son of Byrajee Pirtha Raj; he was glad at heart of the destiny that bound him, for his life, to this people. So at least they read him, and the Asiatic crowd, which is sensitive and subtle in its perception of feeling, and as responsive to sympathy as a woman or child, received his tale with demonstrations of a joy so deep and passionate that it thrilled him to the heart. He would not allow too much time to the ebullition of feeling. His speech over, the court opened, and, for more than two hours, he sat patiently in his alcove above the pillared and porticoed court investigating the cases that were brought before him. And next, after a hasty lunch, he ordered out Snow-queen and rode through the city, showing himself to those who had not been able to come up to the court, and inspecting the works that had been in progress since his departure. In the course of his wanderings, he was amused to meet Aglaia and Kit walking together through the town, with Sumbaten, who looked much puzzled and a little distressed by the innovation, walking behind them. Kit, of course, hailed him joyfully. 'We're having no end of fun,' he said. 'Isn't everything jolly?' 'Particularly jolly, I think,' answered Tom, laughing. 'But don't keep Aglaia out too late, Kit.'
- 66. Then a voice from the near distance hailed him reassuringly, and he saw that the devoted Bâl Narîn was not far from his little Sahib. Billy, in his shikari's dress, looked very much like a fish out of water. The streets of Gumilcund, which to-day were freshly swept and garlanded, were not so congenial to him as the jungle and the mountains; and the bourgeois life of ease and comfort was already beginning to pall upon his fiery soul. But, for the moment, he had constituted himself Kit's guardian, and Tom was perfectly easy about the child. CHAPTER L VISHNUGUPTA, THE PRIEST The sun had set, and that lovely rose-lilac glow, which, for a few moments of the evening, makes the skies of the East so entrancingly beautiful, was wrapping heaven and earth in its mystical radiance, when Tom, having finished his day's work, returned to the palace. A syce took Snow-queen, and he went in thoughtfully to his own rooms, wondering if he ought to ask to see Grace, or if it would be better to wait until the following day. It may be as well to say here that, in the intervals for quiet thought which the business of the day had permitted him, he had made up his mind fully as to his course of action. There should be no repetition of the mistakes of the past. That one outpouring of heart, drawn from him by Grace's anguish of spirit, he could forgive himself. Until he had heard from General or Lady Elton, there should be nothing more of the same kind. He owed it to her, and to their mutual relations—she, a fugitive in his city, a guest in his house: he, the one to whom the honour and happiness of saving her had been granted—to set a seal on the door of his lips, for the present. He owed it to the future—to the position which it was his dearest hope
- 67. and desire she might one day occupy—to do nothing in a corner, or without the consent and approval of her friends. But none the less for his prudent resolve to hold himself in check, was his desire to see her and hear her voice. As he was thinking about these things, Hoosanee came to meet him with a message from the English ladies. They had sent to know if his Excellency the rajah would do them the honour of joining them at their evening meal. He smiled at the punctiliousness of the invitation, answered it with a ready assent, and, about half-an-hour later, found himself on the marble staircase that led up to the pillared hall of the zenana. A little to his surprise, he saw that the hall was empty, and he was about to throw himself down on one of the settees and wait, when a murmur of voices from the daïs, which was hidden by a screen of palms and lilies from the body of the hall, attracted his attention. He went on to the foot of the steps that led up to it, and there stopped for a moment, half paralysed with surprise. As a picture nothing could have been more beautiful and striking than the scene upon which his eyes rested. The ladies were to dine on the daïs, and the centre of its space was occupied by a table, where flowers and rich tropical fruits and sweetmeats, with sparkling glass and silver, were laid out on snowy linen. At the head of the table, on a low couch, draped with embroidered stuffs, a figure that seemed to concentrate upon itself all the light in the room was reclining. It was that of a woman, dressed in a loose robe of white and gold. Her head, from which the veil had fallen back, was propped up on a little hand, so delicate in its blue-veined transparency that the burden seemed to be too heavy for it; her pale face, overspread at this moment by a faint tinge of colour, looked out from its halo of golden hair, with the purity and stillness of a saint in a mediæval altar-piece, and her lips were moving in low, impassioned words that throbbed through the silence like a prayer. Meanwhile, at a little distance from the couch, his large hands with their curiously knotted joints clasped round his knees, and his dark, strongly-marked face lit by deep eyes which
- 68. shone with a dreamy light turned meditatively towards hers, sat a figure so different that it might have been placed there for a foil. But it was not this that made the half-unconscious watcher start and pause, and feel, for a moment, as if his senses had been playing him a trick. It was that in the difference there was a likeness. In the solemn fire that seemed to kindle these two faces, in their meditativeness, in their dreamy enthusiasm, there was something which brought them together. Vishnugupta, the proud Indian mystic, and the simple English girl who had looked the King of Terrors in the face, and, for the sake of another, had vanquished him, met that night on a common ground of sympathy. Then by strange art she kneaded fire and snow Together, tempering the repugnant mass With liquid love—— The words sprang to his mind as he gazed. He went forward, and the spell was broken. Grace looked up, gave a little start, as if she had just awoke from a dream, and held out her hand with a radiant smile of welcome. Vishnugupta rose, bent his head with the proud humility of the Brahmin, drew his robe about his head, and, making answer neither by word nor sign to the rajah's entreaty that he would stay for a little while, passed slowly out of the apartment. The priest had scarcely gone before there came a flutter of garments and a gay noise of laughter and voices in eager conversation from behind the screen that separated the hall and the sleeping-rooms. Then Lucy's little saucy face appeared above the palisade that bordered the daïs. 'Has he gone?' she whispered.
- 69. 'Do you mean Vishnugupta?' said Tom, laughing at her mysterious expression. 'Is that his name? What a name! And oh! what a person!' cried Lucy. She ran up the steps and brought her charming little person, bewitchingly dressed in a long Indian cashmere robe, drawn in at the waist with a golden girdle, into full view. 'I was with Grace when he came in,' she said. 'I have been arranging the table, and I was arranging her. He looked at me and I withered up to nothing. But as Grace seemed to take to him and his talk like a duck to water, I just ran away and left them alone. Darling,' turning to Grace, 'what, in the name of heaven, were you talking about? He has been with you more than half an hour.' Then the others came in, all of them looking curious. But Grace lay back with a smile on her lips, and a strange, inscrutable expression in her eyes. 'It was very good of you,' said Tom gently. 'But you must not let these people tire you. I wonder who admitted Vishnugupta.' 'Please let him come again if he likes,' said Grace. 'He does not tire me in the least. I think, do you know, he has done me good.' She smiled more naturally than Tom had seen her smile since the day when he found her in the jungle. 'Oh! if he does you good, he shall come every day, and I will thank and bless him to the end of my life,' said Tom gaily. 'But now, may we draw you up to the table? We are to have a merry evening, you know, Grace.' His voice shook a little, and, in spite of the brave effort to be cheerful, the muscles of his face contracted painfully. He could not help seeing how fragile she was. But she took up his words at once. 'Yes, yes,' she said; 'a merry evening. Let us fancy ourselves in England, on the banks of the Thames. Thank you,' as they drew in her couch. 'I am sorry to be so troublesome. Kit, will you sit near me, and Aglaia next? No, no, Rajah Sahib; you must take the place of honour. So! We can all see you now! Has he really changed so much, Mrs. Lyster?'
- 70. 'Changed! He hasn't changed at all,' cried the enthusiastic little Irishwoman. 'It's I that was the idiot not to know him. But I'll never be so silly again. I promise you that.' 'I'm not quite so sure that it was your fault, Mrs. Lyster,' said Tom aside. Mrs. Durant and Lucy were exchanging a little war of words about some disputed point of the arrangements of the evening, and Grace was talking merrily to Kit and Aglaia. 'Do you believe,' he asked abruptly, 'in the possibility of people living in two individualities?' She paused for a moment, and then looked meditatively at Grace. 'Until just lately,' she said, 'I should have called the question an absurdity. But——' 'Please go on,' said Tom breathlessly. 'I have watched her,' whispered Mrs. Lyster. 'She is leading two lives. The priest saw it. That is what brought him to-day. Don't look at her; don't let her think you are watching her. She is very sensitive. It would be the easiest thing in the world to frighten that pretty gaiety away. Yes; she is living two lives, and——' 'Well! Don't stop——' 'It should be encouraged. It is her only chance.' 'Of what, Mrs. Lyster?' 'Of sanity and life.' 'What do you mean?' (sharply). 'Don't ask me just now. I will tell you by-and-by. But watch her. Yes —and talk—be gay! I will help you as well as I can. She is a noble creature—a heroine all impact—' said the warm-hearted little Irishwoman, 'and you are almost worthy of her, although—' and here she pulled up and blushed violently. 'Although I'm not almost, but altogether a native,' filled in the rajah, a humorous expression crossing his face. 'Thank you for the
- 71. compliment. It is no small one, Mrs. Lyster.' 'Go along with you,' she said, trying to laugh, though her face and neck were one burning red. 'I shall be speaking to you presently in my native Celtic, and telling you that you are nothing better than a gossoon.' 'Which would enchant me,' said Tom, laughing. 'Anyway'—seriously —'we sign to-night a truce and an alliance.' 'To be sure! though I don't know that I was ever at war with you,' said Mrs. Lyster. And thereupon they threw themselves into the conversation that was going on around them. Forgetting her own sorrows, the vivacious little Irishwoman pulled herself together, brought out her best jokes and most amusing stories, and became the life of the party. Lucy followed her lead. Mrs. Durant, the desire of whose heart had been fulfilled, had no difficulty in being lively. They drew out Kit, who made them all laugh with his funny little sayings. Even the mother of little Dick condescended to forget her own dignity and the imminence of the crisis through which she had been brought, and to enjoy herself. But long before it was over, Tom saw, to his distress, that the sudden springing up of vitality which had enabled Grace to take part in the gaiety of the others was over. She lay back on her couch white and still, turning her large blue-grey eyes from one to another as the sallies of wit and merry anecdotes flew by, and smiling now and then vaguely, as though she was making an effort to follow them, but could not quite succeed. The poor fellow was watching her, as a mother watches a sick child. While he made a feint of listening to the talk at the table, laughing when the others laughed to give himself countenance, and occasionally launching out feebly a witticism of his own, he never lost a single expression of the face that was so unutterably dear to him. Dinner over, he crossed to where she was lying. 'Grace,' he
- 72. said, in a low voice, under cover of the talk, 'what is it? You are looking worse to-day. Is all this too much for you?' 'No, no,' she answered, with a smile so gentle and patient that it thrilled him to the heart. 'And do you know, I really feel better. You must forgive me for not talking. You know' (pressing her hand to her head) 'there is something here still. It won't let me. I get confused.' 'My darling,' he began passionately, and then checked himself. 'I mustn't be too impulsive yet,' he said under his breath. 'Afterwards, Grace, afterwards——' 'Ah!' she said, with a beautiful indescribable expression. 'Lucy has written. They will know in a very short time that I am here. Perhaps some of them will come. In the meantime—' dreamily. 'In the meantime, talk or be silent, as you please. Do anything! Only get well and strong, Grace. Only get well and strong!' 'I will try,' she said plaintively. 'Sometimes—still—life seems very sweet.' 'It will not be sometimes—it will be always, when you get better,' said Tom earnestly. But there was a pang at his heart, for all his cheerful words. For the first time, since he saw her lying insensible in the hermit's hut in the jungle, a feeling of despair swept over his young soul. He would not—he could not—give place to it. Turning away, lest she should read it in his eyes, he met a look of sympathy from Mrs. Lyster. She was far too wise to put it into words, and he found, somewhat to his relief, that he must arouse himself, for there was more to be done. The Resident had sent word that, with his visitors, he would call upon the ladies that evening, and Chunder Singh and Lutfullah, and several other distinguished Indians, who in the rajah's absence had been diligent in inquiries and offers of assistance, had asked permission to wait upon them also.
- 73. It had been decided that the reception should be held in the little pillared hall, which had been hung with garlands and banners for the occasion. Lucy and Mrs. Durant thought it was about time to go down. Grace was asked what she would do. Seeing Tom's wistful eyes fixed upon her, she said that she would like to be present, if she might be quiet. She had a curious dread of being alone in those days. But when she tried to rise, she found that she was too weak. Tears of vexation filled her eyes, but before they had time to fall, the rajah and Bâl Narîn, and Hoosanee and Ganesh had sprung to her couch, and it was lifted up with all its flowing draperies, as if it had been a featherweight, and carried down the steps; Grace smiling through her tears and begging them not to hurt themselves—to be sure to put her down if she was too heavy—an entreaty that made the stout Indians laugh. 'Put me a little out of everyone's way,' she had said to Tom. So he found an arbour-like corner for her, beautifully shaded with palms and tree-ferns, whence she could see everything that went on in the brilliantly-lighted hall, without being much seen herself. There he put the couch down. The Indians retired, and he stooped over her. 'Is that right, Grace?' 'Perfectly right. I shall enjoy myself looking and listening. And now, Tom, you must leave me. The Resident and the others will be here directly.' 'I suppose I must,' he said regretfully. 'I will come back again in a few moments, to see how you are.' And so Grace lay quietly in her corner, and the anguish in her heart —the phantom that was continually rising up to mock her—was at rest for a few moments, while, like images in a dream, the busy little crowd that soon filled the hall, came and went. The Resident and the two English officers, and Chunder Singh and Lutfullah, were brought up to speak to her. They spoke feelingly, congratulating her on her escape. She found a few simple words with which to answer them; but she could not say much, and the
- 74. rajah took care that she should not be made to talk more than she liked. How deep her gratitude was for his watchful tenderness it would be impossible to express. Once or twice, when he passed, she looked up at him with a wistful smile, and once she touched his arm lightly with her thin fingers, whispering, 'You are so good to me!' 'Good!' he echoed. 'Oh! Grace, if you only knew!' And then, for an instant, the warm colour flooded his face, and his eyes shone with a wonderful light; but, not daring to trust himself to speak, he turned away, leaving Mrs. Lyster on guard. Meanwhile, in the hall, which had surely never seen so strange a gathering before, there was plenty of fun and good fellowship. The party at the Residency had just been reinforced by Mr. Montgomery's wife, a handsome and accomplished woman, her sister, a pretty, timid girl fresh from England, and several other ladies, who had come to Gumilcund on the Resident's invitation, leaving, in more cases than one, desolated homes behind them. There were besides the two young officers—Irish, by the bye, both of them—who had come in with Mrs. Lyster, quite well now and up to all sorts of fun. And so the evening glided on merrily. To an onlooker there might have seemed to be something pathetic about their mirth. Scarcely one of the Europeans but had some deep present anxiety to endure, or some recent loss to mourn; but they were English ladies and gentlemen, and they knew how to control themselves. For the sake of one another and their entertainer, they would not be gloomy or morose. The two young officers sang comic songs, and Mr. Montgomery, the Resident, brought out his violin and played dance- tunes which made the feet of the younger ladies twitch to be off, and brave Mrs. Lyster, who was fighting all night with a desperate longing to run away and have a good cry, talked and laughed and told travellers' tales, charming them all with her wit and vivacity. The grave Indians, who knew through what deep waters many of these poor women had passed, were surprised at their spirits. Happily for some of them, it was not kept up late. The Resident and his party,
- 75. with hearty expressions of thanks and goodwill, took leave of them long before midnight, and the Indian visitors followed their example immediately. Then poor Mrs. Lyster sat down and covered her face with her hands. 'I couldn't have stood it another five minutes. Oh! do all of you think me a brute?' she cried, lifting up her haggard face. 'Don't! Don't!' cried Lucy piteously. 'You will make me cry.' 'I think you one of the bravest of women. I always did,' said Tom. 'Do you remember the storm? No one was so plucky as you.' 'Do I remember it?' said Mrs. Lyster, with a queer little smile. 'Why, it was nothing—child's play. But come, my son of Anak, pick up the couch and carry our invalid inside. Be quiet, my dear!' to Grace. 'You're not to be allowed to stir a step to-night. Carry her in, Mr. Rajah, and then take your retinue away and say good-night. We will face the terrors of the silent hours together.' After that the days glided quietly one into the other. Every morning the rajah met his family, as he used to call the ladies and children who had found a refuge in the palace, at breakfast, in the pretty garden-pavilion. And pleasant breakfasts they were, although Grace was never present: for some one—Kit, or Aglaia, or Mrs. Lyster, or Lucy—had always something encouraging to say about her. During the day he gave himself without reserve to business and study, and cultivating useful and kindly relations with the people about him, making meanwhile such progress in the knowledge of Indian affairs, and gaining such insight into hidden depths of life and character, and into the scope and meaning of the philosophies and religions of the country, as would sometimes surprise even himself. After sunset, when the work of the day was over, he met his friends again, and they would all take their evening meal together, talking over past and present, discussing hopefully the state of affairs in the country, and exchanging the news which the mails of the day had brought in. Sometimes Grace would join them at these dinners in the hall, and sometimes not; but she always sent him affectionate messages, of
- 76. which Aglaia was generally the bearer, and he seldom spent a day without seeing her once. Later he looked back upon those early days at Gumilcund, full to the brim of joyful interests, and flooded with the light of hope, as some of the happiest in his life. Gradually a dull pain—a terror to which he could not give a name— began to encroach upon their sweetness. Why did not Grace pick up her strength? At first her weakness was easily to be accounted for. But surely the time had come when they might look for improvement. The rest, the freedom from anxiety, and the daily companionship of her friends ought, by this time, to be taking some effect. Sometimes, when they met, he would try to cheat himself into the belief that she was better and brighter; but the absence of vital strength was a fact that, in spite of himself, pressed home to his heart. Day after day he saw the same white face, the same patient smile, the same sorrow-haunted eyes. Day after day he was the witness of efforts so pathetic that he would entreat her sometimes not to make them. 'Be patient, my beloved!' he would whisper; and all the time, in his own heart there would be a tumult of fierce impatience, a gnawing of angry pain that almost unnerved him. But this was not all. He was conscious—they were all conscious—of a mental cloud—a veil that seemed at times to wrap her away from them. 'Grace is changed. I don't know what to make of her. But I wish—oh! I do wish—that her mother would come,' Lucy cried out one morning when Tom asked her the usual question. Mrs. Lyster gave her a warning look, but she went on. 'Yes; I can't help it. I must speak. Something ought to be done.' 'What can be done, Lucy?' said Tom, whose face had turned perfectly grey. 'Don't mind Lucy. She is speaking wildly,' said Mrs. Lyster. 'She forgets—we all forget—that there are experiences which nothing but the healing hand of time—the slow passage of the years——'
- 77. She broke down, for her voice was choked with sobs. 'I know,' said Lucy penitently. 'But, dear Mrs. Lyster, you have suffered more than any of us, and you are not so strange, so reserved.' 'My dear child, I am much older than Grace, and I have the Irish elasticity of temper, I suppose. We can laugh with the tears on our faces; and I thank God for it. And now, like a darling, run off and look after the children, and leave the rajah to me.' Lucy hesitated for a moment, looked at them with a curious half- mutinous expression in her face, and then turned away. The other ladies had already left the summer-house, so that Mrs. Lyster and Tom were alone. 'Thank you,' he said, looking at her with strained, eager eyes. She shook her head sadly. 'Tell me what to do?' he cried out passionately. 'I love her. You know this already. I would give my life—my blood drawn from me painfully drop by drop—to save her a single pang. The thought of her trouble is agony to me—torture. What are we to do? Shall I send to Agra for an English doctor? I might.' 'I am afraid, my poor friend, that no doctor would do her any good. The disease lies deeper than medicine can cure.' 'What would, then? Tell me, for heaven's sake!' 'She has something on her mind,' said Mrs. Lyster doubtfully. 'I know it—I know it. A fancied trouble. If some one reasonable and wise, like you, were to talk it over with her, she might be persuaded to put it from her. Won't you try?' 'I dare not,' said Mrs. Lyster, in a broken voice. Tom started. 'I don't understand,' he said confusedly. 'And I am afraid I can't explain,' she said. 'There is something about her—a whiteness of soul, a majesty. There, I am stumbling about as
- 78. usual. In plain English, I can't get near her, and I am afraid to attempt it.' 'And yet——' began Tom. 'And yet,' filled in his companion, 'she can be bright enough sometimes. Yes; that is just what I told you before, she has her hours. And' (mysteriously) 'I will tell you a curious thing. That Brahmin, with the wild face and unpronounceable name, does her more good than anyone else. He came in yesterday, just before dinner. I was in the hall with her, and I stayed because I was curious; but of course I was not quick enough at Hindoostani to pick up all they said. You remember how calm she looked in the evening. We all remarked it. But it was so before. She is easier, brighter altogether, when she has been having one of her long wild talks with that wild man.' 'Why wild, Mrs. Lyster?' 'Why, because, so far as I can make out, they seem to be scaling heights and plunging into depths of which we poor mortals have no idea. But I will tell you one thing that struck me, his manner to her. We—well! he doesn't take any notice of us. I don't believe he sees us. He treats her with a reverence that, coming from a man like him, is one of the most touching things I have ever met with in all my experience. It is just as if' (in an awed tone) 'he was talking to one on the other side.' 'Don't, don't!' cried Tom piteously. He was trembling even to the lips, which were ashy pale; but he made a feeble effort to smile. 'You come of an imaginative race, Mrs. Lyster,' he said. 'I understand that, of course. But for heaven's sake, let us have prose, not poetry! It would be too dreadful to let her slip through our fingers now! Can nothing be done?' 'We shall know more when her mother comes,' said Mrs. Lyster. And that was all. The young rajah went to his work that morning with a heart so full that it seemed to him as if bands of steel, growing harder and
- 79. tighter every moment, were winding themselves about him, and pressing out his life. Like a mournful voice—an echo of something he had heard before, Mrs. Lyster's words repeated themselves in his brain. 'On the other side.' What if there was some strange, mystical truth in them? What if in that trance the pure, strong spirit had winged its flight to the heavenly sphere—had found its home there— and now was only kept to its earthly tabernacle by their love, and tears, and prayers? It was a terrible thought. Again and again he tried to put it away from him, but it returned unceasingly, through that long and miserable day, taking the strangest forms, as it swept through his mind. In the evening, when he went up to the hall, he half expected to hear that Grace was worse. But she was in her place, and though she was as pale and fragile as usual, she greeted him with a smile of unusual brightness. Dinner over, he sat down by her couch. 'Grace, dearest,' he said, 'I wish you would tell me what you and Vishnugupta talk about when you are together. I am, in some sort, a protégé of his, and yet, do you know, I have never been able to draw him out, as you do?' Grace looked up at him, an expression of childlike wonder in her eyes. 'Draw him out!' she echoed. 'I don't think I quite understand.' 'Well, then, make him talk.' 'Ah!' she said, smiling. 'But, indeed, it is quite the contrary. He has made me talk.' 'How, Grace?' 'I don't know. I think there is a power about him—a fascination. Do you remember what I told you one day when we were travelling? How I looked round me—above—below—on every side, and saw nothing but misery and pain—how I could not believe in God—could not even thank Him for saving me?' 'Yes, I remember,' said Tom. 'And after that,' she went on, 'I felt, but I couldn't speak. It was all in here—burning—burning—but no words—an awful indescribable
- 80. loneliness. You were all about me, loving me, helping me, caring for me so kindly, and I was like one apart—a spirit in prison. Then I saw this Brahmin-prophet. It was the evening we came in.' She spoke rapidly, and with a curious exultation, which had the strangest effect upon her listeners—for there were two now, Mrs. Lyster having joined them. 'I saw him standing in the road—such a strange figure! It frightened poor little Kit; but I—ah! I can't tell you what it was— he looked at me, and it seemed to me as if he were looking straight down into my soul, as if he knew how I felt. And yet I did not tremble. I asked him to come and see me, and he came. He sat down there. He said nothing, not a single word; but I spoke; it was as if an angel had come down and loosened my tongue, letting the burning thoughts free.' 'Did Vishnugupta understand you?' said Tom. 'He did more than understand. He explained me to myself. Listen, my beloved, and see how overpowering—how beautiful it is. We are stretching out our hands in the darkness—looking for God—weeping because He does not answer our prayers, and He is here within us. We shall part, or we shall think that we part, but it is not so. We cannot part, we meet eternally in the bosom of the Divine. But before we can know this, and enter into His peace, the self must be slain—will—desire—love of the things that are not He. Listen again! I wondered, you know, where the evil came from—pain, misery, cruelty. I know now. These are the things to which the self will grow in its darkness. But there is hope, for in the sting is the cure. Through the evil—through the bitter pain and misery—the vision is born. The poison has a heart of healing. If there were none of this misery that revolts our ignorance, the self would go on, building its palaces about it till the Divine was shut out. As it is, we grow weary at last, and we lay ourselves down at His feet. I thought it was a dream at first; but he spoke to me again, and each time he spoke the vision became clearer. He says they have known it here for thousands of years. It has been growing and fading—growing and fading; but there were always some who held it fast, and when faith was weak, and many had gone astray, and the clue to the labyrinth
- 81. was in danger of being lost, then a revealer—a God-sent teacher came.' There was a pause. Neither of her companions spoke. Mrs. Lyster was looking out before her with bewildered eyes. If this was love- making, it was the strangest she had ever heard of. Tom had covered his face with his hands. It seemed to him that she was moving further and further away from them, and he could not speak for the sorrowful aching at his heart. Then she put out her hand, and, with a smile of the most divine compassion and love, touched his arm. 'Dearest,' she said, 'I must tell you something more. They are expecting another revealer. He will be different from any who have gone before him, for the sphere will be larger. New lights have been dawning upon the nations, and new truths, forced painfully from the silence by the higher minds, are waiting to be shown to the people. He will know all these. He will be of the West by his training, of the East by his nature. He will have the science and learning of the New World, and the self-forgetting passion of the Old. For years he will be content to learn—watching and waiting for the happy moment. Then, when he is sure of himself and sure of them, he will speak—here, in this wonderful country, which has given so many wonderful things to the world, and thousands upon thousands will follow him. This is what Vishnugupta told me, and do you know what I thought? Our prophet is here, I thought to myself. Years upon years to come, when all this dreadful strife and sore is healed, and when I, with so many, many others, who had a part in it, are laid to rest and forgotten, he will speak the words of life, and then, perhaps,' her lips parted in a yearning smile, 'he will remember his love of old time, and these few days of love and happiness, that his love made for her, before——' 'Hush! Grace! Hush!' cried the poor boy passionately. 'It is you I want——' Mrs. Lyster turned away weeping, and he broke into a piteous entreaty that Grace would unsay her cruel words. But in a moment the words died away upon his lips, and he was gazing at her with ashy face and horror-stricken eyes. For the expression they so much dreaded—the look of fear and piteous distress—had come
- 82. back into her face. In the next moment he had recovered his presence of mind, and was stooping over her to ask if she wanted anything. 'No,' she said, trying to smile. 'I am tired;' and then with white lips and eyes, whose sorrowful yearning will haunt him to the end of his days, she besought him to leave her alone. CHAPTER LI THE RAJAH WELCOMES A GUEST AND HEARS A STRANGE STORY The next day was full of business, and Tom gave himself to it with stern self-repression. He had offered a body of guides and pioneers, picked men, as skilful with the shovel and the scaling-ladder as with the sword, to the British army, which was marching northwards to the relief of Lucknow. His offer had been accepted, and to-day they were to set off for Allahabad, where the troops were congregating. In the early morning he inspected them, and then, having given orders that they should be feasted royally at his expense in the market-place, he harangued them in the presence of a great concourse of people, and, mounted on Snow-queen, marched with them as far as the boundaries of the State. Following as it did on an exciting evening and a heavy sleepless night, the day exhausted him, and on his return he would not press his pace. He rode back slowly, his mind, to his own comfort and relief, almost a blank, so that it was late in the evening before he reached the palace. He had left word that he would probably be late, begging the ladies to dine without him, and as he passed into his own quarters he felt glad that he had done so, for he was able for little else but rest. Here, however, an exciting piece of news awaited him. Lady Elton
- 83. had arrived. He asked how long she had been in the palace, and found that she must have entered the city by one gate as he and his men had left by another. Hoosanee, who was his informant, told him that she had arrived in a well-equipped travelling-carriage, and attended by an escort of European soldiers. These, however, had left her at the gate. A young lady—the sister, as Hoosanee had been told, of Grace Sahib —came in with her in the carriage, and an English officer whom Ganesh had recognised as the Captain Sahib Liston, had ridden into the city in their company. At the gate of the palace they had inquired for his Excellency the rajah. When Hoosanee informed them of the business on which he was bound, adding that he might not return till late, the ladies had left their names with him and gone on to the zenana, and the Captain Sahib had proceeded to the Residency, where he would probably spend the night. While Hoosanee was giving his master this news a servant came in with a letter for the rajah. It was from Lady Elton—a rapturous, affectionate, incoherent little note, saying she had seen Grace, and thanking and blessing him for all he had done for them. 'My good Trixy is with me,' she wrote. 'The General would not let me come without one of the girls, and I think she will be a comfort to her sister. I will not see you to-night. When I feel my child's hand in mine my love and gratitude overcome me. I could only weep. I could not speak. But to-morrow morning, as early as you like, we must meet.' And she added, after a few more fervent, incoherent words. 'Both the General and I feel that you belong to us.' Pressing the letter to his lips, Tom wrote an answer hastily. 'My dearest Lady Elton,—I thank God from a full heart that you have come in safely. Command me as if I were your son. It will be my happiness to serve you. To-morrow, since it may not be to-night, I will bid you welcome in person. I am always in the garden early. You are an early riser, I know. If the journey has not tired you too much, perhaps you will meet me there. I must
- 84. see you alone, if possible. Brotherly greetings and a warm welcome to Trixy. Yours always, 'Thomas Gregory.' A long night, haunted by the strangest dreams, passed over the young rajah's head. Now he would be chasing Lady Elton about the garden, trying to speak to her, and seeing her elude him, and waking up with a start just as his hand was on her arm. Then he would come suddenly face to face with her, and she would begin an incoherent story, which he could not understand. Again and again he leapt up thinking it was day, and again and again he composed himself to sleep; but, do what he would, he could not rest for the fever of his heart and brain, and before the sun was up he dressed and went out into the garden. Ever afterwards he remembered vividly the impressions of that morning. He went out into a still and wonderful world. The green things of the earth, the flowering shrubs, the palms, the dark cypresses that lifted their column-like heads above the lower and lovelier foliage, the water that flowed in deep channels by the grass —all these seemed to be asleep. But a soft wind was stirring; far away there was a low confused murmur as of dawning consciousness, and over all stretched a cloudless heaven, pale and mysterious, in the zenith, where the little stars that had shone all night were passing, one by one, tremulously behind the radiant veil of the morning, and, on the eastern horizon, tinged with a dull red, quickening gradually, as if a hand were fanning it, into flame-colour and saffron. The beauty and tranquillity seemed for a few moments to soothe the fever of his heart. He felt a Presence in the garden. The strange words of the night before came back to him. We are stretching out our hands in the darkness—looking for God—and He is here within us. For an instant—a wonderful instant, which he remembered years afterwards with a passionate thrill of gratitude—a wild throb of expectation, the Divine was as near to him as his own quivering flesh and blood.
- 85. It was far too early yet for him to expect to see anyone out; but instinctively his feet turned in the direction they had so often taken lately, and, in a few moments, he found himself in the avenue that led from the English ladies' apartments to the pavilion where they were accustomed to meet in the morning. He had scarcely entered it before he saw at its farther end, walking away from him into the open, the figure of a woman in a long grey cloak. He hastened to overtake it, then stopped, then went on again. Lady Elton? But could it be? The slow pace, the uncertain steps, the bent head, were strangely unlike her. The doubt was soon laid to rest. In the stillness she had heard his footsteps behind her, and she turned and came to meet him. That, too, was a moment which Tom will remember all his life. It was not only the pallor of the once comely face and the attenuation of the form that, when last he saw it, had been so pleasant to look upon in its full matronly beauty; it was the expression of the face, the looking out upon him suddenly like a spectre in the noontide, of that despair which, slowly, slowly, but, as he now knew, surely, had been stealing into his own heart and killing its joy. He sprang forward impulsively and threw his strong young arms about her. 'This is dreadful,' he said; 'I had no idea you were so weak. Why didn't you tell me in your letter?' 'I didn't feel quite so weak then,' she said, drawing herself away with a little smile that seemed to bring the Lady Elton of Surbiton and Meerut back again. 'No, no, you impulsive boy; I am not so feeble as all that. Give me your arm to steady me. There! I am better now.' 'Have they taken care of you? Did they bring you a cup of tea before you came out? Shall I have one made for you now?' 'No, thank you, dear. The little girl's ayah, Sumbaten, took every care of me. I don't think the poor little thing slept at all for fear Grace and I might want anything. Then, you know, I have Trixy to look after me. She is a very good child,' said Lady Elton. She was trying to speak lightly; but he knew very well that the effort was almost too great for her.
- 86. He followed her lead, saying he was so glad Trixy had come. They had a little English society in Gumilcund now, and he did not think she would find it dull; and was it true that Captain Liston had come in with them? 'Yes, by the bye,' said Lady Elton. 'It happened rather conveniently. He had been sent to Meerut from Delhi; did you hear how he distinguished himself there? No? Well, I must leave it to Trixy. The foolish children are engaged, you know. The General was obliged to give his consent, though we don't quite see how they are to live. In the meantime they are very proud of one another; and of course Bertie took an additional interest. So he came with us. I believe he is to join the army for Lucknow somewhere near this. But he was to see you and the Resident first.' 'I shall be glad of the opportunity of congratulating him,' said Tom; 'he is a first-rate young fellow, and Trixy was always a great friend of mine.' As they talked they were walking on quickly, Lady Elton leaning on his arm. There was a secluded spot—a little ferny hollow—at no great distance from the pavilion. The blue waters of the miniature lake lay in front of it, and a little semi-circle of rocks and boulders, down which mimic cascades rushed continually, filling the basins of water in the hollow and keeping moist and cool the delicate mosses and rare grasses and ferns that had made it their home, formed a complete barrier between it and the rest of the garden. Hither Tom, who could not speak freely until he was sure of perfect seclusion, guided Lady Elton's steps. She broke into an exclamation of surprise and pleasure when he led her in. 'I've brought you here because it is quiet,' he said. 'We can talk.' He placed her in a low chair, under a fairy-leaved mimosa, drew up a cushion to her feet, and flung himself down beside her. 'Now, dearest Lady Elton,' he said, 'have pity upon me! Tell me about her.' She was silent for a few moments, looking down upon him, her pale lips parted in a quivering smile, and her eyes dim with tears. 'I was
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