The author of Ecclesiastes begins by declaring that human efforts are to no end--- that, when considered in relation to the vastness and inevitability of the natural world’s cycles, they seem erased.
Because these cycles amount to a seemingly endless process of doing and undoing, neither human vision nor human description can sufficiently capture them (“All such things are wearisome: / No man can ever state them; / The eye never has enough of seeing, / Nor the ear enough of hearing.”).
“There is nothing new / Beneath the sun!” The designation of newness rests upon the impoverished (partial) apprehensions and descriptions of a human subject, inevitably of a broader domain (“Only that shall happen / Which has happened, / Only that occur / Which has occurred;”).
Time is, of course, not only death’s but also song’s first contingency. Lisa Jarnot, in the writing of lyric, anaphoric poems, finds a way of dealing with desire without expressing intention.
In an indexical process oriented by a moving (between the location of the poet’s body, the objects of her direct sight, and a more expansive imaginative sphere) I, the needs and limitations of the body are treated as means (and this index’s sequence determined by sound rather than semantics).
In doing so, this work treats human mortality both as that which separates the speaker from the vast scale of the natural world and its cycles--- ensuring that no person’s vision or speech can ever have a one-to-one relationship with the thing to which it corresponds (Borges tells of an empire that loved map making..)--- and as but one of many things (animals, for example) subjected to the natural world’s cycles of destruction and creation.
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The Maya Deren and co. symposium discussion I referenced in class is available at http://www.ubuweb.com/sound/poetry-film.html, where topics include the relationship between poetry and avant-garde cinema.
ReplyDeleteBecause I am not verbally dextrous, I found it difficult yesterday to articulate my point about the connection between the wonderful poem “Ye White Antarctic Birds” and movies. It is true, broadly speaking, that this poem has similarities to: the disorientation felt by leaving out an establishing shot, a questioning of perception, and a flip-book of images. These are smart analogies, but I question that these analogies can be anything but broad.
ReplyDeleteLet's push on one example, the flip-book of images—what images are being flipped? What image can rival the narrative compression and lack of visual information of a line like “... and him the one I love” with it's simultaneous creation of mystery and a story with two characters, the loved and the lover? Even to have an image containing a “him” who is gazed at lovingly would be different, I claim, because this “him” would probably need a face – at the very least it would be an image of “him” and not the word “him”. Even though we could find movies that would, broadly, employ tactics similar to “Ye White Antarctic Birds” - anything that drills vertically down into a moment of looking through tactics of repetition, reordering, and gradual revelation – the tools necessarily enable and constrain the creation.
thanks for the link, Jesse. and for clarifying--- this distinction between textual and cinematic immanence is indeed one worth considering. I wonder.. do the difference of questions about "his" presence pertain mostly to differences in cinematic versus textual narrative conventions, or does the distinction lie purely in its surface? to rephrase: is verticality contingent upon a horizon?
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