Mysterioso One
LOVELY. LOVELY AND ANCIENT AND FOXED
with rusty brown spots as the oldest
IMMORTAL PRINCESS
or the Bodhisattva Kwannon as a simpering
and infinitely generous
OLD WHORE
How surprised we are at what passes
in past and future
for the scent of apples.
I
M
U
S
T
know more about the skin and muscles
and the wall of stars two billion light-years long
I
T
I
S
all
QUICK
!!!
from Mysteriosos And Other Poems, by Michael McClure.
The above poem, which I have crudely reproduced here (the Google Blogger does not allow center justification and line indentations involve a complex, coded process), looks like a plant. It has a stem, or spine, from which the lines branch out, radiating toward the margins on either side, thwarting linearity and encouraging a view of the text as a form of three-dimensional sculpture. It appears to be holding its ideas and images and sounds in suspension. Its verticality exalts thought. The eyes travel up and down a verbal form inviting rumination in the embrace of a candelabrum. But something else is going on. There is a tension hidden among its lines. Its structure worries a vivid paradox. Words flare outward, like yardarms on a clipper, but are also drawn inward, like particles of iron magnetized into a needle. Two conflicting energies excite the height and punch of the poem.
This structure has been a hallmark of McClure’s for many years. It reminds me of Apollinaire’s Calligrams, or George Herbert’s “The Altar,” which were early examples of concrete poetry, though McClure does not create pictures so much as chisel his way into space, creating oak out of nothingness, plumping energy into palpable chunks. He is inviting us to read the text differently, as a Möbius loop of sound; as a gardenia.
The first two lines, “LOVELY. LOVELY AND ANCIENT AND FOXED/ with rusty brown spots as the oldest,” refer to a form of spotting, or browning, on old paper documents, postage stamps, birth certificates, death certificates, and legal transactions. Pages of an old book, especially. Here in Seattle, it’s impossible to escape the encroachment of humidity and damp. You have to be pretty vigilant, run a dehumidifier, keep the windows open on balmy days, in order to prevent “foxing,” as it is called, in your manuscripts and prize books. The image McClure is presenting us with is paper, old paper, but the next line, “IMMORTAL PRINCESS,” which switches paper to skin, the skin of an old woman, frail and parchment-like: one sees moles, warts, veins. Time written into the scripture of her wrinkly surface. I imagine a venerable old woman in a twinkling tiara, a mischievous sparkle still iridescing in her eyes, something fey and girlish about her despite her age and royalty. She is not a queen. Heavy responsibilities go with being a queen. This being is different. She is unmarried, still waiting for a final ascendancy to the throne of whatever realm she inhabits, a potential for consummation that has long passed by. McClure is presenting us with a strange combination of youth and age. Or, possibly, an old piece of paper with nothing yet written on it.
Or possibly an aged manuscript in the British Museum. A letter from Keats. The beginning to Tennyson’s “In Memorium A.H.H.” The frontispiece to a first edition Leaves of Grass.
Something that feels light and crinkly in the hands. Something complexioned and sensual and prickly with writing.
The next three lines change things radically: “or the Bodhisattva Kwannon as a simpering/ and infinitely generous/ OLD WHORE.”
Things are quick and alive as the alleys of Montmartre with these lines. The woman is seasoned and wise but also self-destructive, promiscuous and daring. She is a wily denizen of vile places. She has seen it all. Beatitude and sin. Everything repellent and stinking and rotten with depravity, but also robustness and Rabelaisian energy, singing that goes long into the night shaking the stars into delirium and Fauve painting, bedsprings squeaking among old wood-burning stoves and African masks.
Kwannon is the Japanese counterpart of the Chinese Kuan Yin, or Guanyin. She is also known as Gwan-eum in Korean and Quan Âm in Vietnamese. She is recognized as the bodhisattva of compassion. Bodhisattva translates roughly as “wisdom-being.” It comes from the Sanskrit: bodhi, meaning “perfect knowledge,” or enlightenment, and sattva, meaning a variety of things: goodness, essence, being, existence, spirit. All these things combined. It refers to someone who has chosen to attain enlightenment with a goal toward helping others. Its application to other suffixes varies its meaning accordingly: sattvadhika means spirited, courageous, or valiant.
According to the Buddhist legend from the Complete Tale of Guanyin and the Southern Seas, Guanyin vows never to rest until she frees all sentient beings from samsara, or reincarnation. After struggling to comprehend the needs of so many, her head split into eleven pieces. Amitabha Buddha (principal Buddha of the Pure Land sect; Amitabha is translatable as “infinite light”), seeing her plight, gave her eleven heads with which to hear the cries of the suffering. When her arms shattered into pieces, Amitabha gave her a thousand arms with which to aid the many in suffering.
But why not an old whore? A venerable, and venerated, sex worker. An infinitely generous sex worker. I leave it to you to imagine how that generosity might manifest. Remember: a thousand arms, and eleven heads.
There is an abrupt shift of thought in the next line: “How surprised we are at what passes/ in past and future/ for the scent of apples.”
Two things come to mind: Frederick Schiller, and Monsanto.
Frederick Schiller kept rotten apples in his desk drawer to sniff while writing. The odor inspired him.
Genetically modified food - fruit, vegetables, wheat, etc. - poses both promise and threat. Selective breeding, or artificial selection, has been in practice for thousands of years. The poodle, the dachshund, and the Guernsey cow are products of selective breeding. Plant breeding is as old as human civilization. Rice, barley, wheat and oats are all products of plant breeding. Classical plant breeding crosses related individuals to produce varieties with desirable properties: increased quality and yield, increased tolerance to such factors as salinity and temperature, resistance to viruses, fungi, and bacteria, and increased tolerance to bugs and other pests. Classical plant breeding relies on homologous recombination between chromosomes to generate genetic diversity.
Genetic diversity is crucial. Diversity in all its guises is crucial. Sameness and standardization run contrary to life.
Modern plant breeding uses techniques of molecular biology to genetically modify desirable traits. The danger here is multiple: corporations that own a patent over a genome have commercial control over the product; the danger inherent in that is obvious. Extortion would not be strong a word.
Another problem with so-called Frankenfood is lack of nutrition: by favoring certain aspects of a plant’s development, other qualities may be compromised. Corn, soybeans, and cotton are, at this point, the crops most subject to genetic modification. It’s a highly debatable issue. Insecticide use has decreased with the adoption of insect-resistant crops. But is the disappearance of bees and colony collapse disorder related to this? As McClure notes, what will pass for the scent of apples in the future?
The next line, which runs vertically down the page, “I MUST,” serves as part of the stem of this poem. The word ‘must,’ as a noun rather than a verb, echoes the earlier line about the scent of apples. There is strength in the phrase “I must,” which the majuscules emphasize. Must is a strong verb. It pushes. It marshals. It declares itself to be an imperative.
Must what?
Must “know more about the skin and muscles/ and the wall of stars two billion light-years long.” It’s interesting how McClure conflates skin and muscle with the stars, with the cosmos, with the generative energies of the universe. This is a salient quality of McClure’s aesthetic; to conflate disparate qualities, disparate energies, disparate magnitudes. It is in high contrasts such as this that we discover power in hybridization, expansion in the poetry of differentials. A root may be exponentiated by water and dirt into a flourish of branches and leaves. A consonant may be hissed into cypress by a magician of vowels. Multiplicity stems from reaching.
“IT IS all QUICK!!!” completes the stem of the poem, roots it in exclamation points. How quick, as Johnny Carson would say, is it?
Pretty quick: 186,000 miles per second.
According to the theory of relativity, space and time are connected. They are one and the same, a single continuum. Space is three-dimensional, time is four-dimensional. By combining space and time into a single manifold, or mathematical space (a line and a circle are one-dimensional manifolds), physicists have consolidated a number of theories in a manner that allows a clearer description of the workings of the universe. In classical mechanics, time is treated as a constant. In relativistic contexts, time bends. Time depends on the motion of an observer.
A poem is quick not only because it blends space and time (time in the poem being a measure of cadence, and pause), but because it dyes the eyes with the fire of inspiration.
As writers, we are discouraged from using exclamation points. McClure has gone contrary to this edict, big time. Not one, but three exclamation points leap up at us at the end of the poem. The first effect of this is that it doesn’t feel like an end. It feels more like a beginning. Secondly, the verticality of the exclamation points mirror the verticality of the poem.
The exclamation point was introduced into English printing in the 15th century and was called the “sign of admiration or exclamation,” or the “note of admiration.” One theory of its origin is that it was originally the Latin word for joy, Io, written with the ‘I’ written above the ‘o.’
I see it as a seed, the little dot being the seed, and the vertical mark above it being the stem.
What steam does not stem from a stalk of talk?
The lips move and a grace of air and thunder is gurgled in the clouds.
Showing posts with label Michael McClure. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Michael McClure. Show all posts
Friday, May 28, 2010
Thursday, April 8, 2010
Vox Humana
It’s raining. And it’s cold. Valentine’s Day is two days away. I turn the key in our Subaru and the engine starts. I am returning a book, The Cavendish Laboratory, and two DVDs, Iron Man and Fun With Dick And Jane, to the library. Within a second or two, a voice emerges from the speakers of our CD player. The voice is rough, ragged, mournful. It is Bob Dylan singing “When The Deal Goes Down,” a song from his album Modern Times. A slow waltz, the song is wistful and introspective, gathering strength and resignation as it moves gracefully toward deliverance.
The song is about loyalty and devotion in a world of painful disillusion and ephemeral hopes. It is also about loss and endurance. It says that I will be there when you die. I will stick with you through thick and thin. Each word is growled, almost shoveled, with tender determination. Dylan’s voice encompasses a range of grit and delicacy. It is the perfect instrument for this song. A younger voice would not have the richness of timbre and emotive force to deliver the song with the same magnitude of conviction and authenticity.
Or would it? Tom Waits had the voice of a much older man when he released his first album, Closing Time, in 1973. Dylan himself sounded much older than his 20-something years when he released his first barrage of albums in the early 60s. There was distance in it, and the sweat of stevedores and ranch hands. It was uncannily mature. Unseasonably weathered. This was a guy who had been places. You didn’t need to touch or him or shake his hand or buy him a drink. You just knew it. It was in his voice.
The melody of “When The Deal Goes Down” is based on a song popularized by Bing Crosby circa 1931 called “Where The Blue Of The Night (Meets The Gold Of The Day).” Crosby’s version is vastly different; the same wistfulness is there, but the voice is more robust, fuller, more varnished, lustrous and light. Louis Armstrong said that Crosby’s voice was like “gold poured from a cup,” and that Crosby was the only white singer playing on the jukeboxes of Harlem.
A journalist once described Louis Armstrong’s voice as a “wheelbarrow crunching up a gravel driveway.” Armstrong himself referred to it as a “sawmill voice.” What created that singular voice, according to jazz drummer Baby Dodds, was a long-lasting cold aboard a riverboat while playing with the Fate Marable band in the early 1920s.
I can see the lights of that riverboat, and a man’s voice echoing over the languid water of the Mississippi like the machinery of heaven.
Our fingerprints betray our identity if we rob an estate or kill someone. But it is our voice that identifies the essence of our selves. The most obscure recesses of our being find themselves revealed in the timbre of our voice, its quiver, its exclamations and inflections.
The human voice is essentially a membrane, a muscular valve. The first person to get a good look at this little apparatus in our throat was a Spanish singing professor named Manuel Garcia.
One September day in 1854, Garcia recorded for the Transactions of the Seventeenth International Medical Congress, published in London, in 1881, I was strolling in the garden of the Palais Royal, preoccupied with the ever-recurring wish so often repressed as unrealisable, when suddenly I saw the two mirrors of the laryngoscope in their respective positions, as if actually present before my eyes. I went straight to Charriere, the surgical instrument maker, and asking if he happened to possess a small mirror with a long handle, was informed that he had a little dentist's mirror, which had been one of the failures of the London Exhibition of 1851. I bought it for six francs. Having obtained also a hand mirror, I returned home at once, very impatient to begin my experiments. I placed against the uvula the little mirror (which I had heated in warm water and carefully dried) and by flashing upon its surface with the hand mirror a ray of sunlight, I saw at once, to my great joy, the glottis wide open before, me, and so fully exposed that I could perceive a portion of the trachea. When my excitement had somewhat subsided, I began to examine what was passing before my eyes. The manner in which the glottis silently opened and shut, and moved in the act of phonation, filled me with wonder.
Garcia was not the first to see a larynx, or speculate on how it worked. Circa 200 AD, the renowned physician Claudius Galen, probably the most influential medical author of his time, was the first to describe the larynx with its three major cartilages and paired muscles. He compared the larynx to a flute, and correctly identified it as the instrument of voice production. In the sixth century, an unknown Italian artist created a mosaic for the Basilica of St. Apollinaris in Ravenna, Italy, that may well be the first picture of the vocal organ: just below the image of Christ the Redeemer is a depiction of the heart surmounted by the larynx, maintaining the belief that the voice come from the heart. Theologians of that time wondered what the voice of God sounded like, whether angels and/or devils spoke, or who spoke first, Adam, or Eve?
Circa the 15th century, Leonardo da Vinci dissected more than 30 cadavers in hospitals at Florence, Milan, and Rome, and included several drawings of the vocal organ in his textbook Quaderni d’Anatomia. He squeezed the lungs of a goose to produce tones, speculating that the human larynx worked in similar fashion.
This goose (and goosed) postulate was further elaborated in the 18th century when Antoine Ferrein, professor of anatomy at the University of Montpelier, presented a series of articles before the Royal Academy of Science, in which he described numerous experiments on human and animal cadaver larynges. He was the first to coin the term “vocal cords,” as he postulated that the ligaments of the larynx were analogous to the cords of the violin, which were at first made of sheep gut, stretched, dried, and twisted.
Ferrein was correct in observing that the tones of the voice vary with the speed of the vibrations, but misconceived the structures of the larynx, which aren’t really cords, but folds, or lips. Seen from above, the vocal folds resemble a vagina, which gives renewed perspective to the idea of delivering a speech. When we speak, we labor to give life to an idea in a ball of wriggling words. We fill words with our breath, our pneuma, our consciousness and being. We give them ligament and motion. Circulation and shape.
In the 19th century, in 1839, the physiologist Johannes Müller conducted a series of experiments in which he demonstrated the myoelastic theory of phonation (myoelastic meaning closely associated smooth muscle fibers and elastic connective tissue) and confirmed that the voice is produced by the airstream that originates in the lungs and sets the vocal folds in vibration.
The anatomy of the larynx was well understood by the end of the 19th century, but no one had as yet seen how the folds move and ripple, contract and expand, when it is in actual use. It was Manuel Garcia who was able to achieve and demonstrate these things. He described in exquisite detail the movement of the larynx during the production of sound, noting variations of pitch and tonal register, how nuances of sound undulated through the folds of the larynx. He could see how they were shaped by muscle and ligament, how air pressure affected the supple malleability of this critical membrane.
Writing for the Royal Society of London in an essay titled “Observations On The Human Voice” in 1855, Garcia wrote: We soon discover that the brilliant and powerful sounds of the chest-register contract the cavity of the larynx, and close still more its orifice; and, on the contrary, that veiled notes of moderate power, open both so as to render any observation easy. The falsetto register especially possesses this prerogative, as well as the first notes of the head-voice. So as to render these facts more precise, we will study in the voice of the tenor the ascending progression of the chest-register, and in the soprano that of the falsetto and head-registers.
The larynx is not the only organ involved in the shaping and generation of the voice. The entire body is involved. At the outbreak of World War I, a young man of 18 years named Alfred Wolfsohn was called to serve as a medic in the front-line trenches. He witnessed unspeakable horrors, men ripped apart, bleeding, howling in agony. Broken, shattered, driven to madness by the horrors he had seen, he was hospitalized for shell-shock.
Wolfsohn felt immense guilt because of a man he had heard writhing in pain on the battlefield that he had not been able to go to for fear of being killed, and was certain that that was the reason he continued to be wracked by aural hallucinations. He could not get the voices of men howling and moaning in the agonies of their wounds out of his head. Prolonged psychiatric treatment did not help. He determined to find a cure himself. He hit on the idea of singing. He intuited that by expressing his anguish through the medium of his voice he might be able to purge himself of the pain and hallucinations.
It worked. Wolfshohn discovered a form of vocal catharsis. He not only expressed in singing the sounds of suffering he had heard on the battlefield, and the torments of his own mental anguish, but feelings of joy and exaltation as well. Strength, sweat, thirst, hunger, lust, elation and anger, everything that makes us feel alive are part of our vocal spectrum. Talking is purgation. Singing is transcendence. When we open our mouths, and shape the sound of our inner universe in words, we instantly grow lighter. Those leaden burdens trapped in our being are exploded into swifts of poetry and invocation.
A Jew, Wolfsohn fled Germany in 1939 and established himself as a singing teacher in London. Because of his discoveries, he was able to broaden the range of singers whose voices were constricted by neuroses and malignant worries. Those who took lessons with him committed themselves not only to explore the many aspects of the human psyche and look for its rapport with the body, but to have the courage to expose their inner demons in the flesh of a song, the precipitate of a sublimated pain.
I think of James Brown. I recall those electrifying performances I used to see on television in the mid-60s on shows such as Shindig and Hullabaloo.
Brown made an appearance on Shindig on September 1st, 1965, that was shattering. He sings with such power and naked energy that it seems more like a force of nature than a song. He sings “Please Please Please” with an anguish so intense it teeters on exaltation. He sings as if he is lifting the world from a mire of torment. His voice tears the air, rips it to shreds. He falls to his knees. A man appears from backstage, gently lays a cape over his shoulders and lifts him from the stage, as if Brown were too shattered and spent to stand. They begin to leave the stage, Brown’s benefactor with his arm around him, leading him away. Brown tosses the cape off and rushes back to the mike. He’s not done yet. He pleads again and again. Don’t go. Please don’t go.
Another figure I associate with that ability to pull heavy, unresolved conflicts and yearnings and desolations out of your being and use them to make something powerful and riveting is Janis Joplin. She had a voice of such total conviction and power it passed through you like a freight train.
Joplin grew up in Port Arthur, Texas. During high school, she developed a severe case of acne which elicited jeers and name-calling from her fellow students. That alone was isolating and painful but there were also notable differences in her personality, her candor and energy that were unsettling to people, particularly people who were more adapted to a culture of materialism and the need to “fit in.”
Joplin identified with the beats. She loved the immediacy, spontaneity, and rawness of their poetry, their heroic lunacy, their openness to experience, their hunger to expand perception, their fascination with the currents and fluctuations of consciousness, and especially their struggles to transcend a materialistic culture that imposed a Procustean obsession with wealth and commerce on everyone. It is wonderfully apt that the poet Michael McClure would one day pen the lyrics to the song “Mercedes Benz” for Joplin.
All this was in her voice. The richness of its timbre, the huskiness of its vigor, its élan vital.
Joplin is one of those people who, before seeing what they actually look like, you can imagine their appearance simply by hearing them. You know instinctively what they’re all about, how they carry themselves, how they smile, how they shine around other people or come to life on a stage. You could feel jubilance and defiance in Joplin’s voice, the hugeness of a life lived intensely and unreservedly. If the eyes are the windows to the soul, the voice is its furnace. Everything pitched in its timbre warms the house of our language.
I could go on all day about voices. Nina Simone has a voice of soft sophistication mingled with unabashed intensity. Listening to her makes you feel wise, and strong. Ella Fitzgerald had a voice as mercurial and bright as Christmas tinsel, yet steady as time.
Amy Winehouse has a voice of nectar. She is the Circe of singers. She makes you feel shipwrecked and open to seductions of forbidden pleasure.
There is a crepuscular region between song and everyday speech called poetry. Here the voice is neither the familiar sound of ourselves breaking the silence at a breakfast table, nor the fullness of our spirit raised in singing. It is in the zone of poetry that our voice becomes the entranced expression of what is ineffable and strange in us.
On the evening of March 13th my wife and I went to hear Michael McClure read his poetry at the Rainier Valley Cultural Center here in Seattle. McClure read in the center’s theatre, a convivial room with comfortable seats, blue velvet curtains and the tangle of stage lights silhouetted on the architrave above the stage. Nearby streetlights tinted a row of windows on the north wall whose textured glass sparkled with a warm golden hue. McClure, now in his late seventies, still has a veneer of youth, the lively affability of a much younger man. His shock of white wavy hair contrasted sharply with his dark clothes, and his presence on the stage was gracious and poised. He held the microphone at a careful angle as it had a tendency to crackle if it weren’t held in a specific position.
McClure has an exceptionally pleasing voice, smooth, mellow, rich. He reads in a very measured manner, precise and focused, relaxed, but vigilant, according a high level of attention to each syllable, each shade and nuance.
There is an intimacy in the voice of a poet that is more sublimated and distant in the voice of a singer, or the grave tones of a politician or lawyer. The effort made toward minting coins of elemental sound imbue the voice with a luxury of nuance. Coins have images. The mind turns intaglio in its words, silver in its vowels, copper in the jingle of its consonants. The voice is allowed an extravagance that is more restrained in conversation, splurges itself in fire and amber. Its tones are raised. Its folds unfold. It becomes more spirit than flesh. More flesh than spirit. It is, essentially, the stem of the throat burgeoning in sound. One’s inner being rises and drops in arcs of ghostly vibration, pumping space with a crisis of jaw and paradise.
The song is about loyalty and devotion in a world of painful disillusion and ephemeral hopes. It is also about loss and endurance. It says that I will be there when you die. I will stick with you through thick and thin. Each word is growled, almost shoveled, with tender determination. Dylan’s voice encompasses a range of grit and delicacy. It is the perfect instrument for this song. A younger voice would not have the richness of timbre and emotive force to deliver the song with the same magnitude of conviction and authenticity.
Or would it? Tom Waits had the voice of a much older man when he released his first album, Closing Time, in 1973. Dylan himself sounded much older than his 20-something years when he released his first barrage of albums in the early 60s. There was distance in it, and the sweat of stevedores and ranch hands. It was uncannily mature. Unseasonably weathered. This was a guy who had been places. You didn’t need to touch or him or shake his hand or buy him a drink. You just knew it. It was in his voice.
The melody of “When The Deal Goes Down” is based on a song popularized by Bing Crosby circa 1931 called “Where The Blue Of The Night (Meets The Gold Of The Day).” Crosby’s version is vastly different; the same wistfulness is there, but the voice is more robust, fuller, more varnished, lustrous and light. Louis Armstrong said that Crosby’s voice was like “gold poured from a cup,” and that Crosby was the only white singer playing on the jukeboxes of Harlem.
A journalist once described Louis Armstrong’s voice as a “wheelbarrow crunching up a gravel driveway.” Armstrong himself referred to it as a “sawmill voice.” What created that singular voice, according to jazz drummer Baby Dodds, was a long-lasting cold aboard a riverboat while playing with the Fate Marable band in the early 1920s.
I can see the lights of that riverboat, and a man’s voice echoing over the languid water of the Mississippi like the machinery of heaven.
Our fingerprints betray our identity if we rob an estate or kill someone. But it is our voice that identifies the essence of our selves. The most obscure recesses of our being find themselves revealed in the timbre of our voice, its quiver, its exclamations and inflections.
The human voice is essentially a membrane, a muscular valve. The first person to get a good look at this little apparatus in our throat was a Spanish singing professor named Manuel Garcia.
One September day in 1854, Garcia recorded for the Transactions of the Seventeenth International Medical Congress, published in London, in 1881, I was strolling in the garden of the Palais Royal, preoccupied with the ever-recurring wish so often repressed as unrealisable, when suddenly I saw the two mirrors of the laryngoscope in their respective positions, as if actually present before my eyes. I went straight to Charriere, the surgical instrument maker, and asking if he happened to possess a small mirror with a long handle, was informed that he had a little dentist's mirror, which had been one of the failures of the London Exhibition of 1851. I bought it for six francs. Having obtained also a hand mirror, I returned home at once, very impatient to begin my experiments. I placed against the uvula the little mirror (which I had heated in warm water and carefully dried) and by flashing upon its surface with the hand mirror a ray of sunlight, I saw at once, to my great joy, the glottis wide open before, me, and so fully exposed that I could perceive a portion of the trachea. When my excitement had somewhat subsided, I began to examine what was passing before my eyes. The manner in which the glottis silently opened and shut, and moved in the act of phonation, filled me with wonder.
Garcia was not the first to see a larynx, or speculate on how it worked. Circa 200 AD, the renowned physician Claudius Galen, probably the most influential medical author of his time, was the first to describe the larynx with its three major cartilages and paired muscles. He compared the larynx to a flute, and correctly identified it as the instrument of voice production. In the sixth century, an unknown Italian artist created a mosaic for the Basilica of St. Apollinaris in Ravenna, Italy, that may well be the first picture of the vocal organ: just below the image of Christ the Redeemer is a depiction of the heart surmounted by the larynx, maintaining the belief that the voice come from the heart. Theologians of that time wondered what the voice of God sounded like, whether angels and/or devils spoke, or who spoke first, Adam, or Eve?
Circa the 15th century, Leonardo da Vinci dissected more than 30 cadavers in hospitals at Florence, Milan, and Rome, and included several drawings of the vocal organ in his textbook Quaderni d’Anatomia. He squeezed the lungs of a goose to produce tones, speculating that the human larynx worked in similar fashion.
This goose (and goosed) postulate was further elaborated in the 18th century when Antoine Ferrein, professor of anatomy at the University of Montpelier, presented a series of articles before the Royal Academy of Science, in which he described numerous experiments on human and animal cadaver larynges. He was the first to coin the term “vocal cords,” as he postulated that the ligaments of the larynx were analogous to the cords of the violin, which were at first made of sheep gut, stretched, dried, and twisted.
Ferrein was correct in observing that the tones of the voice vary with the speed of the vibrations, but misconceived the structures of the larynx, which aren’t really cords, but folds, or lips. Seen from above, the vocal folds resemble a vagina, which gives renewed perspective to the idea of delivering a speech. When we speak, we labor to give life to an idea in a ball of wriggling words. We fill words with our breath, our pneuma, our consciousness and being. We give them ligament and motion. Circulation and shape.
In the 19th century, in 1839, the physiologist Johannes Müller conducted a series of experiments in which he demonstrated the myoelastic theory of phonation (myoelastic meaning closely associated smooth muscle fibers and elastic connective tissue) and confirmed that the voice is produced by the airstream that originates in the lungs and sets the vocal folds in vibration.
The anatomy of the larynx was well understood by the end of the 19th century, but no one had as yet seen how the folds move and ripple, contract and expand, when it is in actual use. It was Manuel Garcia who was able to achieve and demonstrate these things. He described in exquisite detail the movement of the larynx during the production of sound, noting variations of pitch and tonal register, how nuances of sound undulated through the folds of the larynx. He could see how they were shaped by muscle and ligament, how air pressure affected the supple malleability of this critical membrane.
Writing for the Royal Society of London in an essay titled “Observations On The Human Voice” in 1855, Garcia wrote: We soon discover that the brilliant and powerful sounds of the chest-register contract the cavity of the larynx, and close still more its orifice; and, on the contrary, that veiled notes of moderate power, open both so as to render any observation easy. The falsetto register especially possesses this prerogative, as well as the first notes of the head-voice. So as to render these facts more precise, we will study in the voice of the tenor the ascending progression of the chest-register, and in the soprano that of the falsetto and head-registers.
The larynx is not the only organ involved in the shaping and generation of the voice. The entire body is involved. At the outbreak of World War I, a young man of 18 years named Alfred Wolfsohn was called to serve as a medic in the front-line trenches. He witnessed unspeakable horrors, men ripped apart, bleeding, howling in agony. Broken, shattered, driven to madness by the horrors he had seen, he was hospitalized for shell-shock.
Wolfsohn felt immense guilt because of a man he had heard writhing in pain on the battlefield that he had not been able to go to for fear of being killed, and was certain that that was the reason he continued to be wracked by aural hallucinations. He could not get the voices of men howling and moaning in the agonies of their wounds out of his head. Prolonged psychiatric treatment did not help. He determined to find a cure himself. He hit on the idea of singing. He intuited that by expressing his anguish through the medium of his voice he might be able to purge himself of the pain and hallucinations.
It worked. Wolfshohn discovered a form of vocal catharsis. He not only expressed in singing the sounds of suffering he had heard on the battlefield, and the torments of his own mental anguish, but feelings of joy and exaltation as well. Strength, sweat, thirst, hunger, lust, elation and anger, everything that makes us feel alive are part of our vocal spectrum. Talking is purgation. Singing is transcendence. When we open our mouths, and shape the sound of our inner universe in words, we instantly grow lighter. Those leaden burdens trapped in our being are exploded into swifts of poetry and invocation.
A Jew, Wolfsohn fled Germany in 1939 and established himself as a singing teacher in London. Because of his discoveries, he was able to broaden the range of singers whose voices were constricted by neuroses and malignant worries. Those who took lessons with him committed themselves not only to explore the many aspects of the human psyche and look for its rapport with the body, but to have the courage to expose their inner demons in the flesh of a song, the precipitate of a sublimated pain.
I think of James Brown. I recall those electrifying performances I used to see on television in the mid-60s on shows such as Shindig and Hullabaloo.
Brown made an appearance on Shindig on September 1st, 1965, that was shattering. He sings with such power and naked energy that it seems more like a force of nature than a song. He sings “Please Please Please” with an anguish so intense it teeters on exaltation. He sings as if he is lifting the world from a mire of torment. His voice tears the air, rips it to shreds. He falls to his knees. A man appears from backstage, gently lays a cape over his shoulders and lifts him from the stage, as if Brown were too shattered and spent to stand. They begin to leave the stage, Brown’s benefactor with his arm around him, leading him away. Brown tosses the cape off and rushes back to the mike. He’s not done yet. He pleads again and again. Don’t go. Please don’t go.
Another figure I associate with that ability to pull heavy, unresolved conflicts and yearnings and desolations out of your being and use them to make something powerful and riveting is Janis Joplin. She had a voice of such total conviction and power it passed through you like a freight train.
Joplin grew up in Port Arthur, Texas. During high school, she developed a severe case of acne which elicited jeers and name-calling from her fellow students. That alone was isolating and painful but there were also notable differences in her personality, her candor and energy that were unsettling to people, particularly people who were more adapted to a culture of materialism and the need to “fit in.”
Joplin identified with the beats. She loved the immediacy, spontaneity, and rawness of their poetry, their heroic lunacy, their openness to experience, their hunger to expand perception, their fascination with the currents and fluctuations of consciousness, and especially their struggles to transcend a materialistic culture that imposed a Procustean obsession with wealth and commerce on everyone. It is wonderfully apt that the poet Michael McClure would one day pen the lyrics to the song “Mercedes Benz” for Joplin.
All this was in her voice. The richness of its timbre, the huskiness of its vigor, its élan vital.
Joplin is one of those people who, before seeing what they actually look like, you can imagine their appearance simply by hearing them. You know instinctively what they’re all about, how they carry themselves, how they smile, how they shine around other people or come to life on a stage. You could feel jubilance and defiance in Joplin’s voice, the hugeness of a life lived intensely and unreservedly. If the eyes are the windows to the soul, the voice is its furnace. Everything pitched in its timbre warms the house of our language.
I could go on all day about voices. Nina Simone has a voice of soft sophistication mingled with unabashed intensity. Listening to her makes you feel wise, and strong. Ella Fitzgerald had a voice as mercurial and bright as Christmas tinsel, yet steady as time.
Amy Winehouse has a voice of nectar. She is the Circe of singers. She makes you feel shipwrecked and open to seductions of forbidden pleasure.
There is a crepuscular region between song and everyday speech called poetry. Here the voice is neither the familiar sound of ourselves breaking the silence at a breakfast table, nor the fullness of our spirit raised in singing. It is in the zone of poetry that our voice becomes the entranced expression of what is ineffable and strange in us.
On the evening of March 13th my wife and I went to hear Michael McClure read his poetry at the Rainier Valley Cultural Center here in Seattle. McClure read in the center’s theatre, a convivial room with comfortable seats, blue velvet curtains and the tangle of stage lights silhouetted on the architrave above the stage. Nearby streetlights tinted a row of windows on the north wall whose textured glass sparkled with a warm golden hue. McClure, now in his late seventies, still has a veneer of youth, the lively affability of a much younger man. His shock of white wavy hair contrasted sharply with his dark clothes, and his presence on the stage was gracious and poised. He held the microphone at a careful angle as it had a tendency to crackle if it weren’t held in a specific position.
McClure has an exceptionally pleasing voice, smooth, mellow, rich. He reads in a very measured manner, precise and focused, relaxed, but vigilant, according a high level of attention to each syllable, each shade and nuance.
There is an intimacy in the voice of a poet that is more sublimated and distant in the voice of a singer, or the grave tones of a politician or lawyer. The effort made toward minting coins of elemental sound imbue the voice with a luxury of nuance. Coins have images. The mind turns intaglio in its words, silver in its vowels, copper in the jingle of its consonants. The voice is allowed an extravagance that is more restrained in conversation, splurges itself in fire and amber. Its tones are raised. Its folds unfold. It becomes more spirit than flesh. More flesh than spirit. It is, essentially, the stem of the throat burgeoning in sound. One’s inner being rises and drops in arcs of ghostly vibration, pumping space with a crisis of jaw and paradise.
Thursday, April 1, 2010
Poetry As Protein
Mysteriosos, and Other Poems
Michael McClure
New Directions, 2010
In 1952, a biologist named Stanley Miller tried to create life. He sealed water, methane, ammonia, and hydrogen inside a sterile array of glass tubes and flasks connected in a loop. One flask held water, another contained a pair of electrodes. The water was heated to induce evaporation and sparks were fired between the electrodes to simulate lightning through the atmosphere, which was cooled again so that the water could condense and trickle back into the first flask in a continuous cycle. In such manner, Miller produced a number of amino acids that are used to make proteins in living cells. Sugars, lipids, and some of the building blocks for nucleic acids were also formed. No actual organisms were produced, but the experiment demonstrated a feasible answer to one of life’s greatest mysteries: life itself.
It has become a truism to say that life is full of mysteries. But what else can one say? What isn’t, looked at closely, intently, not a mystery? A drop of pond water holds fantasias of unicellular organisms, paramecium with hundreds of tiny cilia along their borders in a flutter of exuberant life, flagellates with their whips in a whirl of constant rotation, amoeba, all feet and protoplasm, wiggling around in a quest for food, and heliozoa, which means “sun animals,” groups of amoeba in little spheres with spikes sticking out like a pattern of sun rays. The spikes are tiny poison needles that pierce their prey. The needle converts to a straw and sucks the essence of their kill.
And then there are the lovely diatoms, eucharistic algae encased within a cell wall made of silica called a frustule, a glassy shell feathered and fractured in a dazzling array of infinite pattern.
Life, consciousness, and a charged language bristling with the mysteries of existence have been at the core of Michael McClure’s poetry for decades. Each poem is a mysterioso, an owl pellet of bones and fur and exoskeletons, a pupa of crackling metamorphosis, a sphere of crisis, an aggregate of words and tendrils alive with revelation.
Misterioso, with an ‘i,’ is a musical direction calling for mystery, such as the opening and closing theme of Bruckner’s Symphony No. 3, or the beginning of Aaron Copland’s “Cryptic,” from Statements, but it is most famously associated with Thelonius Monk’s album of 1958 called Mysterioso, which had De Chirico’s 1915 The Seer (or The Prophet) on the cover. “In the shadow of a man who walks in the sun,” observed De Chirico, “there are more enigmas than in all religions past, present, and future.”
Hence, McClure’s latest collection of poetry is aptly titled. It is divided into six sections, “Something Of India,” “Grahhrs,” “Mysteriosos,” “Cameos,” “Dear Being,” and “Double Moire.”
Among the poems in the first section, “Something Of India,” is an image of such stunning power I was reminded of the train in the Lumière brothers 1895 motion picture Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, frightening the audience out of their chairs and instigating a panicked exodus into the street, so real was the image of the train coming at them. This is the poem “Nagarhole Park,” which I heard read by McClure at the Rainier Valley Cultural Center in Seattle before I saw the poem on the printed page, in which an elephant charges, “shrieking in rage/ and our aged guide,/ the Anglo-Indian colonel,/ shakes one finger/ out the car window./ ‘Stop!’/ he shouts to his ‘old friend’/ and she does/ and she stares/ short-sightedly/ from wrinkled eye bags/ AND/ SHE/ TURNS/ AWAY/ from us,/ then swings back/ and bellows/ her jaw-shaking trumpet blast,/ and shuffles/ away sideways/ into the swinging branches.”
The image works so powerfully on the imagination because of the deft placement of words, economy of description, each word and phrase evoking a precisely grasped image, which the keen perceptions of the poet have captured in telling phrases, such as “wrinkled eye bags” and “jaw-shaking trumpet blast.” The thrilling contradiction between the immense power of the elephant and the frail gesture of a shaken finger sufficient to stop the charge of the animal, an “old friend.” I can feel the compassion of the Anglo-Indian colonel toward the being of this elephant, her character and warmth, her age and impaired vision, and the compassion the poet feels for both, and for the country at large, and the circumstances of their observation. The wildness of our planet is in retreat. Polar bears, giant pandas, Alaskan wolves, Asian lions, jaguarundi, chimpanzees, rainbow parrotfish, bees, and poetry itself are all victims of unchecked capitalism.
McClure has long had a strong immersion in what we term “nature,” which is in fact everywhere, not just exotic parks in India, or wilderness areas in the United States, places set aside in the commons which the Republicans lick their salivating chops over, rabid for uranium and oil, and the anemic protection these places sometimes receive from the Democrats. Nature is a finger, a thumb, a claw on your cat, a bur stuck in the curls of your dog’s fur, a glass of water, a mole, a pimple, a crooked tooth, the hyacinths growing by the window, the wisteria by the porch in hysterical patterns of leaf and twig. Nature is around us, on us, beside us, under us, and in us. “We carry stores of DNA in our nuclei,” observes Lewis Thomas in his essay “The Lives Of A Cell,” “that may have come in, at one time or another, from the fusion of ancestral cells and the linking of ancestral organisms in symbiosis.” Each of our bodies is a galaxy of intercommunicating cells. Everything is shared. Even the enzymes of grasses bear a family resemblance to the enzymes of whales.
This is the rapture, and anguish, that drive McClure’s poetry. He is much older now, but his poetry still has the ring of youth. It is jarring to see McClure with wrinkles. It is hard to think of him as being old. But the wisdom he is alert to within his essential being is ancient. “The most primitive one-celled creatures/ are more sophisticated than my hungers,” he writes in poem 4 of the section titled “Dear Being.”
Perhaps the secret to eternal youth is tuning in to what is most ancient in our beings?
McClure writes with great sensuality, a mingling of fleshly pleasure with metaphysical raptures. “SMILE. SMILE WITH THE SOFT EDGE/ OF THE MIND,” he writes in “Mysterioso Thirteen.” This poem, like most of the others in the collection, is splayed on the page in McClure’s characteristic style, center-justified, so that the lines appear to be unfolding, branching out from a spine, or thorax, in the middle. “Pliant as the lip of an abalone,” he continues, “Strong as the smallest worm in its harshest/ and tenderly nourishing realm./ NO MIND. NO BODY. GONE. GONE./ I stroke my hands over my chest/ and your buttocks/ WE/ SMILE/ INSPIRED/ by protein pleasure/ and loveliness./ So solid.”
The words ‘meat’ and ‘protein’ emerge frequently in McClure’s work. Protein is energy arranged in a linear chain and folded into a globular form. They participate in virtually every process within cells. The shape into which a protein naturally folds is known as its native conformation. If, as I do, you begin to see a natural affiliation with the form and generative structures of poetry, I would say, yes, absolutely. Who can not see that? Only the fussiest scientist would shake his or her head in indignation.
“We defeat presence or nothingness,” “Mysterioso Thirteen” continues, “All of me and all of you/ ARE/ this cameo of perfection/ with smooth polished edges.// THIS/ IS/ REALLY IT!” it ecstatically concludes. I find the use of the word ‘cameo’ of interest here. The word refers variously to a technique of engraving on a gem so that the raised surface of the image contrasts in a different hue from the background, and a brief appearance by an actor in a theatrical performance. The word has a concrete, highly tactile sensuality within the context of the poem, mingled with its connotation of brevity, a transitory appearance, so that the poem’s epiphanic ending, “THIS/ IS/ REALLY IT!” sounds of urgency, excitement, and neural éclat.
Included in this collection is a poem in tribute to Philip Lamantia, “Philip Lamantia’s Poem,” and is dedicated to Lamantia’s wife Nancy Peters.
Lamantia, who passed away in 2005, was, as many of the cognoscenti are already familiar, pivotal to the poetry renaissance in San Francisco, its robust evolution from the 50s into the 60s and beyond, but also, as an Italian-American, as a citizen of San Francisco and as a citizen of the world, he remains the poet in the United States most closely aligned in spirit and art to the French surrealist movement begun by André Breton in France in the 1920s. He was urbane, continental, and even in old age, a very handsome man, who Kerouac described in his novel Desolation Angels (naming him David D’Angeli), as “the most beautiful man, he has perfect features, like Tyrone Power, yet more subtle and esoteric, and that accent he talks in I do not know where he picked it up -- It’s like a Moor educated at Oxford, something distinctly Arabic or Aramaean about David (or Carthaginian, like Augustine)…. ”
McClure compares Lamantia to the Spanish Baroque lyric poet Luis de Gongora y Argote. “Goodbye handsome Gongora/ of San Francisco,” he begins, then, a few lines down, reminiscences on their more intimate time together, “After your adventures/ and travel we would sit around listening/ and watching the scarlet ribbons/ of your voice move in the sea-green/ foam of the air.” This deeply reverent and hallucinatory scene, with its syllables unrolling in a sensual synesthesia, beautifully captures the experience of being in the presence of Lamantia, a man for whom even conversation was a form of uninterrupted poetry.
McClure has also dedicated a section to his friend Francis Crick, the molecular biologist whose research played a crucial rule in discovering the genetic code and helical structure of the DNA molecule. Crick, who passed away as recently as 2004, contributed a beautifully written and heartfelt essay titled “A Scientist’s View” on McClure’s poetry and its importance to him for the 1975 Margins Symposium on Michael McClure. “What appeals to me most about Michael's poems,” Crick observed, “is the fury and the imagery of them. I love the vividness of his reactions and the very personal turns and swirls of the lines. The worlds in which I myself live, the private world of personal reactions, the biological world (animals and plants and even bacteria chase each other through the poems), the world of the atom and molecule, the stars and the galaxies, are all there; and in between, above and below, stands man, the howling mammal, contrived out of "meat" by chance and necessity. If I were a poet I would write like Michael McClure - if only I had his talent.”
The poems in this section, with the curious title “Double Moire,” (it is a scientific term referring to a form of optical differentiation, or refractive index) are brief poems of six lines, each an enigma as rich in data as the Murchison meteorite, a fist of words whose grip must be coaxed open by repeated reading. Each begins with a predication written large in majuscules, then elaborated in a puzzling olio of image and reflection. “ACTION IS PROTEIN,” begins the poem at the bottom of page 114. “It is politics of flesh/ and non-being, NOT nothing, not something,/ here in the face. Here in the stomach and arms./ Just a transient truth, never a riddle/ caught in the runes. Each being knows the tune,/ like the giant seals enraged and high with battling.”
Action feeds protein as much as protein feeds action. The “politics of flesh” is answerable in many ways, but certainly the issue of abortion and right to privacy comes to mind, as well as a multitude of other issues ranging from sexual oppression to obesity, all part of the spectrum of conflicts raging - as the giant seals - in the body politic. The insistence that non-being is “not nothing” is a curious assertion. This odd mingling of the negative and affirmative has a strong correspondence to tenets of Zen philosophy. According to Te-shan Hsuan-chien, a Zen master of the T’ang dynasty period in China, Zen is a philosophy of absolute negations which are at the same time absolute affirmations.
The essence of thinking is to analyze. To take apart, to dissect. To discriminate. To see how all the parts of a thing contribute to a moving whole. But Zen is synthetic, like the polymer chains that build into protein. It is a discrimination based on non-discrimination. On paradox. On contradiction. On chains of interacting forces. On twigs and stones and the luxury of consciousness. On heat. On cold. On Mysteriosos of nothingness and gold.
Michael McClure
New Directions, 2010
In 1952, a biologist named Stanley Miller tried to create life. He sealed water, methane, ammonia, and hydrogen inside a sterile array of glass tubes and flasks connected in a loop. One flask held water, another contained a pair of electrodes. The water was heated to induce evaporation and sparks were fired between the electrodes to simulate lightning through the atmosphere, which was cooled again so that the water could condense and trickle back into the first flask in a continuous cycle. In such manner, Miller produced a number of amino acids that are used to make proteins in living cells. Sugars, lipids, and some of the building blocks for nucleic acids were also formed. No actual organisms were produced, but the experiment demonstrated a feasible answer to one of life’s greatest mysteries: life itself.
It has become a truism to say that life is full of mysteries. But what else can one say? What isn’t, looked at closely, intently, not a mystery? A drop of pond water holds fantasias of unicellular organisms, paramecium with hundreds of tiny cilia along their borders in a flutter of exuberant life, flagellates with their whips in a whirl of constant rotation, amoeba, all feet and protoplasm, wiggling around in a quest for food, and heliozoa, which means “sun animals,” groups of amoeba in little spheres with spikes sticking out like a pattern of sun rays. The spikes are tiny poison needles that pierce their prey. The needle converts to a straw and sucks the essence of their kill.
And then there are the lovely diatoms, eucharistic algae encased within a cell wall made of silica called a frustule, a glassy shell feathered and fractured in a dazzling array of infinite pattern.
Life, consciousness, and a charged language bristling with the mysteries of existence have been at the core of Michael McClure’s poetry for decades. Each poem is a mysterioso, an owl pellet of bones and fur and exoskeletons, a pupa of crackling metamorphosis, a sphere of crisis, an aggregate of words and tendrils alive with revelation.
Misterioso, with an ‘i,’ is a musical direction calling for mystery, such as the opening and closing theme of Bruckner’s Symphony No. 3, or the beginning of Aaron Copland’s “Cryptic,” from Statements, but it is most famously associated with Thelonius Monk’s album of 1958 called Mysterioso, which had De Chirico’s 1915 The Seer (or The Prophet) on the cover. “In the shadow of a man who walks in the sun,” observed De Chirico, “there are more enigmas than in all religions past, present, and future.”
Hence, McClure’s latest collection of poetry is aptly titled. It is divided into six sections, “Something Of India,” “Grahhrs,” “Mysteriosos,” “Cameos,” “Dear Being,” and “Double Moire.”
Among the poems in the first section, “Something Of India,” is an image of such stunning power I was reminded of the train in the Lumière brothers 1895 motion picture Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, frightening the audience out of their chairs and instigating a panicked exodus into the street, so real was the image of the train coming at them. This is the poem “Nagarhole Park,” which I heard read by McClure at the Rainier Valley Cultural Center in Seattle before I saw the poem on the printed page, in which an elephant charges, “shrieking in rage/ and our aged guide,/ the Anglo-Indian colonel,/ shakes one finger/ out the car window./ ‘Stop!’/ he shouts to his ‘old friend’/ and she does/ and she stares/ short-sightedly/ from wrinkled eye bags/ AND/ SHE/ TURNS/ AWAY/ from us,/ then swings back/ and bellows/ her jaw-shaking trumpet blast,/ and shuffles/ away sideways/ into the swinging branches.”
The image works so powerfully on the imagination because of the deft placement of words, economy of description, each word and phrase evoking a precisely grasped image, which the keen perceptions of the poet have captured in telling phrases, such as “wrinkled eye bags” and “jaw-shaking trumpet blast.” The thrilling contradiction between the immense power of the elephant and the frail gesture of a shaken finger sufficient to stop the charge of the animal, an “old friend.” I can feel the compassion of the Anglo-Indian colonel toward the being of this elephant, her character and warmth, her age and impaired vision, and the compassion the poet feels for both, and for the country at large, and the circumstances of their observation. The wildness of our planet is in retreat. Polar bears, giant pandas, Alaskan wolves, Asian lions, jaguarundi, chimpanzees, rainbow parrotfish, bees, and poetry itself are all victims of unchecked capitalism.
McClure has long had a strong immersion in what we term “nature,” which is in fact everywhere, not just exotic parks in India, or wilderness areas in the United States, places set aside in the commons which the Republicans lick their salivating chops over, rabid for uranium and oil, and the anemic protection these places sometimes receive from the Democrats. Nature is a finger, a thumb, a claw on your cat, a bur stuck in the curls of your dog’s fur, a glass of water, a mole, a pimple, a crooked tooth, the hyacinths growing by the window, the wisteria by the porch in hysterical patterns of leaf and twig. Nature is around us, on us, beside us, under us, and in us. “We carry stores of DNA in our nuclei,” observes Lewis Thomas in his essay “The Lives Of A Cell,” “that may have come in, at one time or another, from the fusion of ancestral cells and the linking of ancestral organisms in symbiosis.” Each of our bodies is a galaxy of intercommunicating cells. Everything is shared. Even the enzymes of grasses bear a family resemblance to the enzymes of whales.
This is the rapture, and anguish, that drive McClure’s poetry. He is much older now, but his poetry still has the ring of youth. It is jarring to see McClure with wrinkles. It is hard to think of him as being old. But the wisdom he is alert to within his essential being is ancient. “The most primitive one-celled creatures/ are more sophisticated than my hungers,” he writes in poem 4 of the section titled “Dear Being.”
Perhaps the secret to eternal youth is tuning in to what is most ancient in our beings?
McClure writes with great sensuality, a mingling of fleshly pleasure with metaphysical raptures. “SMILE. SMILE WITH THE SOFT EDGE/ OF THE MIND,” he writes in “Mysterioso Thirteen.” This poem, like most of the others in the collection, is splayed on the page in McClure’s characteristic style, center-justified, so that the lines appear to be unfolding, branching out from a spine, or thorax, in the middle. “Pliant as the lip of an abalone,” he continues, “Strong as the smallest worm in its harshest/ and tenderly nourishing realm./ NO MIND. NO BODY. GONE. GONE./ I stroke my hands over my chest/ and your buttocks/ WE/ SMILE/ INSPIRED/ by protein pleasure/ and loveliness./ So solid.”
The words ‘meat’ and ‘protein’ emerge frequently in McClure’s work. Protein is energy arranged in a linear chain and folded into a globular form. They participate in virtually every process within cells. The shape into which a protein naturally folds is known as its native conformation. If, as I do, you begin to see a natural affiliation with the form and generative structures of poetry, I would say, yes, absolutely. Who can not see that? Only the fussiest scientist would shake his or her head in indignation.
“We defeat presence or nothingness,” “Mysterioso Thirteen” continues, “All of me and all of you/ ARE/ this cameo of perfection/ with smooth polished edges.// THIS/ IS/ REALLY IT!” it ecstatically concludes. I find the use of the word ‘cameo’ of interest here. The word refers variously to a technique of engraving on a gem so that the raised surface of the image contrasts in a different hue from the background, and a brief appearance by an actor in a theatrical performance. The word has a concrete, highly tactile sensuality within the context of the poem, mingled with its connotation of brevity, a transitory appearance, so that the poem’s epiphanic ending, “THIS/ IS/ REALLY IT!” sounds of urgency, excitement, and neural éclat.
Included in this collection is a poem in tribute to Philip Lamantia, “Philip Lamantia’s Poem,” and is dedicated to Lamantia’s wife Nancy Peters.
Lamantia, who passed away in 2005, was, as many of the cognoscenti are already familiar, pivotal to the poetry renaissance in San Francisco, its robust evolution from the 50s into the 60s and beyond, but also, as an Italian-American, as a citizen of San Francisco and as a citizen of the world, he remains the poet in the United States most closely aligned in spirit and art to the French surrealist movement begun by André Breton in France in the 1920s. He was urbane, continental, and even in old age, a very handsome man, who Kerouac described in his novel Desolation Angels (naming him David D’Angeli), as “the most beautiful man, he has perfect features, like Tyrone Power, yet more subtle and esoteric, and that accent he talks in I do not know where he picked it up -- It’s like a Moor educated at Oxford, something distinctly Arabic or Aramaean about David (or Carthaginian, like Augustine)…. ”
McClure compares Lamantia to the Spanish Baroque lyric poet Luis de Gongora y Argote. “Goodbye handsome Gongora/ of San Francisco,” he begins, then, a few lines down, reminiscences on their more intimate time together, “After your adventures/ and travel we would sit around listening/ and watching the scarlet ribbons/ of your voice move in the sea-green/ foam of the air.” This deeply reverent and hallucinatory scene, with its syllables unrolling in a sensual synesthesia, beautifully captures the experience of being in the presence of Lamantia, a man for whom even conversation was a form of uninterrupted poetry.
McClure has also dedicated a section to his friend Francis Crick, the molecular biologist whose research played a crucial rule in discovering the genetic code and helical structure of the DNA molecule. Crick, who passed away as recently as 2004, contributed a beautifully written and heartfelt essay titled “A Scientist’s View” on McClure’s poetry and its importance to him for the 1975 Margins Symposium on Michael McClure. “What appeals to me most about Michael's poems,” Crick observed, “is the fury and the imagery of them. I love the vividness of his reactions and the very personal turns and swirls of the lines. The worlds in which I myself live, the private world of personal reactions, the biological world (animals and plants and even bacteria chase each other through the poems), the world of the atom and molecule, the stars and the galaxies, are all there; and in between, above and below, stands man, the howling mammal, contrived out of "meat" by chance and necessity. If I were a poet I would write like Michael McClure - if only I had his talent.”
The poems in this section, with the curious title “Double Moire,” (it is a scientific term referring to a form of optical differentiation, or refractive index) are brief poems of six lines, each an enigma as rich in data as the Murchison meteorite, a fist of words whose grip must be coaxed open by repeated reading. Each begins with a predication written large in majuscules, then elaborated in a puzzling olio of image and reflection. “ACTION IS PROTEIN,” begins the poem at the bottom of page 114. “It is politics of flesh/ and non-being, NOT nothing, not something,/ here in the face. Here in the stomach and arms./ Just a transient truth, never a riddle/ caught in the runes. Each being knows the tune,/ like the giant seals enraged and high with battling.”
Action feeds protein as much as protein feeds action. The “politics of flesh” is answerable in many ways, but certainly the issue of abortion and right to privacy comes to mind, as well as a multitude of other issues ranging from sexual oppression to obesity, all part of the spectrum of conflicts raging - as the giant seals - in the body politic. The insistence that non-being is “not nothing” is a curious assertion. This odd mingling of the negative and affirmative has a strong correspondence to tenets of Zen philosophy. According to Te-shan Hsuan-chien, a Zen master of the T’ang dynasty period in China, Zen is a philosophy of absolute negations which are at the same time absolute affirmations.
The essence of thinking is to analyze. To take apart, to dissect. To discriminate. To see how all the parts of a thing contribute to a moving whole. But Zen is synthetic, like the polymer chains that build into protein. It is a discrimination based on non-discrimination. On paradox. On contradiction. On chains of interacting forces. On twigs and stones and the luxury of consciousness. On heat. On cold. On Mysteriosos of nothingness and gold.
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