Collecting nothing, on Bloom

By Margaret Christakos

Here, I want to introduce my reading practice as one that can, on occasion, be kind of OCD. My interest in poetry is largely in its enticing containment of the sort of productive multitudinous contradiction that Walt Whitman liked to crow about. Every poem, even bad poems, honestly, offers me, if given a few hours, the enjoyment of moving onward from the nothingness and blankness (Whitman himself said; “I wait on the door-slab,” which is pretty funny after the declaration “I contain multitudes”!); well, like him I often wait on the door-slab of nothingness. Maybe this is both a feature of modern existence, which can be so overwhelming, so erasing of thought, and of the odd spaces I sense among my various identity aspects, mother, writer, teacher). Anyway I like to sense myself within a movement toward the pleasing, enervating somethingness which seems to percolate from poetry the longer I stay with it. This practice of attention pitches me into poems, into books of poetry, and then out again to speech, to write these little talks. It’s important to me they are talks, read from a paper. For what you have here is the sign that earlier in the day I was crushed over a computer typing in a kind of primal ecstasy. I was writing and reading, moving back and forth from Ronna Bloom’s Permiso, to a few other texts I have been reading, selections from my beloved Oxford Book of American Poetry (ed. David Lehman), to the Influency outline, to texts I called up from the Internet, churning my hips over a really hard, plain blue chair in my kitchen. I like to work in my kitchen, because during the day everyone else in my house is gone, and there I can be, typing, reading, thinking, so loud the shelves begin to shudder. I love this sensation and this learning and I love that I do it for you, because you have allowed me the privilege here, in this room, to speak it.

So really so far, we have nothing. Nothing salient, or bright; it’s all pretty homey. Plain speech is moving into the room, and we are awaiting the poetry, the philosophy about the poetry, and some critical gesture to elevate the tone so that we know this is a large room, a smart room, a transformative room. Maybe. Maybe it will become this. How do we move from a blank to a certain kind of blank, a named blank? How do we come up with what modifies, what describes and defines the kind of blank we inhabit? How do we, in short, make a blank, unblank.

The blank page. Every writer has some trepidation about this vast ground, this field, this “great pond,” as Wallace Stevens has said, toward which words will move to see their own reflection. Is that field or pond bigger than us, or so small any word will mar it, disrupt its surface? There seems to be a basic problem with blankness in our culture.

For we all know that to be blank is to be inert, to be what, as if dead? Suspended? Voided? What is it to be blank? Does blank occur in English following on the french blanc? Is unrelenting whiteness then the visual analogy we need to call into the frame? How close does that move us to blindingness, a degree of white that shines us into not being able to see at all? Or is it blank as in utter darkness. To have no reflection in the world, to be invisible? To be silent? To go around shooting blanks. To be snuffed. This makes the relationship I mentioned earlier, with the shuddering shelves, kind of interesting. Surely while I type I do not actually cause the structure of the room to palpably move, do I? Does thought, and its tracking as writing, make enough noise to rattle the timbers? Sometimes old houses can crack, I’ve heard, split like a brain, left and right, while you are hacking out a text. You have to be careful.

These fissures, these splits do occur. Things happen. And there is an aftermath. A time when perhaps glibness and ornamental speech must take a back seat. According to Wallace Stevens, the fall is, apparently, one of those times. He wrote this poem in 1952, when interestingly he was in his 70s, close to his own “end.” He’d been writing a very long time, and still he wanted to go back to the plain sense of things.

The Plain Sense of Things

 

After the leaves have fallen, we return

To a plain sense of things. It is as if

We had come to an end of the imagination,

Inanimate in an inert savoir.

 

It is difficult even to choose the adjective

For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.

The great structure has become a minor house.

No turban walks across the lessened floors.

 

The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.

The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.

A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition

In a repetitiousness of men and flies.

 

Yet the absence of the imagination had

Itself to be imagined. The great pond,

The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,

Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence

 

Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,

The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this

Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,

Required, as a necessity requires.

 

I rise to the line Stevens gives us, that “the absence of the imagination had / Itself to be imagined.” This statement is elaborated by the poem’s last two lines, so let’s hear them together for a moment: “the absence of the imagination had / itself to be imagined…as an inevitable knowledge,/ required, as a necessity requires.” Now this is not, actually, a “very plain sense of things.” So the poem has that movement I was thinking about in my kitchen this afternoon, of moving from what seems to be a condition of the loss of language’s hold, almost to zero capacity, to a much deepened, amplified potency whereby language can give form in speech to almost ineffably abstract conceptual thought. If we hadn’t taken the time though, to enumerate things in the world, first the fallen leaves, the minor house with its lessened floors, the unglamorous greenhouse, the leaning chimney, the flies, mud, and water like dirty glass, it’s almost as if we couldn’t have mounted again the hope that anything less material could ever be named. In the poem’s first line there is a process of return described, “we return” says Stevens, and here he’s identifying a time-based cycle of moving from perhaps the comfort of the imagination to the discomfort of not being able to access the imagination, of being, as a result, inanimate, inert. Blank.

When we scan the poem there is no trigger event given for this loss, this fall, just a “sadness without cause,” as if it too is inevitable. That a “fantastic effort has failed” whatever that failure is, close up, is a sign that failure itself is rather inescapable, that like the seasons, the repetition of failure is a natural phenomenon. It’s plain, it’s tough, that sense that repeats over and over of having come to the end of something. “It’s as if we had come to an end” like those “wasted lilies” in the last stanza. The lilies have simply done their thing, and can’t be repaired, which is different from the greenhouse that “badly needs” painting and the chimney, which might, if someone really wanted, be restored to more vivid structure, be set tall and straight again. The emphasis in the poem’s last line on the word “require”—“Required, as a necessity requires”—makes it clear that some things are plain and simple: we humans need imagination; it is our very sustainability.

Another poem came my way when I was thinking about the problem of blankness this week. It is one of many written by Emily Dickinson in 1862, when she was 32 and it goes like this:

Pain — has an Element of Blank (650)

 

Pain — has an element of Blank —

It cannot recollect

When it begun — or if there were

A time when it was not —

 

It has no Future — but itself —

Its infinite contain

Its Past — enlightened to perceive

New Periods — of Pain.

As in the Stevens poem, there is no specific cause described for this unrelenting, blindingly present pain. Things happen, things are lost. Inevitably, we feel pain. Things, experiences we are inside of, things we want and things we don’t want, and things inside of “us” taking their space or asking permission to. Dickinson makes us think about how pain is a thing, apart from us, that cannot order itself into time. And so time is utterly upended, and what do we do with that? Maybe Pain is both nothing and everything, as a “blank” can be. Contradictory, and multitudinous.

Which stirs forward an echo of these lines from Ronna’s poem “Trammelled”:

We felt nothing, the way the brain

feels nothing but reveals everything.

The way the moon has no light

but reflects.

Here you can begin to move into much human thinking and read Aristotle, Hegel, inquire into the very nature of perception and essence. How do we know a thing is real? How are emotions “things” and what does this have to do with writing, with making a record about the splitness of the inner world and the outer world like two halves of that house that splits when you sit pounding out at your computer. Part of what poetry does is to allow a grappling with this inevitable capacity and failure of identity, of language, of knowing, to “return” across centuries. Time seems so important, sequences in time, our comparison of one felt condition to the next.

The first word of Wallace Stevens’ poem is a word about ordering time: “After.” “After the leaves have fallen, we return.” The first line of Ronna Bloom’s book Permiso is “One day I found a different life than I had before.” She offers two quotes as epigraphs to her book: both speak of a before and an after. Jack Gilbert’s “Maybe when something stops, something lost in us can be heard.” And Mirabai’s “I have felt the swaying of the elephant’s shoulders, and now you want me to climb on a jackass?” In the case of Bloom, however, there is elucidation about the cause, the source, of pain, and of the sensation of blankness, and its weird entanglement with surfeit, with everythingness.

I mentioned OCD so long ago, before, and here is why. I began to notice and be intrigued in Permiso by Ronna’s repetitiousness of the terms “something,” “thing/s,” “nothing,” “everything.” These simple abstractions seemed to lift away from the text’s crust of specific wounds, and also seemed to allow the work to inhabit a plain speech poetic. The well known “No ideas but in things” credo that William Carlos Williams made so influential to 20^th century poetry seems to be at work often in her poems: from the simple chair on the book’s cover, to the myriad objects and clean things named in poem after poem: dust, water, skateboard, traffic, seeing eye dog, the Gap window displays, cops, feet, cherry tree, a grey cat. But just as often, the poems understate a kind of general fuzzy condition of unnameable grief, and lapse away from clear image-making. From my list of many examples here are just a few: “Everything dies so fast” (“Barbecue,” 32); “Now everything / is running out.” (“Lilac Buds,” 49); “I am something / between hero and hidden.” (“The Broken A,” 74); and “Everything went soft / including my soul” (“This Phrase Letting Go,” 100)

Instead, and this is one of the “things” (!) I am inexactly curious to hear Trish Salah speak on tonight as she joins us to lecture on Permiso, the zones where Ronna does not name small contained things but instead alludes to how loss can be “as if” infinite, all-permeating, pins me to Permiso, allows me to be as sad and troubled as I, often, need to be. When I wait on my door-slab, without a blanket.

—

Here then, a little list keeping: Some examples from Permiso of “everything,” “thing/s,” “nothing,” and “something”:

“…in its wake something new, something like / terror when water rushes into places / it doesn’t belong.” (“Water,” 16)

“I waited for something to happen. / There was no symbolism in the room.” (“Last Night,” 19)

“…the room, the empty one that / began to gather a desk, a carpet / to ready itself for something.” And “Think of something quick / water rushing away” (both “Something to Rest On,” 21)

“Others appear: take bites, sips, pass things / back” (“Public House,” 25)

“I should sell the house // bake you into something to entice the buyers.” (“Hazelnuts,” 27)

“Everything dies so fast” (“Barbecue,” 32)

“Something or nothing goes in.” and “A landscape is like a poem: you can’t take everything in at once.” And “The rest… / returns like something you didn’t know” and “You can’t even name the things you see.” (“Teaching Myself How,” 43)

“Shut the door. Waited. Nothing.” And “Sweet things tasted cloying” in “Burning Tongue,” 45)

“Even when there is nothing left to produce,” and “the machine churns, looking for something / to chew” (“The Mill,” 47)

“Now everything / is running out.” (“Lilac Buds,” 49)

“Anything is possible.” And “Things fall out.” (“World Cup,” 55)

“Went everywhere. Held everything.” (“Neil Young Songs…,” 56)

“You are left with yourself / as familiar things get yanked away.” (“Say Hello,” 58)

“In the cartoon, everything is allowed.” (“Everything is Allowed,” 67)

“We are no longer allowed to carry anything/ onto a plane except our bodies. Okay. / Let us be stripped.” (“Flying,” 69)

“…delicate wires / meant to hold tiny, imaginary somethings.” And “I learned something.” And “Everything is adjustment.” ( “House/Boat,” 70-1)

“…waiting to be released / or hurt or it’s the same thing.” And “I am something / between hero and hidden.” (“The Broken A,” 74)

“…my heart was staring / at the sun and nothing / could make it close its eye.” (“Van Gogh’s Wheatfield,” 80)

“But you must build something, mustn’t you?” and “Something I can’t see is broken.” And “…but nowhere I was nor knew anything.” (“Floods,” 82-3)

“…if you don’t trust it, I have nothing.” (“A Boat in the Water,” 87)

“…but wanted something.” (“Are You My Angel?” 88)

“And underneath, nothing.” And “Or some other thing.” And “Expecting one thing already there,” (“Rumble,” 92-4)

“photographs of nothing” and “he understood the power of nothing,” (“In the Hall in the High Atrium,” p. 95)

“clearly a Friday thing to do.” And “The mind is just a frgaile thing, housed and hovering” (“Yes,” p. 97)

“the beautiful women who are my friends have skin that knows things” (“A Snack.” P. 98)

“Everything went soft/ including my soul” (“This Phrase Letting Go,” p. 100)

“There was nothing left of us/ but recognition —” and “We felt nothing, the way the brain/ feels nothing but reveals everything. / The way the moon has no light/ but reflects.” (“Trammelled,” p. 101)

“I stopped wanting the things I couldn’t live without.” And relief/ then nothing.” And “maybe to some other/ that silence would be something. Something for whom/ the buzz of the body is noise.” (“”Noise,” p. 102)

“I wished she would stop,/ she was giving me something/ I needed.” (“Cara Sposa,” p. 104)