The Fever Sings in Mental Wires

By Eric Foley

In Silence, John Cage writes,

When                       going from nothing            towards something,                          we have all

the European                   history of music                  and art                          we             remember

and there we can see               that this                             is             well done           but the             other is not.

So-and-so contributed              this and that                       and             criteria.                                But now we are

going from                        something        towards nothing,                                 and there is no way

of saying success        or failure              since all things                     have equally                           their

Buddha nature. (143) 

Cage’s 1961 work initially came to mind as I read M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! because of how both books utilize blank space on the page to emphasize the silences and gaps between bits of language. Philip writes, “Within the boundaries established by the words and the meanings there are silences; within each silence is the poem” (Zong!, 195). Yet the content of the above passage from Cage also applies thematically to Philip’s project. Philip is rigorous in her use of traditional Western forms, sources, and discourses as points of departure for her anti-narrative through time and space. Fugue and counterpoint, techniques of Western classical music, are utilized to great effect; the quotes that precede each section come from canonical male figures (Shakespeare, St. Augustine, Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens, Paul Celan); and the body of the text itself is pulled from an eighteenth-century legal document.

Following her reading at Influency in the spring of 2009, Philip mentioned that she often felt Buddhism was the only religious/spiritual practice of which it was socially acceptable to speak anymore, in certain circles. Perhaps the questioning of traditional patriarchal Western meta-narratives that has been going on for over a half century, and which now seems firmly established in “the academy” and elsewhere, is at least partially responsible. At the same time, this process has definitely helped open more space and context for a work like Zong!, as well as for the inclusion of innovative books such as Philip’s earlier She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks in university syllabi.

Other than its comparatively sparse history of being used as a tool of colonization, subjugation, and violence, what I find attractive about Buddhism is the relative ease with which it reconciles, or at least simultaneously holds, seemingly oppositional ideas and impulses. It is in this context that one can find Buddhist resonance in Philip’s struggle in Zong! to “release the story that cannot be told, but which, through not-telling, will tell itself” (199).

I am greatly interested in how ideas of relationality and comparison are foregrounded in Zong!  These concepts are of course crucial to all poetry (metaphor, simile, homophonics—sounds that sound like other sounds) and language (meaning accrues through the relation of letters and words to each other). In the final “Notanda” section of Zong! Philip writes that in the process of finding its own form, its own “voice,” her long poem “suggests something about the relational—every word or word cluster is seeking a space directly above within which to fit itself and in so doing falls into relation with others either above, below, or laterally” (203). Thus, in Zong! #21, we get such clusters as, “is being is...is is...is there is...is is” (37-38). The words relational, relation, and relationship begin to stand out as they get repeated throughout the “Notanda.” Relation-ship.

Listening to Philip’s reading, I felt at times that something was being channeled from a different realm, an effect of which composers and poets from Johannes Brahms to James Merrill have spoken. This raised questions about authorial design and control; the degree to which the poem that Philip set out to write matched the poem that emerged. How had chance, and synchronicity, entered into composition? How could the work be seen to lead us back to Cage’s emphasis on spaces and silences? Equally striking was Philip’s comment that, in the absence in secular capitalist societies of traditional mourners, poets partially assume this role. Further questions came to me: Is this a responsibility? A burden? A privilege? A right? What forms of compensation might once have accompanied this role, and what forms accompany it now?

Finally, I was struck by the mention of Influency in the acknowledgments section of Zong! and by a footnote referring to a conversation with one of the participants from the earlier session featuring Philip. This, along with Philip’s obvious gratitude for our engagement with her text, enhanced my idea of the kind of role a reader can play in the engagement with a book of poetry. It also allowed me to wonder, in the context of this and the other books we were about to read—if those of us lining the inside of the classroom make up a (sometimes significant) part of the audience and discourse around these texts—what kinds of responsibilities on our part might that entail? 

Afternote

In its original composition, my piece ended with the following lines: “Here I’ve gotten through this whole response without directly broaching the subject matter of the poem. I guess we all have our ways of avoiding pain, guilt, complicity.” Hearing M. NourbeSe Philip read from Zong! was a very emotional experience that raised difficult and exciting questions. By ending with the two sentences above, I suppose I was attempting to acknowledge that my initial response primarily centred on the “exciting aesthetic questions” aspect of things.

Writing more directly about the kind of loss, grief, and injustice that the book approaches is more difficult (for this reader) to do. Editing this piece almost a year later, I feel a deeper sense of how impossible it is to separate the aesthetics of Zong! from its content, how the relationality of the language it contains often stands in for the relationality of (differently racialized and privileged) bodies that stands at the centre of the work. I could be hard on myself for this lack of initial head-on engagement, but perhaps the truth is that any kind of real engagement with a work of art occurs over time, and is a complex, ever-fluctuating and expanding process. Jennifer Moxley tells us that “Aesthetic is a troubled word, a word which, at least since modernism, has been used as a code for ‘apolitical’ and ‘disengaged.’ Writing that has the explicit goal of challenging the reader’s ideas, or inciting social change, cares little for the aesthetic. Or so we are told” (Moxley, 2). Or so we used to be told.