I’ve talked in part about my experience coding the Frankenstein manuscripts, at least from a practical, project-oriented viewpoint, but there seems to me something lost in only talking about that side of things. While step-by-step instruction for a coding-based project like ours is certainly useful information in one sphere, it inevitably leaves out the impetus, the drive, the sheer imaginative hook, that got us roped into such a thing in the first place.

Something there is that doesn’t love the non-canonical: the marginalized, the deleted, the abjected, the notes and writings that never quite make into a final manuscript. This accounts for our fascination with celebrity interviews and bonus footage on DVDs, with directors’ cuts and ‘never-before-seen’ acting spots–and in the literary world (though much less glamorous than the film industry) it accounts for our desire to read the biographies of our favorite writers, to mine their drafts, letters, manuscripts, and notebooks, for glimmering bits of data that might, on one level, satiate our personal fan-boy appetites, and, on another level, serve as keys to unlock, inform, or explain our scholarly impulses and queries.

It’s a curious thing, this love of outside material, one we often pretend to not have (“death of the author,” ad nauseam) but, in the end, wear like chocolate on our faces.

II.

In our recent readings about databases and accumulating information into an archive (where all the non-canonical stuff goes), this quote gets at the heart of the matter as well as anything:

Having “inventory” is a requirement for “invention.” Not only does this statement assume that one cannot create (“invent”) without a memory store (“inventory”) to invent from and with, but it also assumes that one’s memory-store is effectively “inventoried,” that its matters are in readily-recovered “locations.” (1)

Our desire to ‘invent’ something–a paper, an argument–about a text or author we’ve come to revere is inextricably bound to the inventory of information that exists about said text or author: to create something new (newness being part of invention) is to consider all of it, and to then take an extra step.

One of my laments in the Frankenstein coding project was only that, at this stage of things (i.e. early–speaking about the project and about me as a coder/researcher) was that my work had not yet given me sufficient experience with the inventory to truly invent anything–that is, my ten pages of coding is too limited a sample for me to effectively claim anything interesting with regards to patterns or tendencies in the text (“Did Percy cross out monster more often to replace it with creature?” I asked. “Were Mary’s additions typically reiterations/rephrasings, or pieces of new information? Did Percy’s suggestions tend to stay in the spirit of what Mary had written, or did they go in a new direction?” And so on.).

So I’ve since returned to a favorite non-canonical inventory of mine–the poet George Oppen’s commonplace books (he calls them ’daybooks’)–with the mindset of a coder looking for patterns. And though I haven’t actually been coding these daybooks, I’ve attempted to treat the source material with the same diligence and thoughtfulness that I would if I were working with TEI.

(Note: In full disclosure, there’s a part of me that suspects that I will attempt to propose the actual coding of Oppen’s daybooks as an academic project of mine in the future, so some of my research and writing here was/is pre-prepared in some capacity.)

III.

I began this pseudo-project (i.e. this “exploration”) already familiar with George Oppen’s poetry and at least vaguely aware of the rough outline of his life—wealthy family, runs off with a girl, Objectivist poets in New York, Communist party and exile in Mexico, thirty years without writing, triumphant return—so what I was looking forward to discovering in the process of approaching his biography, letters, and daybooks again was not a more holistic understanding of the poet’s life but rather his patterns of thinking, how he, in his own words, understood what it was he was doing in (with?) poetry in those first two books published after the thirty year hiatus (The Materials, 1962, and This in Which, 1964). As a subset of this I was hoping to get a few glimpses into the working-through of the philosophy(-ies) informing the writing of the poem “Psalm,” particularly the I-thou relationship I found the perceiving I/eye establishing with the deer and the strong sense of the uncanny that emerges from such an encounter.

As it happens, Oppen was a generous note-taker and -preserver, which made my hope for retrieving information about this time quickly fulfilled. He was also rather transparent when it came to the cloud of ideas surrounding and appearing in his poems, often including, in writing, his working through a theory or quotation by restating it or reapplying it half a dozen times, then translating that process into a handful of potential poetic lines. In Daybook One, for example, Oppen moves from meditating “I don’t think life should be valued only when it can be sentimentalized (this remark derived from Yeats)” to commenting:

even Keats [felt] that he had to say something profound…[in writing] Beauty is truth truth beauty—If it were true, the line would be beautiful, and it is not. It is not in any case how poetry makes “meaning.” The meaning of [William Carlos] Williams’ poetry, for example, is that life is not valuable only when it can be sentimentalized or only when it can be generalized…and Williams has been important to us: the end of sentiment, the end of generalization is very nearly upon us: it is no longer convincing

to eventually circling the simple poetic phrase “the thread of generalization” scrawled at the bottom of the page. Ultimately this way of thought, the pattern of the mind at work, moving from inspiration to internalization to output, rings true to and intrigues me greatly, which perhaps explains my keen interest in “Psalm” (which begins with an epigraph from St. Thomas Aquinas and proceeds to seemingly enact the quoted idea that “truth follows” something through the I/eye’s watching the deer stand, eat, and move through the forest).

I became particularly interested in watching this thinking-pattern unfold in Oppen’s writing from 1960 to 1963 (the years around his return to poetry and publishing of The Materials and This in Which). The letters from this time reflect Oppen’s having to defend his new work to a tremendous degree—arguing hard for his individual prosody on a regular basis—while pitching the book manuscripts for publication. What emerges in these defenses, I found, generally falls into three major themes: (1) the poem as an immediate object… (2) an object which figures and configures honest experience… (3) and that honest experience requiring an understanding of the mystery of the world (man’s place in it and account for the things that are beyond him) through sight, through the eye: “I mean to be a part of a discussion among honest people,” Oppen writes, “without inventing imaginative geometries—we HAVE only our sight” (January 1962). This ‘honest discussion’ ultimately becomes an argument for Oppen’s desire for clarity and understanding manifest in poetry, a mode of philosophy he would return to in his daybooks and letters (and subsequently, in his poems) quite regularly.

In one letter Oppen contextualizes his philosophy of clarity within the larger framework of the philosophies (or ‘traditions’) informing other Objectivist poets, namely Charles Reznikoff, Williams Carlos Williams, and Louis Zukofsky. “The members of this group had a very strong sense of their own histories,” he explains:

Rezi’s awareness of the Jewish past, Williams’ sense of America and its roots, Louis’ relation to Bach and other ‘sources we tide from,’—I am sort of short-winded historically, but not blind. I remember my father and my grandfather: I think of my daughter. I’m aware that the subways are pretty old…and that the Queen Mary is fairly new. The ground seems very old to me. I write about nothing else…I don’t remember discussing ‘tradition.’ If we had, Williams would have spoken as in the American Grain, Louis might have used the word in a more classic sense, Rezi might have thought we were all talking about the day before yesterday. And I would have been. I was twenty-four. (February 1961)

For Oppen, then, the ‘tradition’ he was operating within, as he understood it, had an immediacy to it, a loyalty to the lived experience as it was lived (and seen!). Thus, there appear fewer (if any) loyalties to meta-narratives, such as Zukofsky’s classics or Reznikoff’s Jewish history or even Williams’ American heritage, in Oppen’s own work. “I DO NOT MEAN TO PRESCRIBE AN IDEA, BUT TO RECORD THE EXPERIENCE OF THINKING IT,” Oppen proclaims in one of his daybooks, furthering the point more explicitly (Daybook II.III); “I do not easily give myself to such things. I do not insist on knowing who’s my papa, who’s my mama, and whom I love, but I do very much want to know—while we live—which is north and which is south, where the ground is, and where it ends” (Daybook II.I). (Note: This last statement is followed, in what I can now consider ‘typical’ Oppen fashion, with the poetic phrase “Door—meaning a common door, with a door knob—& panels,” which seems to me to echo in a distant but familiar way the idea of saying the thing as it is in small words without overcomplicating the experience.)

In another letter, Oppen refers to this concept of knowing “which is north and which is south, where the ground is, and where it ends,” as ‘coming to terms with’ the “physical conditions of life” (June 1962), and later again as one’s “becom[ing] aware of himself as…a part of reality,” registering in that same moment “the existence of what is not himself, what is totally independent of him, can exist without him, as it must have exist before him, as it will exist after him” (September 1963). In short, Oppen’s primary concern in poetry, particularly after his return to writing, is reconciling the individual to his individual experience of the world sincerely and truthfully, in a way that fully captures the oddness and intrigue implicit in the act of sight—sight as a uniquely human experience, i.e. perception and meditation for meaning—and the resulting and lingering sense of the uncanny (the object of perception’s being strangely familiar and foreign simultaneously). This sense of the uncanny, I find him saying (albeit in not so many words and without the term itself), is the human experience, the unique position of ambiguity the individual must and does find himself in as a living, seeing thing.

Given how true all of this rings with me, what strikes me most having read Oppen’s commonplace materials, in the end, I suppose, is how little this philosophy tended to resonate with Oppen’s peers in the publishing industry (this constitutes the bulk of Oppen’s letters between 1960-63) and even with some of his fellow Objectivist poet friends. In closing, two of my favorite moments in Mary Oppen’s (George’s wife’s) Meaning a Life, an autobiographical memoir of her life with George, hinge on two linked conversations between Oppen and Louis Zukofsky upon the shopping of Oppen’s first manuscript (The Discrete Series) and, later, his second manuscript (The Materials). On both occasions Mary recalls Zukofsky asking of Oppen, “Do you prefer your poetry to mine?” or “Do you like your poetry more than mine?” Though eventually having to answer yes—leaving Zukofsky “pale” and “noticeably hurt”—George is said to have, understandably, attempted to soften the blow; Mary writes:

George, insisting on clarity and understanding…implying that Louis used incomprehensibility and obscurity as a tactic, said “You’re tougher than I am, Louis,” referring to Louis’ disregard of the reader. [But] to George, ‘tough’ meant an operator, a schemer. (209)

And so I suppose this is the lasting impression of George Oppen I gleaned from a coding-minded approach to his ‘outside’ works: that of a steadfast poet and thinker whose loyalties to truth and to his art (and to the truth of his art, it stands to reason) exceeded those to his poetry community, whose poetry and poetics each had embedded in them an ethical, moral, obligation to quantify and objectify human experience in such a way as to do the odd beauty of merely existing some ounce of justice. 

__

Notes: 

(1) Carruthers, Mary. The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200. New York: Cambridge UP, 1998. p. 12.

Oppen Materials: 

Oppen, George. The Selected Letters of George Oppen. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, ed. Durham: Duke UP, 1990.

—. The Collected Poems. Michael Davidson, ed. New York: New Directions, 2008.

—. Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers. Stephen Cope, ed. Berkeley: U Cal P, 2007.

Oppen, Mary. Meaning a Life: An Autobiography. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1978

Enjoy.

Jaguar: How Alive Are You? (YouTube)

figurative work [that] often features the juxtaposition of human bodies and animal limbs, or heads. Sometimes alien parts make an appearance as well. He integrates old and new surfaces, incorporating the nostalgia of his childhood into a present assemblage… Seeley’s icons adopt the iconography of saints and superheros with all of the mystical proportions childhood bears with them. To re-erect and reexamine the Gods of childhood in effort, perhaps, to examine those ancient power structures. In Seeley’s case, they often become hybrid.

I looked through Seeley’s work and found it timely and illustrative for our being in between thinking about hacking and thinking about the monster. The following photo-examples I pulled from Seeley’s Delicate Matter:

Though the superhero imagery certainly resonates with a particular nostalgic part of me, it is the two “Icons” that I’ve been coming back to all morning. In a recent tweet, I suggested that the monster essentially is an uncanny subversion of nature, and that we come to fear these monsters out of a deep cognitive dissonance that begins with (is triggered by) their altered appearance, but quickly moves into something much more substantial (and permanent) when we become aware of the fact that the unseen characteristics, and thus the very nature of, the monster must have been altered too. To then make the monster a holy monster is to redefine one’s relationship with the Uncanny from one based in Fear of the Monster to one based in Reverence for the Sublime.

That Seeley has created a narrative for how monsters become, and then become holy, and that such a narrative is the result of human technological developments in space travel, and that the monster is then the natural evolution of life on earth (both in terms of the space-dwelling ‘alien’ men and then earth-dwelling ‘hybrid’ animals) intrigues me to no end:

As for the difference between man and animal, there isn’t a huge difference for me. In the “delicate matter” series, the story so far is that man has left earth for outer space because he becomes enamored with something he can’t comprehend, something that is entirely different from what he knows. He leaves earth on bad terms with the animals and while he is gone animals become what they were destined to be, a transformation per se, into heavy metal loving, super power using, pop culture loving creatures. When man gets to space he finds it to be less than he had hoped, and he tries to come back but the animals refuse. So man is stuck in space while animals take he’s [sic] place back on earth, essentially filling his old shoes, and becoming the new ‘man’…The head swapping was a way for me to even more-so humanize the animals. Initially all the human body, animal headed figures in my paintings were referred to as ‘saints,’ figures that were idolized by the other animals and which usually also adorned halos.

Keats suggests that men of Imagination ought to possess “Negative Capability,” essentially the ability to comfortably occupy a space in which paradoxes, contradictions, and elements of the Uncanny abound, without needing to reach for reason or logic to make sense of the experience. I suspect Seeley’s gesture of finding (transcendent?–or at least substantial) value in the monster, and proving as much by elevating him to ‘sacred’ status via the religious icon, is one way to articulate how it is that we can paradoxically fear and ‘make-holy’ an incomprehensible, Uncanny figure.

Edit: 18 March 2012–An Addition

So now, a month and a half later, I’m thinking about Seeley’s work again: I’m home for Spring break, getting my tattoo touched up, and trying to find a new place on my body to ink the deer Icon posted above. There’s something powerful about the image, something that rings deeply true to me about the way we encounter the sublime-in-the-Uncanny. But perhaps I should back up for a second…

Two weeks ago I was fortunate enough to be able to sit on a conference panel to present a paper I had written–and am obsessively adding to–exploring elements of the Uncanny in prosody, particularly something I’m calling poetry’s “Uncanny Sound.” One of the more apt poems I’ve come across in this project is Hart Crane’s “The Hurricane,” a poem in which Crane, standing in the eye of a hurricane, watching it destroy the world on all sides of him, is forced to create a new language to echo–and enact!–the impressiveness and sublimity (i.e. the ‘too much’-ness) of a natural disaster, a language in which old words are razed to make material suitable for the “Uncanny event” and new words are joined to antiquated, Biblical suffixes to anchor the world in some sense of supernatural history. All of this then comes together in an artificial ‘hybrid’ language of contradictions and anachronisms (one half of poetry’s “Uncanny Sound”) that serves the magnificent power of such an experience well, for as the highs are made low with “summits crashing” and lows are made high when “sea-kelp” goes to “high heaven dashing,” so too is the highest language brought down among base terms and the lowest language elevated to the level of scripture. To speak this poem aloud, I’ve discovered, is to summon the power of the hurricane; to become the hurricane, for a time; to internalize it and bring it in you.

So I’m bringing this up alongside my thinking on the Icons because I sense Seeley’s understanding of the natural world of animals corresponding with Crane’s relationship with the natural world of weather, specifically that there is something unnatural inherent to the natural world, unnatural in that there is such otherness (and power in this otherness) present in the natural world at special times that one simply cannot experience as native, incidental, familiar, or safe, but foreign, deliberate, disorienting, and dangerous instead.

What’s happening in these special moments, I’m thinking, is a shift from what Martin Buber calls an I-It relationship with the world to an I-Thou relationship. The relationship one has with ordinary things as objects of experience and use Buber calls I-It, an essentially “detached” relationship (e.g. the one might have with pen); the attitude of the I here is that the It is separate from himself, an object that can be intriguing to observe or fortunate to use, but nothing more. The relationship one has with others, on the other hand (no pun intended), Buber calls I-Thou, and this “involves the whole person;” here, the I, a meaning-making individual, “addresses” a Thou as a meaning-making subject, not an object, and is thus “addressed” as a subject in return. These I-Thou “encounters,” Buber claims, constitute “real life,” in that they are the only authentic and real (i.e. meaningful) relationships one may expect to find in the world. By addressing the existence of the Thou in another, one effectively moves himself toward an intimate, subject-to-subject relationship with the Ultimate Thou, which is God.

So when I say that

I suspect Seeley’s gesture of finding (transcendent?–or at least substantial) value in the monster, and proving as much by elevating him to ‘sacred’ status via the religious icon, is one way to articulate how it is that we can paradoxically fear and ‘make-holy’ an incomprehensible, Uncanny figure.

…what I’m suggesting is that Seeley is finding in the natural world a Thou, not an It; not a world to simply be seen or projected on or used, but a world that looks back, projects back, and uses.

This is a fairly powerful claim as an artistic statement, but more so as a statement of ‘the nature of things’ (as Lucretius would have it). As we begin to transition further into Romanticism and the Romantic poets–the second half of this Technoromanticism idea we’re orbiting–I think we’ll find this conversation sprouting up again and again, begging us to evaluate and then re-evaluate our relationship to our (un)natural world through art in both the traditional sense (painting, music, poetry) and then the non-traditional sense (?, ?, ?).

I admittedly know or understand very little (read: nothing at all) about the computer hacking world, so I’ll have to defer some of my thinking on this until Phil, Amanda, and others of you educate me on it, but for whatever reason it seems important to me now to clarify our definition in its original context (i.e. computers) some if we aim to apply it to other technologies (e.g. books). If “hacking” means more than simply “tinkering with,” that will mean one thing for us; if “hacking” only means “tinkering with,” then that will require us to use some adjectives to describe the intentions (good, or bad, or simply curious) of respective hacking processes.

Note: Something I had forgotten but feel obligated to recognize–Phil had this to say about hacking/altering:

“It’s worth more thought than I can devote to it for the moment, but it’s certainly a practice of appropriation. In our time the hacker ethos of making technology one’s own comes to us by many paths…To hack a book–to take a first hack at it–could be to come to fluency within the system of book-making, to appropriate the received technology of book production and printing for one’s own unique artistic vision, to appropriate past books, [etc.]“

I’d still like to delve into this a bit more, but I’m sure it’s something we’ll get around to on Thursday.

In the meantime, here’s something fun to look at:

Dario Robleto: "You have to make the assumption that alteration is a constructive act, not a destructive one, and it’s the opposite of most of our impulses."

Guernica magazine recently featured an interview with Dario Robleto–one of my favorite visual artists and one of the more interesting and versatile thinking-people I’ve come across (as you’ll see in the interview)–in which Robleto talks about using ‘dead’ objects as material for ‘new,’ ‘living’ artwork. Some examples (quoting Guernica’s Rebecca Bates):

Mammoth hair plucked from receding glaciers is braided into flowers in the Victorian tradition (“Some Longings Survive Death”); album covers of live performances of dead musicians are used to make stage lights (“Candles Un-burn, Suns Un-shine, Death Un-dies”); cotton and soldiers’ letters to their wives become pulp for new paper used in wreaths (“Defiant Gardens”)…human hand bones are set in a circle with the 50,000-year-old claws of extinct cave bears

…and all of this to “tur[n] the original materials into something else, something almost unrecognizable, and in doing so ignit[e] a conversation about how we wrestle with grief, and how turning that grief into something tangible may or may not be a comfort.”

Without pulling too much more from the interview itself (go check it out), I’ll leave you with this gem of a selection for now. Maybe we can have some sort of conversation on whether Robleto is “hacking” art, “altering” his materials, or something else altogether, in the comments.

Guernica: The materials you use often take on a new form. For example, you’re no longer able to listen to the pulled tape of the earliest audio recording of time, so I’m wondering if you find there’s a sense of destruction inherent in the act preservation?

Dario Robleto: I understand that this could be the interpretation. But if you want to really understand what I’m doing, I ask the viewer to make a leap, to not immediately understand alteration as destruction. You have to make the assumption that alteration is a constructive act, not a destructive one, and it’s the opposite of most of our impulses. It’s like what I was saying about the Victorians and us understanding past ways of thinking through a modern point of view, which we can’t help. That’s the moment we live in, but it’s not the only way. To understand something changing form as a destructive act is a very modern, Western gut reaction to things, and I get it. But what I’m suggesting is nothing radical, this notion of things constantly changing, and that the change is not inherently destructive. Things change, our bodies change, everything’s changing, and to me that philosophy’s no different with these materials. With audiotape or the paper or any number of things I use, what is initiated by the alteration is the art. The artwork, the discussion around it, the fact that we’re talking now—all these things that are set in motion are part of the constructive nature of alteration. It’s never a violent destructive act; to me it’s always a respectful, constructive, pushing-the-story-forward act.

*Dario Robleto has a website at: http://www.acmelosangeles.com/artists/dario-robleto/