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sight and meaning
I recently finished reading Sight, a book-length collaboration between Lyn Hejinian and Leslie Scalapino.
In her introduction to the book, Scalapino recalls the statement of purpose they set out with, governing both form and content: "We agreed that the form of our collaboration was to be in doubles, pairs (such as two sentences, two lines or paragraphs, or series of these, etc.); and that the subject, being sight, should involve things actually seen."
More traditional poets, operating under these constraints, might produce something akin to The Haiku Year, a collaborative circulation of image poems, daily "snapshots." (A sort of poetry version of Flickr?)
But Hejinian and Scalapino are not traditional poets. In the second introduction to the book, Hejinian points out immediate openings she perceives in the constraint: "[W]e never limited the scope of what might be considered a sight or sighting. And I, at least, included occasional dream images and many other purely mental pictures..."
The end result veers into something more akin to a philosophical investigation: it commonly reads like something a post-structuralist theorist might write on the act of seeing—only even more cryptic and elliptical, thanks to the tendency of both poets (Scalapino especially) to disorder and disassemble syntax. So, to revise, it reads a bit like a work of post-structuralist theory translated by an Internet engine or run through the cut-up machine:
"The physical creates a state which has no mental 'place' and so no resolution there. Arising from there not being a mental counterpart ever repressed, but that not being a state of resting. The pale sea gold to the fog and fishing slowly is a state which has neither counterpart, of one's mental or physical weariness, yet is a luminous outer occurence then apprehended and is 'apparently' only being awake at dawn, (which I wasn't) as nothing else.
The artificial, unnatural?, suppression of the physical state makes the luminous event occurring in nature part."
Don't get me wrong—I don't intend this as a criticism of the book. I enjoy reading this kind of poetry, much as I enjoy reading works of theory that I find opaque (and cut-ups, and Internet mistranslations). I've often said that I think avant-garde theory can best be appreciated as a form of poetry, and I was unsurprised to recently stumble upon Hejinian saying something similar in her essay "The Rejection of Closure":
"Coming in part out of Freudian psychoanalytic theory, especially in France, is a body of feminist thought that is ... explicit in its identification of language with power and knowledge—a power and knowledge that is political, psychological, and aesthetic—and that is identified specifically with desire ... [What is] striking to me [is] that the kinds of language that many of these writers advocate seem very close to, if not identical with, what I think of as characteristic of many contemporary avant-garde texts—including an interest in syntactic disjunctures and realignments, in montage and pastiche as structural devices, in the fragmentation and explosion of subject, etc., as well as an antagonism to closed structures of meaning."
Making these sorts of aesthetic choices can be said to be part of a political project, and it's a project that I support, but I also need to stress that I, frankly, find it beautiful to watch language doing unexpected things—doing anything other than producing meaning. Additionally, I need to say that there is something about reading a text that I can't understand that I find distinctly comforting—it transports me back to being a child, and the wonder I felt at being surrounded by mysterious objects and texts—things that were incomprehensible, yet very clearly charged with meaning.
Thanks go to Judith for the gift.
[Related: although Hejinian's "The Rejection of Closure" can't be easily found online, a sequel essay, "Continuing Against Closure," can.]
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Saturday, February 28, 2004
11:46 AM
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