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Lyrical Strategies in Presenting the Body in John Ashbery's Where Shall I Wander and A Worldly Country
1.
John Ashbery’s late poetry – the poetry written in the twenty-first century – offers an intriguing perspective on many issues central to our culture. This is of course true about the entire Ashbery’s oeuvre. My point here is that now we are in a better position to front Ashbery’s texts than ever before. We have gained a critical distance to Harold Bloom’s Freudian model of the Oedipal crises, which nominated Ashbery as a continuator of American Romantic tradition, privileging the entity of “voice” in Ashbery’s texts. Or equally erroneous design by Helen Vendler who proposed parsing Ashbery into sense in a laborious process of “understanding” him. We have digested Marjorie Perloff’s insightful theory of indeterminacy which placed Ashbery among poets who evade postulates of authenticity by assuming polyphonic stances where there is no unity of voice or self and generic boundaries are constantly crisscrossed. Or her more recent criticism, where, contrary to her earlier generalizations about Ashbery's poetics, she is specific, cogent, and as “mercurial” – her own label – as the poet himself. We have swallowed “queer Ashbery” put together by John Shoptaw who opined that the poet's homosexuality played a major role in his literary career. Moreover, several publications have recently argued that Ashbery’s poetic project aims at communication and shows a deep concern for readers. Ashberian idiom is no longer accused of nonchalant incomprehensibility or logorrhea which was a commonplace only a decade ago, when William Logan caustically noted: “In the past four years Ashbery has published 650 new pages of verse – it's not just too much, it's too much by a fabulous, Arabian Nights amount”(57). Quite contrarily, more and more critics appreciate Ashbery's effort to use spacious and innovative patterns, both on the level of the single poem, and on the level of the book.
Volumes such as Where Shall I Wander or A Worldly Country advance a very accurate and deep diagnosis of a certain historical situation America, or generally the West, has reached. This diagnosis also embraces a situation a particular body, John Ashbery’s, or any human being’s body, has reached, or finally reaches. The reading of Ashbery’s poetry I would like to propose here could seem reductively plain. I find the poet’s most recent works to be first and foremost specimens of lyric poetry devoted to various presentations of corporeal problematics and experience. Some critics have already paid attention to the question of lyricism in Ashbery. Charles Berger wrote about the self against the tropes of traditional lyrical persona in The Double Dream of Spring (147). Charles Altieri dealt with Ashbery's lyricism as a means that enabled a poem to avoid our current methods of making sense of the world and, by its very inchoateness, allowed an exploration of new territory of feeling and experience (“Motives in Metaphor” 656). Charles Simic elucidated Ashbery's consistency in expanding the limits of lyric poetry with randomness and nonsense as integral parts of the human experience (56).
All these opinions may indicate that after experiments with form and closure which lead to the opening of meaning in his early collections, like in the debut Some Trees – after his attempts to test the limits of free verse in longer compositions, like in “Rivers and Mountains,” “Skaters,” or Flow Chart – Ashbery’s poesies became more conservative all in all. Or, perhaps, literary practices en masse have shifted towards fluidity of form and rhetorical complexity, changing the idiom of lyric poetry so much that nowadays Ashbery’s voice does not differ radically from voices of other contemporary American poets. Therefore I treat every poem by Ashbery as a certain discursive space, often ruptured and deformed, but still analyzable as a literary text without recourse to Kabbalah or psychoanalysis. In the twentieth century poetry, lyricism I am referring to finds its foundation most probably in Rilke (and before him in Hölderlin and Baudelaire), from whom it spreads to a number of poets in different languages, from Celan and Kunze in German, through Machado and Paz in Spanish, to Cendrars and Micheaux in French. In English, its greatest representatives and Ashbery's immediate precursors were Auden and Stevens.
What emerges from the above list is a poetic tradition whose main purpose was, if we can still trust J.A. Cuddon, to privilege “a personal and subjective fashion” in rendering the relationship between the self and the world (515). The above-mentioned Charles Altieri, more accurately, specifies lyricism as one of the ways in which “post-Enlightenment literature counters ... reduction of the mind's cognitive powers into analytic operations by developing frameworks to express the full affective life of the psyche” (656). However, there is something more important that characterizes the greatest lyric poetry: a supreme sense of urgency, an utmost mindfulness and sharpness of perceptory and linguistic apparatus of the speaker, an effort directed at apprehending Heideggerian Dasain, which is visible, for instance, in Celan's poems as interpreted by Hans-Georg Gadamer or Jacques Derrida. Because of this very focus, lyric verse often produces a tension between the form of the poem, which is historical and therefore communal, and the poem's message, which represents a private stance delivered in a more or less casual linguistic material. The twentieth century lyric poetry expanded thematically, gradually replacing traditional topoi of love, nature or metaphysical quest with their contemporary equivalents rooted in city life, like alienation, technological environment, or linguistic manipulation. It had a broad philosophical scope, and it provided material for philosophical investigation for different thinkers from all over the field, from existentialists to deconstructionists.
John Ashbery's poetry easily fits in with the above model, tentative as it is. The following paper tries to highlight how the poet presents human body and bodily perception in his most recent volumes: he starts with the traditional topoi of lyric poetry – aging and death, and he arrives at the idea of the de-temporalized past, which helps him to overcome his skepticism towards the human body. My point is that Ashbery recycles certain strategies common for his precursors in order to test their limits and demonstrate their arbitrariness, but also to mark his affiliation with literary conventions. His final message – that time's essential indeterminacy enables us to shape it into a livable continuum – stems from post-Kantian inheritance, yet it is not root-and-branch original in the context of the twentieth-century verse, proving Ashbery's contingence with the tradition of lyric poetry.
2.
The world of Ashbery's poems has always been rather devoid of physical attributes. The speaker's perceptions were based on a restless movement of his mind, which resulted from the fact that Ashbery himself, as he confirmed in interviews, notoriously distrusted immediate experience and did not allow for its direct presentation in language. To what extent do his latest volumes change this pattern? The ethereal self, which flashes momentarily in Ashbery's latest verse, seems to be more immersed in the physical reality. This may be a result of Ashbery's texts' overall greater intelligibility and transparency. As John Emil Vincent sharply observes, we should never “discount the possibility of this poet utilizing the lucid for poetic effect,” as “clarity [is] an important element in Ashbery's variousness” (14). We can distinguish several levels of the self's immersion in the quotidian. In the first and most abstract, reminiscent of the bulk of Ashbery's earlier poetic output, the only trace of bodily presence is collage-like string of sensory data, structured in a narration whose dazzling incoherence intermingles realistic fragments in everyday vernacular – the backbone of the poem – and highly sophisticated metaphors. The self's embodiment, like in Ashbery's previous volumes, is disparaged by a veering deictics and frantic speed of chunked visions passing in the poem's lines. A good example of this strategy is “The Love Interest” from Where Shall I Wander:
We could see it coming from forever,
then it was simply here, parallel
to the day's walking. By then it was we
who had disappeared, into the tunnel of a book.
Rising late at night, we join the current
of tomorrow's news. Why not? Unlike
some others, we haven't anything to ask for
or borrow. We are just pieces of solid geometry:
cylinders or rhomboids. A certain satisfaction
has been granted us. Sure, we keep coming back
for more – that's part of the “human” aspect
of the parade. And there are darker regions
penciled in, that we should explore some time.
For now it's enough that this day is over.
It brought its load of freshness, dropped it off
and left. As for us, we're still here, aren't we? (Where Shall I Wander 69).
As Ashbery confessed in one of his interviews, all of his poems are “love poems” (Bloom, Losada 127). This is definitely true about “The Love Interests,” a narration about a lovers' day (and night), which went by apparently with no memorable events. “Solid geometry” of “cylinders” and “rhomboids” into which their selves were transformed in the course of their relationship may reflect their emotional hollowness or coldness. “A certain satisfaction” they were “granted” is not enough to change the “parade” of their affair into a full-bodied life. Daily routine, which “was coming from forever,” finally overwhelmed the speaker's and his partner's lives to the extent that their existence seemed dubious and deracinated. Therefore, it is not decided if they are “still here.” This plain narration is disrupted with extensive structural metaphors that blur its obviousness: “By then it was we/who had disappeared, into the tunnel of the book,” “we join the current of tomorrow's news,” or “[this day] brought its load of freshness, dropped it off and left.” They produce an effect of defamiliarization, bringing about an endless deferral of the factual. However, referentiality is not absent in the poem altogether, which stands behind the thesis of indeterminacy. Rather than abyss of negativity connected with the subject's separation from the world, a new field of interpretative possibilities is opened up: the bodily perception is denied the ontological status of reality, and the whole poem shifts into a dreamlike sphere of eerie imagery, whose fictitiousness, and, finally, textuality – suggested by the speaker's disappearing “into the tunnel of the book” – are stressed. In Ashbery's verse, the border between the text and the world is always to be clearly visible.
A number of poems from Where Shall I Wander and A Worldly Country presents similar selves of limited bodily existence, adrift in the flux of uncanny dailiness. “Days of Reckoning,” “Heavy Home,” and “New Concerns” from Where Shall I Wander, and “The Ecstasy,” “Forwarded,” and “It, or Something” from A Worldly Country can serve as the prime examples. Not only is the opening of their meaning carried out by various formal devices – from roadroller-like working of sestina or pantoum, pressing ever new meanings out of repeated word patterns, to the Emersonian trope of superfluity in longer poems, trying to take hold of the all-embracing linguistic habitat – but also by their titles which, characteristically for Ashbery, do not produce an instant metaphorical sense. They force the reader to explore new constellations of signification, expanding the field of the poem in an assimilatory process. According to Kacper Bartczak, this trace is a hallmark of all Ashbery's oeuvre, distinguishing the poet fundamentally from post-Romantic tradition:
Ashbery's poetic output ... suggests an epistemology completely different
than Romanticism's version of it. Meanings do not come about as the attempts to refer to the world faithfully; they are accidental products of the activity of the mind that, inevitably, get organized into larger systems. ... The likening
of the poem's progress [or, I could add, the title] to the approach of a wave, for example [or anything else], is merely an artificial catalyst thanks to which the naturalistic capacities of the mind will turn out meanings (58-59).
This is exactly how the reader is prompted to initiate an interpretative process, relating the titles of Ashbery's poems to their content, which is conspicuous in the above quoted “The Love Interest.” The “interest” may suggest the speaker's willingness to maintain the status quo in his relationship with his significant other. On the other hand, the existing status quo may violate the speaker's wishes, suggesting a general law which makes all affections “geometrically” dull in the end. Thus, the title is designed to instigate an endless guesswork, which is a part of Ashbery's broader strategy in dealing with meaning-producing structures.
3.
Another, higher level of bodily immersion in routines of the mundane is exemplified by a group of Ashbery's poems more focused on individual experience. In respect of narration, these poems are more coherent, and their discourse is seemingly more immediate, representational or even realistic. The speaker, whose voice is stable and does not splinter into plural or slip into the third person, refers to his bodily experience in a manner of meditation, occasionally alluding to his literary career, and swiftly turning out historical or sociological generalizations. On a different level, he is telling a story of a cultural generation he belongs to. Of course, Ashbery is as far from being a confessional poet as possible, and his poems give the reader only a display of momentary states of consciousness, echoing with clichés of historical jargon. Yet, these bits and pieces – biographical and perceptual debris – are more than enough to get the reader involved in a meticulously channeled interpretative process. “Singalong” from A Worldly Country is a good example of this strategy:
You watch in street clothes. Why not
accept the easy way; the one
that's offered? The kind one?
Because it isn't easy or kind enough.
It has to be hard
To have brought us this far.
Any time soon
we'll manage to build barns,
paint, lock the padlocks, waive anything
dire. That way, we think, it will keep
for us and for a while. Other
than that we sleep, nod
like reeds at the edge of a pond.
Those places left unplanted will be cultivated
by another, by others. Looking back it
will seem good. The majestic verandah.
All the ships numbered.
The hedges grazed
like autumn, or a blight,
like fruit (A Worldly Country 76).
The most conspicuous feature the poem reveals is Ashbery's unceasing penchant for masks. In his earlier volumes, the poet's favorite guise was that of a detached (and “pedantic” as David Bromowich calls him) lecturer delivering a skewed pseudo-scientific talk, like in “The System.” In his latest collections, a mask of an old man, or as in this case – an old poet – comes into view, bringing in a Romantic topos of the sage, common for late Yeats (“Sailing to Byzantium”), Eliot (Four Quartets), or Auden (“Marginalia”). This seems to be an example of Ashbery's inclination to recycle the banal which is helpful in coming into terms with ineluctable limits of one's originality. Ashbery used this strategy earlier, for example in “The System.” According to Bartczak, in the last poem, “the vital force is derived not from the purified ego of the High Modernist original expressive persona, but from the utilization of second-handedness” (45). The same is true about “Singalong:” the poem goes beyond irony or pastiche, coming to terms with the unoriginal imagery which crowds contemporary consciousness. Rather, we find some sarcasm here which can be located mostly in presentation of the past – reduced to a level of comic strip story – or in the use of the plural forms, contradicting the individual perspective of lyricism.
The very title of “Singalong” suggests a unison of voices, and it implies an imperative to join it. The sensory data are not subject to doubt, and the first stanza is a straightforward description whose final sentence ushers in a vague allegorical meaning: “It has to be hard/to have brought us this far” does not refer to the “street clothes” the speaker (the poet, the sage) is watching. Or perhaps this is clear from the very first line, “You watch in street clothes,” with its syntactic contortion, blurring “watching in” and “watching in street.” What brought the speaker to his present situation was language – hard and uncompromising poetical discourse. The second stanza inverts the ratio between the narrative and allegorical levels of the poem, with the description losing its realistic grasp: the reader is coerced into a search for figurative meaning, led by the old topos of garden and land cultivation as references to high culture. The first lines imply storing and preserving literary achievements and their inherent values in a safe place, like harvest for later use in winter, which has already come, as we can infer from the speaker's complaints about his uncomfortable idleness: “we sleep, nod/like reeds at the edge of the pond.” Then we have a glimpse of literary successors – “another, others” – who are supposed to take over the farming or gardening business, and cultivate “places left unplanted” as such is the natural order of things. Hopefully, in result the farm or the garden will look as splendidly as before. However, the poem's finale distorts these happy prospects: bringing poetic fruit is likened to the working of autumn or blight, which contradicts the overall consolatory message the speaker has tried to convey.
4.
“Singalong” and many other poems from Ashbery's recent volumes associate old age with all sorts of decay, which by no means can be redeemed by ambiguous gains of senility. The old body suffers, because it is diseased: “For now, pain pauses in its round,/notes the time of day, the patient's temperature” (“Anticipated Stranger,” AWC 60). This is an epistemological limit the speaker cannot resolve: “Suffering aimlessly, pointlessly/I think I'm on the spot right now” (“Objection Sustained,” AWC 73). Pain is also inflicted on the body by excessive self-examination: “We suffer for the lies we told” (“Annuals and Perennials,” WSIW 35). A conspicuous feature of the body's ailment is its exasperation resulting from the hustle and bustle of city life: “My head ached from those boulevards (“Told Her to Get on with It,” WSIW 23). On the other hand, there is a pervasive feeling of loneliness in Ashbery's play of the hall of mirrors: “I'm somewhere else, alone as usual.//I must get back to my elegy (“Novelty Love Trot,” WSIW 50). As a result, the body is overwhelmed by a feeling of physical inadequacy: “We grow more fragile at our posts,/ interrogating vacant night” (“Lost Footage,” WSIW 47). The final reason of all its weaknesses seems to be the sheer extent of its existence: “Like all good things/life tends to go on too long” (“Broken Tulips,” WSIW 30).
Another dimension of the body's suffering results from a distress caused by its own aging and mortality:“We are incurably, undeniably aging” (“Ukase,” AWC 22). This distress is rather inarticulate and too platitudinous to be conveyed in verse: “Every year at this time of day I get a feeling/of a pain, like thyme or dried figs./Nobody needs to know what is ailing me,/which is sad, but telling them would be worse” (“The Handshake, the Cough, the Kiss,” AWC 25). Inexpressible passing of time opens the body onto a possibility of death as the end of all its involvements: “Time's aged frisson/gets to me more and more, like mice/in a pantomime” (“Cliffhanger,” AWC 18). The ensuing fear of death often extends to others – friends or close ones: “You were mortal,/so why didn't you say anything?” (“Cliffhanger,” AWC 18). The speaker finds a consolation in the fact that volatile aliveness of the self is a part of an external pattern imposed by empirical reality: “Tomorrow there will be fireworks, and then,/back to the chain of living and dying” (“Pavane pour Helen Twelvetrees,” AWC 69).
Occasionally the body escapes its affliction, crossing physical boundaries of the world and fleeing into transcendental regions of pure spirituality, uncanny boundlessness: “Let others taste you./Sleep happily;/the wind is over there./Come in. We were expecting you” (“Litanies,” AWC 10). However, there is some ghostliness in the self's disembodiment: “We're leaving again of our own volition/for bogus patterned plains streaked by canals,/maybe. Amorous ghosts will pursue us/for a time (“Mottled Tuesday,” AWC 15). The body shares the immaterial locus it reaches with other similar existences that “have shapes but no power” (“Annuals and Perennials,” WSIW 35). The body's unearthliness is stressed by the fact that it can hear voices of the dead: “A voice like that of my mother says,/'Then you'll just have to learn/to do without it. The leaves are shells' (“Promenade,” AWC 51). It can see apparitions: “Can yo walk? I asked./Sure I can, it said. I'll walk with you a little way./We can talk about love and play/and the ocean that is always next door (“Well-Scrubbed Interior,” AWC 17). The trope of the poet as a specter appeared in Ashbery's earlier volumes, notably in Hotel Lautréamont, but then it served to portray the poet in between the world of the living and of the dead; here it enables the speaker's body to transcend its immediate concerns.
A different transcendental plan is introduced by a pervasive trope of dream-vision, occurring even in the speaker's seemingly coherent accounts: “[Y]ou are glad it's over, except for a ton of sleep/and the half dreams that people it – people you knew/but they weren't those people, only figures on a beach (“Involuntary Description,” WSIW 16). Reality of dreams is ubiquitous, and it can be entered at any time: “Dreams can strike you in your sleep when you are least aware of it” (“The Lost Train,” WSIW 73). The collation of reality with dreams produces a space which no longer guarantees an ontological certitude: “I don't go out much, though/staying at home never seemed much of an option./... I feel more certain about 'now'/and 'then,' because they are close to me,/like lovers, though apparently not in love with me,/as I am with them. I like to call them,/and sometimes they reply, out of the deep business of some dream” (“Composition,” WSIW 70). According to John Saunders, late Ashbery gives us an impression that the speaker is “simultaneously in medias res and at almost cosmic distance from them” (81). This externalization of the speaker is visible in the final question of “The Love Interest:” “We are still here, aren't we?” In the truly indeterminate world of reveries, the speaker is on the brink of dissolving into the entropy of nature and literary clichés.
This is not vintage Ashbery. The poet's handling of the trope of the body in his two recent volumes proves his conscious choice to continue the lyric tradition developed by his precursors, like W.H. Auden. It would be interesting to examine Ashbery's affiliations in this respect with contemporary lyric poets from other languages, like Joseph Brodsky, Thomas Tranströmer, Thomas Venclova or Czesław Miłosz, all of whom devoted a great deal of their poetic effort to map out the problem of body in the adjacency of its annihilation. Their poems, as well as Ashbery's, are very ambivalent about the body, especially when it is afflicted with old age. Moreover, many of their poems about the body follow a similar pattern: a presentation of the body's weakness – a dream vision – a transcendental solution. Obviously, by the virtue of its proximity to the end of self's individual time guaranteed by death, they subversively elevate old age is by all sorts of associations with sagacity and prudence. Ashbery's speaker takes up this trope and ardently provides us with sententious comments about everything and nothing in particular: “Everything has a silver lining; it's a matter/ of turning it over and scrubbing some sense into it” (“One of His Nature Poems” AWC 56). In many poems, the mask of a sage blurs with the previous Ashberian mask of a lecturer: “Tragically, in these times of culture, to be divided/by a shortfall that is already riven in two” (“The Binomial Theorem,” AWC 48). Only sporadically solemnity of the speaker's voice slips into mockery: “[I]n times of war/we make good warriors./In peace we are as nothing:/good dads or bankers./But see where the tide is rising/for the umpteenth time, and try/to put a saddle on that. Then/clap your hands” (“Feast or Famine,” AWC 40). But mostly, the speaker is portentous and addresses the reader as if from a ring of initiates: “Try to avoid the pattern that has been avoided,/the avoidance pattern. It's not as easy as it looks” (“Sonnet: More of Same,” WSIW 68). It is exactly a perspective granted to the speaker by his age that enables him to share his clichéd wisdom with the reader. However, Ashbery seems to do one more thing: he recycles the trope of the old body to contrast it against his peculiar vision of time and the past.
My claim is that physical body is another trope of skepticism for the late Ashbery's poetry. Like earlier skeptical gestures of the poet, it strikes root in a discontent with the concepts of presence and identity, which translates to the following predicament: “[T]he pain of here contraindicates pleasant dreams of there” (“Dryness of Mouth,” WSIW 15). First and foremost, it is connected with reality's immobility and all its spacio-temporal restraints that force the self to accept the realm of empirical necessities. Finally, these necessities are controlled by the speaker's effort to subdue the past.
5.
The problem of the self tormented with its being here and now in Ashbery's poetry requires a digression. As early as in his debut Some Trees, the poet was preoccupied with finding a balance between the poetics of exclusion and of indiscriminate all-inclusion. This was obviously related to his formal experimentation and crossing of generic boundaries in order to transmit as fully as possible “debris of living” (Three Poems, 7). What he discovered in Three Poems was that the world could not be decoded as an entity separate from the self. Thus, to avoid the fluctuations of absolute incoherence expressed directly in The Tennis Court Oath on the one hand, or “the deathly dangers of literal meaning” in Harold Bloom's parlance on the other, the Ashberian self was trying to anchor to a stable poetic form in order to find at least a temporary accommodation in it, which is conspicuous in one of the most important collections of Ashbery's middle period, Shadow Train. This formal stability did not necessarily include stanzaic or rhythmical patterns: as Flow Chart demonstrates with its irregular chunky blocks, or riffs interrelated by pronouns, narrative modes, motives, locales, etc., formality does not have to be formulaic – it can and does escape programmatic nature of devices employed. In Ashbery's later volumes, the self found its anchorage increasingly in rare moments of communion with the other, which is one of the main arguments of in Kacper Bartczak's illuminating study In Search of Communication and Community. The Poetry of John Ashbery.
What is implied in the above blurb-like artistic profile is that Ashbery's poetic development was a form of refraining from his natural tendencies whose source was the poet's profound skepticism both to the self as the poetic product – a trope, and the self as the mind spinning turbulent images – a soul. This insight leads us, after Bartczak, to Stanley Cavell who in his two studies on skepticism, The Claim of Reason and In Quest of Ordinary, traces the source of the contemporary skepticism down to the Kantian heritage. It is Kant's originally anti-skeptical idea of “conditions,” trying to bridge human Understanding and human Reason and bring us back to the validity of our being, which places us in the inflexibly perceived world of empirical laws: from now on we have to closely analyze our views and methods of comprehension; the world becomes a “task” forcing us to re-examine its material form and our habitat (Bartczak 79-80). In this perspective, Ashbery definitely falls into a category of a skeptical poet. All in all, his poems meticulously scrutinize atomized sensory experience, revising the concept of “knowledge” and “externality.” Bartczak opines that the Ashberian self surpasses its skepticism via intersubjective gestures: “Many poems in [Ashbery's] later volumes further disperse hermetic subjectivity and simulate situational contexts for communication” (120). To my ear, at least in Ashbery's most recent volumes, the self's skepticism is transgressed by rather solipsist projections of the past. More importantly, this transgression is a part of a larger project directed towards reassessment of more basic empirical concepts, like the notion of time and the body encapsulated in temporality.
In Where Shall I Wander and A Worldly Country, the projection of the past unburdens the self's from its centrality, discarding its epistemological strictures of solipsism. Moreover, the past perspective helps to ease some of the long lasting tensions in Ashbery's poetry, fixing the breach between lucidity of realist, and “egoless” communion with the world of the post-structuralist artist. Finally, the past also helps the self to overcome the problematic relation to its body, erasing ailments of the old age and replacing them with litheness and effervescence of the youth.
6.
In his previous collections, Ashbery, as any poet, inevitably tried to recapture the past, using nostalgias over the passage of time. However, in his two latest volumes the past – and more generally, time – becomes the primary medium of sense production. This is not simply a derivative of the poet's aging. Reading late Ashbery is like visiting watchmaker's shop where “many clocks [are] continually chiming and striking different hours” (“And Counting,” WSIW 26). Quite interestingly, the title of Where Shall I Wander seems to be a paraphrase of a line from the 1992 volume, Hotel Lautréamont: “... And where shall we go when we leave? What tree is bigger/than the night that surrounds us?” (12). This is one of mystical moments in the collection: the speaker approaches God and confronts himself with eternity metaphorized into night, which echoes Pascal. Such titling is a gesture that sets the reader on a straight hermeneutic path, continuing the Whitmanian stance of guidance. Therefore, time, and especially the past, are to be read teologically, as destinations on a metaphysical route.
The intensity and ubiquity of the theme of the past and various conceptions used to yield it are overpowering. What is shoring this impression up is the fact that on several occasions Ashbery uses allegorizations of time when relating to the past, like this one from the poem “Perfect Hat”: “Oh the mill sang of many things but its wheel/was always rolling whether you noticed it or not./The wheel that is still today but much larger” (AWC 34). The conventional trope of mill wheel is a subject to the typically Ashberian procedure of estrangement. The ever growing mill metaphorizes into enlarging vastness of time which is also suggested in the poems by time expressions, stressing temporal distance, like “It all happened long ago” (“Feverfew,” AWC 5) or “He had a brother in Schenectady/but that was long, long ago (“A Kind of Chill,” WSIW 12). The time expression can be a metaphor itself: “This would have been a powerful/soul adventure in the old calendar (“A Small Table in the Street,” AWC 54). However, more often time is objectified without referential specificity: “Time was running/downhill while the clothes gave out. No one/wanted to wear them any more (“The Gallant Needful,” AWC 58).
It is the unimaginable extent of time and the irrevocability of the historical past that the speaker fears most:“We're living backward. We are not making up for the mistakes of the past, we are the past” (“The Snow-Stained Petals Aren't Pretty Any More,” WSIW 62). According to Charles Altieri, “to win the only possible victory over time” means “to take as the source of meaning and strength one's active involvement in the distortions of time and perspective” (Self and Sensibility 157). Ashbery's poems get actively involved in forming a perspective on temporality that does not form a single diachronic line: “In the morning it was warm, period. I went out on some pretext/and stayed for twenty years./When I returned you asked if I had forgotten anything,/and I answered no, only the milk. Which was the truth (“The Ecstasy,” AWC 20). Personalized time and the past are both malleable and multidimensional, full of gaps, rapids and strands: “The clock was on the verge of striking. And you know something/it never did!” (“And Other Stories,” AWC 57). Additionally, time and the past avoid fixating, Cartesian glance:“It is cherry, then, to reflect on the past/ and what it brought us.//... The wraparound flux we intuit/as time has other claims on out inventiveness” (“Are You Ticklish,” AWC 70). Even the meaning of our personal history is nebulous to our understanding capabilities: “What if we are all ignorant of all that has happened to us?” (“Feverfew,” AWC 5)
The past is an area into which we have been inevitably pushed by the flow of time. Yet its meaning is open, and its recapturing requires our effort:
So often it happens that the time we turn around in
soon becomes the shoal our pathetic skiff will run aground in.
And just as waves are anchored to the bottom of the sea
we must reach the shallows before God cuts us free (“A Worldly Country,” AWC 1).
To reach the shallows, which is the speaker's task, is to internalize time and prune it down to proportions of an individual existence. Thus the self becomes more resistant to a recurrent alterity brought about by passage of time, which otherwise produces a discontent: “Too late, the boar's/head on the mantel glows in solitary/archetypal annoyance at the way time has just passed (“To Be Affronted,” AWC 2). This paradigmatic vexation is overwhelmed by meticulous presentations of some past reality, where the past is not simply a time designator, or a deictic time index, but primarily an additional dimension of the poem's absolute present.
This procedure could be read literally on the text level: the voracious temporality of the poem – or any work of art – devours the past in order to store it in its own contemporaneity. Such is the starting point of “Affordable Variety” (WSIW 3), “Coma Berenices, (WSIW 7) or “America the Lovely” (AWC 59). In the first of the poems, which illustrates complexity of Ashbery's technique, the past permeates the present to the point where they cannot be separated:
It is one thing for a child to kidnap a parent.
It is quite another for the parent to sit down with the child,
Blocking the path and its favorite mosses.
Cathexis arrives early in a golden coach.
We see stuff perched around,
mazes stuck in mazes,
knot of grapes at the throat, the horizon.
And we couldn't keep it coming.
That is so.
This is an invaded country.
Dawn will abdicate all your book.
Walking around will tell the important things:
discount ways, barrels of breakers,
days swept into being.
The child grew up as these things grew,
listened and was worried for the starched moments
dropped from the official record. We bought pants
and suits, the occasional gray shirt.
By week's end all was silence and industry (WSIW 3).
The humorously sententious opening of the poem prepares the reader for a peregrination in a distant land of the speaker's childhood. The description in the next stanza in the present tense is a dense structural metaphor verging on personification, which almost resists parsing: some people including the speaker witness a scene when “cathexis” – quite an unusual term meaning emotional energy invested in a person, object or idea – comes back to them, hardly recognizable, or even hardly conceivable. This image rooted in the speaker's present is then projected into the past by the first distich, and then, by the second, into a vague spatial and historical context. The comment in the penultimate tercet enables the reader to connect all the previous units of the poem with an unspecified concept of childhood. The final stanza locates these disparate fragments in a fixed perspective of a solemn narration, referring to a particular point in time in the speaker's childhood.
Often when a particular time reference is made the speaker uses it to produce further generalizations about the past and history, which is reminiscent of Ashbery's earlier usage of the scholarly mask. However, his conclusion seems to have some apocalyptic trace in it: it's good that what was present passes away, ceases to exist, discharges, and accumulates as the past:
[W]e were part of all that happened there, the evil and the good
and all the shades in between, happy to pipe up at roll call
or compete in the spelling bees. It was too much of a good thing
but at least it's over now. They are making a pageant out of it,
one of them told me. It's coming to a theater near you (“Interesting People of Newfoundland,” WSIW 29).
In comparison with the past, the present is meager, and its advantages illusive: “These apartments we live in now are nicer/than where we lived before, near the beginning (“When I Saw the Invidious Flare,” WSIW 38). In the present, the speaker feels disoriented, as if out of time:
Seasons belong
to others than us. ...
The pure joy of daily living became impacted
with the blood of fate and battles.
There's no turning back the man says,
the one waiting to take tickets at the top
of the gangplank. Still in the past
we could always wait a little. Indeed,
we are waiting now. That's what happens (“More Feedback,” WSIW 46).
This fondness for the past makes the speaker wish that the present would come to an end: “It will be all over in a minute, you said. We both believed that, and the clock's ticking: Flame on, flame on” (“Like a Photograph,” AWC 11). Only when the present is behind us, transformed into the past, it is livable: “I enjoy seeing a gunboat in the harbor, it signals me we can always turn back to sip the past once it's over” (“The Lost Train,” WSIW 73). The passage of the present time and the resulting consciousness of the self's impermanence is a source of pain: “time passes, assuring vulnerability” (“Pavane pour Helen Twelvetrees,” AWC 68). On the other hand, in the indeterminate region without temporality brought to eerie life, the body is free from poignant experiences of mortality.
Ultimately, in the great eponymous poem of Where Shall I Wander, the speaker escapes to his personalized fantastic past, the final dwelling of the self. The narrative consists of the miniature stories from his life, or rather fantastic close-ups of perishable minutiae of existence, unifying the past, the present, and the future: “Shifting, too anxious to be fully aware, the screen of dirt and glitter grazes the edge of the pavement. It is understood that this is now the past, sixty, sixty-four years ago. It matters precisely at the drip of blood forming at the end of an icicle that hisses at you, you're a pod of a man. You know, forget and dislike him” (“Where Shall I Wander” 75). The loquacious speaker, spinning tales and spitting out random tidbits, makes it clear that it is a story of his past when he was a seed inside the “pod” he is now. However, “pod” does not imply accomplishment, like a fruit does. Time is not defined according to the rule of “proleptic retroactivity”which claims that our temporal existence is defined when we look backwards to find the roots of our present. In this paradoxical gesture, results produce causes. The “pod” is ambiguous, as it does not necessarily contain seeds.
For Ashbery's speaker, the past and present are not merely products of linear futurity. Here, inchoateness of individual experience escapes teleology: “To be seen from behind, here is what you have to do. Smear a tongue depressor with a little suet, than stand away, pessimistic as always. The part in your hair will come to seem the natural one. ... You know, you've got to go out, jostle the barometer, bump into the hall tree and excuse yourself, descend three steps, walk to the curb and pee against someone's sedan (“Where Shall I Wander” 75). The speaker, addressing his past self, does not make clear what really happened, suggesting possibilities and leaving space for guesswork. In other words, the past contains also the negative dimension of experience, all the “stories that were not.” The seemingly endless rift between the speaker's present and his past selves, as expressed in the above fragment, gets repaired in the course of the poem. The last part reads:“You wore your cummerbund with the stars and stripes. I, kilted in lime, held a stethoscope to the head of the parting guest. Together we were a couple forever (“Where Shall I Wander,” WSIW 81). This is the speaker's reconciliation with his past: at the end of it, or at the beginning, however cranky and improbable, there is a metaphor binding disparate fragments of his experience – his consolidating memory.
In my exegesis, Ashbery's philosophical horizon rests, on one of its ends, on Heideggerian anxiety connected with temporality, and on the other, on Lyotardian awareness of confrontation with the absolute temporary limit. Heidegger asserts: “When fear assails us, it does so from what is within-the-world. Anxiety arises out of Being-in-the-world as thrown Being-towards-death. When understood temporarily, this 'mounting' of anxiety means ... that the future and the Present of anxiety temporalize themselves out of a primordial Being-as-having-been in the sense of bringing us back to repeatability” (395). Ashbery's speaker overcomes anxieties of the present and the future, contriving an intuitive “having been,” which reduces the impetus of his being-towards-death. The eschatological overtone of this modus operandi finds its analogue in Lyotard's theories of time as expressed in The Inhuman. Reflections on Time. According to Lyotard, “In 4.5 billion years [with death of the sun] there will arrive the demise of... phenomenology and...utopian politics” (9). In Ashbery's latest poems there is a growing consciousness of the self's final limit, which manifests itself as a “valedictory” timbre. However, the new poems do not celebrate the passage of time and leaving something behind, which is a typical modernist trope. Instead, they overcome the obstacle the body places in the way of (poetical) thinking.
8.
John Emil Vincent claims that Ashbery's later volumes depend more on the unit of the book to produce their effects: “To read later Ashbery without the unit of the book in mind reduces one's critical specificity – leaving one to suggest that the work is either simply a product of temperament, that of a genius or jester, or a product of a single poetics, Whitmanian or whimsical” (5). This is also rue about Where Shall I Wander and A Worldly Country. The first volume starts with “Ignorance of the Law Is No Excuse,” which is a description of a particular point in history, and it ends with “Where Shall I Wander,” which transfigures the past into post-Cartesian presence. Similarly, Ashbery's most recent volume opens with a description of a certain locality in the past – dreamy land of the speaker's youth in “Worldly Country” which via the poetic effort get transformed into a “fruit” in the final poem “Singalong.” These are the maps of the poet's most recent peregrinations, and his ultimate metaphors. For Ashbery, the past is the future – a worldly country where, accompanied by his readers, he wanders.