« Empire of Signs
Time Conquered. John Ashbery's Holderlin Marginalia
John Ashbery's recent collections of poems display a striking consistency in their attempts to grasp the phenomenon of passing time. It seems that they aim at finding an external perspective on the time-related issues, which could reduce the speaker's vulnerability to the unstable ontology of aging. Thus, starting with Your Name Here (2000), through Chinese Whispers (2002), to Where Shall I Wander (2005) and, finally, A Worldly Country (2007), the poet has restlessly produced exegeses of his personal chronology, and projected them against a broader flux of his culture's temporality. According to John Emil Vincent, one of the central questions in the late Ashbery is expressed by a line from the eponymous poem in Chinese Whispers: “How to describe the years?” (164). This question touches on the extent of our ability to experience and describe time as and after it passes. The poet is quite doubtful if we can conceive of reality's flux: a parlor game of Chinese whispers, in which a phrase is whispered in a circle from one player to the next, changing beyond recognition, metaphorizes into a life passing from present to present, shifting with each passage, and ending up unrecognizable. Ashbery curbs his profound skepticism towards human condition, conspicuous in the above metaphor, through his formal inventiveness, ignoring the critical labels attached to him previously.
His recent visions of time, in contrast to the earlier bulk of his oeuvre, are rendered in rather a lucid vernacular, centering around a fixed self with a linear past. This does not mean, of course, that Ashbery is into mimetic representation, granting his readers more than an occasional purchase on meanings. Each of the New Yorker's volumes is as experimental as it could be, both on the level of the book, and on the level of the individual poem. His poetic ministrations typically include oscillation between multiple registers, accumulation of non sequiturs resulting from swerving levels of interiority, and irregular syntax. In addition, we should remember that Ashbery's texts are crowded by a multiplicity of personae and speakers, which stirs up the poem's deictics. Marjorie Perloff, the most cogent of Ashbery critics, describes this quality as a “polyphonic stance” which enables the poet to “talk back” to the aggressive media and business culture (189). As for his linguistic material, the poet's narratives revel in random tidbits of harping everydayness interspersed with sublime lyrical riffs. On top of that, Ashbery baffles his readers with extraordinary opening and closural gestures which increase the feeling of textual insouciance. Therefore, in the context of Ashbery's profoundly experimental flair, “Hölderlin Marginalia,” though it seems to stand out from other poems in Where Shall I Wander, should not really raise eyebrows. Yet it does and for a number of reasons.
Most obviously, the title of the poem directly alludes to the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843), who after a brief spell of poetic hyper-activity between 1793 and 1803, became irrevocably demented and spent the final thirty-six years of his life in seclusion in a house of a carpenter, Zimmer, writing doggerel rhymes about seasons of the year, and signing them as “Scardanelli” (Libera 5-7). Hölderlin's poetic output remained obscure until the beginning of the twentieth century when he was monumentalized by the greatest literary figures of the time, including Rainer Maria Rilke, Stefan George and Thomas Mann (Libera 8). As we can see, Ashbery's titling is a suggestive sense-producing device in the context of Hölderlin's biography, demonstrating that time can be, and often is, conquered. The title also raises a question of the shifting margins of our culture, and the ever changing ratio between the marginal and the central. In this sense, “Hölderlin Marginalia” sounds like an oxymoronic phrase, bringing to mind a “margin of the margin,” an area at the very border of civilization where culture meets non-culture and where metaphors emerge from primordial chaos. Such a literary stance squares with philosophical outlooks of the theorists of the epistemological limits of thought, as in Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault or Jean François Lyotard. As for the latter, Ashbery shares with him one more thing: a conception of time which is indeterminate, yet, at least to some extent, controllable by human beings.
In “Hölderlin Marginalia,” there are several scenes with the same self in clearly different temporalities, which is marked by varying tonalities of voice. What binds the scenes together is the speaker's strife against the confines of his existence, imposed by time as well as space. As for its poetics, “Hölderlin Marginalia” is a rhetorical vertigo of brief jagged stanzas, distorting the syntax almost beyond the limits of the poet's native tongue. The poem is divided graphically into six sections by long continuous lines. Thus each section visually resembles a grave or a lot in a cemetery. The opening of the poem thrusts the reader directly into a solipsistic flux of atomized sensory experience:
And in the soaking of which,
or the trunk.
is gas gas gas gas gas
of which the room too
is furnished
always the quaking of relief
is followed by gold scrub
piercing of a robot
They came to get you in times of relief as yet unimaginable,
or imagined –
circus tigers tip out on the loom, and the
hand
still stays.
An unseen servant stocks the kitchen with supplies
and out pantries are furbished by autumn
the kettle relinquishes nothing
_____________________________
( “Hölderlin Marginalia”17)
Introductory “and” suggests an unfolding conversation between indeterminable personae in a spooky world of a horror movie: we are in the nearest proximity of a decomposing body, in a room – or a coffin? – full of possibly virulent gas. “Gold scrub/ piercing of a robot” evokes naturalistic images connected with postmortem decomposition of body when robot-like bugs penetrate a corpse. On the surface, this may be read as an example of Ashbery's gallows humor, but at a closer examination we find a series of metaphors with an elegiac undertone, like “relief as yet unimaginable,” “pantries furbished by autumn,” or “the room furnished by gas.” The speaker repeats the word “gas” five times, which almost explodes its sense into “guess,” before it sublimes into an abbreviation used to denote a newspaper in the next section: “More gaz and gaz in the openings between the tombs” (“Hölderlin Marginalia”18). There are more paronomastic chains like that in the poem: “Lord the lingo of the ingot” (“Hölderlin Marginalia”17), “try wry irises” (“Hölderlin Marginalia”18), or “bring dawn yet not yet down” (“Hölderlin Marginalia”19). According to Kacper Bartczak, Ashbery's puns are a fitting device for displaying interconnectedness within one cultural field (171). In the first sections of “Hölderlin Marginalia,” they center around death and decay, hitting on a transcendental note. The reader's impression is that the speaker waddles in a sticky language, making every effort to escape from the plastering fabric of words. This metaphorizes into a poetic liberation from linguistic or physical paradigms, which is the most important trope of the poem.
The image of the tigers “tipping out on the loom” is a very interesting example of tropic intertextuality or metalepsis, invoking Blake's famous poem, “The Tyger.” An offspring of Blake's “fiery thought,” the tiger opens a space of unceasing interrogation: either a cousin of Leviathan or a man-made creation, it incorporates primeval chaos, which may figuratively stand for pre-structured perception, free from Urizen's unmistakable unequivocality. In Ashbery's poem, this meaning gets an ironic spin: “circus tigers” imply tamed and trained animals used in cheap entertainment. The message is clear: everything is a prepackaged product on a cultural scene, and we are cut off from the pure energies of Blakean Imagination. That is why “hand/ still stays,” and nothing can force it to move. The image of the tiger reappears in the final section of the poem, which may point to futility of circus-like literary practices as a means to grasp reality. The ultimate tercet of the section provides a broader external perspective. “Kitchen,” “pantry,” and “kettle” intimate a locality shared with others, like a home, which logically appears in the next section:
_____________________________
Bye and bye
a grave overtook even the steamroller... .
He was my finest. ...
The sand path to the open space
(in Maine)
and the lovers go under it is gaz
More gaz and gaz (“Hölderlin Marginalia”17-18)
Another pun opening this section provides an interpretative frame for the reader: “bye and bye” connotes parting or leaving. The speaker gets out of the uncanny confines only to be captivated by painful memories of his long-ago romance, and particularly by a picture of him and his greatest love in a sand path in Maine. This is because of the recondite power the grave exerts over its vicinities – it overtook the steamroller – and the speaker's life, almost in the manner of the Stevensian jar. What is important, the picture is connected with the trope of opening or letting free to which the “sand path,” and possibly their love, led. “The lovers go under it is gaz” is a syntactic distortion which dramatizes abrupt separation. Once love was gone, other means of attaining this “opening” had to be invented, which is the main theme of the next, third section:
_____________________________
We who have
so much stamina it seems
impossible not to start again
the cool, the water
everything is open...
this tree, this henhouse is open
or the aquarium lusts silently all an afternoon
for what images?
...
try wry irises...
that is try anything, a sense of time is passing
concerts that
__________________________________
(“Hölderlin Marginalia” 18)
The speaker finally manages to find a way of “opening” reality thanks to his endurance, starting and trying over and over again. However, his achievement brings in a sense of futility permeating the whole section, with tropes pointing to wistfulness, like “lusting aquarium” or “wry irises.” Things are open but “for what images?” Perhaps the attempts at “opening” things were more important than the achieved goal? Perhaps we should not stop trying to “open” things, even if they are ostensibly unclosed, as this is the only method to keep our sense of life? The abrupt ending of this section is a closural gesture pointing that the period of opening discoveries has expired. Interestingly, it has a form of a graphic poem: “concerts that”... There is no time to tell what concerts.
The next two stanzas try to recreate a chronicle of the speaker's “opening.” The dominating tropes of the fourth section are those connected with going away and further decentering:
Then you grow up you grow away from
not meaning it as tedium –
everyone has to grow up a little in their life
a passion, orange,
platter of roses time will destabilize
in long or in large, keeps
still the secret. ...
[T]ravel all night
to the respected star
fall and worship the pebble time left there (“Hölderlin Marginalia” 19)
“Growing up” is likened to traveling in time or being unwillingly pulled through time, and it becomes clear that time is the main barrier separating the speaker from “stability.” “Traveling to the respected star” implies following one's goal while “worshiping” the pebble left by time could be read as an act of dissidence to the passage of time. “Pebble” is a survivor that managed to escape time's abyss. This meaning touches on the Stevensian trope of the “rock,” signifying reification of the past that Ashbery used in his previous volumes, like A Wave. Further in the section, we have flotsam and jetsam of past experiences arranged in a cryptic narration about the speaker's maturing: glimpses of different localities, like hotels, interspersed with the speaker's attempts to get his past experiences organized. In the final sixth section it becomes clear that the “opening” means writing verse – a life-long project, completely absorbing the poet's energies:
________________________________
A vast rudeness all at once, blinking like an incredulous ocean
with its garters down, in the foam chest of thundering... .
There are still other stays to unfasten
linkage in the teeth of night,
both lion and tiger.
We blend in with one another.
The relief is in the book,
taken to new extremes,
to further sights
in the cause of a new dimension
growing back from the tree,
caused briefly
by someone's mistake
now sucked out like venom,
the tears of materiality, the skin
of the birch
blown away and within grace
divided (“Hölderlin Marginalia” 22)
The opening gesture suggests a moment of revelation when reality is demystified. The speaker's voice emerges from the fury of the elements, unfolding an epiphanic vision of understanding. The speaker's “blending” with other “opening selves” could be understood as going beyond his distinctiveness towards some collective (or textual) awareness (or community). Thus the process of “opening” is a painstaking surpassing of one's selfhood. The promise of “relief” is guaranteed by rhetorical figures employed by the poet, with their dazzling inventiveness and masterly accurateness; in a word – it is ensured by a lasting form. The above fragment, typically of Ashbery, is autotelic, and it comments on the ongoing process of writing. Producing such a book is exactly the poet's goal. Only a formally superb volume can sooth the pain of being “here” as a fixed identity. However, this happens at a price: when reality's randomness is channeled into a form, it gets divided from its own “openness” – its indeterminacy which the speaker wanted to preserve. Hence “the tears of materiality” whose demystification is stressed by the sentimental cliché of the final image of the divided birch.
To reiterate the progression I've been tracing, “Hölderlin Marginalia” deals with the complex relations between reality, experience, time and writing. Time, which finally annuls all experience (or almost all, as it was demonstrated in the first section), can be conquered or overpassed by the process of writing, which gathers all experiences and distributes them in a collective and seemingly timeless awareness of a community. As for reality, preserving it in writing requires a constant effort on the part of the poet, the result of which remains highly questionable. In respect of the Horatian trope of immortal poet, Ashbery veers from the Mediterranean tradition that connotes timelessness with artistic greatness. The concept of immortality is more problematic for the American poet: in his perspective, it requires abandoning of the notion of the egotistic self as well as giving up writing understood as recapturing reality. Actually, the title of the poem could read: “Ashbery Marginalia” as it explores the main motives and strategies of Ashbery's own poetic thinking. Thus, the reference to Hölderlin is ironic, and it interlocks with the popular perception of the American poet.
An inevitable question any critical analysis has to cope with at this point is the relation of Ashbery's vision of poetry to the central text defining the role of the poet in American literature, namely Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay “The Poet.” As early as in his Map of Misreading (1975), Harold Bloom dubbed Ashbery as one of the strongest American poet in Emersonian tradition, grasping the complex attitude of the New Yorker to the transcendental thought : “For Ashbery, the Emersonian tradition [is] both the immediate burden and immediate strength” (198). Ashbery seems to share Emerson's belief that the greatest vocation of the human intellect is to come as close as possible to reality: “The true nectar [is] the ravishment of the intellect [obtained] by coming nearer to the fact. These are auxiliaries to the centrifugal tendency of a man, to his passage into free space, and they help him to escape the custody of that body in which he is pent up, and of that jailyard of individual relations in which he is enclosed” (“The Poet” 133). Ashbery's formal and structural inventiveness is a prove of his tremendous effort to unravel veering patterns of the real world: improbable as it may sound, the poet himself often claimed that his main goal, even in his radical disjunctive experiments from The Tennis Court Oath (1962), was to further the cause of the close mimesis. However, Ashbery cannot share Emerson's conviction that the poet reveals the symbolic meaning of nature to the rest of the mankind. In “The Poet” we read: “He is the true and only doctor; he knows and tells; he is the only teller of news, for he was present and privy to the appearance which he describes. He is beholder of ideas and an utterer of the necessary and casual” (124). The transcendental connection between the word of a genius Sayer and the physical world of actions got broken already at the end of the nineteenth century. Ashbery follows the path set up by modernist, like Mallarmé.
If “Hölderlin Marginalia” echoes with the Renaissance myth of the artist, it stresses its gaps and blanks resulting from indeterminate character of reality. This awry biographia literaria mocks linear chronology: the opening cemetery section should logically be the last in the sequence of presented events. The following section, where the trope of opening rises to the surface of the poem, logically takes place at the same time as the last, epiphanic section. The third section, about the speaker's endurance in his attempts at opening reality, could easily be placed as an introduction, explaining the speaker's motifs, or a conclusion, summing up lore about writing poetry. The fourth and fifth sections, with their retrospective glances, logically fit in after the second section. Therefore, the poem's temporal structure does not lead from the past to the future: instead, each part offers its own present that only hypothetically overlaps with the main course of my analysis. Such an open design enables us to interpret the poem in diverse ways every time we read it. A unifying trace of these readings may be an eschatological stance resulting from the confrontation with limit of the speaker's and the poem's individual time.
The concept of time which emerges from Ashbery's late poems finds a compelling analogue in Jean François Lyotard's theories of time as expressed in his collection of essays The Inhuman. Reflections on Time. Furthermore, the post-mechanistic idea of time advanced by the French philosopher provokes Ashbery's readers to adopt new interpretative strategies. The most general view shared by Ashbery and Lyotard is their repudiation of modernity's vision of time, in which future conditions the present. This assumption was grounded on the works of Augustine, Kant and Husserl who misprisoned time via structural metaphors in order to eliminate contingency. As the techno-scientific spirit and figure of capitalism came into maturity, the means of controlling time became even more efficient. Contrarily, for Lyotard, time is profoundly indeterminate, but the most convincing proof of its indeterminacy is provided, ironically, by the modern physics.
In our temporality, there are two extreme limits to the capacity to synthesize a multiplicity of information: the one minimal, the other maximal. According to Lyotard, such is the major intuition which guides Leibnitz's work, and in particular the Monadology: “God is the absolute monad to the extent that he conserves in complete retention the totality of information constituting the world. And if divine retention is to be complete, it must also include those pieces of information not yet presented to the incomplete monads, such as our minds, which remain to come in what we call the future” (60). Modern physics, on the other hand, finds its ground on the other side of the limit. It focuses on recording of bits of information as they are received, which is situated at the degree zero of consciousness or memory, representing the simplest unit required by mechanics – a particle. But even a particle has some elementary memory, a temporal filter – it enters into relation with other according to specific regularities: “[C]ontemporary physicists tend to think that time emanates from the matter itself, and it is not an entity outside or inside the universe” (61). Therefore, there are regions without time, and regions with temporalities more complex than ours.
This vision of time has yet an additional dimension: Lyotardian time does have a limit that is the expectation of the life of the sun. The anticipated explosion of this star is a challenge posed to all human thinking: “In 4.5 billion years there will arrive the demise of... phenomenology and...utopian politics” (9). This final catastrophe implies “an irreparably exclusive disjunction between death and thought. ... All the events and disasters we're familiar with and try to think of will end up as no more than pale simulacra” (11). It is impossible to think this end – to think it one has to be on both sides of that limit. Lyotard recognizes two common attitudes to this ineluctable circumstance. The first is to ignore it and to continue philosophizing with a glum afterthought resulting from the abyss between human knowledge and the material world. The second is to try to anticipate the disaster and fend it off with means produced by the laws of the transformation of energy. Only this is at stake today in technical and scientific research in every field “from dietetic... to nuclear physics” (12). Global economy, saving surplus energy in the form of capital by the use of technology, tries to reestablish complexity of the human monad to adapt it to extra-terrestrial environment. In other words, the only essential objective of any branch of knowledge is to overcome the obstacle that the body places in its development.
What can the reader of Ashbery's poetry infer from Lyotard's inhumanism? It would be interesting to read Ashbery's poems in terms of their confronting the absolute temporary limit. “Hölderlin Marginalia” exposes a poignant consciousness of the end of individual time, and it tests different means to approach this end, as physical matter (a corpse in a grave) and as a symbolic structure (a book). In both of them, there is an objective to overcome the obstacle the body places in the way of development of poetical forms. It is the Lyotardian perspective of the end of time that propels the speaker to try the impossible: conquer time. Passage of time is indeterminate – each section of the poem and possibly each image in embedded in different time-relations. They cumulate into a multi-dimensional analysis of the self's efforts to transcends its immediate circumstances. Stretching poetry's conceptual capacities, the speaker opposes to the relegation of the art and literature to the miserable function of cultural ornaments. Finally, “Hölderlin Marginalia” belongs to a tradition questioning the reason: the poem stays responsive to questions, but it does not neutralize their power to disquiet.