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:: The Radical Nature of Experience

Activity is the only community. The conservative gesture, always a constant (any ordering, institutional and societal) is to view both activity and time per se as a condition of tradition. As such, both time and activity are a “lost mass” at any time. “For just as modern man has been deprived of his biography, his experience has likewise been expropriated.”¹

My focus is on non-hierarchical structure in writing. For example, the implications of time as activity—the future being in the past and present, these times separate and going on simultaneously, equally active (in reference to Whalen’s writing, and similar to Dōgen’s conception of time and being)—suggest a non-hierarchical structure in which all times exist at once. And occur as activity without excluding each other. This is unrelated to social power (it can possibly transcend it) but is related to social intelligibility at some time. Social marginality is a state not producing necessarily, but related to, thought/form as discovery.

In Susan Howe’s poetry, “vault line divergence” (dual marginality?) is tracking of observation itself as making a present-time.

Lyn Hejinian described to me her work in progress, The Border Comedy, as being instigated by the notion of a collaboration in which one sends one line to someone else and the other person adds to it; yet in The Border Comedy she writes one line, then allows time to pass and comes back to it. But she was having trouble making the line unfamiliar to herself. She couldn’t get a line sufficiently unfamiliar, so began to work on all fifteen books of The Border Comedy (it is intended to be modeled on the fifteen books of Ovid’s Metamorphoses) at the same time, perhaps only returning to one spot in the work a couple of weeks after it was written and only looking at a few lines on the computer at once (in order not to ‘remember’ the background). “In order to keep writing fresh the memory of it has to fade. Unfamiliar, it is ‘of the moment.’”

In language horizontal and vertical time can occur at the same moment. Hejinian says that the unfamiliarity of the writing is a prompt; it prompts the future.

A lost mass (Paris gone) Shine red in young swallow’s mouth:

One of Philip Whalen’s poems might be written over a period of several years in a notebook, then typed and chopped into separate lines, which, arranged on the floor, are comparisons of different moments or periods of time and his mind at those times. Thoughts would have similarities and differences in two times, say. “It is not collage,” Whalen made the distinction speaking to me. Collage would be a completed woven or superimposed fabric (when read later); in his poems, the levels in the writing maintain their first imprint, the pattern of what the mind was doing at those different times. Is the distinction that a collage is more passive as a construction in the sense that the viewer sees it later, rather than active comparison on the part of the reader and writer in reading as real-time, an activity?

Whalen comments within Scenes of Life at the Capital that the process of copying from the manuscript to the typewriter suppresses the material: the copy is transmogrified throughout (with a sense of its original shape retained, its first imprint having been there); the physical original (written by hand in a notebook, before being translated into typeface) is also activity, it is physical imitation/which is fiction too. That is, it is fiction only; there’s no original.

In Whalen’s writing, comparable to Dōgen’s articulation of being as time (the poetry not being a description of anything outside, but a demonstration of one’s mind doing this—the syntax and structure duplicating the process that is the reader’s own mind-phenomena), the nature of the present is only disjunctive; the times occurring separately are at the same time.

Every place is the same

Because I felt the same, remembering everything

We boated for hours on the Lake of Constance …²

Remembering everything, all layers at the same time, writing is the mind’s operations per se and imitation of it at the same time.

Fits of psychic imperialism

there’s no point in returning until I find out

why did I have to come all the way back here

endless belt of punchcards travels through the neighbor’s loom

repetition of a pattern from a long time back

(P. 55)

Restatement adjusting perspective (also readjusting perception, which is pervasive, different from perspective) to an ordered sense is psychic imperialism; rather, Whalen is making overt imitation (in and) as being itself only the perspective’s moment:

There is a wonderful kind of writing

Which is never written NOW

About this moment. It’s always done later

And redone until it’s perfect

(P. 60–61)

“I just want to wreck your mind.” His moment redone is imitation rather than representation: he’s imitating speaking to himself rather than the writing dramatizing conflicting postures (in the sense of posturing which is to portray his own psychology or conflicts). In other words, he makes constructions overt as voices simultaneously as their being the ego of the speaker. So it displaces it by occurring at the same time (“wrecks the mind”).

Activity is everywhere not operated upon by only one. “No change of identity but a change of state” (p. 111). Activity is itself conditional.

That is, by placing passages of notation of events, seen to be similar and in the particular moment of text (construction of voices as shape/sound, their interrelation which is that moment—as being always outside the time when it occurred) there is a change in the shape and structure.

The poetry is ventriloquism that, by being sensitive scrutiny of himself, is actual conversation. The ‘imprint’ of someone only as their speaking has a shape that is the text.

Moment of change or connection is not coming from the individual (writer/reader) nor transformation from single crucial events, but is throughout the minute notations (isn’t any of them per se, at any one time).

The writing as the crystal does not act upon or change anything:

… In order to make this day great

Yesterday must be altered

(P. 69)

Making “this day great” is at the same time illusion and observing the nature of subtle pervasive change that is not caused anywhere.

Being free of himself is tonal (he makes fun of himself, imitates himself). Speed and vision are manifestations of each other, an activity, being outside.

Now currently appearing a persistent vision

When it happens at the correct speed

But if you get too close it is only

Patterns of light

Drop candy and try to follow it

Creates new place and time.

(P. 82)

Whalen cited The Art of the Fugue as an influence and described to me studying fugue structure, which is a pattern of major and minor melodies. The notebook method of composition of Scenes of Life at the Capital (capital cities of different times and locations are ‘occurring’ at the same time) is horizontal unfolding (procedure of the fugue) as note against note, and melodies moving over time as (if) ‘history.’

In The Kindness of Strangers, excluding horizontal range, the horizontal is implied (it is excluded by at the same time being there implied, ‘recalled’). Excluding this range by only ‘choosing’ the non sequitur (thought ‘connection’ omitted in close secession/succession) is disjunction in present time alone (that is, only the disjunction is there).

The implied ‘comparison’ (to shape/sound of horizontal fugue movement, as if ‘history’) is insisting on the process or act of that disjunction itself as being mind-phenomena.

Only the disjunction is there: occurring by the action (of the mind making leaps and remarks, and imitating its own sound and conversation, to itself or others); but there is the backlog at the same moment that is range itself. An implied vast space and terrain.

Whalen is saying we need not bear out the constructions that are in place. We are not ‘caused’ by ‘history;’ while it is being constructed.

Being “free from orders, notions, whims / Mine or other people’s” is also to be free from one’s own regime imposed even in ‘procedure,’ that of disjunction itself (or that he finds connection, makes a connection at all). One isn’t remaining even in the moment of perspective as that ‘disjunction’ itself. The poem is one’s always leaping out of one’s mind, not being in the same moment of one’s mind there.

“Olson told us that history was ended” (p. 120). The account of having been going to attempt to somersault, and the report that he had just somersaulted leaves nothing (no action). The writing ‘records’ actions, physical (mind actions, as if physical and mind were conflated as writing). To write as only disjunction is in order to “wreck” one’s mind; a range having been excluded is entering the same time (“For Kai Snyder,” p. 112).

Past, present, and future occurring at the same time (wreck one’s mind) are the disjunction in which one cannot be in any instant.

Imitating the voice as melody in the fugue structure (not being in the same moment of one’s mind) is history occurring as his own pattern (‘found’ by placing lines together) of past events, the writing repeating that pattern as connections, which are then new connections. The writer’s ‘own voices’ are fictions of him and fictions of being voices, imitation only of conversation—which is what conversation is only. There’s activity in that “All that I hear is me and silence.”

A lost mass (Paris gone)

Shine red in young swallow’s mouth

(P. 136)

STUDENT: “What keeps us from giving up everything?”

TEACHER: “Fiction.”

(P. 135)

“Repetition of a pattern from a long time back,” there is change throughout is history, so it’s on nothing.

Writing the present moment, his activity right at that moment—‘just what’s happening’ right now is a zero. People might get really bothered by his seemingly just writing about the activity in the minute, ‘nothing.’ It can’t ever be a connection.

In The Kindness of Strangers, disjunction as timing, placing different times (dated poems and passages or lines of poems undated written at different times) against each other (melody against melody) so that the greater the distance the greater the disjunction/leap (or the opposite: the smaller the time distance, the greater the disjunction/leap. Leap is different from disjunction), then the disjunction or leap is not time?

Non sequitur as ‘no relation’ is used as differentiation; or similarity is used to be differentiation. Whalen is using non sequitur to be: not comparison but differentiation paired continually so as to occupy the same time, enter the same time. Contraries existing separately.

‘Comparison’ occurs by line as the nonstop weave/‘history’ in Scenes of Life at the Capital. In the dating of poems, with gaps of time, placed next to each other in The Kindness of Strangers, the writing is only the mind’s process as if imitating the process, recording the ‘inside’ separate from the action in the world? “The act of remembering or the vibrations of the sutra / crash through the real world” (108): the ‘act’ and remembering—the two—are the action in the world, what it is only, and smash it by being in it; yet are in it, separate.

Vertical/horizontal: “All walking at some angle to this void reality / Immediate bright breath” (p. 108). The ‘two’ are together that are not two also:

Morning zazen evening drunk

Mosquito hawk legs thinner

Than a leg between

Legs thin as a

Hairy laugh tail

(108)

Compression of evening and morning in real-time only and being the same. “Cold penetrates the root of cold; heat penetrates the root of heat. Even if you try millions of times to avoid cold or heat, it is like trying to put a tail where your head is.”³

The notebook method of Scenes of Life at the Capital (which is separate times compared to each other) allows all layers to occur at the same time in the text, while being read/acted in by the reader as real-time (representation) where it is not. It’s only the way the mind works making fast disjunctions and connections; it is phenomena as being one’s mind. ‘Seeing’ is not separate from being action and these are only the process of the text/one’s mind phenomena. Writing is therefore an experiment of reality.

In The Kindness of Strangers, separate dated poems are placed next to each other out of sync chronologically: “Move without moving any THING.”

Chronological sequence does not initiate (anywhere) in others.

The present only takes place ‘now,’ having no earlier occurrence, and is in the future which is not ‘present.’ ‘Then’ takes place ‘now’; it was ‘then’ only when it occurred.

To explain eclipses and to predict them

large numbers are needed

most of all zero.

(P. 137)

So the “present intention” does not govern the future. “The crystal does / Nothing. Its shape and structure makes all / the difference.”

A ‘zero’ (that excluding the horizontal range) is the disjunctive present, which is: ‘then’ is ‘now,’ the present is ‘now,’ and the future is the same ‘now’ (they occur at once, but not hindering each other, being entirely those times, separate from each other—in a ‘present’ as being disjunct).

As writing the ‘present’ is open or zero—a lost mass—as is an eclipse. One is not separate from activity anywhere. Or in it, either.

A minute move is there a non sequitur per se.

A ‘random’ (that is, detailed, minute) speck put beside (compared to?) some other ‘random’ (minute) speck—their interrelation occurring solely changes the entirety/interiority of ‘historical’ event (that which appears to be a crux and unified); the disjunction (in non sequitur) of the event occurs only as being that present-time.

The ‘event’ not existing at all and/as activity is throughout it. All times being brought together and separate simultaneously (‘wreck the mind’) is there being no ‘history’ then.

Comparing distinctions, which are the layers as states of mind in different times, as if these are the sound/shape that’s the writing, is the ‘interior’ motion of ‘experience.’

Susan Howe’s “Otherworld light into fable/Best plays are secret plays”:⁴

Second time somewhere—the second time is the present only fictitious deeps

Cries open to the words inside them

Cries hurled through the woods—the moment of divergence is the physical page of the text.

—their activity nowhere in it

—as that being pervasive.

in the otherday

on wild thoughtpath—is throughout

Moving the second moment, (of writing) into the place of the first moment, and occurring at the same time.—As the original moment

History does not exist; (my reading of her text “Articulation of Sound Forms in Time” is) Howe’s writing is not a re-creation (the latter being ‘drama’) of people ‘in history’ but an occurrence solely in a present reader—that is itself the occurrence of disjunction.

Corruptible first figure—so that its second occurrence in/as present-time is itself only; is not transmuted.

The event (Bright armies wolves warriors steers) is not transmuted either, breaks bounds (is out of bounds) (p. 17)—By its being illusion—and is out of bounds by being marginal (real-time/historical) people who are ‘unknown’ or ‘minor.’

Have lost the beaten track—being on the beaten track is one’s illusion and losing it is. Vault lines divergence—the divergence occurs by the continuance of the illusion, the antecedent moment stretched and occurring ‘only’ in the present/as page of text merely, the written itself becomes the vault line and the divergence.

As their activity is nowhere in it—second figure can be somewhere, ‘an’ occurrence in time at all. That is, by history/event not existing at all, there can be occurrence at all.

The Progress of self into illusion/history as activity in the present only—because the real actions of the past no longer exist; The figure of a far-off Wanderer is illusion of self.

Whatever suffering existed then or now—is ‘only’ the present person in real-time; Portents of lonely destructivism

The line of writing as (their/any) one’s physical death. As if the writing could be a spatial relation ‘to’ being.

The concentration is on not diverging from illusion—this is the physical/spatial relation that occurs as the text

The writing is also a false Impulsion of a myth of beginning, an element of rigorous Americanism as Knowledge narrowly fixed Knowledge (p. 12) by being antecedent to (any) action—it is nowhere—not existing in one—where one has no activity in the present.

Writing is the present creation of illusion in order to diverge from it in being a state of attention. Attention, the activity of reading or observing, is the only history and present moment—at all.

Best plays are secret plays (11)—because it is an action, at all (Anarchy into named theory) (p. 32)—this is in attention itself.

Her wild thoughtpath is there being a present at all—there’s no life rather than activity there.

Frequently critics regard Howe’s writing as salvaging ‘lost’ experiences in relation to tradition or history, rather than separating these (as actions) from history—rather than secret actions because they are not in history at all. Are also the actions that are ‘of’ that which is the poetry. Have no translation.

Howe’s use of ‘selection’ (rather than initiation) as a writing process submerges the writer’s activity of thought ostensibly in history itself, by being in prior texts by others outside one’s/her own cognition as instrumental: “This is my historical consciousness. I have no choice in it. In my poetry, time and again, questions of assigning the cause of history dictate the sound of what is thought.”⁵

Howe’s introduction to her Frame Structures: Early Poems 1974–19796 places biographical accounts of people living before the author’s life alongside memories of her childhood; that is, her life is ‘unrelated’ (can’t be observed to be related) to theirs. Yet the framing of these accounts, and these being an introduction to the poems, structures a view of history as causality. Her framing there is ‘opposite’ from my reading of her lines from “Articulation of Sound Forms in Time.” Her imposition of ‘history’ on her own life and poems is a traditionalist myth of beginning, a determinateness: “Innocency. A pure past that returns to itself unattackable in the framework. Restoration” (p. 26). A state that is “Innocency” suggests the poet’s seeking stasis of a childhood reconfigured (as if a Golden Age). “Restoration” is that past state, which didn’t exist and is desired.

Actions as Reading and Plays.

It occurs by simply giving up one’s mind; yet one can’t do that in order to write it. This contradiction is evoked also in reading and hearing it:

During performance of my poem/play, The Weatherman Turns Himself In, the audience sat in a darkened field of hanging black irises (flowers) with rapid action occurring outside this field in front of the viewers. The activity is going on in a medium where it cannot realistically occur. Rapid action is apparently being represented in a setting of a play that cannot be rapid action, as of action films; and the play’s action is occurring solely via the language being stilled to be contemplative as the language’s only activity.

For example, slab of yellow teeth man on motorcycle to slash woman hurrying with suitcase—occurs as ‘speaking this action’ at/in the exact time of it.

By the activity being separated from the language and going on at the same time, the action is not (only) what is heard and seen, and it only takes ‘place’ there.

Activity is the only community. At the same time the viewer is conscious of separation, one solely.

This passage from As: All Occurrence in Structure, Unseen—(Deer Night) (writing that is to be read and not enacted and is also the activity of a play) analyzes the structure of The Weatherman Turns Himself In:

There could be a circumstance in which the actions were continual and ‘visible’ by the people speaking of an action while doing it. People were describing an action as it was occurring and being seen: all being its occurrence. Being seen, seeing, and speaking are all actions that are equal and in time. A man said, “I found the action/the movements distracting—so that I couldn’t listen—I just wanted to listen to the language.” I want the viewer to exist, in this distraction. Not to listen as such. So as not to re-form the action of listening, itself. At all. That one could apprehend outside of formation only.

This same passage from As: All Occurrence in Structure, Unseen—(Deer Night) also analyzes structure in a prose work (of mine), Defoe, sections of which were performed as a play called The Present. In The Present, separate scenes occur at the same time in and at the sides of a small center space. The past action (which is the first part of the play; inconveniently difficult choreographed actions occur, such as a heroin dealer later flickering on a motorcycle being carried in a cocoon by starving boys on a desert) impinges into present commentary (second part of the play), the action recurring as a different present which is at the same time.

Thus both play (The Present) and prose work (Defoe) have sequences solely of written ‘rendition’ of physical action (in the play actions are ‘said’ as they are enacted) followed later by sequences of observation or discursive commentary (in the play this is in part two; these are spoken and also shown as handwritten phrases on slides): these are separate as if observing the physical actions, which are also past and present. The separated passages cause the ‘obverse’ (conceptualization or action) to collapse becoming one—always being separate. It is ‘as if’ we’re seeing and reading mind structuring.

Writing not having any relation to event/being it—by being exactly its activity. It’s the ‘same thing’ as life (syntactically)—it is life. It has to be or it’s nothing.

“A child imitates in space certain motions and shapes derived from earlier incomprehensible relations conveyed by others. Motions are created beside (as if ‘by’) themselves, such as the motions of running.” Actions are no more ‘givens’ that are known than are concepts. Thus, the text as imitation of physical movements/gestures (yet) as language is utterly separate from its conceptionalization. Both are empty in that the motions have no generalization (motions have no language, which is what they are there). For example, in The Weatherman: running is ‘spoken’ (“As from not being liked and so without there being anything runs”) by The Other as she runs hurling a bar into the wheel spokes of cycles on which people attacking ride.

Conceptualization separate from action is observation of what? Occurrence does not bring these even with each other; so in occurrence (of either at the same time) they (‘motions’—which are the occurrence—and ‘conceptualization,’ the occurrence) are utterly separate, are ‘gone’ there, and one realizes that.

Occurrence being separate from itself ‘there,’ “experience” is ‘seen’ from the viewpoint of its dissolution.

Giving up the outside as ‘conversation’ and at the same time giving up the interior ‘conversation’ occurs in the ‘viewing’ of performing (these becoming the same). ‘Making’ writing impermanent. Disjunct instant is neither conceptualization, nor “contemplation”/metaphysics, nor ‘solely’ action as in an action film (which is as if ‘not’ in life, the ‘plot’ of an action film being only segue of actions). Neither any thing nor its concept.

Agamben’s notion of experience having been “expropriated,” the individual supposedly no longer being able ‘to have’ experience (‘they’ say)—as one being separated from one’s action and perception of it, or by their saying that this is so?—here (‘viewing’ text or viewing action as performance of it) the practice of separating occurrence as a form of attention—of there being no relation, of one to occurrence—is ‘other than’ alienation (renders “alienation” irrelevant, not what’s occurring; rather, it is observation). Without being a message or polemics, this attention of itself as an activity is: ‘watching the experience of one’s mind at once as if ‘with’ one’s physical actions—and watching as being itself action.’ In other words, it reinstates “experience” as (separate from ‘their’ definition of one’s, or one’s own prior, experience) a different activity.

Notes

The Radical Nature of Experience was first given at a talk at the Assembling Alternatives conference at the University of New Hampshire, 1996.

1. Giorgio Agamben, Infancy & History / Essays on the Destruction of Experience (New York: Verso, 1993).

2. Philip Whalen, Heavy Breathing (Bolinas, Calif.: Four Seasons Foundation, 1980), 54. Hereafter cited in text by page number only.

3. Dōgen, Moon in a Dewdrop, Writings of Zen Master Dōgen (North Point, 1985), 108–109. Hereafter cited in text by page number only.

4. Susan Howe, “Articulation of Sound Forms in Time,” Singularities (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1990). Hereafter cited in text by page number only.

5. Postmodern American Poetry (New York: Norton, 1994), 648.

6. Susan Howe, Frame Structures, Early Poems 1974–1979 (New York: New Directions, 1996). Hereafter cited in text by page number only.