Whalen Again - Portrait From Another Direction

You can talk about the writing or you can talk about the man. Does a man's writing stand for the man, or does the man stand beside his writing (taking full credit and responsibility for it)? Whalen might have said that selflessness is close to godliness, in that we are mere vessels through which divine inspiration may--or may not--come. Whalen was a man who never seemed to take his luck for granted. Many of his poems come roundabout to a provisional conclusion, wary of satisfaction, respectful of fate, and modest in expectation. 

Haiku, for Gary Snyder

                               I S

Here's a dragonfly

                              ( T O T A L L Y )

Where it was,

                           that place no longer exists.

                                                                                    15:i:60

 

This is a poem from Braincandy 1962-1965, a section of poems from On Bear's Head [1969]. It's a very simple poem, which is why I chose to talk about it (long poems use up a lot of space in a blog, and are likely to put people off, is my take).

We've all had the experience of watching a dragonfly light on a twig or a rock nearby, or just hover nervously in mid-air. Dragonflies are among the most primitive of living things that still survive; they've been around since the dinosaurs, in fact they were around 100 million years before that, so you could say these little guys are a talisman of duration--the perfect formula to carry the DNA of life through time's adversity. 

They're also extremely agile in flight, can hover, change direction, land and take off, with astonishing speed. They're carnivores of the insect kingdom, eating smaller insects than themselves. In their nymph form, they live in water, and breathe through gills in their rectum, and can rapidly propel themselves by suddenly expelling water through the anus (a neat trick!). 

You can be looking at a dragonfly hovering beside you, its twin sets of wings quivering, and suddenly it's gone--they're that fast, your eye can't follow them. Metaphorically, this astonishing speed suggests a form of transubstantiation, or the instantaneous transfer of matter from one place to another, without literal apparent means. 

Is the poem a true haiku? Well, that depends. Classic haiku, the three lines, traditionally defined 5/7/5 syllable scheme. Given a little latitude, one could almost call any short English poem of this approximate length a haiku, especially if it functions as one--that is, through the juxtaposition of two things (as, an image and a comment upon). Clearly, Whalen's self-conscious decision to make a haiku poem implies a Zen content, and is well within the haiku tradition as it comes down to us through translations in the West. 

It differs, however, from its antecedents by not simply setting up a contemplative observation, but in some sense enacting what it describes. It is not simply static, but a live current to transmit energy! This notion of an energy construct is a post-Modern idea, one which Charles Olson referred to in his essay "Projective Verse" [1951]. The embodiment of an energetic charge--or linguistic discharge--is crucial to much of post-Modern poetic theory. 

The poem sets up a dialectic between two sets of narrative. The ostensible "poem" (or traditional haiku) is in the lines "Here's a dragonfly/Where it was,/that place no longer exists." This is a fairly straightforward, if somewhat predictable, haiku sentiment--the transitoriness of nature, of matter in any temporary form, or the ephemeral nature of visual perception, or of the mystical "disappearance" of an observed "moment" in the continuum. It's a Bergsonian idea: that Duration is unextended yet heterogeneous, and its parts cannot be juxtaposed as a succession of distinct parts, with one causing the other, thereby making determinism an impossibility and free-will pure mobility, which he called Duration. Perception of instantaneous fleeting moments suggests that we can capture frames or images from time, like putting an insect on a pin, but our sense of the continuous flux of "everything" proves that this is an illusion. Nothing stops. Nothing stands still. Everything is moving. Everything is irretrievable. 

The other half of the dialectic is the capitalized simultaneous parallel words "I S" and "( T O T A L L Y )". How do these two juxtaposed words function within the narrative of the poem? They're both "inside" the poem and "outside" it. You could say they represent a sort of deus ex of the world will (or universal spirit). Everything simply "is"--beyond human agency or blessing. This "is"-ness is totally encompassing (the universe), not limited either by our perceptual apprehension, or by the means of expression (language, mental processes).

The poet's perception of the being of the dragonfly--its "being"-ness--represented by its physical body existing in one place, then vanishing--inspires the realization that matter and empirical observation are illusions. As we sit on the earth, studying this hovering dragonfly, we're upsidedown, spinning around a planetary gyroscope, in an elegant dance of multifarious energy and matter of which we, the dragonfly, the twig it rests/ed upon, the air and the light and the moment in time, are all an involuntary, accidental part. 

This superconsciousness of awareness of the universe is a very Buddhist concept, not altogether alien to Western thought, but difficult to express except in formulaic terms. This poem is another example of the concise equational quality of the best short poems, which can express things that 1000 pages of dense philosophical analysis can't. It's like a summary of one of the important points of Wittgenstein's Tractatus: That in signifying what can be said, it will signify what cannot be said. 

Whalen's poem is an attempt to say the unsayable. The simultaneous hovering analagous capitalized letters (words) are symbolically linked to the hovering of the dragonfly: The moment in time which seems to hover precariously, and then vanishes before our eyes. The "I S" is an expression of the pure energy of the body of the insect--the energy which holds it together as a formal structure, the energy by which it throbs and flits decisively through the continuum, and of the flux of everything else as well. "( T O T A L L Y )" functions as a modifier but it is really unnecessary. Whalen could simply have titled the poem IS and perhaps have had the same effect; though lacking the enactment of the juxtaposed parts, it probably wouldn't have signified as clearly what he intended. The dragonfly probably is the "I S" which hovers above the poem proper--it's in the poem, or hovering just above it, both in and out of time, in and out of the poem.

Before such illumination there is no choice but to accede. All effort, all struggle, is encompassed within the continuum of the universal flux.