Via Negativa

Only one time in my life have I ever let my guard completely down. It was, of course, for love.

“My guard” – please forgive the cliche. I mean, you know, that imaginary wall – “security barrier” if you like – that protects, indeed defines our autonomy as free and sovereign individuals. Or, in a less Kantian sense: the door that we prefer to keep firmly shut in order to avoid being overwhelmed and destroyed by Whatever.

What the imagination can build, I said to myself, the imagination can remove. Without telling my lover what I was doing I began, figuratively speaking, to strip. Looking full into her face, one by one I took off every mask, every cloak, every pretence – and I have many. I was enough of a would-be Buddhist to realize that there was no true face or essential self “underneath,” but I was determined to show it to her anyway.

It helps to know that she was a mind reader, one of two I’ve dated. (Both were women who had been abused as children; mind reading was pretty clearly a survival tool.) We were sitting in the back of a funicular car at the time. When we got to the bottom of the mountain some ten minutes later, I broke the spell. She said quietly, “That felt like a thousand years.” Which might have been sheer glibness (another defense mechanism of hers), but I think she meant it.

She was leaving Japan in two days, and I would be staying on in the Far East for another six months. Our relationship had never been more than another life experience for her – a circumstance for which I never blamed her, because she had been honest about it from the start. I, however, had fallen deeply in love for the first time in my life. The sex had never been that good, for reasons I wouldn’t fully understand until years later, when additional experience and the achievement of some measure of distance permitted a more dispassionate judgement. Removing my guard, letting her completely inside, was the only thing I could think of that might have a chance of making her as attached to me as I was to her.

In part, it was simply an effort at communication, true communication. You’ve heard, I’m sure, that “show, don’t tell!” is the poet’s dictum. I wanted to show her what actual love was like, and the only way to do that was by showing what it could do.

Even aside from romantic love, the fact is that we cannot communicate in any real sense without communion, without opening ourselves up – imitating Christ or Isaac or some other poor rooster, all potential wound on the altar of the soul. The exchange of information is either completely peripheral to true communication, or else our concept of information must be radically expanded to include such embodiments as breath and heart.

The Japanese understand this. They have a strong cultural preference for non-verbal communication, and tend to feel that if close family members or lovers depend too much on speech, it’s a sign that their relationships are weak. But as Butuki said recently about his attempts to negotiate with Japanese businessmen, the entire language works through innuendo. Definitive statements are rude. A typical sentence concludes with a diminuendo of self-deprecating qualifications: “you-know-isn’t-it-perhaps-I-wonder-but,” accompanied by the baring of teeth in a subordinate’s grin or the slightly more restrained and tolerant smile of the superior.

Wordless or otherwise, communication on the level I attempted that day cannot help becoming a form of sorcery, a manifestation of power. This was not, as the cliche has it, “naked power,” but power incidental to a demonstration of psychic nakedness. Had our relationship been more balanced, perhaps it wouldn’t have seemed like such a big thing. I imagine that anyone reading this who has been married for a long time will be feeling a mixture of amusement and pity that I never got beyond all the sturm und drang . . .

It almost worked. After her return to the states, she stayed faithful for what she later told me was a record for her – four months. As for me, I descended into squalor and drunkenness, changing so completely that by the time my parents flew into Osaka three months later, my own mother walked by me three times in the airport terminal without recognizing me.

I have hated Japan ever since.

So Czeslaw Milosz finally kicked off (thanks to Siona for the link). He was 93! I find it encouraging that someone so fundamentally dour could live so long. It challenges our idiotic pseudo-Christian cultural predilection to look askance at anyone who dares to utter a discouraging word.

In the last year he lived in the United States, Milosz kept a journal subsequently published as The Year of the Hunter (translated by Madeline Levine, FSG, 1994). On March 30, 1988, Milosz contrasted his worldview with that of the hugely influential Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz:

Do you really like Gombrowicz’s novels and plays? Now, be honest! No. I don’t envy him his having written them; I would not wish to be their author. Do they disturb me? Yes. Because if people really exist only for other people, if the cocoon we have spun vanished in a cosmos about which we can say nothing, not even whether it exists (at most, that it exists in our minds), if this is so, then perhaps we really do live in hell. My anxiety derives from my thinking of Gombrowicz as a modern writer, so that I have to consider myself old-fashioned. A polite little boy who believes in a dear little God, who tries to avoid sin, encounters an uncivilized rapscallion who sticks out his tongue and thumbs his nose at the authorities of two millennia. In the final analysis, what I can oppose to Gombrowicz comes straight from the strorehouse of ancient concepts:

“The world exists, not just in my mind.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because it is observed by God.”

. . . I have a tremendous need to go outside of myself, beyond my persona; the more I am aware of my aging organism, the stronger is this need, this desire to be somehow a part of God’s thoughts when he observes the world, a need for perfect objectivity, for a sphere that endures independently of people’s fleeting interconnections. I have tested this; my poetry is like that, it moves outward, it travels beyond me. The ideal: to be able to say that, although things are not good with me, the world endures and moves along its path, and in this world, despite all its ghastliness, there is another side, a true side, a lining visible to the eyes of Divinity. In other words, my quarrel with Gombrowicz really revolves around his “argument about the existence of the world”; that is, his stubborn denial of assertions that something other than our perceptions exists. That is one of his attacks on objective truth. The other is the way that people entangle themselves in a single interconnected body; hence, the truth is always their truth, God is their God.

Milosz’s view was essentially tragic. Later in the same entry, describing a Palm Sunday mass, he muses on his feeling of identification with millions of other believers over the centuries, and his intuition that a figure like Christ is necessary because “every individual is alone with his threshold of pain, of dereliction, and I in my egotism am unable to enter into my fellow man.”

A day later (April 1), Milosz references the Japanese philosopher Keiji Nishitani, whose critique of Sartre and Nietzsche for their “subjectivization of atheism” also seemed to fit Gombrowicz.

What remains is to reflect on the virtually inescapable conclusions of extraordinary intellects like Gombrowicz (because, after all, Sartre and Gombrowicz arrive at the same conclusion independently of each other), and to consider also the probability that the post-Christian West opens to the philosophy of the East where the subject-object problem is crossed out.

Farewell, old prophet.
__________

For appreciations of Milosz as a poet, see the cassandra pages, the vernacular body and languagehat. And be sure to check out Siona’s recollection of a classroom visit by Milosz linked to above.

Back on January 26, I quoted from Milosz’s appreciation of a poem by Izumi Shikibu, also in A Year of the Hunter.

I don’t know if I’ll get to write an original post today or not. But I want to alert my regular readers to some terrific essays that have appeared elsewhere in the last day or two.

At Creek Running North, Chris writes about Comfort Food:

This raw, empty feeling; this gnawing void in my gut I find so compelling: it’s just like Mom used to make.

Elck meanwhile describes a dinner of dangerous ideas:

The party was held in a large, book-lined apartment on the Upper West Side belonging to M.K.’s uncle. There were twelve people present, and all of them were very interesting. Most of the guests were people I was meeting for the first time. From the moment I stepped into the building, until the moment I left (some three-and-a-half hours later), I did not speak one single word.

Dale just wrote what may be the perfect blog post.

I walk by exhausted rhododendrons. Pick a brown shrunken flower-corpse. To my surprise it is supple and responds to my fingers. Not dead, not stiff. Nothing can be quite dead today. Worn, fragile, faint, loved to gasping by the overbearing sun, but not dead.

And Paula has turned out another post that is more than an essay, it’s a visual and intellectual treat. She describes working in a small factory making silicon chips back in 1973:

It was a fascinating place and I had a fascinating job. There were long, tubular furnaces into which I had to slide trays of silicon wafers, thin and perfect as communion hosts, to imbue them with boron and phosphorous and turn them into semiconductors. Then there was the little plexiglass hood, bigger than a breadbox, smaller than a coffin, under which I scoured the wafers with a waterpik-like sand jet. It seemed far too delicate an operation for its name: sandblasting. The radio played Killing Me Softly over and over that summer. To this day the song reminds me of sandblasting silicon wafers — the hiss of sand on silicon, the slowly burnishing surfaces.

Finally, be sure to stop over to The Middlewesterner for Saturday’s Poem: this week, one of the most interesting poems about angels since Rafael Albertí.

Surrounded by such riches – as all of us are every day in this world, whether we know it or not – why should I ever write more than words of praise?

For many months now I’ve been liberally sprinkling this blog with excerpts from Braided Creek, the “conversation in poetry” that Ted Kooser co-authored with Jim Harrison. So can I claim credit for Kooser’s selection as the new Poetry Consultant to the Librarian of Congress? (I refuse to employ the new, overblown term “Poet Laureate” for an appointment that lasts a single year!)

Ted Kooser, like Wallace Stevens, made his career in the insurance industry. I believe this is the first time in many years that the Library of Congress has selected someone from outside academia.

Here’s a piece that speaks to me. This is from Kooser’s Sure Signs: New and Selected Poems (Pitt Poetry Press, 1980).

Visiting Mountains

The plains ignore us,
but these mountains listen,
an audience of thousands
holding its breath
in each rock. Climbing,
we pick our way
over the skulls of small talk.
On the prairies below us,
the grass leans this way and that
in discussion;
words fly away like corn shucks
over the fields.
Here, lost in a mountain’s
attention, there’s nothing to say.

Yesterday, I took my sister-in-law Luz to visit Jack Troy, a local potter and author of Wood-Fired Stoneware and Porcelain, a seminal text in its field. The focal point of our visit was his huge anagama, a wood-fired kiln of traditional Japanese design. Made from special, high-temperature-resistant bricks, it stretches some ten to twelve feet up the side of a hill, bulging in the middle like a snake digesting a rabbit. A side door, through which the pottery is loaded, allows one to enter and sit inside.

I felt as if I were sitting under an overturned boat – a common impression, Jack said. But in fact the resemblance is accidental. The design evolved over the centuries largely through trial and error. Anagama means “cave-kiln,” and the first anagamas, Jack said, were basically just “woodchuck holes with a chimney.” The chimney for this one is relatively short, because an arched flue extends from the tail of the kiln uphill underground for another twelve feet. A large, open-air tin roof shelters kiln and wood supply from the elements.

Though there are many other ways to fire pottery with wood, the anagama process is unique for the extremely high temperatures that are involved – up to 1300 degrees Centigrade during the last day of the 5-day firing. No glaze is needed; ash from the burning wood lands on the pieces in a random pattern and then melts and flows over them. The chemicals in the wood as well as the currents and eddies of the flames determine the look of the finished work.

Jack uses hardwoods exclusively – oak, cherry, maple and black locust – because of the complex colors they can yield. Pine and hemlock produce nothing but greenish tints; only deciduous trees, with their high calcium content, can reproduce all the shades of flame. Most of the wood comes from a local saw mill’s scrap pile, so there’s a high proportion of bark to wood.

Jack fires the kiln only once a year, in late spring. During this time the fat snake turns, of course, into a dragon. The anagama consumes roughly a cord of wood a day, and needs to be tended around the clock. Firing is thus of necessity a cooperative affair, with many potters sharing the labor and the rewards. Barry Lopez wrote a lyrical piece for Harper’s a few years back in which he described the experience of helping with an anagama firing: it was like watching over a river of fire, he said. Peepholes in the side allow the tenders to gauge its condition with the help of special cones designed to wilt at precise temperatures.

Concentration is essential. To keep the tenders alert and entertained, Jack has rigged up what he calls an “Amish video game”: a long cord with a two-inch-diameter metal ring tied to its end. The cord is suspended from the eaves midway between two of the support posts, and a hook protrudes from one of the posts about five feet up, right at the end of the cord’s swing. The idea is to stand next to the opposite post, grasping the ring, and let it go with just the right trajectory and momentum to make the ring drop down over the hook.

Jack’s delight in this simple game was infectious. He managed to hook the ring after ten tries, Luz after eight. It was difficult to gauge the role played by accident, as opposed to skill. I quit after 15 unsuccessful attempts, though I think I could have gone on trying the rest of the afternoon. Luz and I were impressed by the way that an activity so addictive could have such a calming effect.

The anagama method militates against any consistency in appearance; Jack’s resistance to assembly-line standardization extends to every facet of his work. He takes his motto from Moby Dick: There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method. Barry Lopez’ river analogy reminds one of Heraclitus’ famous dictum that you can’t step into the same river twice. Accident and surprise animate the anagama potter’s art.

“I’ve never been a lizard,” says the generally silly Random Surrealism Generator at the bottom of the page when I go to fetch the Heraclitus link from my archives.