Quicks and Strings by Robin Blaser
[Part 2]
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want to get on to make a few notes on some of the other letters, but I can’t pass by “1429” in this one. I do not find it in Toynbee, whose discussion of the Italian Renaissance strikes me as slipshod and parochial (Englishly so), a renaissance of a “dead civilization,” as he would have it. Alberti would not summarize it until 1435 (Latin) and 1436 (Italian). This Renaissance was well under way before 1429. Dante had noted a shift in experience, in Purgatorio, Canto XI, from the transcendent beauty of Cimabue to our own ground in Giotto. In the fifteenth century, my mind moved to Masaccio and Donatello. This is, in terms of the visual arts, also language — the flow over centuries of human consciousness of exactly Olson’s concern, the relation of Language and reality. Toynbee was little concerned with this. I think Olson was after the closure of single-point perspective, the earth or humanity as simplifying centre. His irony in the matter of how long Ptolemy lasted, the Americans, and Bessamer I’ll leave for another time. (Michelangelo and Blake after him eyeing the Last Judgment went after the antiperspectival.) I was at a loss, then, and so turned determinedly toward Olson’s poems and Maximus.
I was grateful for the attention to Dante, and for the recognition of the “assymetry” of terza rima. I noted his generous remarks on my “power over old forms” and watched for the “crack in my door” — for it to “widen” and “blow open.” The poem he remembers as being four is “Song in Four Parts for Christ the Son,” which he’d found by way of a copy of Occident (1948) in the Black Mountain Library, is now enfolded in “lake of souls (reading notes,” in Syntax (1981). And the “Quaternity” he recommends I translated in 1957 into Quandary — “form-in-life” — finding it now a lifetime quest. (Blake’s Zoas are propositions of it, and I’ve found elements of it in Mallarmé, with the help of Robert Greer Cohn, who calls that quality of mind “Polypolarity.”)
The poem “I weep, fountain of Jazer” is now in The Collected Poems (pp. 419-420). Jazer is a city of Gad (Joshua 21:39) and in this poem takes us to Isaiah (16:9), startlingly to the judgment on Moab. Perhaps, Melville’s biblical eye brought Olson to this passage. The letter says “changes” around 1875. The poem brings Dr. Moon, unresting image of change, “Out of the dry sea.” The letter suggests that the poem reflects “Two big changes.” The first must be change itself. The second is the “I” of the poem, Olson or any one of us, who is a pool and mysterious even to the self, playing “pocket-pool” with sources that cut “my finger” — is it a pointing finger or the finger that turns a page? — “Look Jazer: / it weeps” — the blood that is ourselves, close to what the soul is. Just to type out a version of my first take, back then.
Olson’s first letter was, in the lingo of the ‘60s, mind-blower.
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hen we arrive, Olson is waiting for Don Allen and me at
small table in The Tavern bar. We’d barely settled when Olson turned to
me and asked, “Who
is Matilda?”
It took me some time to find my bearings. We were, it turned out, in the midst
of Dante — Purgatorio, Cantos
XXVIII & XXVIX — gazing with him across a stream — one appears
who warms herself in love’s
beams — she is the fourth of Dante’s six guides in The Comedy. I do not remember in detail my answer. I do know that
it was inadequate. I said she was a kind of innocence in human nature —
not in nature itself — the Christian tradition knows little of that
— that she was there at the border of the Earthly Paradise to prepare for the uninvented Beatrice for whom Dante searched heretically through all the realms (with a side-note on Charles Williams’s The Figure of Beatrice) — that she was the first revelation in the
poem of the feminine in the possibility of human redemption — that she
was a guide toward an as yet unseen splendour. Well, that’s where I was.
There’s more,
wonderfully told in William Anderson’s Dante The Maker (1980), where Matilda is among “levels of meaning.” I don’t think I had the
good sense then to go at the erotic imagery that surrounds her in the poem. Our
wild conversation at The Tavern left many another matter dangling — ethos and pathos in character and suffering, for one — we repaired to the swimming pool on the beach, where Olson read for us Maximus 1-22 straight through and added “There Was a Youth
Whose Name Was Thomas Granger.” I don’t think that we asked for this last
poem — it had appeared in the Divers Press In Cold Hell, in Thicket, 1953, and he told me it was
written in 1947, before I’d
even heard of him. I felt that he just very generously tossed it to me that day
— that it might touch something that runs through my mind like a shadowed
stream. At least 3 hours had passed without a tick — of any clock. We
headed for the restaurant where Betty joined us — her ink drawings which
I was to see later, pinned to a kitchen door in the Ft. Square apartment, still
appear before me when I happen to think of them — and we dined on
lobster. As we rushed to catch the train back to Boston, I looked back —
Olson was checking each plate for morsels of lobster one of us might have
missed — Betty was laughing.
Letter, May 13, 1958
— this one seems to me so very important. It was set off by my sending a
postcard on the occasion of the publication of Olson’s beautiful poem “The Lordly and
Isolate Satyrs”
in Evergreen Review — a poem of
shifting perspectives and images of folding realities. Olson had recently said
to me, “I’d trust you anywhere with image, but you’ve got no syntax.” I wrote on my
postcard simply, “Who’s the image boy
round here,”
followed by some remarks meaning WOW! I was in love with the imagery of that
poem, by the structure of them. One day, I would like to stop over this letter
— on Olson’s
dream of the birth of image from rhythm — rhythm anadyomeme — on finding syntax thereby, not in the inherited
formalities, but in the rhythms of an indeterminate life — deep in the “immediately structural”
— where one may be hanging on for Dear Life.
Suschiel K. Gupta, A Comparative Etymologic Lexicon Common Indo-Germanischer (Indo-European) Words (Sverge-Haus, Vols. 1 & 1A (1986), vol.2, B-Dh (1990), vol. 3, D-Dh (1991), vol. 4 (Etruscan, Illyrian, Thracian, 1992). Incomplete.
And it would be wise to read
R. Beard’s The Indo-European Lexicon: Synchronic Theory (North Holland, 1981).
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hen Olson came more often to Boston / Cambridge during my last year there, 1959, there were fewer letters and a habit of phone-calls had begun.
Once, the two of us dined at the Würsthaus in
Harvard Square — Olson talked marvelously of what he thought a new stance
in the “cosmos” might feel like
— over our boiled dinner — of our undiscovered imagery — it
was something of a preface to what was coming up in The Maximus Poems — the dynamic talk of it, a neighbourly
conversation. Many hours later we noticed the waiters staring.
When I left Boston for Europe on the freighter Nova Scotia, July 14, 1959 — three days
each in Halifax and in St. John’s en route to Liverpool — following
Melville to Prince’s
Dock — Olson came to the ship to see me off, along with a bunch from
Harvard carrying a gift of three moonstones I still have — Don Allen and
Frank O’Hara
sent messages to the ship with names and addresses of people to see —
Jesse Whitehead and Steve Jonas joined us — and I’d prepared for Cutty Sark all around
until the ship sailed — Olson gave me a first edition of Redburn: His First Voyage, 1850, signed “To Robin, his
first voyage.”
Every sailor on the ship and I read it during the three weeks it took to get to
Liverpool — they’d
never heard of the book and were amazed so to see their city — I was
astonished that so much was the same — the pink weeds around the dock
— the basement windows — I splurged on the great hotel where Hawthorne,
Melville, and Henry James had stayed — my first edition is not as it was.
The last thing Olson said to me before he left the ship was “Don’t get stuck in
Europe. Head for Hittite country.” Just what he wanted to do himself.
This beloved companion.
21 May, 1995
PS: Here in Vancouver, I can’t help but think of the note Olson sent me not long after I arrived here, handwritten:
Note here for your Office ----
Wall!
The West in fact still seems to me substantively the still undisclosed—or insufficiently rubbed & occupied [as the cave lion’s shoulders still show on French ice-age caves]; and San Francisco as Emporium—folds Discovery after Spaniards—still
lacks a ‘Continental’ “Shelf”: it will in fact fall-in to the Pacific as you know within a determinable number of years—1' per Century or something the rate is, until she suddenly
disappears as Atlantis did the day Santorini blew up 1400
BC almost on the nose
I wish each
Westerner wld treat himself—and
herself—as
astride the
East African
rift!