Charles Stein and George Quasha in Vancouver
[Part 4]
MAUD: He died just at the right moment, didn’t he, to avoid the seventies?
QUASHA: In that sense, yes. But it’s really important,
therefore, to be able to separate what is a kind of essential fruit in Olson
from a kind of Olson angle on everything. The world’s full of bullies
because that’s how you got heard. Certain kinds of personalities got
heard when others didn’t. So what? The fact is that there is a vision there that has got an integrity and a power for us. To go back to The Special View of History at this point is to
ask the question about all these areas that Olson is very vulnerable in, like,
for instance, the feminist position on Olson. He’s extremely vulnerable
on that point, and that’s not an easy thing to discuss, and it shouldn’t
be simply defended. It’s not a question of just defending Olson against a certain grossness in his approach to certain questions. But in what sense was he not feminist or feminist? You may find that those attitudes have a lot to do with the personality style and certain areas of his life that went unexamined. And you have to at least take into consideration that the discussion of issues relative to feminism were not particularly articulate around then.
COPITHORNE: They were relatively articulate when they were allowed to be heard.
QUASHA: By him, you mean?
COPITHORNE: By him and his followers. I’m sorry to interrupt, but I did hear articulation and I heard it being shut down.
STEIN: The stories are awful and they’re undeniable. The question is, in spite of that, is there still something of use?
QUASHA: You have to see where he wasn’t ready or able to
hear it, where it didn’t come in the right door for him or something. It’s
a whole context; it’s an entire field of things. The world has shifted in that respect now.
MAUD: He believed that Zeus was not a woman, and a woman couldn’t be Zeus.
COPITHORNE: I suppose, Ralph. But what does that mean though?
MAUD: It means there are differences.
BOWERING: Well, in the olden days . . . Let’s go back to Pound and anti-Semitism.
QUASHA: The feminist issue has become a problem for many women in
appreciating Olson or being able to make use of Olson. It would be nice if one
could have a clear enough discussion that would remove some of the blockages
because: Is Olson his opinions? Is Olson his limitations? Is Olson Tom Clark’s
Olson? If Tom Clark’s Olson is your Olson, then that’s that as far
as I’m concerned. Are we going to go through history and take each person
in terms of their limitations and then throw them out because they didn’t
make it in whatever issues are most powerful for us right now? Not to
trivialize any issue, but what’s the gain in Olson’s thought? It’s
so important to recognize what that gain is because it’s so enormous.
STEIN: The truth is that if you can’t read Olson because
you experience it as male address and it excludes you, that’s a fact.
There isn’t any argument with Rachel DuPlessis; no argument with her.
That’s her experience, that’s how she sees it. She needs to get
those same ideas she’s got to push them out from Marianne Moore and
Pound, fine. For a lot of people they don’t deliver it, and I don’t
actually see that they deliver the same thing for her; but that’s her
business. And Susan Howe, say, is very interesting in that she is obviously
getting a tremendous amount and still is able to articulate her difficulties.
That’s important. And I don’t feel I’m in any position to
know anything about anybody else’s — particularly women’s
— connection or not. The connection is a matter of reality. I remember
Olson saying, like, you know: “If you give a kid a cookie, either it
makes it or it doesn’t. And you know when it doesn’t.” There’s
no politics there. It’s a fact. So there’s no defense there
whatsoever. But what’s interesting is that there are people for whom something moves past that.
COPITHORNE: I’d rather just forget — you know, leave it for the time being, unless we really want to do it, because each case has to be addressed as each case.
QUASHA: Of course it does.
STEIN: The way I think of it is that if you have ever received a
charge, it’s a problem that can’t go away. You can’t make it
easier for yourself by adopting some position on it. You’ve got the
problem. I’m a Jew; I owe an enormous debt to Pound. That’s a
problem. I’m a Jew; I owe an enormous debt to Heidegger. I’m a
Buddhist and I have a debt to Aleister Crowley. Crowley is as bad as they come
in every possible way, and I learned an enormous number of things from him when
I was involved with that material. I have sympathies pretty much on the left of
politics, and I don’t like an awful lot of the people that I love. I have
to live with that. There isn’t any way out.
But if you have the other
view of Olson’s politics — this Connecticut poem ends with “the
initiation / of another kind of nation.” And obviously you can hear that
a couple of ways. You could hear it very simply as he wants a nation with
different politics, different principles, different people in power, or
something like that. But I don’t quite hear it that way. I heard it as
another sense of what the scale of the human community is. In other words, it’s
going on a kind of ontological level not just at the surface, the political
level. And the thing that interests me in all this — maybe the question
isn’t even just Olson, it’s a question of language and creativity
in our time in general: there seems to be remaining possibilities for
possibility. It’s as if you — a shtik of mine — you almost have two modalities of
taking the real, and they are set seemingly against each other: possibility/actuality.
And it’s as if there were two ways of taking the real, one in which facts
are dead, finished, closed, known; the other in which facts are the current
terms of possibility, they are that out of which possibility is generable. And
it’s a mode of shifting a certain angle. There are these sites in Olson
where he seems to be, you know: “All men are the glories of Hera by
possibility.” Enyalion. ‘When is possibility there? That’s
the positive side in his darkness because he is suddenly seeing that the sign
of politics is the creation and projection of possibility. Then that changes
the site of the whole concern with the fact of the material, because the fact
of the material is now not what it looked like in, say, the early part of the
twentieth century when you’re trying to overcome late nineteenth century
romanticism in every possible way, so there is objectivity, facticity,
formalism and all the different strategies, both philosophically and
literarily, to get out of the shmush of Swinburne or whatever the name of the
enemy is, Alexander Blok. There’s a step from that to Olson and Duncan, a step to that, because the question for both of them, that discovery of the charge of imagination, burrows into fact much deeper, digging right in.
I live underneath
the light of day
I am a stone,
or the ground beneath
My life is buried,
with all sorts of passages
both on the sides and on the face turned down
to the earth. . .
That concrete material side is
the side of the source, everything has been turned upside down, He does get
this very much from Jung and Yeats really, Jung’s idea that the
archetypal dominance of an age is changing so that what was spiritual in the
Middle Ages is now material, that the projection of the archetypal force will
be found in that, so that’s your politics of matter. But at our point
there’s no longer a dichotomy between factuality and possibility except
as a mode of taking reality: the mode of taking possibility is not the
contradictory of facts, it’s an entire stance, because for factuality
even the future is dead. For possibility the past (meaning our concrete past
but also everything that’s other) continues to be alive. Once you’re
no longer involved with accepting a particular cosmological or ontological
framework in the way it insists upon itself, once you’ve just jiggled
that a little bit, suddenly all kinds of possibilities turn out to be alive. I
think that’s another way of taking what the relationship to Olson might
be. You have to deal, of course, with the parts of him that close things down
and make things impossible. But what else is there? What is there that
continues to project?
QUASHA: It’s not that I want to excuse, ever, anything. I
won’t excuse it in myself. But I say that in Olson there are places where
he didn’t get conscious and there are places where he did, and where he
did, nobody got that conscious about those things and in that way: that’s
what’s so extraordinary. Yeah, you can find it elsewhere, but there’s
something about the way he cuts through, there’s something that is really special in the best sense in The Special View of History that is different from anything else: that we see
things not by quantity but by their intensity of being. I don’t think anybody said it the way he said it there.
[Tape proceeds with Charles Stein temporarily not in
the room.]
MAUD: George, you’ve had a long relationship with Charles
Stein, haven’t you? Do you get along?
QUASHA: We have an ongoing dialogue, where we’re
fundamentally very different kinds of people, so we modify and correct each
other. We’ve written a lot of stuff together, we’ve written all
these things on Gary Hill together, and we developed a method, a dialogical
method. We started out calling it “dialogical criticism” many years ago. . .
[Stein enters]
MAUD: We’re talking about you, Charles.
STEIN: I suspect.
QUASHA: They were enquiring into our relationship, so I thought I
would spill the beans. Basically, we started by recording — we’re
the most completely recorded relationship in history. We have probably
thousands of hours of conversation at every stage. What we have done is, the
best of the stuff in recent years we transcribe it, and think it further, like
the Gary Hill books which come out of our relationship with Gary, because the
dialogical relationship extends to him. (He lived in our house, next to me, for
six years.) The point is that we were able to develop these discussions,
transcribe them and develop them into a method by which we could generate text.
The text would arise out of this that we both could accept. In the process of
doing that we’ve had to learn how to give up a certain aspect of ego. You
might think of it as giving up a certain aspect of maleness, like a surrender
of a certain part of yourself that wants to control and wants it to be your
idea or whatever. It’s a work, a work inside a certain kind of space of
connection. Even though Olson’s work seems very male in that respect, he’s
a kind of a monologist — the same with Duncan, by the way. They had
different styles. I spent a lot of time with Duncan and while Duncan’s
the monologist you’d think he wasn’t listening. He’d be
talking a mile a minute, non-stop, nothing’d stop that train, that train
just keeps on going, and then fifteen minutes later he’d quote you
exactly what you’d said, and he’d comment very precisely on it. He
was completely in dialogue with your presence. I think there’s a sense in
which what I heard in Olson’s voice on the phone that day, that’s
something more fundamental than how we are in our personal relationships that
personal relationships could learn from, and that is: how we are in dialogue
with listening itself, listening to reality, listening to the world, listening
to the poem. In a way Olson brought into consciousness listening itself for
what it actually is: possibility. I don’t think meditation is anything
other than listening. I don’t think anything that’s of value is
anything other than a certain kind of breakthrough in your ability to hear
more. I think that’s what poetry is about. The poet primordially taught
people to listen because he listened in such a way — the oral poet, as
you know from Lord and oral studies would always be working with the response
of the audience. In that context, that’s dialogue. That’s
meaningful dialogue, that’s where something is being carried into its
archetypal possibility, and at the same time it’s very immediate and concrete.
STEIN: There’s hardly an Olson poem that doesn’t
occur in the space between himself and a whole range of other utterances. The
ones we were looking at before are a case in point, even, like you were saying,
you could have the quotation quoting Olson, and imagination of Olson. But very
unique and amazing structures emerge there that are only possible because this
voice that seems to be in a cartoon of “projective verse” only concerned with projecting itself in fact is the most incredible listening that language has ever produced, really, in the sense of how it finds its own occasion for utterance inside listening to something else, other language.
MAUD: Well, I’m glad we talked about Olson. I’m pleased we kept to that subject in spite of the fact that I know you could have talked about lots of other things. On behalf of the people present, I thank you.
BOWERING: Let’s have a round of applause. [Applause]
TESSA (child): Why are you clapping?
MAUD: We’re clapping because George told us to.
McGAULEY: To say thank you, for something wonderful.