T Thilleman
T. Thilleman migrated to New York from the Midwestern State of Wisconsin in the early 80’s. For a brief period he worked for Pace Editions and the artist Chuck Close on handmade paper editions under the direction of the late Joe Wilfer. Throughout the 90’s he helped edit Poetry New York and their pamphlet series. He is the author of poetry collections including Three Sea Monsters, Onönyxa & Therseyn (opening book for an extended work, Sketches), and the novel Gowanus Canal, Hans Knudsen.
Orogeny/Erogeny: The “nonsense” of language and the poetics of Ed Dorn By T Thilleman
Tom remarked, on the evidence of
The last scene when the Mexican-
Japanese said Vaya con Dios
And Yul said a simple adios,
“that was philosophical.”
Then the five of us went home
Singing Frijoles!
Twirling our umbrellas
And walking like wooden legged men in a file
One foot in the gutter
The other on the sidewalk.
Ed Dorn, The North Atlantic Turbine
I was interested in language as a material entity.
Robert Smithson, Writings
If there were stages of development along the prophetic faultline, they maintained a foot in the signage of language and monument by way of the negation of negation. Whether we are talking about the twentieth century or an array of such century-long coordination, “time” doesn’t matter because the specter of “machines” have always been part of the make-up and build-up of any culture. What matters is the attention to the locus of monumental meaning as it played with a reliance on mechanical as well as biological selection and adaptation. The locus is something the Eye itself holds as a hierarchical attribute to knowing.
The language here is purposely evolutionary because it wasn’t until our own very near and recent age that the Pleistocene human mind body and world were thrown into our imaginations. The event, that is, of human pre-history coincided with a measure of geologic time and matter, out of which the Pleistocene geo-era could forge its image of either a Neanderthal or Cro-Magnon or what-have-you variation of a human fore-figure.
That fore-figuring enables us to invent and then articulate a parity with Earth for the first time. The movement in expressing this find is one of discovery, no matter how nonsensical it might at first sound.
In that firstness, our global imagination was able to reach beyond the here-to-fore onto-theological boundaries of space and time and con-figure ourselves into a cosmos that has Earth as its centering force-field, beyond quaint pictures or panoramas as its locus. Language and story could engage with the primary interface of Being instead of relying solely on the caesarean birth of a negated negation, suddenly towing all interpretation “forward.” In other words, the difference between shadow and sun-source were brought beyond the Platonic allegory in order to re-engage negation in a theoretical field where all the basic physical impetuses to language and making were at one time in embryo, and nowhere else. An Earth-centered cosmology, instead of the inherited mind-set of solar-centered approaches to life.
The creation or discovery of Pleistocene era humanoids made possible geologic time-scale with here-to-fore “meaningful” assemblages of language as a site for creation itself. The reaching into human anatomy by way of a vaster stretch of time relieved the seigniorial “glory” of the prophetic task and assumed a course that re-makes even today the otherwise isolated individual human.
Out of the solitary, the reach and imaginative span of culture is no longer waiting for the prophetic interpretation to become a beheld world spectacle. Time has entered the theoretical and exists in that visionary scape. The monument to the future is no longer erected by the Hegelian story-board, whose abstractions can be written as either “fate” or the emblematic recovery of some sort of narrow-minded nationalism. The “glory”, the doksha (doxa, δόξα, immanence) of the Greek era of wisdom sciences has made its way toward an event whose center has a term within the Earth upon which it rides and disburses itself into a rare pattern of remaining relevance and revelation.
The Longpoem
That we are involved in a global ride was briefly encountered in the form of a travel writing, a longpoem by Ed Dorn in the mid 1960s. Dorn’s The North Atlantic Turbine began with “the end product,” in order to examine where humanity was and what it was up to as it rode upon the back of the great Turbine, the turning screwthread of Earth.
Examining the “remains,” separating them out from the normal day-to-day flow, Dorn sifted through discovery, winnowing out the rarest qualities of observation through the sieve of acknowledgment in order to make the poem give up an ontogeny to recapitulate any phylogeny the reader would be able to throw back at it.
The poem is, quite literally, inaugurated at the site of a global event, the discovery of large layers of natural gas in the North Sea, off the Scottish coast. As a global economic find, the poem actually becomes a prophetic carrier to a later time (a few years later) when oil would be discovered in the same part of the North Atlantic, transforming, for instance Shell Oil and BP, both as companies in the global oil market, but as phorae (carriers) for the emergency poetry drills for and un-Earths. In other words, Dorn created the poem as an Earth-site whose meanings are not merely applicable to a specific Earth, but to all “maps” the Earth gives up at a critical depth.
The confluence of Earth and World, as Heidegger mentioned in the late 1930’s, is everywhere involved with a strife, a rift and a rending of World with Earth. The World of humans, their nations and geographic spread, their literacy and language fallacies encounter a very palpable cold within enstonéd geologies of that venturing. In other words, the co-inhabitation of consciousness as it sleeps (Earth), riding into its collection of end-products (World), and as we have seen, the utter wreckage of language (Humans in co-existent nations) is completely at a loss to understand what is happening.
I speak now
Of the orogeny
Of my soul
An unpublished poem (c. 1966) by Ed Dorn on orogeny proclaims the reach into the ground, to this planet Earth, a sedimentary relationship to all historically established relevancies. History consumed by the consciousness of the ore, the mining depths of the screwthreading ride of globalism, of time as a preternatural site within the Earth itself, consonant to it and in a correspondence with it.
The consuming has three tines that stake a claim in the coming meal, just before extraction, thus just before transforming the substance claimed into something edible:
Psyche
Pneuma
Physis
consumed by the wheels and passage inaugurated by the end-product of humans: “consciousness.”
and this extension
Of my limbs
Of my superior Chelozone
In this cold cold zone, the superiority of stretching into one’s own body, this reach toward and through an instrumentality ofor the extraction, as the Earth’s Lake Superior, a body of water also makes its way to Hudson’s Bay, the poet offers as analogy—a like distancing of the turning Earth, of moving over the Earth, of Earth as the body of a lover, turns the orogeny, the Being at base in ores and rocks of the planet, those levels those tectonics of stone rendering the sound of the poet’s line:
I speak now
Of the erogeny
Of my soul
So the reach and distribution, the consummation, can no longer be heard but by the lover who lives in a like zone of the world of Earth. This zone will transform, likewise, the entire makeup of the poem and become its sole resource for any attempt at extracting an interpretation. In other words, the distribution of the erotic through-out the stony depths of the Earth of the poem, the site of the poem, will always make its way into summation as a make-over of immanence (doxa), the inevitable articulating presence of the poem. There may be many ways to read the poem, but all interpretations have been transformed by the erotic implantation of the poet’s three tines, thus valorizing the meaning of the poem as a site, whose cardinal points are always relevant and thus revelatory in their unique context.
The passage from unknown to known (past to future) has been blocked by consciousness and yet it is a living Eros within the bedrock of the cold cold body of Earth. The issue is not heat versus cold, the issue is
Tell me now my Illinois
Is not old
So the home, the poet’s birth-hole original site, is no longer an extension of consciousness (that totality of belief) rather than that, is soulful; and any of the limbs that might be so involved are also extensions of the oldness (Pleistoscene-ly aware) of Soul. Thequite literal block of stone in non-erotic charge gives into the depth of the time of Earth, an erogeny of being beyond proof, beyond the capable negation of consciousness, re-instituting the positivities of Eros as ore. This one instrumental reach by the poet signals the transcendent nature of the poem, thus giving it a prophetic channel by which to modulate a passage toward the future, always and everywhere.
These reachings and discoveries are the, likewise, the newly arrived “Algonquians,” the poet says, the “first” peoples, older than old and outside the usual dialectics of historical, Western Man.
A Theory of Truth: Sleep and wakefulness
“Starts with finished product” i.e., the land and thought of a man venturing (the fact that land is meant to travel on is the prophecy given to man holds man in a constant travel and belts the Earth with his particular channel the Earth has another channel and maybe the consonant features of these two channels will meet but of course one has to start with the finished product, the totality of the process of consumption channels that are pipelines and conduits for run-off and offal the poem this opening now of the poem exists in theoretical space as well as the Turbine itself (the poem) ventures and echoes the cold isolation of Iklivik thule the first place that establishes the prioritizing of the end process so that venture is the projective fuel for the intention of the venture.
The very northern local, Iklivik, Ultima Thule its city, its cold isolation the poet’s realm of truth, the limbs of Eros stretching into the cold ore stone of Eros as the Earth turns. The venturing and the ventured: nothing ventured nothing gained. Nothing risked, in other words, nothing ultimately extracted from the poem, whose speculative surface conceals the oil and the ore and the ultimate gold by which all else will be measured into a settlement or habitation, returning investors and investment to the first and most riskiest the greatest reward.
The priority is nothing more than the stretch into deeply cold stoned depths of the turning Earth, over against any other time-line historicization of identity. For instance, as these pieces and parts of the poem are being written in England in 1966, the persistence of national identity arouses shallow forms, prioritizing relations among nations in a timeline of world consciousness. But that has nothing to do with the plunder of Earth’s resources nor the clock upon which that venturism rides. The longpoem can reach that reality of speculation, in spite of the personal isolation given to the poet by any circumstance that would be his immediate interpreter.
The “current” of the Atlantic is the turbine of sleep/wakefulness beginning/end. “Only” a few million years the movement ventures, nothing more nor less; it is the precision of the movement that counts in the passage from sleep into wakefulness, the venture, the investment made so precise by that larger scale of “time.” The ancient Earth, the stones that make a mapped border stronger than any nation or line drawn by our near-histories.
No race or nation governs the movement.
Divisions of history not enough to fuel the movement, it is the slaving and rum running were/are the conscience as a truth of the poem, wed to the movement of the Turbine’s currencies. These various instances from the historical “relevance” of economic plunder makeover the speculative quality of the longpoem as well as the nature of the species that would undertake such an investment. The nature of gain and gold are held in the scale upon which the large extraction out of sleep and the nature of time the poet has drawn.
A Poem A movement
Difference between ages is expansion of commercial enterprise, the attachment to movement by which Man becomes the signs and entrance to meaning even though he is not its ultimate interpreter. This is a fundamental attachment to negation provided by machinery. The channel of Man is a negative function par excellence. Consciousness thus given a ride by that un-choice.
Leaving the machine, the endless cycle of negation of negation behind, the creativity of an evolutionary process begins to make itself known in not just ideational categories or identification. Here is the positive assertion of the Earth, which before was the choicest moment of negating negation. The Earth is a Turbine, a new stand-in for the “machine,” as I’ve named it in this writing, that un-site which has ghosted mankind since before time was even codified or “known” by them.
Here too the intersection of Smithson’s great Earthworks and his theoretical position therein: that the museum, the housing of his open-ended Earth site can indeed be reproduced in a gallery or museum, but it will always be, there, a “non-site.”
The finer and more complex associations of natural selection (the rare remains, the finds), echoing a Darwinian register, make movement a positivist agenda, one in which the machine of history, with its assemblage of signs all thrown into historicism, or, a negation of negation left behind. Movement resides in the complex associations of the planetary, and, most importantly in this regard
Man is not
Thus we have in the longpoem the “inquisitive fingers” of the people which do diminish the “gold’s value” writes Dorn in his evolving Turbine.
The investment in growth and development along a civilized bias renders the very nature of expressive individualist trait deleterious to “building.” The idea of mankind in a “bad” moral state is part of his acquisition of what I would call expressive time. That time is not considered part of the building unless it is able to be monumentalized, put into the imminent character of every selection, as if “natural” selection were always and everywhere of a scale yet to be explored by man.
The expressive, in time as well as act and action, is what poetry is. But not so simply the act of projecting an image of self. Rather, expressive time is transiting. Poetry oscillates (to use a term borrowed from Heidegger, the last universally recognized philosopher of the West) between what it supposedly houses and the personal acquisition of travel and transiting and transitional realms. Poetry contains existence as much as it makes existence—both are poetry’s possibilities unfolded by its expressive erections.
The sense then of rum running or slave-trading being the gold-standard, but therein a natural questioning of their necessity or bias threatens the machinery which validates valuation gained by their pursuit. Everywhere, we hear echoes of what a threat of coordinated negation (that channel of measure and value) brings to the realms of power. The sense of being a part of something is in contention through the revelations of the scale of a “natural selection” process:
Not includes west Africa
Goes to west Africa
Rum slaves and crude molasses
Wilberforce a standard trick [torsion, pendulum;
Of conscience, what i.e., Englishman, born-again xian, anti-slaver]
Can be thought of man
As he ventures
Part of Bristol is still rich.
That consciousness, when held in the channel of thought, is feckless, and the return on investment not measured by consciousness, dis-validates the Human scale, actually, and here then the beginning of the cross-section the longpoem is always bringing as a register of scale.
It starts of course
With the finished product
Nothing starts with the 1st.
Nothing. The end
Is first. Always.
There is no beginning
Unless the end
Has been reached. First.
The second is the middle
And that may be people
Or some other material.
Molasses or molasses skinned persons.
The turbine is only movement.
The current of the Atlantic
Swirl.
As against that common Human assumption, which makes cause and effect a centrality to any and all, as if literacy itself holds the key to the movement, and any deviation from a ‘correct” interpretation runs afoul of error, even if the Turbine (movement) cannot be contained in thought or the representatives for thought:
More north than
Most casual laborers know.
So cold.
From the center of
the earth
The line comes up to
pierce
any man
Can’t understand
what gravity is
That he has an
ordered and
Endlessly transferrable
place
So cold
you wake up
mumble some complaint
to yourself.
The complaint is the utterance, the articulation of expressive time itself.
Black comes into the senses
More than green. One day
There came on Lexden Road
a long, high hearse
with a sloping back like a
medium hill.
a man in funereal garments
Rode shotgun
his face under the black
top hat
a grinning
memento mori
This apparition is the ‘Slinger of Dorn’s other Longpoem Gunslinger, riding over the lexical attributes of the poem in place (England, a land of temporary exile for the poet here) and is a kind of skeletal attribute of death as well as the living expressiveness of the particularization the poem makes known—an expression, being candor, always makes the scale or revelation of the poem larger than it would be if it could not include such complaint, such articulation.
“trade has increased is what that means” and by this grin the satisfaction of being “civilized” gives all the value it needs to the inquisitive. In other words, to find the base we are now no longer concerned with how to further any competing claims, which might have arisen in a contest to build the future out of the present. The “seeing into the future” whereby negation of negation, the machinery of inventive mankind, has been put away from the truer base, the alignment of Earth with the individual as a Pleistocene example. The New Scale. And so the puny apparition of Man is also the skeletal structure, the anatomy of the poem in human terms.
What is mortality? Has anyone raised that question within the interpreting guises of poetry or cultural artifact? Again, we have transferred our enquiry regarding the present not so much as the way into the future—we know they are both the same, the present and the future—rather we have transferred our poetry and allegiance to the mark the poem leaves us with, forward into the question as its every movement.
We are writing a reading of the theory of mind, as it gets called in evolutionary sciences, in order to raise the very essence, not so much of truth (and Dorn does not really mean “truth” as something provable, rather something extremely variable) as the competence of locally adaptable structures that have no need of history. Local ways of accessing symbolic resonance, in other words, without raising the specter of past glories and monuments, like rum running or slave-trading antecedents, in order to build a connective rapport to any and all.
Ontogeny recapitulates Phylogeny, as Ernst Haeckel had written long ago in order to explain a more hands-on approach to the being and hence the “reality” of fossils as they fit or didn’t fit in with the Darwinian “tree of life.” Haeckel is also responsible for founding and naming a species, Homo Stupidus, to distinguish a clade in the tree different from Homo Sapiens.
“on the occasion of this excitement all creatures describe” fuel is what is being got at, whether it is a modern build-up or an ancient one, like Pleistocene era hominoids, stones, birds or other Animalia.
Provisional fragment
“in defense of a man’s head” is the passage from unknown (not known) to known. The erogeny/orogeny coupling. Part of an inevitable process? Or is it more timeless—looking at something long enough it goes from known to unknown and back to known again? But what now holds the known? If it is given to a history, an antecedence, an a-priority, then it brings on the specter of negation. It brings on un-original theater, a kind of pretend belief in re-enactment which already was asking an audience to suspend its belief and knowledge in the inevitable—all over again—for the same of … of what?
Living things are not given completely to negation, are they? as a mode of travel? What about the difference in channels, in frequencies that emanate from the erogeny involved here?
The automobile is actually just an illusory level of attachment to the planet because it is the evolution of historically derived, “negative” inventions: the combustion engine. It wasn’t discovered by accident, nor was it the result of pure innate competence—many pressures into the exploitation of the negative charge for its future realization were brought into thought and action, law and application. So the inventiveness that man displays is indeed a curious feature of his anatomy. It continues to undermine itself, in a way; calling to that within the Human, the poet is aware that his own history must be expressed to its fullest, in order to risk every nonsensical attribute a slick summation would render and thus project into the future.
The poet is aware of all that is at stake within the prophetic capacity of the poem. Nothing less than the future is at stake.
Dorn’s work is of a mode of discovery: to always entertain passage as open and never closed. Knowing something can always hear itself as unknowing too, by which it belongs to the stretch of the travel, the direction of what we brought in here as Ultima Thule at the beginning, a register as well of the “Pleistocene” scale of time.
The ratio (ratiocination) of the scale is never completely settled, just as the artefactuality of the poem can always be re-examined, along morphologistical contours, creating a new topology to add to a collection of such.
Unknown occasions can also pass into being “known.” But the changeableness of these things are representative of a living condition, symbolic in ways that are not driven by echoic systemization or invention predicated on the drive to make the present into the future. The future might have already happened and come and gone as far as “knowledge” is concerned. Hence the necessity for an ac-knowledgment, an exteriorizing of what is known, in order to test it. The questioning, the testing, of course flips any preconceived notion of outside and inside. We saw that shape of weird and strange serendipity with Gherasim Luca’s work.
The world, then, as both strange as well as un-strange, living in dynamic intro-spection of an epoch larger than any conception of time ever concocted. This making of the poem as longpoem is opposed to static representation thus it is a primary presentation of riding the Earth, a living screwthread of poesis.
Language, in this case a sense of English, “different” in its evolution from past to present and into its future, where it is spoken “around the globe,” has an effect now that does not need to isolate itself as a haute (ho!) aspect of knowing. Known things are dependent as well as independent of the “local” of an island (in this case England, but any “where” as home ‘cause of the squeaky springs before during and after, will suffice).
(N.B.)… expressive time is the reach we need to understand, the difference between land time knowledge bases and language time knowledge bases, knowing they mirror one another’s illusions as well as sureties—is the expressiveness that marks “the passage” …
Poesis
Expressiveness conveys.
As it is a conveyance, expressiveness retains the primitive essence of the human both ontogenetically as well as phylogenetically. Translation: expressiveness invests and investigates through inquisitiveness at the heart of the individual in a very primal capacity, species wide.
It is the movement, vehicular movement, inherent in the root phora which means “to carry.” Somehow in the build-up, civilization and other cultural spreads (which work much faster than actual genetic evolutionary mechanisms), signage became a stand-in for such Being.
Substituting an onto-theologicality for the species’ upright bi-pedalist movement toward adaptability over Earth became the destiny of the machinery that has shadowed them since their inception.
A vehicle is a thing as well as a machine when assigned signification; a machination, an invention that allows our senses access to meta (beyond) knowing or ana (equal to) knowing gives us, in sensory sent or ready-to-send, mode.
Expressive time modulates access to these two modes, the activity of awareness (sensory sent) and kinaesthesia (ready-to-send). No wonder we can substitute one for the other into seeming infinity: we were born to that capacity and words are an emblem of that inter-activity.
Orogeny/Erogeny: The “nonsense” of language and the poetics of Ed Dorn By T Thilleman
Tom remarked, on the evidence of
The last scene when the Mexican-
Japanese said Vaya con Dios
And Yul said a simple adios,
“that was philosophical.”
Then the five of us went home
Singing Frijoles!
Twirling our umbrellas
And walking like wooden legged men in a file
One foot in the gutter
The other on the sidewalk.
Ed Dorn, The North Atlantic Turbine
I was interested in language as a material entity.
Robert Smithson, Writings
If there were stages of development along the prophetic faultline, they maintained a foot in the signage of language and monument by way of the negation of negation. Whether we are talking about the twentieth century or an array of such century-long coordination, “time” doesn’t matter because the specter of “machines” have always been part of the make-up and build-up of any culture. What matters is the attention to the locus of monumental meaning as it played with a reliance on mechanical as well as biological selection and adaptation. The locus is something the Eye itself holds as a hierarchical attribute to knowing.
The language here is purposely evolutionary because it wasn’t until our own very near and recent age that the Pleistocene human mind body and world were thrown into our imaginations. The event, that is, of human pre-history coincided with a measure of geologic time and matter, out of which the Pleistocene geo-era could forge its image of either a Neanderthal or Cro-Magnon or what-have-you variation of a human fore-figure.
That fore-figuring enables us to invent and then articulate a parity with Earth for the first time. The movement in expressing this find is one of discovery, no matter how nonsensical it might at first sound.
In that firstness, our global imagination was able to reach beyond the here-to-fore onto-theological boundaries of space and time and con-figure ourselves into a cosmos that has Earth as its centering force-field, beyond quaint pictures or panoramas as its locus. Language and story could engage with the primary interface of Being instead of relying solely on the caesarean birth of a negated negation, suddenly towing all interpretation “forward.” In other words, the difference between shadow and sun-source were brought beyond the Platonic allegory in order to re-engage negation in a theoretical field where all the basic physical impetuses to language and making were at one time in embryo, and nowhere else. An Earth-centered cosmology, instead of the inherited mind-set of solar-centered approaches to life.
The creation or discovery of Pleistocene era humanoids made possible geologic time-scale with here-to-fore “meaningful” assemblages of language as a site for creation itself. The reaching into human anatomy by way of a vaster stretch of time relieved the seigniorial “glory” of the prophetic task and assumed a course that re-makes even today the otherwise isolated individual human.
Out of the solitary, the reach and imaginative span of culture is no longer waiting for the prophetic interpretation to become a beheld world spectacle. Time has entered the theoretical and exists in that visionary scape. The monument to the future is no longer erected by the Hegelian story-board, whose abstractions can be written as either “fate” or the emblematic recovery of some sort of narrow-minded nationalism. The “glory”, the doksha (doxa, δόξα, immanence) of the Greek era of wisdom sciences has made its way toward an event whose center has a term within the Earth upon which it rides and disburses itself into a rare pattern of remaining relevance and revelation.
The Longpoem
That we are involved in a global ride was briefly encountered in the form of a travel writing, a longpoem by Ed Dorn in the mid 1960s. Dorn’s The North Atlantic Turbine began with “the end product,” in order to examine where humanity was and what it was up to as it rode upon the back of the great Turbine, the turning screwthread of Earth.
Examining the “remains,” separating them out from the normal day-to-day flow, Dorn sifted through discovery, winnowing out the rarest qualities of observation through the sieve of acknowledgment in order to make the poem give up an ontogeny to recapitulate any phylogeny the reader would be able to throw back at it.
The poem is, quite literally, inaugurated at the site of a global event, the discovery of large layers of natural gas in the North Sea, off the Scottish coast. As a global economic find, the poem actually becomes a prophetic carrier to a later time (a few years later) when oil would be discovered in the same part of the North Atlantic, transforming, for instance Shell Oil and BP, both as companies in the global oil market, but as phorae (carriers) for the emergency poetry drills for and un-Earths. In other words, Dorn created the poem as an Earth-site whose meanings are not merely applicable to a specific Earth, but to all “maps” the Earth gives up at a critical depth.
The confluence of Earth and World, as Heidegger mentioned in the late 1930’s, is everywhere involved with a strife, a rift and a rending of World with Earth. The World of humans, their nations and geographic spread, their literacy and language fallacies encounter a very palpable cold within enstonéd geologies of that venturing. In other words, the co-inhabitation of consciousness as it sleeps (Earth), riding into its collection of end-products (World), and as we have seen, the utter wreckage of language (Humans in co-existent nations) is completely at a loss to understand what is happening.
I speak now
Of the orogeny
Of my soul
An unpublished poem (c. 1966) by Ed Dorn on orogeny proclaims the reach into the ground, to this planet Earth, a sedimentary relationship to all historically established relevancies. History consumed by the consciousness of the ore, the mining depths of the screwthreading ride of globalism, of time as a preternatural site within the Earth itself, consonant to it and in a correspondence with it.
The consuming has three tines that stake a claim in the coming meal, just before extraction, thus just before transforming the substance claimed into something edible:
Psyche
Pneuma
Physis
consumed by the wheels and passage inaugurated by the end-product of humans: “consciousness.”
and this extension
Of my limbs
Of my superior Chelozone
In this cold cold zone, the superiority of stretching into one’s own body, this reach toward and through an instrumentality ofor the extraction, as the Earth’s Lake Superior, a body of water also makes its way to Hudson’s Bay, the poet offers as analogy—a like distancing of the turning Earth, of moving over the Earth, of Earth as the body of a lover, turns the orogeny, the Being at base in ores and rocks of the planet, those levels those tectonics of stone rendering the sound of the poet’s line:
I speak now
Of the erogeny
Of my soul
So the reach and distribution, the consummation, can no longer be heard but by the lover who lives in a like zone of the world of Earth. This zone will transform, likewise, the entire makeup of the poem and become its sole resource for any attempt at extracting an interpretation. In other words, the distribution of the erotic through-out the stony depths of the Earth of the poem, the site of the poem, will always make its way into summation as a make-over of immanence (doxa), the inevitable articulating presence of the poem. There may be many ways to read the poem, but all interpretations have been transformed by the erotic implantation of the poet’s three tines, thus valorizing the meaning of the poem as a site, whose cardinal points are always relevant and thus revelatory in their unique context.
The passage from unknown to known (past to future) has been blocked by consciousness and yet it is a living Eros within the bedrock of the cold cold body of Earth. The issue is not heat versus cold, the issue is
Tell me now my Illinois
Is not old
So the home, the poet’s birth-hole original site, is no longer an extension of consciousness (that totality of belief) rather than that, is soulful; and any of the limbs that might be so involved are also extensions of the oldness (Pleistoscene-ly aware) of Soul. Thequite literal block of stone in non-erotic charge gives into the depth of the time of Earth, an erogeny of being beyond proof, beyond the capable negation of consciousness, re-instituting the positivities of Eros as ore. This one instrumental reach by the poet signals the transcendent nature of the poem, thus giving it a prophetic channel by which to modulate a passage toward the future, always and everywhere.
These reachings and discoveries are the, likewise, the newly arrived “Algonquians,” the poet says, the “first” peoples, older than old and outside the usual dialectics of historical, Western Man.
A Theory of Truth: Sleep and wakefulness
“Starts with finished product” i.e., the land and thought of a man venturing (the fact that land is meant to travel on is the prophecy given to man holds man in a constant travel and belts the Earth with his particular channel the Earth has another channel and maybe the consonant features of these two channels will meet but of course one has to start with the finished product, the totality of the process of consumption channels that are pipelines and conduits for run-off and offal the poem this opening now of the poem exists in theoretical space as well as the Turbine itself (the poem) ventures and echoes the cold isolation of Iklivik thule the first place that establishes the prioritizing of the end process so that venture is the projective fuel for the intention of the venture.
The very northern local, Iklivik, Ultima Thule its city, its cold isolation the poet’s realm of truth, the limbs of Eros stretching into the cold ore stone of Eros as the Earth turns. The venturing and the ventured: nothing ventured nothing gained. Nothing risked, in other words, nothing ultimately extracted from the poem, whose speculative surface conceals the oil and the ore and the ultimate gold by which all else will be measured into a settlement or habitation, returning investors and investment to the first and most riskiest the greatest reward.
The priority is nothing more than the stretch into deeply cold stoned depths of the turning Earth, over against any other time-line historicization of identity. For instance, as these pieces and parts of the poem are being written in England in 1966, the persistence of national identity arouses shallow forms, prioritizing relations among nations in a timeline of world consciousness. But that has nothing to do with the plunder of Earth’s resources nor the clock upon which that venturism rides. The longpoem can reach that reality of speculation, in spite of the personal isolation given to the poet by any circumstance that would be his immediate interpreter.
The “current” of the Atlantic is the turbine of sleep/wakefulness beginning/end. “Only” a few million years the movement ventures, nothing more nor less; it is the precision of the movement that counts in the passage from sleep into wakefulness, the venture, the investment made so precise by that larger scale of “time.” The ancient Earth, the stones that make a mapped border stronger than any nation or line drawn by our near-histories.
No race or nation governs the movement.
Divisions of history not enough to fuel the movement, it is the slaving and rum running were/are the conscience as a truth of the poem, wed to the movement of the Turbine’s currencies. These various instances from the historical “relevance” of economic plunder makeover the speculative quality of the longpoem as well as the nature of the species that would undertake such an investment. The nature of gain and gold are held in the scale upon which the large extraction out of sleep and the nature of time the poet has drawn.
A Poem A movement
Difference between ages is expansion of commercial enterprise, the attachment to movement by which Man becomes the signs and entrance to meaning even though he is not its ultimate interpreter. This is a fundamental attachment to negation provided by machinery. The channel of Man is a negative function par excellence. Consciousness thus given a ride by that un-choice.
Leaving the machine, the endless cycle of negation of negation behind, the creativity of an evolutionary process begins to make itself known in not just ideational categories or identification. Here is the positive assertion of the Earth, which before was the choicest moment of negating negation. The Earth is a Turbine, a new stand-in for the “machine,” as I’ve named it in this writing, that un-site which has ghosted mankind since before time was even codified or “known” by them.
Here too the intersection of Smithson’s great Earthworks and his theoretical position therein: that the museum, the housing of his open-ended Earth site can indeed be reproduced in a gallery or museum, but it will always be, there, a “non-site.”
The finer and more complex associations of natural selection (the rare remains, the finds), echoing a Darwinian register, make movement a positivist agenda, one in which the machine of history, with its assemblage of signs all thrown into historicism, or, a negation of negation left behind. Movement resides in the complex associations of the planetary, and, most importantly in this regard
Man is not
Thus we have in the longpoem the “inquisitive fingers” of the people which do diminish the “gold’s value” writes Dorn in his evolving Turbine.
The investment in growth and development along a civilized bias renders the very nature of expressive individualist trait deleterious to “building.” The idea of mankind in a “bad” moral state is part of his acquisition of what I would call expressive time. That time is not considered part of the building unless it is able to be monumentalized, put into the imminent character of every selection, as if “natural” selection were always and everywhere of a scale yet to be explored by man.
The expressive, in time as well as act and action, is what poetry is. But not so simply the act of projecting an image of self. Rather, expressive time is transiting. Poetry oscillates (to use a term borrowed from Heidegger, the last universally recognized philosopher of the West) between what it supposedly houses and the personal acquisition of travel and transiting and transitional realms. Poetry contains existence as much as it makes existence—both are poetry’s possibilities unfolded by its expressive erections.
The sense then of rum running or slave-trading being the gold-standard, but therein a natural questioning of their necessity or bias threatens the machinery which validates valuation gained by their pursuit. Everywhere, we hear echoes of what a threat of coordinated negation (that channel of measure and value) brings to the realms of power. The sense of being a part of something is in contention through the revelations of the scale of a “natural selection” process:
Not includes west Africa
Goes to west Africa
Rum slaves and crude molasses
Wilberforce a standard trick [torsion, pendulum;
Of conscience, what i.e., Englishman, born-again xian, anti-slaver]
Can be thought of man
As he ventures
Part of Bristol is still rich.
That consciousness, when held in the channel of thought, is feckless, and the return on investment not measured by consciousness, dis-validates the Human scale, actually, and here then the beginning of the cross-section the longpoem is always bringing as a register of scale.
It starts of course
With the finished product
Nothing starts with the 1st.
Nothing. The end
Is first. Always.
There is no beginning
Unless the end
Has been reached. First.
The second is the middle
And that may be people
Or some other material.
Molasses or molasses skinned persons.
The turbine is only movement.
The current of the Atlantic
Swirl.
As against that common Human assumption, which makes cause and effect a centrality to any and all, as if literacy itself holds the key to the movement, and any deviation from a ‘correct” interpretation runs afoul of error, even if the Turbine (movement) cannot be contained in thought or the representatives for thought:
More north than
Most casual laborers know.
So cold.
From the center of
the earth
The line comes up to
pierce
any man
Can’t understand
what gravity is
That he has an
ordered and
Endlessly transferrable
place
So cold
you wake up
mumble some complaint
to yourself.
The complaint is the utterance, the articulation of expressive time itself.
Black comes into the senses
More than green. One day
There came on Lexden Road
a long, high hearse
with a sloping back like a
medium hill.
a man in funereal garments
Rode shotgun
his face under the black
top hat
a grinning
memento mori
This apparition is the ‘Slinger of Dorn’s other Longpoem Gunslinger, riding over the lexical attributes of the poem in place (England, a land of temporary exile for the poet here) and is a kind of skeletal attribute of death as well as the living expressiveness of the particularization the poem makes known—an expression, being candor, always makes the scale or revelation of the poem larger than it would be if it could not include such complaint, such articulation.
“trade has increased is what that means” and by this grin the satisfaction of being “civilized” gives all the value it needs to the inquisitive. In other words, to find the base we are now no longer concerned with how to further any competing claims, which might have arisen in a contest to build the future out of the present. The “seeing into the future” whereby negation of negation, the machinery of inventive mankind, has been put away from the truer base, the alignment of Earth with the individual as a Pleistocene example. The New Scale. And so the puny apparition of Man is also the skeletal structure, the anatomy of the poem in human terms.
What is mortality? Has anyone raised that question within the interpreting guises of poetry or cultural artifact? Again, we have transferred our enquiry regarding the present not so much as the way into the future—we know they are both the same, the present and the future—rather we have transferred our poetry and allegiance to the mark the poem leaves us with, forward into the question as its every movement.
We are writing a reading of the theory of mind, as it gets called in evolutionary sciences, in order to raise the very essence, not so much of truth (and Dorn does not really mean “truth” as something provable, rather something extremely variable) as the competence of locally adaptable structures that have no need of history. Local ways of accessing symbolic resonance, in other words, without raising the specter of past glories and monuments, like rum running or slave-trading antecedents, in order to build a connective rapport to any and all.
Ontogeny recapitulates Phylogeny, as Ernst Haeckel had written long ago in order to explain a more hands-on approach to the being and hence the “reality” of fossils as they fit or didn’t fit in with the Darwinian “tree of life.” Haeckel is also responsible for founding and naming a species, Homo Stupidus, to distinguish a clade in the tree different from Homo Sapiens.
“on the occasion of this excitement all creatures describe” fuel is what is being got at, whether it is a modern build-up or an ancient one, like Pleistocene era hominoids, stones, birds or other Animalia.
Provisional fragment
“in defense of a man’s head” is the passage from unknown (not known) to known. The erogeny/orogeny coupling. Part of an inevitable process? Or is it more timeless—looking at something long enough it goes from known to unknown and back to known again? But what now holds the known? If it is given to a history, an antecedence, an a-priority, then it brings on the specter of negation. It brings on un-original theater, a kind of pretend belief in re-enactment which already was asking an audience to suspend its belief and knowledge in the inevitable—all over again—for the same of … of what?
Living things are not given completely to negation, are they? as a mode of travel? What about the difference in channels, in frequencies that emanate from the erogeny involved here?
The automobile is actually just an illusory level of attachment to the planet because it is the evolution of historically derived, “negative” inventions: the combustion engine. It wasn’t discovered by accident, nor was it the result of pure innate competence—many pressures into the exploitation of the negative charge for its future realization were brought into thought and action, law and application. So the inventiveness that man displays is indeed a curious feature of his anatomy. It continues to undermine itself, in a way; calling to that within the Human, the poet is aware that his own history must be expressed to its fullest, in order to risk every nonsensical attribute a slick summation would render and thus project into the future.
The poet is aware of all that is at stake within the prophetic capacity of the poem. Nothing less than the future is at stake.
Dorn’s work is of a mode of discovery: to always entertain passage as open and never closed. Knowing something can always hear itself as unknowing too, by which it belongs to the stretch of the travel, the direction of what we brought in here as Ultima Thule at the beginning, a register as well of the “Pleistocene” scale of time.
The ratio (ratiocination) of the scale is never completely settled, just as the artefactuality of the poem can always be re-examined, along morphologistical contours, creating a new topology to add to a collection of such.
Unknown occasions can also pass into being “known.” But the changeableness of these things are representative of a living condition, symbolic in ways that are not driven by echoic systemization or invention predicated on the drive to make the present into the future. The future might have already happened and come and gone as far as “knowledge” is concerned. Hence the necessity for an ac-knowledgment, an exteriorizing of what is known, in order to test it. The questioning, the testing, of course flips any preconceived notion of outside and inside. We saw that shape of weird and strange serendipity with Gherasim Luca’s work.
The world, then, as both strange as well as un-strange, living in dynamic intro-spection of an epoch larger than any conception of time ever concocted. This making of the poem as longpoem is opposed to static representation thus it is a primary presentation of riding the Earth, a living screwthread of poesis.
Language, in this case a sense of English, “different” in its evolution from past to present and into its future, where it is spoken “around the globe,” has an effect now that does not need to isolate itself as a haute (ho!) aspect of knowing. Known things are dependent as well as independent of the “local” of an island (in this case England, but any “where” as home ‘cause of the squeaky springs before during and after, will suffice).
(N.B.)… expressive time is the reach we need to understand, the difference between land time knowledge bases and language time knowledge bases, knowing they mirror one another’s illusions as well as sureties—is the expressiveness that marks “the passage” …
Poesis
Expressiveness conveys.
As it is a conveyance, expressiveness retains the primitive essence of the human both ontogenetically as well as phylogenetically. Translation: expressiveness invests and investigates through inquisitiveness at the heart of the individual in a very primal capacity, species wide.
It is the movement, vehicular movement, inherent in the root phora which means “to carry.” Somehow in the build-up, civilization and other cultural spreads (which work much faster than actual genetic evolutionary mechanisms), signage became a stand-in for such Being.
Substituting an onto-theologicality for the species’ upright bi-pedalist movement toward adaptability over Earth became the destiny of the machinery that has shadowed them since their inception.
A vehicle is a thing as well as a machine when assigned signification; a machination, an invention that allows our senses access to meta (beyond) knowing or ana (equal to) knowing gives us, in sensory sent or ready-to-send, mode.
Expressive time modulates access to these two modes, the activity of awareness (sensory sent) and kinaesthesia (ready-to-send). No wonder we can substitute one for the other into seeming infinity: we were born to that capacity and words are an emblem of that inter-activity.
