Every word is a prejudice, Nietzsche famously points out. One might add: Every word prejudices. Nowhere is this truer than in the nominal realm. One’s name cannot be separated from one’s good name.
He cared deeply for Liz and was her biggest fan and cheerleader. He felt bad that she had not been contacted about the Snowden poetition.
“So what should I do?” he asked her. “Sign it? Rewrite it?”
“Ah,” Liz said. “The patriarch’s quandary.”
Mark did the work of smiling sympathetically. He saw that Liz was peeved, and hurt, and with good cause. The problematic situation of women was not to be underestimated, not that Liz was in danger of committing this error. In her most recent sonnet, “mandate” had been displaced by the neologism “womandate.” Now Liz was, as she liked to say, lady-pissed. Mark totally got it.
But in the meantime he had a problem of his own, and an itch to explore the problem in writing. They had finished their coffees and their refills. It was time to go.
The two friends stepped outside. It was a lovely November afternoon. They hugged and separately went off.
As soon as he got back to his apartment, he wrote:
We attribute to Bertrand Russell the following notion, that to acquire immunity from eloquence is of utmost importance for citizens of a democracy. We are curious about the notion because Stevens was. And we connect Russell’s statement, thanks to Denis Donoghue, to this one, by Locke: “I cannot but observe how little the preservation and improvement of truth and knowledge is the care and concern of mankind, since the arts of fallacy are endowed and preferred.”
If we grant Russell’s words a merely provisional validity, we can ask: What is a verse petition if not fallacious eloquence? What is poetry if not a riposte to the forces of fallaciousness? What are these forces if not power’s language?
Mark wondered if he should explain that, by “fallacy,” Locke meant “deception.” He decided not to. The reader would connect the dots.
Not for the first time, Mark asked himself who this notional reader was. He had never, not once, met a disinterested party who had even heard of his poetry, never mind read any of it. Maybe his pensées would gain him a reader he could physically touch.
He felt a wavelet of nausea. The feeling had a certain etymological justice: he had jumped from one ship to another. But what was the alternative? To write nothing? It had been months since he’d produced, or even wanted to produce, a word of poetry.
Mark wrote:
How little I associate writing, properly undertaken, with the generation of the written. The more someone writes, the more suspicious I am of his credentials—as if this person had neglected his actual vocation in favor of the meretricious enterprise of putting words on the page.
Then:
Sometimes I sit down to write and feel the internal presence of … bad faith. Therefore I desist from writing. On the other hand, what would it mean to write in good faith? That sounds even more suspect.
He ate a cheese sandwich with mustard and olive oil. That was dinner. He went to his armchair. He wrote:
It is assumed that the writer’s first allegiance is to language. This is false. The writer’s first allegiance is to silence.
Now it was dark out. Usually the poet would read a book, but tonight he lacked the wherewithal. He opened a can of beer and went online. For a while he skipped from one site to another. Everything was either about the election or not about the election. He checked his e-mail. Nothing new. Then he went onto Facebook, then back to skipping around the Internet. He found himself reading, without interest but with close attention, about persimmon farmers in Florida. He rechecked his e-mail. Hello, Merrill had written him again.
Actually, Merrill had written Merrill—Mark had been bcc’d. The e-mail brought “exciting news”: funding had been secured (from whom, Merrill didn’t say) to buy half a page in the Times for the poetition. This moves the needle, Merrill stated.
Mark’s reaction involved three thoughts. One: “Move the needle”? Two: What an operator Merrill Jensen was. What a maestro of fallacy. Mark knew for a fact that Merrill not only disliked Bob Dylan’s lyrics but also disliked Bob Dylan’s songs, which he’d once sneeringly characterized to Mark, who did like them, as “Pops’ music.” But sure enough, the minute the Nobel was announced, the prick was at the forefront of the congratulators and imprimatur-givers, arguing that Bob Dylan was an unacknowledged legislator of the world; ergo, Bob Dylan was a poet. It made Mark want to puke: the pseudo-reasoning, so right-wing in its dishonesty; and the big lie that Dylan somehow lacked acknowledgment. The big truth, not that anyone dared to speak it, was that Shelley’s dictum needed to be revised. Poets were the unacknowledged poets of the world.
Had Mark been among the scores of writers contacted by the media for their reaction to the prize—which he hadn’t been—he would have spoken up for his comrades in verse. He would have faced down the wrathful online barbarians who vilified any perceived anti-Dylanite. (Their favorite disparagement, tellingly, was to accuse one of being a “nobody.”) He would have stated:
The status of poet is not to be worn like one of those fine ceremonial gowns sported by recipients of honorary degrees for a single, sunny, glorious afternoon. Not even by Bob Dylan. If there is such a thing as a poet’s mantle, it is a $4.99 plastic poncho: useless for fashion but good in the rain and the cold. And in an emergency.
His third thought about Merrill’s e-mail was that his name had never appeared in the Times and that if he signed the poetition it would.
His apartment was on the third floor of a Victorian only minimally maintained by its owner. There was a bedroom and a kitchen–living room equipped with an armchair, a desk, a desk lamp, a small sofa, and bookcases that entirely covered two walls. No television. The kitchen-living room had two windows. When Mark wanted to pace about the apartment, his one option was to walk to and from these windows. This he now did.
It was a journey that he’d made thousands of times, and thousands of times he had viewed the shingled rooftops of the houses across the street, and beyond them, in the town’s small business district, two brown glassy towers. At night, you couldn’t see much beyond the glare of the streetlight directly in front of the window. And yet evidently there was an inextinguishable need to approach an opening built into a wall for air and light, and to look through it.
Somebody down there was walking a dog. That was a poem, right there: the master, the leash, the joyful dog, etc. But the territory had been covered. There was that Nemerov poem, just for starters; and the one by Heather McHugh with that all-time-great dog line—doctor of crotches. A poem by Mark McCain would be water poured into a vessel that was already full: superfluous.
He kept looking, which was another poem—a poem about the peculiar percipience of the one who gazes out a window. The poem would do for the window what theorists had done for the threshold: it would offer the idea of the fenestral as a consort to the idea of the liminal. He wouldn’t write it. The automatic metaphoric associativity of “the window” was just too much. He could always play with the associations, of course. But surely