Howe’s use of ‘selection’ (rather than initiation) as a writing process submerges the writer’s activity of thought ostensibly in history itself, by being in prior texts by others outside one’s/her own cognition as instrumental: “This is my historical consciousness. I have no choice in it. In my poetry, time and again, questions of assigning the cause of history dictate the sound of what is thought.”5
Howe’s introduction to her Frame Structures: Early Poems 1974–19796 places biographical accounts of people living before the author’s life alongside memories of her childhood; that is, her life is ‘unrelated’ (can’t be observed to be related) to theirs. Yet the framing of these accounts, and these being an introduction to the poems, structures a view of history as causality. Her framing there is ‘opposite’ from my reading of her lines from “Articulation of Sound Forms in Time.” Her imposition of ‘history’ on her own life and poems is a traditionalist myth of beginning, a determinateness: “Innocency. A pure past that returns to itself unattackable in the framework. Restoration” (p. 26). A state that is “Innocency” suggests the poet’s seeking stasis of a childhood reconfigured (as if a Golden Age). “Restoration” is that past state, which didn’t exist and is desired.
Actions as Reading and Plays.
It occurs by simply giving up one’s mind; yet one can’t do that in order to write it. This contradiction is evoked also in reading and hearing it:
During performance of my poem/play, The Weatherman Turns Himself In, the audience sat in a darkened field of hanging black irises (flowers) with rapid action occurring outside this field in front of the viewers. The activity is going on in a medium where it cannot realistically occur. Rapid action is apparently being represented in a setting of a play that cannot be rapid action, as of action films; and the play’s action is occurring solely via the language being stilled to be contemplative as the language’s only activity.
For example, slab of yellow teeth man on motorcycle to slash woman hurrying with suitcase—occurs as ‘speaking this action’ at/in the exact time of it.
By the activity being separated from the language and going on at the same time, the action is not (only) what is heard and seen, and it only takes ‘place’ there.
Activity is the only community. At the same time the viewer is conscious of separation, one solely.
This passage from As: All Occurrence in Structure, Unseen—(Deer Night) (writing that is to be read and not enacted and is also the activity of a play) analyzes the structure of The Weatherman Turns Himself In:
There could be a circumstance in which the actions were continual and ‘visible’ by the people speaking of an action while doing it. People were describing an action as it was occurring and being seen: all being its occurrence. Being seen, seeing, and speaking are all actions that are equal and in time. A man said, “I found the action/the movements distracting—so that I couldn’t listen—I just wanted to listen to the language.” I want the viewer to exist, in this distraction. Not to listen as such. So as not to re-form the action of listening, itself. At all. That one could apprehend outside of formation only.
This same passage from As: All Occurrence in Structure, Unseen—(Deer Night) also analyzes structure in a prose work (of mine), Defoe, sections of which were performed as a play called The Present. In The Present, separate scenes occur at the same time in and at the sides of a small center space. The past action (which is the first part of the play; inconveniently difficult choreographed actions occur, such as a heroin dealer later flickering on a motorcycle being carried in a cocoon by starving boys on a desert) impinges into present commentary (second part of the play), the action recurring as a different present which is at the same time.
Thus both play (The Present) and prose work (Defoe) have sequences solely of written ‘rendition’ of physical action (in the play actions are ‘said’ as they are enacted) followed later by sequences of observation or discursive commentary (in the play this is in part two; these are spoken and also shown as handwritten phrases on slides): these are separate as if observing the physical actions, which are also past and present. The separated passages cause the ‘obverse’ (conceptualization or action) to collapse becoming one—always being separate. It is ‘as if’ we’re seeing and reading mind structuring.
Writing not having any relation to event/being it—by being exactly its activity. It’s the ‘same thing’ as life (syntactically)—it is life. It has to be or it’s nothing.
“A child imitates in space certain motions and shapes derived from earlier incomprehensible relations conveyed by others. Motions are created beside (as if ‘by’) themselves, such as the motions of running.” Actions are no more ‘givens’ that are known than are concepts. Thus, the text as imitation of physical movements/gestures (yet) as language is utterly separate from its conceptionalization. Both are empty in that the motions have no generalization (motions have no language, which is what they are there). For example, in The Weatherman: running is ‘spoken’ (“As from not being liked and so without there being anything runs”) by The Other as she runs hurling a bar into the wheel spokes of cycles on which people attacking ride.
Conceptualization separate from action is observation of what? Occurrence does not bring these even with each other; so in occurrence (of either at the same time) they (‘motions’—which are the occurrence—and ‘conceptualization,’ the occurrence) are utterly separate, are ‘gone’ there, and one realizes that.
Occurrence being separate from itself ‘there,’ “experience” is ‘seen’ from the viewpoint of its dissolution.
Giving up the outside as ‘conversation’ and at the same time giving up the interior ‘conversation’ occurs in the ‘viewing’ of performing (these becoming the same). ‘Making’ writing impermanent. Disjunct instant is neither conceptualization, nor “contemplation”/metaphysics, nor ‘solely’ action as in an action film (which is as if ‘not’ in life, the ‘plot’ of an action film being only segue of actions). Neither any thing nor its concept.
Agamben’s notion of experience having been “expropriated,” the individual supposedly no longer being able ‘to have’ experience (‘they’ say)—as one being separated from one’s action and perception of it, or by their saying that this is so?—here (‘viewing’ text or viewing action as performance of it) the practice of separating occurrence as a form of attention—of there being no relation, of one to occurrence—is ‘other than’ alienation (renders “alienation” irrelevant, not what’s occurring; rather, it is observation). Without being a message or polemics, this attention of itself as an activity is: ‘watching the experience of one’s mind at once as if ‘with’ one’s physical actions—and watching as being itself action.’ In other words, it reinstates “experience” as (separate from ‘their’ definition of one’s, or one’s own prior, experience) a different activity.
Notes
The Radical Nature of Experience was first given at a talk at the Assembling Alternatives conference at the University of New Hampshire, 1996.
1. Giorgio Agamben, Infancy & History / Essays on the Destruction of Experience (New York: Verso, 1993).
2. Philip Whalen, Heavy Breathing (Bolinas, Calif.: Four Seasons Foundation, 1980), 54. Hereafter cited in text by page number only.
3. Dōgen, Moon in a Dewdrop, Writings of Zen Master Dōgen (North Point, 1985), 108–109. Hereafter cited in text by page number only.
4. Susan Howe, “Articulation of Sound Forms in Time,” Singularities (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1990). Hereafter cited in text by page number only.
5. Postmodern American Poetry (New York: Norton,