In memoriam Kennneth White (1936-2023)
1In his 1985 book of essays, Une apocalypse tranquille: crise et création dans la culture occidentale, Kenneth White reminds us of the etymological meaning of the term, and warns us against the limitations of the loud laments and terrifying projections that inform the conventional visions of apocalypse. He then offers possible variations on the theme of the apocalyptic unveiling that imply a double dimension, both existential in describing the collective and individual troubles that provoke the apocalyptic crisis, and poetic as the human disruptions are translated into chaotic, exploratory, often cryptic textual manifestations:
Au-delà de ce qu’une apocalypse, normalement comprise, comporte d’hystérie collective, de millénarisme, d’eschatologie, de bouleversements dans le ciel accompagnés de révolutions terrestres sanglantes suivies de lendemains qui chanteront faux, j’entends « apocalypse » ici dans le sens premier, grec du terme : dévoilement, mise à nu.
Déconditionnement, dérive, découverte. (9)
2The “deconditioning, drifting, discovering” processes mean a liberation of the subject from categories of perception that have been imparted through education and have become ingrained. The exhortation aims at discarding constraining patterns of determinacy to engage on a random path towards mystical discovery. If one follows White’s trajectory, the discovery lies in alternative modes of inhabiting the world. In the wider frame of his reflection, this work is part of the empowering of a geopoetics, a poetics of the earth that in actuality results from a cosmic experience of the world.
3This vision is not without consequences over White’s reading of Jacques Derrida’s Glas in the ensuing vignette playfully entitled “De la dialectique à la galactique”:
À propos de telle phrase, ou de tel morceau de phrase lu dans un texte, Derrida dit qu’elle peut avoir un retentissement tel qu’elle doit constituer un noyau d’énergie centrale : « On doit toucher là (coagulation de sens, de forme, de rythme) à la matrice compulsionnelle de l’écriture, à son effet organisateur. » Dans Glas, ce noyau organisateur sorti de la matrice compulsionnelle est représenté par la coagulation de deux consonnes : gl, qui passe scripturalement dans un livre publié à la maison d’édition Galilée, qui tourne culturellement autour de la mer de Galilée et qui pourrait déboucher éventuellement dans une galaxie post-ontologique.
Le gl, c’est ce qui prend à la gorge et qui coupe le souffle. C’est ce qui se trouve à l’origine de toutes les généalogies.
Une inconnue.
Comme en mathématiques – mais ici il n’y a pas de formules.
L’élément premier d’un espace sans formules. (109)
4As he meditates along with Derrida on this visceral internalization of variant chains of signification that play on kabbalistic correspondences between words and sounds, White defines the contingent modes of meaningfulness, as meaning is turned into a furtive crystallization of apparently random connections. As such, it is unstable and eminently non-systematic, but not as far as being entirely personal, subjective and arbitrary. On the contrary, it emerges as the primary core that organizes the universe for a Galactician that, according to White, stands for a depersonalized agent, without a personal identity (113). He relates the odyssey of this individual to the advent of Robert Musil’s “man without qualities,” Walt Whitman’s “self” or Zen Buddhism’s “non-self.” For Derrida, the main character in this adventure into an alternative outside of literature is a human being characterized by action without activism, performance without violence, in many ways an instance of the numerous experimental poets that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century as participants but deliberately not as combattants in the democratic debate.
5Quoting Jean Genet, White underscores how this is an ontological evolution that is linked to a non-antagonistic relationship to nature and the actualization of a quasi-magical equality of the human with the non-human:
Quand je rencontre dans la lande – et singulièrement au crépuscule, au retour de ma visite aux ruines de Tiffauges, où vécut Gilles de Rais – des fleurs de genêt, j’éprouve à leur égard une sympathie profonde. Je les considère gravement, avec tendresse. Mon trouble semble commandé par toute la nature. Je suis seul au monde, et je ne suis pas sûr de n’être pas le roi – peut-être la fée de ces fleurs. Elles me rendent au passage un hommage, s’inclinent sans s’incliner mais me reconnaissent. Elles savent que je suis leur représentant vivant, mobile, agile, vainqueur du vent. Elles sont mon emblème nature, mais j’ai des racines, par elles, dans ce sol de France nourri des os en poudre des enfants, des adolescents enfilés, massacrés, brûlés par Gilles de Rais. Par cette plante épineuse des Cévennes, c’est aux aventures criminelles de Vacher que je participe. Enfin par elles dont je porte le nom le monde végétal m’est familier. Je peux sans pitié considérer toutes les fleurs, elles sont de ma famille. Si par elles je rejoins aux domaines inférieurs – mais c’est aux fougères arborescentes et à leurs marécages, aux algues, que je voudrais descendre – je m’éloigne encore des hommes. (Genet quoted in White 114-115)
The way Genet describes his encounter with the plants that, in French, bear the same name as his, is the occasion of a peculiar “recognition” based on a “deep sympathy” that is to be understood etymologically. As “natural emblem” of the man, Genet’s flowers are akin to the totemic figures of shamanic cultures as the common name transforms both the plant and the man, bonding them both to a geology of human crimes while integrating them into the ahistorical time of the vegetal. Relinquishing the predatory modes of human supremacy, with such companions as Whitman, Derrida, or Genet, White thus defines a relation with (rather than to) the world that seems to be a shared condition with W.S. Merwin’s poems in The Lice. If one can see in Genet the desire of the abandoned child to find roots and be someone, one can also witness in his autobiographical note processes of dehumanization and “naturalization” that lead him beyond the borders of literature into another dimension of existence and interaction with otherness, “away from men,” into the shared living materiality of the swamp ferns and algae. One striking feature of this quotation is that it powerfully links this abstraction from the human world with an acute awareness of its cruelties and crimes: the ground itself is poisoned with the cremated bones of victims in ways that lead to rethink the very definition of the apocalyptic poet. Far from being the foreseer of disasters to come, he is rather the observer and witness of unheeded horrors that have already happened. The intense “sympathy” with one’s place and time is what unlocks these deep-buried images. Similarly, the poems in Merwin’s The Lice, probably his most famous collection, tie in with experiments taking place in poetry in the late 1960s as part of a different mode of political commitment and protest—one less based on the specificity of the event (namely the Vietnam War and the escalation of U.S. involvement in South Vietnam) than on a recognition of the human being’s atavistic impulse to destroy and massacre:
When the war is over
We will be proud of course the air will be
Good for breathing at last
The water will have been improved the salmon
And the silence of heaven will migrate more perfectly
The dead will think the living are worth it we will know
Who we are
And we will all enlist again (64)
6“When the war is over […] we will all enlist again”: the first and last lines of this short poem convey a bitter irony that is emblematic of an assessment of humankind as intrinsically violent and murderous. The irrepressible return of the same counters temporary signs of improvement such as cleaner air and water, free migratory paths, and the persistance of life. Obstinately, the poem insists on the fact that these do not happen out of an essential mutation but as a brief and precarious reprieve from an ongoing spiral of destruction. The positive observations are systematically disrupted by a jarring use of lineation that threatens the processes of syntactic integration. The two most striking examples of these run-on-lines in the poem stress the separation from the good (“will be / Good”) and the delusion in believing one can know oneself and stabilize this identity (“we will know / Who we are”). The line “Who we are” is unpunctuated, adding to the indeterminacy of a statement in which “who we are” could easily morph into “who are we.” What remains after the war is nothing but the premises of another war as if the interval of fresh air and live animality were a pointless detour in a programmed resurgence of violence.
7The charge, in The Lice, often explicitly weighs on the stupidity of established entities such as state or nation. In “An End in Spring,” the “compatriots” dwell in a consumeristic fiction that is satisfied with the material tokens of a manufactured prosperity:
It is carried beyond itself a little way
And covered with a sky of old bedding
The compatriots stupid as their tables
Go on eating their packages
Selling gloves to the clocks
Doing alright (7)
8But the rules of the market that make “selling gloves to the clocks” a possibility are sealed with absurdity. The mysterious and mystical “It” “becomes a deity” that deserts this world to take refuge among “others” beyond the reach of names or nouns:
Ceasing to exist It becomes a deity
It is with the others that are not there
The centuries are named for them the names
Do not come down to us
On the way to them the words
Die (7)
9The finality of the word “die” isolated in the last line of the poem may seem overly emphatic, but it also allows for a syntactic manipulation whereby it might stand as an injunction or a curse to the readers—a violent address to awaken them from their post-prandial glibness of “package”-fed consumers. The summoning of a specific season for this indictment in the poem’s title, as well as the resort to tense syntactic structure, and meaningful lineation, inscribes the poem in the tradition of both T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” and William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All:
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain. (Eliot 63)
Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches–
They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind– (Williams, 1971 95)
10The primacy of death over the delusions of rebirth and renewal is echoed in Merwin’s poem, stressing the Eliotian cruelty of spring and the Williamsian “cold” of an indeterminate season. The death of words in the spring sends Merwin’s reader back to this paradigm of antiphrastic responses to spring whereby “the beginning is assuredly / the end” (Williams, 1958 3). Although Williams’s Spring and All, published in 1923, is to be read as his response to Eliot’s “The Waste Land” (1922), intending to oppose Eliot’s return to the “sacred woods” of tradition as a remedy to the post-World War I moral and civilizational crisis, it can also be seen as converging on the diagnosis of a collective delusion: the turn to “spring” as the metaphor for redemption, rebirth, the victory of life over death, fails to exorcise the universal condemnation to cruelty and uncertainty.
11If Neal Bowers sees in this dynamic the reinstatement of an archetypal cosmic world, this world however has nothing at its core—a nothingness one can choose to read as a positive assertion rather than a nihilistic resignation, but which one is forced to recognize as intrinsically ambivalent, neither a condemnation nor the springboard for redemption:
In these early passages, representative of others too numerous to cite here, Merwin embarks on his pursuit of Logos, the Word behind everything. His journey is, in many respects, archetypal, a search for a verbal grail; but the hunt is enacted in the context of a contemporary cosmology. God, or Logos, is the nothing behind everything, and so Merwin’s drive is toward that nothingness. Some critics regrettably see his quest as negative, failing to recognize the essential paradox that informs Merwin’s vision. What he strives to attain is not an arid obliteration but a perception of that original, fecund nothing. (25)
12The impulse in Merwin is rather an attempt to express the recognition of this emptiness that is much akin to the nothingness of Zen Buddhism. It entails a non-predatory relation to otherness that is obsessively and antiphrastically described in the poem “The Last One”:
Well they’d made up their minds to be everywhere because why not.
Everywhere was theirs because they thought so.
They with two leaves they whom the birds despise.
In the middle of stones they made up their minds.
They started to cut. (10)
13Deliberately legible as a poem about deforestation, the text however evolves towards a meditation on the pervasive “shadows” that come to replace the destroyed elements of the natural world. As inexorably as each line that ends with a full stop, the arbitrary gestures of destruction produce a devouring monster of the dark that will eventually engulf all of the destroyers.
Well in the morning they cut the last one.
Like the others the last one fell into its shadow.
It fell into its shadow on the water.
They took it away its shadow stayed on the water. (10)
14The use of the pronoun “they” is in this poem at the same time the classical rhetorical figure of anaphora that constructs the poem into an angry indictment of environmental destruction, and a cataphoric projection into a future that is out of control and repetitive, relentlessly going on with catastrophic destructions despite the visible signs of danger. At the end of the first page of this poem, the shadow has become an autonomous force, feeding on every attempt to counter it:
They came back the shadow was growing.
They started setting up stones it was growing.
They looked the other way it went on growing. (10)
15In a 1982 interview with Ed Folsom and Cary Nelson, Merwin asserts the parallel to be drawn between these unnamed agents of the poem and the human beings that obstinately “look the other way” and fail to see the growing threat that ends up “swallowing” them. These lives are ruined by their own destructive acts, diminished both physically and psychologically so that they are radically unable to “make any sense of the world.” The mental loss inscribes the moral shortcomings on the body, and locks the vicious circle of bad faith:
And if we really are so dishonest and so mutilated that we can't make any sense of the world, or come to any terms with them, then our lives are maimed and truncated accordingly–your imaginative lives and probably our physical lives too. (Folsom, Merwin and Nelson 38)
16The metaphor of amputation runs through the sentence with “mutilation,” “maiming” and truncating. The body is seriously harmed and diminished, allegorizing the deletion of the mind and the suppression of any form of clairvoyance. In “The River of Bees,” the temporality of this process is formalized in such a way that cancellation becomes inevitable: a limit has been crossed, and there is no turning back or starting afresh, since the future perversely echoes into the present, an unavoidable actualization of the disaster to come:
We are the echo of the future
On the door it says what to do to survive
But we were not born to survive
Only to live (32-33)
17Assessing the present specimen of the human species, and their strategies to overcome nature and their own nature, Merwin initiates a reversal of logic whereby the future is not open but a programmed set of circumstances that current events precipitate with dire determination: where one would expect the commonplace assertion that the present echoes the past working along a rational chain of causality, one is confronted with a backlash from the future that performs a radical teleological inversion. As echoed in the present, the future is the cause of our experienced consequences and ends up collapsing onto this present as well as the past. Future events are more certain than the past events that are lost and irretrievable—what is more, these events consist in an apocalypse that no survival methods will avoid, condemning individuals to the boundaries of their ephemeral lives, with no option for endurance, no hope for growth over the generations. In Hank Lazer’s analysis of Merwin’s poems, this is the way extinction weaves itself into the poems to become their master key:
Merwin’s perception is one of time reversed, with the future turned around and rushing back at the present. In turn, the present becomes a moment wedged between the past, which cannot be remembered, and the future, which, if it will exist at all, will exist without us. (282)
18Extinction ranges on all levels of existence, from the planet all the way down to a poetic self that anticipated not only his death but its future celebrations. “For the Anniversary of My Death” celebrates a death of the author that is not just metaphorical or theoretical, but factual. The poetic persona plays on its own fictitiousness to stage an absurd anticipation of the poet’s death, while laying emphasis on the precariousness of life. Though alive at the time of writing, the persona inscribes the celebration of its own passing on potentially each day of each living year.
Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveller
Like the beam of a lightless star (58)
19The poem establishes a non-chronological organization of events, with future death not as a horizon, but as a daily commemoration impressed on the present, and reverberating from the limited confines of the poet’s unaware mind (“without knowing”) to the vastness of cosmic dispersion (“the beam of a lightless star”). The passing away of the poet is also a permanent condition that is infinitely iterated in the deaths hanging over the heads of humankind at large.
Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what (58)
20The anecdotal occasion of the anniversary of one’s death is elegiac, leading the poem to resort to many of the tropisms of the elegy: the poet’s estrangement in a life disowned, in a community of men despised, and in a natural world unrecognized, his claim for love, the melancholy call of tiny birds on rainy days, and the confrontation with one’s cognitive limitations. Yet, maybe because of this intertextual referentiality, and more certainly because of its transmutation of each living day as an anniversary of one’s death, compulsively iterated and rehearsed on a daily basis, the elegiac mode ends up informing Merwin’s paradoxical discourse on history.
21Once the bottom has been reached, there only remains for the poet the ingenuous decision to make a “wish”:
The star in my
Hand is falling
All the uniforms know what’s no use
May I bow to Necessity not
To her hirelings (25)
22As the poet releases his mystical attribute of power, the protest against human violence becomes the heart of the poetic engagement. Men dissolve in the shells of their uniforms that pointlessly command them like Eliotian hollow men that have acknowledged their emptiness down to the recognition and content acceptation of their uselessness. Be they aware of having been coerced into this situation or not, they fall under the fake authority of necessity’s “hirelings,” a discourse that is usurping the forms (“uniforms”) of a higher, capitalized necessity the poet wants to claim. Thus, readers are led to reassess the initial image which reminds them, if need be, that it also metaphorized a more generic account of causality—one that Merwin contradicts: the command of necessity, once necessity has been capitalized, has indeed been diffracted into its diminished “hirelings,” mercenary versions without legitimacy. This lost humankind is, in Merwin’s view, so tragically lost that, in the poem “December Night,” it does not even deserve the hope for salvation of a Christmas prayer:
Tonight once more
I find a single prayer and it is not for men (43)
23More generally for Merwin, the poetic becomes the locus of a prophetic modality that is an exploration rather than a prescription, based on the empirical snippets gathered through a specific mode of attention that crosses through the boundaries of outer aspects into the inside of the objects of observation – even to the cost of clarity and coherency:
Fact is in the world of relation, one is always looking at the outside of facts. One sees all the facts from the outside. One is never going to be on the inside until one is caught up in the relation, then of course you don’t see the inside; there is no separation between the inside of you and the inside of what you’re looking at. […] I think I’m probably often deluded about what I’m doing in my own writing because I keep thinking that I'm getting nearer and nearer to an immediacy of historical detail, and yet when people talk about the poems I realize that may not be their impression. But then for years I thought that I was writing more and more simply and directly, and people kept saying the poems were getting more and more difficult, opaque, harder to read. (Folsom, Merwin and Nelson 49, 52)
24The consequent textual density simultaneously infuses the poetic with the prophetic and purges the poetic of the prophetic: “opaque” and esoteric, the poems lend themselves to the proliferating interpretations produced by paranoid reading; condensed, in the Poundian sense of the term, and at times haiku-like, the poems seem to retract from sweeping visions into disjointed observations. The refusal to stabilize and dogmatize the vision signs the “absolute receptivity to” and “acceptance of otherness” described by Anthony Libby in “W.S. Merwin and the Nothing that Is” (32, 40). But it also opens the poet’s eyes to the reality of the world. Man’s blindness and deafness to the warnings of the world cannot remain ignored and crystallize into the “deep sympathy” found in Kenneth White’s geopoetics, whose method is in fact akin to the method described by Jerome Rothenberg as the poetic, as well as existential, practice of “deep image.” In “Why Deep Image?” Rothenberg writes:
The event that seemed to me most clearly central to the happening-of-a-poem was what we came to call “deep Image.” The word deep wasn’t intended to convey a sense of profundity, pseudo or otherwise, but to show that the direction of seeing this kind of image is into a man rather than outside him: not a habit of the eye so much as a penetration of the self to refocus on the world through the eyes-of-feeling. This means that we have to try to see the world in all its natural and contemporary detail as if no differences existed between the seer and the things he sees. To see in this way–through the self (emotively)–results in certain necessary changes on the material emerging in the poem:
“a heightened sense of the emotional contours of objects (their dark qualities, or shadows);
their free re-association in a manner that would be impossible to descriptive or logical thoughts, but is here almost unavoidable;
the sense of these objects (and the poem itself) being informed with a heightened relevance, a quickened sense of life;
the recognition of the poem as natural structure arising at once from the act of emotive vision.”
The power of deep image is its ability to convey a sense of two-worlds-in-one–directly–with no concept to come between the inner experience and its meaning. (33)
25As demonstrated by Matthew Hofer, W.S. Merwin, like many in his generation, first had access to the poetry of Paul Celan through Jerome Rothenberg and his 1959 City Lights anthology of “new German Poets.” Like the poems by Celan, the poetry of The Lice foregrounds a discourse of extinction and what Hank Lazer calls “a myth of uncreation,” delineating a world of parasitic humans, vermin crawling over the planet intent on performing the disasters of a global holocaust.
26The prophetic tone, and the obsession with death as well as the hermetic experimentation with language through iterated “re-associations” (Rothenberg 33) find their matrix in Celan’s poems, and in the creative translation by Jerome Rothenberg. In “A Death Fugue (after Paul Celan)” for instance, the poem works though four movements that tragically adumbrate the modalities of the Holocaust, working out the unstoppable dynamics of destruction whose image becomes progressively more suggestive: from the first occurrence of “a man in this house who cultivates snakes and who writes,” one this moves to “a man in this house your golden hair Margareta / he sets his dogs on our trail he gives us a grave in the sky / he cultivates snakes and he dreams Death is a straw boss aus Deutschland” (Rothenberg 46-47). The serial approximations assert the pervasiveness as well as the elusiveness of death, in ways that converge with Merwin’s fugal writing in such poems of The Lice as “For a Coming Extinction,” where the injunction to the gray whale to tell “the great god” to spare the humankind ironically transform the prayer into an inadvertent revelation of human blind and cruel self-centeredness: from “Tell him / That we who follow you invented forgiveness” to “Tell him that we were made / On another day” to “Tell him / That it is we who are important” (68-69). From the apparently humble claim of and for forgiveness, human beings move on to remind the animal they are destroying of the Biblical foundation of their murderous supremacy, but this constructed legitimacy soon crumbles as the desperate and aberrant assertion of human “importance” surfaces and closes the poem down, dooming the human to extinction.