Paul Nelson
December, 2005
Annotated
Bibliography of Third Semester Reading -
Paul Nelson
Blaser, Robin. The
Violets: A Cosmological
Process Studies, pp8-37, Vol. 13,
Number 1, Spring 1983
Robin Blaser may be the most credible poet/scholar to comment about Charles Olson’s prime source, Alfred North Whitehead. It is interesting to note that this essay appeared not in a literary journal, but in one on the study of process. This is key, because Blaser, as a working Open Form poet, understands the critical nature of an understanding of Olson is in the process he adapted from Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, among others, and articulated in his seminal 1950 essay “Projective Verse.” In fact Blaser boils down Olson’s poetics to two main points, those being stance and ethos. He also recognizes that in the poetry and poetics of the most important poets, Olson included, there is, in Blaser’s words, “a spiritual chase” (8) that is in their arguments, essays and poetry in general, a cosmology and epistemology is being weaved into the work over and over again. He points out that: “Whitehead’s sense of reality as process…stands to correct both materialism and idealism in their command over us” (9). He also shows Whitehead’s forerunners in the process mode of thinking, leading back through Hegel, Lotse, Schelling, Herder and Liebnitz and through his Jesuit friends to Neo-Confucian Li and Chu Hsi, which is understandable. Chinese culture, until the 20th Century, was based very much in an holistic cosmology. It might be said the best of Western culture can be traced back to the three teachings of Chinese culture, Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism.
Extensive examination by Blaser of Olson’s papers, and the notations on Olson’s copies of Whitehead’s
books, especially Process and Reality
and The Aims of Education allows him
to get into the mind of Olson and make sense of how he was able to give
Whitehead’s theories the most noble tribute, by way of USE. Blaser is able to
help us translate: “a metaphysics back into poetry, there to re-tie us to the
real” (24). Violets are a recurring theme in Olson’s poetry, perhaps influenced
by William Carlos Williams in Williams’ poem referring to Einstein, and while
the natural world remains basically the same as eighty years ago, (Mt. St.
Helens may erupt, but twenty years later new life is thriving), the old
spiritual forms which “held” the real together for hundreds of years have come
loose. Blaser knows Olson’s process poetics, are his cosmology, are sourced in
most notably in Whitehead and are a modality for escaping the personal cost of
life in a mechanistic, control-oriented culture.
Bram, Shahar. Charles Olson and Alfred North Whitehead: An Essay on Poetry.
Lewisburg:
I have not seen a better summary of the critical nature of the impact of Whitehead’s philosophy on Olson’s poetics, which are his cosmology. In this well-designed essay, Bram quickly lays out some critical points about what poetry is to Olson:
…poetry is not a poem: the name of an object, a finished aesthetic object, the outcome of a process is negligible. Rather, the poem is poesis; the process of creation and the poem are, at most, two names or two perspectives for contemplating the same activity, the creativity of a human being in the world; (12)
Olson argues that Whitehead “only refines and corrects the most ancient myth-cosmos” and “Olson’s poetic act constitutes a critique of prevailing norms and a proposal for an alternative ethos, which he actualized as a poetics. The poem is an act and a call to act, the building of a new (re-newed) identity for the individual and the community; (12) “every place, according to Olson, is an opening place, and can serve as a gate inward that can be used to return outward, after further growth. (14); and most importantly:
“Olson does not adopt the scientific worldview and its concepts metaphorically” (15). This last point can’t be understated, and Olson may have been TOO committed to process. Much of The Maximus Poems turns out to be field notes and jottings which, for other poets, would be not more than material for new poems. Olson leaves them all in so his process is completely transparent and Bram concludes his introduction with the notion that The Maximus Poems has “an acute sense of failure in the concluding section of the poem” (17). (In his essay Blaser says Olson felt he needed another ten years.)
Another
place Bram gets to matters rarely discussed by Olson critics, or anyone else,
is the notion of the field. Michael McClure told me this is a concept that
Olson got from Robert Duncan and Olson does call his Open Form composition
process Composition by Field, sort of
as a subtitle of Projective Verse. As Bram points out, the concept of field
denotes “a dismissal of the traditional perception of space” (20). He used Albert
Einstein as his scientific source to relate the importance of this branch of
physics from the 1947 book The Evolution
of Physics: “A new concept appears in physics, the most important invention
since Newton’s time: ‘…the field…it is not the charges, nor the particles but
the field of space between the charges and the particles which is essential for
the description of physical phenomena’” (20).
The limits of Cartesian thinking have been well documented, though we still live in a very Newtonian/Cartesian culture of competition and domination. The chapter on Descartes to me seemed like beating a dead horse, but this is 30 years after Olson’s death and I have studied this old paradigm and the emerging one extensively. I did find some interesting tidbits in the chapter on Fluency, such as how Whitehead “bestows a new, more “open” content on the concept of causality: the macroscopic process is conditioned by the past, but is open to changes suggested by the present with its new ‘prehensions.’ The subject re-enacts the world and grows with it” (83). This notion may be the most critical one for those who believe that developing a discipline in an Open Form process allows a deepening on one’s consciousness. Bram also points out Olson’s notion, out of Whitehead, that the poem is an organism, and that “we have the ability to create, which is to narrate, which is the ability to bloom” (85) is also critical for the notion of individuation through Olson’s method, or others based on, or similar to, it.
There are
many other salient points, but I’ll refer to the last of them under two basic
headings. The first is the notion that what ails Western Culture did not begin
with the apple that fell on
The second of these last two notions is called the “Stance.” His stance is USE. To dig for this information and create a process out of a cosmology that rectifies the split in Western culture that Olson suggests goes back to 450 BC. Using the demotic, the concrete, applying it to one’s community (polis) using a process that does not seek to describe, but enact, these are all aspects of the brilliance of Olson’s poetics. Bram lays them all out in terms of their primary source in the cosmology of Whitehead more clearly than has even been done.
Hawkins, David. Power Vs. Force. Sedona: Veritas, 2004.
This is one
of the most critical books of our time. While the science in it may be subject
to scrutiny, (and deservedly so), the consciousness model it illustrates can be
used as a metaphor with great benefits to the reader. His basic premise is that
there is a difference between Power and Force. Power is associated with the
whole while Force with the partial. Hawkins says: “On examination we…see that
power arises from meaning...it is always associated with that which supports
the significance of life itself…(whereas) Force must be justified” Power
requires no such justification. (108). As an example
of Power he suggests the example of Mahatma Gandhi and his non-violent
resistance. Compare that with the policies of George W. Bush,
especially the justification of the war in
Central to our thesis, Hawkins likens Force to a movement, whereas Power is a field. Gravity may be understood as a Power in Hawkins definition. Its power moves all objects within its field, but it does not move. To elaborate on the critical nature of meaning, Hawkins says: “Force has transient goals; when those goals are reached there remains the emptiness of meaninglessness. Power, on the other hand, motivates us endlessly” (110). “Victory over others brings us satisfaction, but victory over ourselves brings us joy” (111).
Hawkins understands that the key to the lack of evolution is that society looks to correct effects, instead of causes. (This is at the core of our health care “system.”) And in a passage that strikes me as eerily similar to Olson’s notion of Projective Verse, Hawkins cites the main obstacle to man’s development is the lack of knowledge about the nature of consciousness. He says:
“If we look within ourselves at the instant-by-instant processes of our minds, we will soon notice that the mind acts much more rapidly than it would acknowledge. It becomes apparent that the notion that our actions are based on thoughtful decisions is a grand illusion. The decision-making process is a function of consciousness itself; with enormous rapidity, the mind makes choices based on millions of pieces of data and their correlations and projections, far beyond conscious comprehension. This is a global function dominated by the energy patterns which the new science of non-linear dynamics terms attractors” (21).
(In Projective Verse, Olson starts with a quote from Edward Dahlberg:
“’ONE
PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION.” It means exactly
what it says, is a matter of, at all
points (even, I should say, of our management of daily reality as of the daily
work) get on with it, keep moving, keep in, speed, the nerves, their speed, the
perceptions, theirs, the acts, the split second acts, the whole business, keep
it moving as fast as you can, citizen. And if you also set up as a poet, USE USE USE the process at all
points, in any given poem always, always one perception must must must MOVE, INSTANTER,
ON ANOTHER!” (Olson, Collected Prose,
240)
Hawkins’ Map of Consciousness suggests a numerical value for human traits, or emotions, rising from Shame, Guilt, Apathy, Grief, Fear, Desire, Anger, Pride and, at what Hawkins calls the level of “integrity,” Courage. Up from there he cites Neutrality, Willingness, Acceptance, Reason, Love, Joy, Peace and finally Enlightenment. The problem here is the numerical system. He claims to have scientifically tested this through kinesiology (muscle testing) and that this modality can work to measure the fields of anything, including works of Literature, Buildings and other things. This is where Hawkins gets out on shaky ground, in my view, but if one looks at this map as a metaphor, it is extremely useful in terms of understanding how one’s thoughts and actions resonate and how to move up the scale and experience the higher attractor fields of Love, Joy and Peace.
A book not
central to my thesis, but used as an example of one of the great challenges of
American society and the cultural issues behind that, namely our system of
elections. This is perhaps the main way the competition/domination paradigm
works in our society and is summed up by the notion of Winner Take All, with
its operative principles:
“If
I win…You lose
If
I have representation…you don’t
If
I vote for my favorite candidate who has no chance of winning…I’ll help elect
my least favorite candidate
If
we’re for it…then they’re against it…” (43)
Hill argues
for a Proportional Representation system of elections, and understands behind
those political divisions are racial and ethnic fears which are driving our
political discourse.
Lee, Stephen. Scientific Investigation into Chinese QiGong.
This book,
little more than a pamphlet, seeks to describe the Chinese notion of Qi and the
Western scientific data that validates it. He explains that Chinese do not see
Qi as a substance: “but rather, as the essence of life, the bridge of
consciousness between mind and body, and ‘the eternal now’ in which all
activity occurs” (4). This does suggest a field. The most critical passage of
the book, in terms of our thesis, refers to the measurement of the magnetic
fields of the human heart and brain. This research was done at
Olson, Charles. Human Universe.
(Collected Prose)
In this essay, perhaps his most influential after Projective Verse, Olson makes a distinction between the abstraction enabled by language since 450 A.D., or the time of Socrates and the Human Universes of the experience of the human organism and that of his environment. He suggests the distinction is between “language as the act of the instant” as opposed to what he sees as part of the problem with literature and culture in general, and that being “language as the act of thought about the instant” (156). Because of this tendency toward generalizing and abstraction the problems with literature are similar to the other specializations we have in Western culture, exacerbated with Newton and Descartes, that being modes of writing that only incorporate a plane, a part of the whole. Olson says: “It comes out a demonstration, a separating out, an act of classification, and so…it has turned false” (157). Olson believes the language of abstraction has allowed this.
He follows up his assertion from “Projective Verse” by stating form is not isolated from content, suggesting:
“The error of all other metaphysic is descriptive, is the profound error that Heisenberg had the intelligence to admit in his principle that a thing can be measured in its mass only by arbitrarily assuming a stopping of its motion, or in its motion only by neglecting, for the moment of its measuring, its mass. And either way, you are failing to get what you are after – so far as a human being goes, his life. There is only one thing you can do about kinetic, re-enact it. Which is why the man said, he who possesses rhythm possess the universe. And why art is the only twin life has – its only valid metaphysic. And if man is to once more to possess intent in his life, and to take up the responsibility in his life, he has to comprehend his own process as intact, from outside, by way of his skin, in, and by his own powers of conversion, out again” (162).
Olson in this essay, again shows that in Western culture, the advances of 20th century physics and the cosmology of Whitehead are a necessary shift for the culture to embrace to advance beyond the competition/domination model that so cripples the evolution of the species. His studies of Mayan culture are an attempt to illustrate his point and constitute the final three pages of the essay. “Human Universe” is a critical companion to “Projective Verse” which serves as a guide to those seeking a holistic approach to writing and allow the practitioner to take responsibility for his or her own process of evolution.
Olson, Charles. The Maximus Poems.
This is
Olson’s life work, which must be placed alongside William Carlos William’s epic
“
In his Guide to the Maximus Poems, George Butterick suggests this is more than a poem that includes
history, that the form of The Maximus
Poems is the act of history. In
this act of history, Olson reveals his cosmology as his poetics. In the process
view of reality, it is the act of writing as an enactment and not a
description, as he says in the essay “Human Universe.” What he creates with The Maximus Poems is a stance toward
reality that values community, or in his words the “Polis,” over profits, and the
redemption of pejorocracy or a worsening of
government rule aided by a popular or commercial culture that deadens the
senses:
By
ear, he sd.
But
that which matters, that which insists, that which will last,
that! o my people, where shall you find it, how, where, where
shall you listen
when all
is become billboards, when, all, even silence, is spray-gunned?
when even
our bird, my roofs,
cannot be
heard
when even
you, when sound itself, is neoned in? (6)
Olson tries to make his point against
pejorocracy by invoking the Greek goddess of victory
known as Nike, but ironically, the advertisements by the gym shoe manufacturer of
the same name at once lessen the impact of his point, and prove it. Central to
my line of inquiry, is the poem:
Letter
2
…..tell
you? ha! who
can tell
another how
to manage
the swimming?
he was
right: people
don’t
change. They only stand more
revealed.
I,
likewise
(9)
This is central because for Olson,
the writing of the poem is the process that reveals one’s true self, that helps
to build a soul, but one has to be open to the non-linear and learn how to
trust the sound of the poem as it is sung in one’s head. It is a task that takes
tremendous courage, perhaps more than Olson had himself by the end of his life.
It is a process antithetical to a dominant culture in which even most poets
define themselves with a product mentality: publications, awards, etc. and the
situation has only intensified and gained tremendous velocity since Olson died
in 1970.
In another strong poem Olson again
restates his theme of getting beyond the cosmology of competition:
Maximus to
Gloucester, Letter 27 [withheld]
I come back to the geography of it,
the land falling off to the left
where my father shot his scabby golf
and the rest of us played baseball
into the summer darkness until no flies
could be seen and we came home
to our various piazzas where the women
buzzed
To the left the land fell to the city,
to the right it fell to the sea
I was so young my first memory
is of a tent spread to feed lobsters
to Rexall conventioneers, and
my father,
a man for kicks, came out of the tent roaring
with a bread-knife in his teeth to take care of
a druggist they’d told him had made a pass at
my mother, she laughing, so sure, as round
as her face, Hines pink and apple
under one of those frame hats women then
This, is no bare incoming
of novel abstract form, this
is no welter or the forms
of those events, this,
Greeks, is the stopping
of the battle
It is the imposing
of all those antecedent predecessions,
the precessions
of me, the generation of those facts
which are my words, it is coming
from all that I no longer am, yet am,
the slow westward motion of
more than I am
There is no strict personal order
for my inheritance.
No Greek will be able
to discriminate my body.
An American
is a complex of occasions,
themselves a geometry
of spatial nature.
I have this sense,
that I am one
with my skin
Plus this – plus this:
that forever the geography
which leans in
on me I compel
backwards I compel
to yield, to
change
Polis
is this (185).
A strong emotional current comes up
near the end of the poem, which also happened to be near the end of Olson’s
life. In an untitled poem, the daily disappearance of the sun inspires:
Sun
right
in my eye
4 PM December 2nd arrived
at my kitchen
window blazing
at me full in the
face approaching
the hill it sets
behind glaring
in its burst of late
heat right on me
and as orange and hot
as sun at noonday practically
can be. Only this one
is straight at me like a
beam shot to hit me
It feels like
enforcing itself
on me giving me its
message that it is sliding
under the hill and
that I better
hear it say
be hot man
be hot
be hot and orange
like I am
I am
sending you
this message as
I slip exactly to
West I am burning you man
as I leave I’m even stronger
now just as I
go I am already
cooled that much but still
I turn on you
and flare
as I start to
go. But still
hot and red now blaring
on the slope of my disappearance
point.
Now I begin to
go hear me I
have sent you
the message I am
gone (577).
And the emotion in a poem, with too
complicated a format to recreate here, chronicles a part of his history and
love for his father. (495)
Olson was so
committed to his process that many poems are nothing more than notes, or
jottings, which for the typical poet would amount to materials that might end up in a poem. It is ALL in “The
Maximus Poems,” including Whiteheadian cosmology,
Algonquin Indian myths retold and other mythology, but to what effect? In a
work cited earlier, Robin Blaser suggests that The Maximus Poems was unfinished, with Olson needing an extra ten
years to do it justice. Of course, one would suggest an Open Form poem is never
complete, only stopped when the author dies. The end of the poem gives us a
clue as to what the end was like for Olson:
my wife my car
my color and myself (635)
which suggests Olson did not reach the
humility he suggested in Projective Verse was necessary to make one of use. He,
at the end, was focused on that which he had lost, not what he had gained. If
he did indeed “sacrifice every thing, including sex and woman / – or lost them
–to this attempt to acquire complete / concentration” (473) then he may have
still been based in a Newtonian/Cartesian notion of limitation and not in the
paradigm of process and abundance which, ironically, his work continues to
foster. But he did sense the direction in which we, as a culture, need(ed) to aim, and the notions of process, polis and ‘istorin – finding out for one’s self – are powerful
literary and soul-building tools sharpened by the man who ushered in the
post-modern era in literature and used to their best advantage yet in this epic
poem.
Olson, Charles. The Special View of History.
This is the
second part of the philosophical one-two punch that Olson began with his
seminal essay “Projective Verse.” In that essay he made note of a “stance
toward reality” which brings such verse into being. In this document he expands
on what that stance is, developed at
He has two epigraphs to set the tone, one from Heraclitus “Man is estranged from that which is most familiar” and the Keats quote on Negative Capability “that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason…” (14) He likens Negative Capability to the Einstein’s notion of Relativity and suggests it is a stance in opposition to Power. That power would seem to me to be similar to what David Hawkins calls Force, which stems from the Newtonian/ Cartesian need to control or dominate.
Olson suggests: “…history is the function of any one of us” (17) and is a tool for use, that it not have us “by the throat” as he reminds us Mussolini said when the Allied troops landed at Anzio in World War II. He also cites Herotodus as using history as a verb and translating that as meaning: “To find out for yourself” (26).
Olson does go on a bit about how: “…life is the chance success of a play of creative accidents. It is the principle of randomness seen in its essential application, not in any serial order imposed at random on either chance or accident…but in the factual observation of how creation does occur: by the success of its own accident” (48). The advances in Field Theory, as I have cited before through Sheldrake and Hawkins, suggest that fields attract like energies, so that it is not the random at play, but attractor fields, though they may seem random at first blush.
Olson uses Whitehead’s concept of prehension, both negative and positive, along with Einstein’s use of coincidence and proximity to explain, somewhat torturously that man’s order is “no longer separable from either those of nature, or of God. The organic is one. Purpose is seen to be contingent, not primordial “it follows from the chance success of the play of creative accidents” (or of attractor fields) “it does not precede them. The motive, then, of reality, is process, not goal” (49). (emphasis added.)
There is one other passage which I find quite clear and fascinating: “The tenses… of the mythological are never past, but present and future…” (22).
Summarized, Olson’s Special View of History suggests history is not something you’re stuck with, but something you can, and must, use to find out for yourself who you are and how you fit in to whatever tradition/lineage/calling you’re summoned to, and how you act with that knowledge.
Paul, Sherman. Olson’s Push.
In this
excellent introduction to Olson’s work, Paul examines Olson’s relations to
elder poets, especially Pound, Eliot and Williams and also demonstrates a keen
knowledge of some of the components of Olson’s stance which make it so
visionary. The first I find worth commenting on is the notion of the nexus of
history, process and feedback. Paul recognizes Olson wishes not to transcend
history, but enter it and use it. This is possible because history for him is
not accumulation, but change. That is history is not simple addition, the
merely linear causality assumed by those who read its course as inevitable
decline and accordingly prefer the past to the present, a view Pound expresses
in Hugh Selwyn Mauberly:
All things are a flowing,
sage Heracleitus says;
But
a tawdry cheapness
Shall outlast our
days.
On the contrary, since history is process it course is never single, never inevitable, never foreclosed. Process opens possibility, and history is always prospective, never limited by origin, which, in any case, may be recovered…spatially, in the fullness of time. This is what feed-back proves and why Olson considers it “the law” of history…feedback…is a means of correction, the use of knowledge of past events to foster change in an ongoing process… (22/3).
Here Paul demonstrates why Pound is Modern and Olson Post-Modern. Olson grasped the advances in quantum physics and the cosmology that was sympathetic to those findings to move beyond where Pound was even while utilizing the best of Pound’s advances in poetics.
Paul also extends the interesting last point we made about Olson’s Special View of History above, that being the present. Olson’s notion of the present, Paul suggests: “…is the present world, the actual familiar world of things from which…we have long been estranged; it is also presence. The present is a “human universe,” the possibility opened again by modern science…and confirmed for him …by extant ways of the Mayas” (33).
On Projective Verse, Paul again shows a deep understanding of its merits:
“Projective Verse is not only a poetics of presentation, but a poetics of present experience, of enactment. It replaces spectatorism with participation, and brings the whole self – the single intelligence: body, mind, soul – to the activity of creation. Dance …is a correlative of this poetics; and so are action painting and jazz, which poets at this time turned to because they offered the instruction they wanted. “There was no poetic,’ Olson says of this time. ‘It was Charlie Parker.’ Charlie Parker reminds us that Olson, more than any of his predecessors stresses breath” (39).
Of Whitehead, which there is much of use in this work, Paul reminds us that an: “…actual entity…becomes itself by prehending other objects” among other notions (126). Paul knows, as Olson does, that the key to survival of the species is an open, matriarchal, consciousness, beyond dominism and the restraints of the Newtonian/Cartesian paradigm. With that Paul, quoting Olson, says in the epilogue: “’man is either going to rediscover the earth, or leave it’” (253).
Ray, Paul, Anderson, Sherry. The Cultural Creatives.
Harmony:
Based on
research done for corporations to better market products, this book is an
incredible resource for people who feel alienated by dominant culture values
and don’t feel as if their own values are shared by other people. These people
are one of the three subcultures Ray and Anderson began to recognize after 13
years of market research on the values of American consumers. The three
subcultures are: “Traditionals,” which is described
as a group of people who tend to lean backward with their worldview and live in
reaction to the Modern, secular worldview; the “Moderns,” a group with a life
stance of Standing Pat with the status quo; and the “Cultural Creatives,” or the planet’s new counterculture, with a life
stance of leaning forward and using feedback to go beyond the worldview of the
Moderns. They suggest the birth of this new subculture happened about the time
of the founding of Esalen, an educational center for
the exploration of human potential founded in
Saffo, David. Charles Olson, Martin Heidegger, and Ontic Immediacy: a Phenomenological Interpretation of poem-in-the-world. Hangman #4 http://www.hubcapart.com/h-ngm-n/429.htm
Saffo uses Martin Heidigger’s notion of Da-Sein (there-being) as the mind and the object (or situation) as a unified phenomenon and that the poetics of Charles Olson parallel Heidegger’s theory of “a unitary phenomenology” (1). Quoting from Olson’s essays: “Human Universe,” “The Special View of History,” and “Projective Verse,” the last of which demonstrates his great understanding of the key to Olson’s poetics. He suggests: “one way Olson finds to guard against the habit of descriptive discourse is to mimic the body’s biological process of rapid apperception” and goes on to say: “Thus his poetic discourages interference from the ego-subject of the poem, and stresses reliance on the object’s (or situation’s) existence. A ‘being-in-the-world’ interacting with an object may enact the experience with a ‘poem-in-the-world.’” Thus changing the poetics of an individual also changes the individual’s philosophical stance toward reality as well. Olson places importance on the actual object and not the individual’s description of it.
I have not yet seen a better understanding of why Olson’s poetics work so well to allow content to change in the projective act, deepening the practitioner’s experience of being, which Saffo calls: “Ontic Immediacy,” “which stresses the role of the body’s senses—always already measuring the degree and duration of each stimulus—as the foundation of the being’s intellectual and emotional present.”
Upledger, John. Cell Talk.
In many ways this is a delightful book, especially the anecdotes, but in other ways a book too difficult to read for someone without extensive knowledge of physical human systems. Upledger is best known for the creation of a system of healing known as “Cranial Sacral Therapy,” which uses light touch to first connect with and then manipulate spinal fluids to aid a homeostatic process of healing by releasing emotional traumas. I especially resonated with the authors’ concepts regarding the experiential nature of consciousness and the inability to use Newtonian science to prove the nature of consciousness.
von Hallberg, Robert. Charles Olson: The Scholar’s
Art.
This work focuses primarily on the poetic theories of Charles Olson, done by a writer who recognizes the critical nature of Olson’s contribution in that area of North American literature. von Hallberg recognizes that Olson’s placed emphasis not only on the content of his poetry, but also the way language “under the control of a system with its own dynamics – shapes the subject matter” (22). Again we are reminded of how Olson said in “Projective Verse” how the content does change in this system of poem-making. von Hallberg also recognizes the participatory nature of Olson’s poetics in which the poem is not something one reflects on as much as engages with, inviting response and how Olson veils statements made in his work and that this: “apparent obscurity demands participation” (32).
The main facet of Olson’s connection to Whitehead and Heraclitus is in his belief, confirmed by these philosophers: “…that reality is an unceasing process which undermines all static achievements. Hence, all preconceived forms…all closure, is unfaithful to reality. Olson engaged this matter in moral terms: in order to fulfill its moral obligation, art must commit itself – no matter the painful uncertainty – to process, to open form.” And von Hallberg recognizes this commitment to the unknown: “..encourages repetition, parenthesis, and apposition. Because nothing can be stated exactly and finally, one must try to say something once, be dissatisfied at the incompleteness of expression, try to say it again more completely, be again dissatisfied, and so on, in theory at least, ad infinitum” or until death ends the process (72). With that in mind, von Hallberg understands that The Maximus Poems are not “the result” of Olson’s labors, “they are his labors” (73).
In von Hallberg’s section focusing specifically on Whitehead’s philosophy and how it influenced Olson, we get this key bit:
Each actual entity is, in Whitehead’s system, a process, first a process of becoming itself and then of becoming every other actual entity. According to his interpretation of the theory of relativity, no two actual entities are unrelated; each actual entity ‘feels’ every other actual entity. His term for this ‘feeling’ is prehension. One actual entity can prehend another positively or negatively: if positively, one actual entity transmits itself – and thereby extends its life – to another; if negatively, Whitehead would say that one actual entity ‘decides’ not to feel the other actual entity, not to form itself out of the energy of the other. The peak of the process of concrescence – the point at which the actual entity has become itself but has not yet dissolved into other actual entities – he terms “satisfaction” (86)
In this quote we see part the source for “Projective Verse.” I am thinking about the line: “But if he stays inside himself and is contained within his nature as he as participant in the larger force, he will be able to listen, and his hearing through himself will give him secrets objects share” (Olson Collected Prose 247, emphasis added). What is omitted from the content? Those things which are eliminated are done so, in Whitehead parlance, through negative prehension, which can be described as intelligence. Does this mean that the evil is left out of the poem? No, but I think the manner in which it is handled. Does the evil consume one, our allow the practitioner to fall into the trap of being governed by what disturbs him? I think the projective act takes us to deeper levels of understanding, or meaning, of being.
Later with von Hallberg and again in the realm of Whitehead we see the further definition of reality, which Olson understood and incorporated into his concept of poem-making and of being: “Action and motion, in Whitehead’s philosophy, supplant the Aristotelian concept of matter as substance; in Whitehead’s system there is no such animal as a thing…” Whitehead and quantum physics, conceive of a thing itself as what it does and von Hallberg suggests: “At the center of the object, therefore, is no nucleus of tangibility, but instead a system of relationships” (96). The notion that inside an atom is a lot of space has been confirmed by quantum physics, and thousands of years before by Taoists. von Hallberg also points out Whitehead’s notion, endorsed by Olson, of concrescence, in which the past is alive in the present, but the present is not a dilution of the past: “…because the process of concrescence includes an element of novelty that can make for progress” (103). Also in this section von Hallberg points out the difference in worldview between T.S. Eliot and his source in Spengler and Whitehead (Olson’s chief philosophical source) which is quite relevant to our mode of inquiry, seeing that Eliot’s view is bleak, while Olson’s is more hopeful, but the Olson poem “The Kingfishers” states Olson’s take on that better than I can here.
There is so
much to comment on, because von Hallberg’s
scholarship combined with his understanding of Olson’s contribution, is
remarkable. He even understands that, though Olson in “Projective Verse” speaks
of “humilitas,” “…he is humble only when he takes the
part of the documenter” (198).