On Perfectionism

° Where I start from is incident of Stanley Cavell’s lecture today at Duke and quick thoughts about ordinary language philosophy as a spur of analytic philosophy, a technical corrective that does not quite get at basic ethic, which is, among other thing, connected with a perfectionist purpose—a desire to be exact, right, thorough, complete—that extends its hand in the arts, philosophy, development of personal ethics and so on.

° As Buddhist practitioner for 10 + years, I have been deeply inflected by a perfectionist impulse & it still draws me to analytic philosophy, to a generous sense of the value of good analysis, and a desire to get at what a thing is. The deep questions that finally made it impossible to “be a Buddhist” are connected to a critique of perfectionism & mastery projects. There is a connection between deep ambivalence for “desire” and its messy and unstable valances and ascetic project of getting at a thing. I chose in the end for desire.

° Theme of perfection haunts Pound/Olsen trajectory in American poetics. There is a discipline, and a withering critique of what is less than perfect and needs a cull.

° What I call a technical critique is a complaint about tactics and stance that does not repudiate an ethic.

° A critique of perfectionism is a difficult essay. It so quickly can be suggested that the critique itself, as such, is a correction and is, therefore, perfectionist in its purposes. I believe this involves a confusion of topics.

° People tend to read to their respective games. We discuss partly to shoulder each other to our respective interests. When a person points out you are being perfectionist in your complaint, they are reasserting the authority/regime of their game. Note that nothing has been said about the complaint, which quickly becomes a non-issue. This is called a counter-suit; in interpersonal relations, it means the other person is really not listening.

° Simply because a thing can be said to belong apparently to a species or series does not mean that this is what it is, or that the species definition is a sufficient delineation of scope, tendencies, character, and so on. All species definitions are simples.

° When I speak of a confusion of topics, I mean a difference in playing field. Surely there is a point to periodically pointing out that perfectionist purpose is not the only field we play on. Perhaps all poetic evocation of a second ground, all shamanic discovery of a second mode of being, is just a way of saying again there is something else, another thing we are doing.

° Perfectionism is a form of disciplinary violence and a regime. All regimes produce new adherents who will be willing to “go to war” in the name of protecting the regime.

° People read to their interests. In “Without Words” I suggested that my audience “reach through my words, to take whatever they desire”. Most often it’s a mirror of some kind. A desire to lay a set of cards on the table, designs, other plans, to have a conversation about that.

° I suppose I am as bad as anyone and half know this because I watch myself so close, each hand’s movement considered from several angles—an old strategy for making a still.

° Only a few—and is it just women?—seem to be interested in whether the mirror has anything to say. A different world back behind the black grasses hidden where the scotoma flicks eclipse across you.

° On bad days, I sort through the people who come at me after a reading. I know I am asking that they go beyond the surface of their expectations. They’ve looked for the coins they think should be flashed & not finding these go in several directions. Some, feeling the power in the piece anyway, go competitive and assume there must be some hidden demonic interest in what I am doing that they a) either want in on, or b) have to confront as an evil. This is called a projection. Others seeing clearly that I am not interested in power simply sneer at my “weakness”, at my failure to perform the prerequisite “dance of the chains”.

° On some days I do not mind the hands rifling through the drawers; other days its as if hands were brushing aside carefully considered webs//unheard whispers.

° Long ago, Lisa handed me this scrap of paper said “I am not of your race. I belong to that Mongol clan which brought forth on the earth a monstrous truth—the authenticity of life—and a knowledge of rhythm. You do well to hem me in with the thousand and one bayonets of western enlightenment, for woe unto you should I leave the dark of my cave and set about in earnest to chase away your clamoring.”

° I suspect I am of mixed race, since analysis still draws me, dazzles me with the promise that rigor will straighten a thing into appropriate habits and as a key to a mimetics that wants to make another feel a thing that passes.

° Slip, missed foot, bald spot make witness against a perfect finish. Chopped note, over play as elements to mingle alongside evidence of the perfect, not as a more perfect, but as a result of the desire to care, which also produces a consideration and wants a mimetics.

° Rilke speaks of praise—hence truth as praise rather than mantle, as call. A turn to things driven less by mastery or precision but by care, love, consideration, mercy.

° In Buddhist meditation aimed at developing one-pointed attention, one first has to grip hard to pull mind again and again back to its object. But, in time, the handler realizes this alone won’t quiet the horse, and, instead, you begin to let the rein loose again.

° I am asserting a bifurcation, or drawing the line more sharply. There is bluster here and hyperbole. I am dissatisfied with this, not because of its imperfection, but because I sense there is a dimension of care that hasn’t been reckoned, a line I’ve crossed.

° Someone else more experienced with the public arena is frustrated I am suggesting we go back to the beginning. We either have some choice or we do not. They’ve been sitting on the other side of the boat and have been working hard to steer it as well.

***

A First Disquieting and Spider Geneology

James Longenbach’s Stone Cottage treats Yeats/Pound friendship by a study of--I think it was--three winters they spent together in a cottage near house of future wives. There is a quote I have to paraphrase—Pound speaks of image truly realized as a place in which one would be after death. Whether he meant immortality in art or actually thought of himself—like a tantric Buddhist—as actually producing image of a future life is not clear. Still, given this, the work of resisting slight flimsy bad French symbolist poetry is less about gender—though it is surely still about this—then a doubt that it was a good way to go about making a boat of one’s soul. It is a methodological critique, and, as such it begs the question of the perfect, machined or sharp wrought, that a person can never be, And that’s what I meant about gender too.

Machines extend the reach of a human interest—that’s something S. Kubrick said when asked about 2001: a Space Odyssey. He was saying we mostly want to murder we don’t know why. And so here, a desire to be perfect as a way to avoid the catch death.

Aristotle says a man—and I think we should read “man” here—reaches his end in adulthood. And maybe there is an echo there of the old notion of the stele which captures a man’s best moment, rushing forward in full strength into battle, as “image” scrawled on stone over grave. Aristotle doesn’t have a lot to say about death as a man’s end, which is a bit of a slip for a natural philosopher you ask me.

To be perfect is to avoid death. If I only eat a grain of wheat a day I become shining and pure. If I stand by this fence for a year on one leg, I disappear into the colors and am perfectly hidden as tree or the dusk.

I think Pound is right one way about the image—and maybe in his own time, this was what Plato was after as well—a way to say that a second order of being existed that was made of light and not the dim half-light of symbolist dreamscape. But I think both are wrong about that second order as the locus of something fixed and immortal, truly lit up. Here I am thinking about Tarkovsky and how lucky he was to work with moving images, to make images in time that, not matter how true, were also episodic.

A few weeks back, I was suggesting to Joe a difference between a lyrics of light and a lyrics of shape-shifting, where the first is a lyric that attempts to make itself clean so that a still light sounds. It is Promethean & wants to steal fire. The second is a lyric that attends to the way shape turns; it wants to make roses suddenly appear in a room, wants to paint a room into a well, wants to discover what remains unlit at the edge where body ends and further dark of night is also soul.

A long time ago I wrote an odd children’s lit piece about a pair of sprites—Allbright and Amorice—who were joy beings about us.

Any numbered thing has a third or a fourth and what dense complex geometries begin to occur, and so I would not divide the world into light and change. So these are dimensions let’s say, aspects of lyric, and perhaps desires or seasons that, like water, require us.

***

In Anne Carson’s book on Sapho and lyric, *Eros, the Bittersweet”, she considers a poem in which the poet watches a man woo a woman, and the man’s desire becomes a vehicle for her to say her own desire as well. Carson takes us off then through the notion of poem/image as mediating term between self (as yet undisclosed) and other (unmet) who come into relation through the image.

The motif of statue/image as portal to absent or dead lover is found in many stories about image and portrait, and the question always ends up focusing on the authenticity of the image, which strikes me as a lapse, since the image can only be gesture and is real enough as such. The question of authenticity then is a question about realizing self and other in the image, which is the wrong place for either, since a question about an extremity is best answered by a return to ground, where gravity can bear.

Sapho-self looking out is not Sartre hid behind the key-hole, but she lays out a rug she and the other could sit on when a figure for her desire is scried. Hence poem as ritual space, as lattice worked out into relation and tied down to say that. I love and where I emerge into the light of my image I also pull another possible other towards me.

Hence, what Rilke speaks of as “call” in the Seventh Elegy.

****

Here’s some poems along the edges of this:

1. With Plaint

Commerce made no dent in this—call it a God-shaped hole or mind—calling.

After WWII, how could you say there was no difference between daily life and art, and what could that have been (were it a place), but another Brigadoon?

Ruined asters and velvet detritus. In dawn, dandelion must and Dresden ash and moth floated on rivers of air, bell-like, illusory dragons.

Oh terrible conflation of Asian no-thought and desperate material hour in aftermath abundance.

Oh slip of the tongue & clever Dis. Mantled associations in subset living room. A Middleburg amounts. Slough forgets downtown.

Earth not equal. Shouldn’t enumerated sequence no longer tongue apt at say it? A furnace gape? Mars its stations (oh, oh, the polio lines, trailing sonombulant aisles too) Ghost dance bread lines.

No longer make equal inter-Sant (was patient) who sang a trick. Oh Coyote hadn’t we understood? (The way you disappeared behind the billboard? The way you ate the sun?)

2. Sea

tidal wash I spoke
into the waters of September

mourn thought hook-fretted
where
far distance spangles

3. At Salt Woman’s

What spends at its soothe (her
immolation rain-feathers: her
cascade) “I make many
houses on the bright soil
you dreamt, where
your eyes fell”

[I invite your ingestion
I put your sign up at
the outset, but it
says “Tupelo” and
we are that much
farther off track in a spelling,
as fingered apart

from lotus-light to dispersed
newspaper, stained by black
Mississippi water.]

translation of hour into
gutter’s leaf, metallic impart,
this between brushing
your flanked hair, rests on
I would, open as cloud-
less sky

One name for your dry lake
is cherry-pit marked
could be Joshua bathing
or salt, we both
know it.

4. From “Places I’ve Lived”

Specific triangle between North/South US 5
South of LA yoga-spent patchuli incense
half hour under median bushes

[Since I remain orient-wise a
spider web, from which rib
does this bridge depart? could you
navigate back, hand tracing
its suspended string?]

One night, still tied
to my tongue’s dream
the way cans rattle behind a
vanishing wedding
two-step.

That’s place with you
I ask for salt, you brush
curry on my arm. Whose fat
do we eat
without story?

Confused among many nights
a carapace riddle made
imbricate by asked dawn series
flicker past.

Somewhere, perhaps on a mantle
too high to see, she
left a note for me
under a cup. Could you
look to see?

After that the cards spoke
in soothing futures. It was
San Francisco after all. They
let me sleep under the
shelf in the moon of
the cross three nights
shuffled.calm.

5. On Reading Olsen in August

left to devices the carpet//folds tensed
by a 10 AM sun, makes thin light of it//too little
to drink and this hurts what we
threaded with geese and breath//under slips in
a closet & thyme you put up to catch flies

these knots make “what weeds
as an explanation
leaves out is” a suggestion turns
footpath certain we touch “that chaos”
is not our condition” too many patterns
standing on driveways, hats off
for “that relaxation” he meant—therefore a
flash of teeth

a thickened shadow, the black spot he says
to say he’s not scotoma-shopping
falls from him lattice you pick
your way up rose-shadows Romeo
door that I am you bend against

a third//in Sapho’s hands
spied self before figure lifts
its skeletal sunflower against
what limit?

what you push against to project//all flowers
cup
water as parenthesis and
conjugation//

death’s restraining hand

I’d open windows to a mingled also.

6. The Red Thread

she and I are the red thread worked into the late afternoon

veil I am apart oceans or falling hair separate

we become archetype rain scrawled temporal

vine growth under eyelids writ bad fairy sulk

hallelujah!

7. Buddha Looked Left

Buddha sat
like cloth dipped
in the water of
the day—shook
out, hung up
by mom on the
line, on the line
‘neath the Great
Lake limestone skies
‘neath Gabriel &
all other saints (stone
gone sky), he sat
dipped like die
and then he
looked aside
from what
pulled & he saw
he saw
She was walking
by his side.


8. Image Poetry with Swan

images change is the trouble
that stillness or a sharp beak
distill the red thread running
through the day, and yet
sky a perfect longing over oaks
is still heavier
demands out hear

9. At Sky

what wants to become color has not been flower
what wants to be light has not been a moon

what wants to be feeling needs the never-ground of water
these three make a garden meet

all things still the count goes on from any poise
uneven footed turns grate straw paths between